142: How to Fix 5 Common Blogging Tech Mistakes with Andrew Wilder

In this episode I share about something that I call the Image Triple Play. And we chat with Andrew Wilder from Blog Tutor. He is a Food blogger pro expert and all around incredible person chatting about important things for you to know and mistakes to avoid. Hey everybody, this is Bjork Ostrom and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast and we are sponsored by WP Tasty, which is our accompanying site for WordPress plugins. And the tasty tip today actually has to do with the most recent update of Tasty Recipes, which is the recipe plugin that we use on Pinch of Yum. It's also the recipe plugin that we have available at Tasty Recipes. So the Image Triple Play, I mentioned it at the beginning of this podcast episode. What is that and why is that important? Well, there's an interesting little piece in the Google guideline for developers and we'll link to that in the show notes. But you can basically get there by searching for Google structured data recipes and on that page it'll talk about all about this thing called structured data and why it's important for your recipes. And within that there's a little link to a place where you can learn more about images and why images are so important. And I'm going to read a little snippet from this page that talks about the importance of recipe images. And this has to do with the image triple play. So it says for best results provide multiple high. And this is Google on Google's page. For best results provide multiple high resolution resolution images, minimum of 50k pixels when multiplying width and height with the following aspect ratios. This is the important part. 16 by 9, 4 by 3 and 1 by 1. So essentially those are kind of like the TV sizes and then a square. So 16 by 9 is the TV size for a 1920 by 1084 by 3 is the old standard TV size and then 1 by 1 is a square. Now what the heck does that mean? Well, essentially what Google is saying is for the best results for your search results you should provide multiple. So that means more than one triple. This is where the image triple play comes in. High resolution images and they should have the following aspect ratios. And again those are 16 by nine, four by three and one by one. So what does this mean? Why is it important for you? Why should you know about it? Well, Google has this awesome ability to display an image next to some search results, not just recipes, but you notice it for news is another really common one. And there's different ways that they display those images and the Best way to see this is to do a search result on different types of devices. So to do a search result on your desktop computer and then to do it on your mobile device, and you'll see that images display differently depending on the device that you're using with different sizes. And essentially what Google's saying here, and this is the Tasty tip, is that you should include all of the recommended sizes for those different images. And we just pushed out a really big update for Tasty Recipes that allows this to happen automatically in the background. So anytime that you post a new piece of content, it will automatically have those three sizes created for your recipe. And this is the thing, we're super excited. Tasty Recipes also goes back in time and makes those updates for all of your old content as well. So really excited about this update. And if nothing else, it's good for you to be aware of that with your recipes or content in general online that you should be aware of the ability to optimize for those multiple sizes. And again, if you want to read that, if you are interested in geeking out, you can read that developer's guide from Google and we will link to that in the show notes. But that is the Tasty tip sponsored by WP Tasty. And now we are going to jump into the podcast interview with Andrew Wilder and this will be even more tips and advice from him because Andrew's going to be talking about some of the biggest mistakes to avoid as a blogger. And he has seen a lot and fixed a lot because he has a company called Blog Tutor that helps bloggers he manages helps to manage their sites, to keep them up and running and to keep everything really smooth. So he's going to be talking about some of the most important things for bloggers to be aware of as they build and scale their blog. So let's go ahead and jump in. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Hello.

Hey.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, fun to chat in person. We chat a decent amount via text, whether that's slack on the Food Blogger Pro Experts channel, checking in every once in a while or email. But it's rare that we get to jump on an official voice call. So this is the real deal here. As close as we can get to meeting in person.

One of these days we will actually be face to face.

One of these years, we might actually make it happen. So we're having you on the podcast again. You are a Food Blogger Pro expert and we're going through and interviewing our experts again. Way back in episode 20, we interviewed you and you talked about site security. A lot of that still applies and is really important. So I'd encourage people to check that out. Foodbloggerpro.com 20 and that will bring them to that episode. But today we're going to be talking about some common mistakes. And you work with a lot of bloggers and specifically a lot of food bloggers, and you've been able to work with them and see some mistakes, quite a few mistakes, and fix those mistakes. So today we're actually going to hone in on five of those different mistakes and we'll walk through each one of those and it'll be good because we'll be able to compare and contrast the different ways that we are either doing what you're talking about or not doing what you're talking about, as we're going to talk about here with the number two. So that would be my little teaser to go into it. But before we jump into it, can you talk a little bit about what you do, Andrew, and what your day to day looks like and what you spend your time doing?

Sure. I've been sitting in front of my computer a lot lately. I basically help websites run smoothly. That's sort of what it really comes down to. I work with my clients to implement a whole bunch of stuff to make sure things are set up technically correctly and then to help with all those little questions that come up from time to time. With food blogging, it's always changing. There's always SEO stuff or there's speed things, or there's all this stuff. And it's frankly, it's very competitive. Right. You need to keep evolving very quickly because everybody else is. And there's so many blogs. So when I work with so many clients, I start to see the patterns and I can help a little more quickly and work with people either one on one or, you know, sending out an email list to my subscribers, et cetera, to kind of give them a heads up on, hey, this is coming down the pipeline. And so to sort of have a broad view, I guess, across many sites is really helpful.

Yeah, you have one of those unique roles and it's always great to interview these people because you are able to look broadly at a subset of people that you're working with. And if somebody gets too far into just their world, they don't see everything else. But what you do is in your world, that's your job, is to see everybody else, all of the clients that you're working with. And so you get to see these trends and you get to notice, hey, what? When you change this, this has an impact. And we're going to talk about some of those things here today. So first thing that we're going to talk about, number one, is the really hot topic of hosting. So before we get into the specifics of the specific mistake of using crappy hosting, can you talk about what hosting is and why it's so important for bloggers?

Yeah. So food blogs in particular, and really active blogs are actually really demanding. WordPress is an extremely complicated program. The reason it's so successful is it doesn't seem complicated, but there is hundreds of thousands of lines of code and the user interface is great, and that's why it's really grown and it can do so much. But with that complexity comes a lot of that power, comes a lot of complexity. I guess, fundamentally there is a computer sitting somewhere that has your code on it and your images and your database. And when somebody goes to your website, that computer has to basically run all that code, compile it all into a blog post, and then spit it back out and send it back to your browser. Computers run at different speeds and different hardware configurations, different software configurations can make a big difference on how fast that can happen and how reliably that can happen. Not all hosting is created equal. It's actually been great to see that hosting in general has gotten more powerful, faster and cheaper, and the cost is trending down, not up, which is great. You can get a lot more bang for your buck now. But the other thing about hosting in general with providers is they tend to change very slowly because once they bring in thousands of clients, they don't want to start changing their software and changing their setup because that might break things on existing sites. Individual hosting companies tend not to change much once they're all configured. And so that's a potential gotcha that being around longer isn't necessarily better, it's not necessarily bad, but it's not inherently better.

Sure. And so to go back a little bit. So I think it's an important little piece to point out for people that are just getting into it, this idea of a computer somewhere that is hosting your information for your blog. And I love to think about the meaning of words. And when we talk about hosting, it's also, you would call it a server. And a server is somebody that brings you something at a restaurant. Right. So they bring you your meal. The server equivalent for websites is somebody that brings a visitor the information. And so the computer somewhere in some server farm is hosting that information. When somebody comes, they serve it to that person. So one of the things that I think is important to point out is when why would you have to pay for hosting when you don't have to pay for it in other places? Like if I upload a video to YouTube, I don't have to pay for that. Or if I start a blog on WordPress.com, which is a little bit different than WordPress.org and self hosting, I don't have to pay for it. Or on Blogger I don't have to pay for it. So what's the difference between those two? And how can these companies not charge for hosting when other companies charge for hosting?

That's an interesting question. So I would say that you are paying for it, you're just not paying cash. So with YouTube you're paying for it by being shown advertisements and possibly demographic tracking. And Google is tracking what visits you site and collecting your personal data and your usage history. So that's how they're profiting and paying for it. Because none of this is free, right? Servers cost money to buy, cost money to maintain. Electricity is a huge cost in hosting actually, and air conditioning to keep the servers cool and all that stuff. So the money's got to come from somewhere no matter what. So for those free services like blogger or WordPress.com, where they're hosting it, they may have add on services like if you want to use your own domain, you may have to pay for it. So they have ways to get some money in that way. The biggest thing though is the reason you wouldn't want for our audience, the reason you probably wouldn't want to use those services is that they don't provide enough flexibility. The nice thing about WordPress.org, that's the shorthand for self hosted WordPress where you download the software, you install it on your own server. Probably not a server at home, but a server you're controlling through purchasing a hosting plan somewhere. The advantage is you can control all of it. You can add plugins, you can even change the actual code if you wanted to. So you have a lot more freedom and flexibility. And you can also run ads. I think on WordPress.com, you still can't run your own ads. And I think they may run some of their own ads there. So they're profiting off of your traffic instead of you got it.

And it was interesting actually in episode 137 we interviewed Trey George and he talked about a site that he was working on with his wife and they were not running on WordPress. I forget offhand which it was like a $20 a month or $50 a month service. And the site was super popular. And he said at one point he had a conversation with, it was like the CEO or one of the people that was high up in the organization and said, how does this happen? How are you able to pay for this and make it work? And they said, well, actually it's not like we're not making money on your site because it's so popular. So it's interesting to hear stories of that where maybe there are those sites like a squarespace site where you pay $50 a month and they host everything for you. But there are probably those whales, those outliers that are costing them more, but the people that don't have as much traffic make up for it. So interesting to think about that world of hosting and how that plays out. Now if you self host, there are different types of hosting underneath that. So we've first said, okay, we want to self host, we want to use WordPress.org, but then underneath that there's different types of hosting categories that are shared and VPs and dedicated. And how do we know what to pick within that? And what's the difference between those?

Sure. So a lot of it comes down to cost. So when you've got a server sitting in a rack somewhere, there's only so much computing power and memory and hard drive space that it has. And so hosting companies have come up with ways to sort of divvy that up across multiple clients. And so the entry hosting is called shared hosting. That might be the kind of plan where you see that's three or four dollars a month or maybe even ten dollars a month for quote unquote, shared hosting. And what they do is they put 500, maybe 1,000 different websites on one server. And the reason they're able to charge three bucks a month is because they've got a thousand sites, they're making three grand a month on that one server. So that's how they're scaling it up. The trick with that is you get what you pay for. And if you've got 999 neighbors on that server, you're all competing for those same resources. They will give you a finite amount of resources. And then if too many neighbors take up too much of that, it might actually slow things down. So that's one potential pitfall there. But just in general, with the shared hosting, imagine 500,000 different accounts on one server. And that's sort of what you're looking at the next step up is called a vps. That stands for Virtual Private server. And that's essentially a bigger chunk of a server. Actually we could jump ahead to the opposite end of the spectrum to what's called a dedicated server. And that's where you've literally rented a computer in Iraq and it is yours. So you're spending probably 300 bucks a month to have this, what they might call a bare metal server. It's much like a computer, desktop computer, computer that sits in your house. It's just the form factor is a little different. The hardware might be slightly different, but it's the same basic idea. You've got a processor and a hard drive and memory and it's optimized for running websites. So a dedicated server, you might purchase one that or you're leasing one essentially that might have 8 gigs of RAM or 16 gigs of RAM and a four core processor, stuff like that. So if you're not quite at the level of needing a dedicated server, that's where virtual private servers come in. Where instead of having a whole box, you might get 18 of a box or 1 16th of a box. And so they actually have software that virtually carves that server up. And everybody who's on that gets 1/16th of the resources. Those are generally dedicated resources. So if it's a server that has, let's say 16 gigs of RAM and they've got 16 clients, each person on that or each account on that will have 1 gigabyte of RAM all to themselves. And so that's sort of the like how you carve up a dedicated server. The modern version of that, that's sort of the old school method. The modern version is going to be a cloud based virtual private server. And these are, this is what Amazon Web Services does. Google Compute, DigitalOcean and Linode are popular hosts Vultr. And what you do is you basically say, I want a cloud based vps. And instead of there being actually carved up one specific server, it doesn't really matter, you don't care. They handle all that on software and a server farm. And they basically say, okay, you know what, we're going to give you one CPU and two gigs of ram, good luck. They allocate the resources however they do it and you don't really care, but you know you've got those level of resources assigned to you. So most of my clients are working on cloud based VPSs. And then you have to size the VPS based on your needs and how busy your site is. If you are, if you're an E commerce site, you're going to have people logging in. You might need more resources because it's a little more intensive. You can't cache as many pages, which means storing generated pages and serving them again. Every site's a little different and so it's hard to compare apples to apples.

Because every site is different and the resources will be different, the traffic will be different. So how does somebody know? What are some ways that they can tell if. Are there tests you can run? Is it just in general? Keeping an eye on speed. Do you look at page speed in Google Analytics? How do people go about figuring out if they have good hosting or not?

So it can be challenging if you don't really know what you're looking at. And there's a lot to look at. Page speed is definitely one of them. When you're working in your dashboard and you're editing a post and you're hitting save, does it take one second to save the page or does it take 10? There are little clues like that, where it's like subjectively you can say my site feels slow, but there's a bunch of different factors on page speed and I don't want to go too far down the page speed rabbit hole. But there's sort of back end stuff where the server may be slow and then there's front end stuff where you've got too much stuff on your site, you're loading too many images and things like that. From a hosting perspect, you're really concerned with the back end stuff and what you want to look at there is how long does it take your server to generate a webpage. So if you look at your homepage, how long does it take for just the homepage document, the HTML, the actual code of the page itself to come back to the browser. And then once the browser has that, it'll then request all the other things like a style sheet and images and all that. So that metric that you want to look at is called time to first byte. That's B, Y, T, E. So you want to be looking at that for uncached pages, which means you know the server is actually generating a page from scratch. And usually if you have any caching plugins, if you're logged in, you'll be seeing uncached pages. That's usually the default. So in terms of real world numbers, what you want to see ideally is a time to first byte time of under 200 milliseconds or 0.2 seconds. That's the number Google wants to see faster is always better. In reality, on a WordPress site, especially a food blog that has 30 or 40 plugins doing all this different stuff, it's really hard to get that fast on initial page generation. If I see a page generation time of 500 or 600 milliseconds, I know we're in pretty good shape. If I'm seeing 1.5 seconds or 1500 milliseconds, or if I'm seeing 2.53 seconds, that's an indication that that hosting is underpowered. It may be that there's a plugin conflict or something wrong, but usually I've done this enough that I could name most of the hosting companies where it's like, yeah, I could tell you need to get off that hosting company because they're not giving you enough resources to generate the page fast enough.

The place you can go for that, there's actually a test you can run bytech.com and I just hopped over there and tested Pinch of Yum, and we're at 460 milliseconds. Time to first bite. Which, again, that's a number that we've always looked at and said, oh, it'd be really nice to get that under the 200 recommended from Google. And that's actually, it's. It's always nice when Google actually gives you a hard piece of data because it's like there's so much that you don't know, but they've come out and said like, oh, this is our recommendation under 200. But it's interesting because then I pull up Food Blogger Pro, and it's, you know, it's. It's 1, you know, 10, 65 milliseconds. So it's like twice as slow as Pinch of Yum. And we have those on two different hosts. So FoodBlocker Pro is on DreamHost and Pinch of Yum is on Media Temple. Not because those are the ultimate best hosts, but because it's what we've had and we just haven't switched. Um, so if somebody does this test and they realize they have a slow score, how do they go about changing? Obviously, what you do is you work with people and help them to get on fast hosting, and you use cloudways for that. But is this something people could do on their own, or is it pretty complicated? What do the steps look like? If they realize, hey, I'm kind of using crappy hosting and things are slow and my time to first byte is slow, how do they go about correcting that?

Well, it depends on the hosting that they're on. So some hosts, there may be some levers you can pull to make things better and you don't have to change hosting. One of the things actually I want to mention about hosting is I've actually been finding it's generally best to change hosting or change servers, not necessarily hosting companies, but to change your hosting to a new server every three to five years. And that's because as technology and software is improving and hosts are not updating their platforms, you really don't get that benefit unless you change to a new host.

So can you talk about that a little bit more so people understand? So when you're saying you said not necessarily changing hosts, but changing servers, or were you just talking about literally changing to a different company?

Well, the easiest way to think about it is changing to a different company. But if you like your hosting company, but you're ready for a new server, you could actually move to a new server, like literally a different server box in the farm somewhere. Because their new servers may be configured with faster software. The most recent and best example of this probably is PHP, which is the programming language that WordPress is built on. About a year and a half, two years ago, they changed for PHP version 5.6. They jumped to version 7.0. There was no 6. They skipped it entirely.

It's kind of like the 13th floor of a building. They're just like, it doesn't exist.

Yeah, it was kind of contentious and they decided to make a clean break and just were like, you know what, we're going to 7.

Sure.

And the thing to know about this is PHP 7 is roughly twice as fast as 5.6. It's a massive improvement. I mean, you don't usually see improvements like that. Usually it's like 5, 10% faster. You chip away at it. This is hugely different. And so if you're on old legacy hosting, they're not going to bump you up to 7.0 without you asking, because there were a bunch of functions that were removed in 7.0, so it could break your site. Hosting companies don't want to break thousands of sites. That's a nightmare for them. So they're not going to necessarily make that an option for you. By now, I think they've all probably made it an option, but they're not going to move your site to php7. But you may be able to log into your dashboard and switch that on. That's not the only thing that factors into your time to first byte score. But if you're running PHP 5.6 and you're getting times of. I'm going to give you some loose numbers based on my experience. This isn't scientific, but let's say you're getting a time to first byte of 1.0 seconds or 1000 milliseconds. You switch to PHP7 and you might be down to 650, 700.

Sure. So it's a pretty immediate improvement potentially.

Keep in mind with time to first byte too, nothing happens for the visitor until that HTML document comes back. They're literally staring at a white screen. You want to get that page loading as fast as possible so that stuff starts happening so the visitor doesn't go away. Anything you can shave off of that very front end is hugely impactful in terms of visitor retention and usability and all of that.

With that, you're saying one of the ways that you can improve it is to switch to have updated hardware. Like literally, it's like upgrading your computer, which most people probably do that every three to five years. After five years you kind of realize my computer's a little bit slow. Same with your server. It makes sense to update that to the next most latest and greatest version that's available. Maybe that you could do that within the hosting company you're using, but a lot of times it might involve switching to another host. The other thing to look out for would be PHP7. Is your site running PHP7? And what's the best way to know that? How can you run a test or look into it?

I'm trying to think of a simple, consistent way. The easiest thing to do would be to ask your host. Sure there are certain plugins that might show it, or if you use cPanel, it may show it. But there's no built in way in WordPress to say, oh, I'm using this version for the sake of an answer that'll work for everybody is ask your host.

Yeah, for sure. Totally understandable. Makes sense. And everybody will get how to do that. So that's good.

Right?

Got it. Any other recommendations for people in regards to hosting? Tips, tricks, things that they should look out for, other tests that they can run to get a better idea of if their hosting is good or not.

Yeah, it's tough when you don't have a big picture view. I go on the Facebook groups like Food Blogger Central and others, and everybody's got an opinion on hosting. People speak from their own personal experience, which may or may not apply to you. I could go through a list of hosts and tell you all the reasons Why I would never recommend them. Unfortunately, the list gets pretty big because I've seen enough problems with enough hosts. But to take a step back, the things that I really look at with hosting are speed and reliability, cost, of course, and customer service. You know, there's reputation, there's, there's all these other things, right. But the feature set of hosting, you know, if you're just going to go sign up for a new account, if you're comparing like cloud based VPS hosts, the features themselves are generally pretty similar. Now you're comparing, you know, a 1 gigabyte RAM or 2 gigabytes RAM, et cetera. And on newer hosts they're all going to be roughly comparable. And unless you really dig in, create a test account on each one and then, you know, clone your site onto all of those and do speed tests is hard to tell. But are you the kind of person who really wants telephone support? Is that important to you? That's something to check. Or is email support sufficient? The company I recommend and use is called Cloudways. C L O U D W A Y S. They don't do phone support, they have tickets. But they prefer chat support and they're available 24.7on chat. I think 24.7support is critical for hosting. That's actually why I don't offer any sort of hosting service to my clients.

Because I'm not available 24 7.

24 7, yeah. So I'd rather have a host who has a team spread around the globe who's always awake and can do that. Got it.

And with Cloudways, is that a type of service that if somebody wanted to switch to, would they be able to do that on their own or would that be something where they'd maybe need some hand holding from somebody that is more tech oriented or. The obvious example would be working with you. Could people handle that switch on their own?

You know, it depends. It depends on the person moving. Hosting is one of those things that I generally recommend outsourcing, and we could talk about that later. That's going to be point number five, because it's the kind of thing you're not doing every day. It's a pretty steep learning curve to do it smoothly and without, without interrupting your site. You know, you don't want your site to go down, so why spend your time, unless you enjoy it, why spend your time doing that? Why not hire somebody to help you move it, who knows what they're doing and then you can just keep working on, you know, recipe development and social media and all the stuff you know all that other stuff that for sure. The stuff that you need to be doing day in, day out.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

A lot of hosting companies will offer to do a free migration. Cloudways actually does free migrations for new accounts. Unfortunately I don't recommend it. I've seen them miss a couple details here and there. And that's I think in large part because food blogs are very detailed and very complex. You know, if it's simple little portfolio site that has a couple of plugins, they'll get it right. But food blogs have so many little things and I've seen them botch SSL certificates or they haven't copied over redirects that used to be there and stuff like that. And I've now done this on so many sites, I've got this checklist and I know if I do it in the right order because I've learned the hard way on all of these little things. So it helps to hire somebody who's meticulous with those details.

Yep. And that makes sense. And that would be like you said, we're going to talk about this idea of kind of bringing in capable people to help with you at the end here, but maybe to do a little bit of a teaser. That's one of the things that we've found to be most beneficial is finding people that we know like and trust to be able to bring into our circle and say, hey, can you help with this? Because this is something that either is a one time thing that we know that we can't do or don't want to become good at or learn just to do it or on an ongoing basis. It's something we know we don't have time for. So let's jump to number two. So this idea of images. Food blogs are notorious for having a ton of images and really big images. And this is something that on Pinch of Yum we have retina images which are really big, really beautiful and also probably not the best use of resources. So you can use Pinch of Yum as maybe the anti example of the issue with large images. And you can also talk about why people would decide to include retina images. But then what's the downside of that?

Sure. And there's a lot of confusion and misinformation about this. So the bottom line is speed is critical. Right now, 70% or so of users are on phones. They may or may not be on WI fi. They might be on a 3G or 4G connection. And if Google has made it clear, this is another Thing where they've made it crystal clear they want sites to be fast. And on a food blog, which generally has a lot of images, images are the single quote unquote, heaviest item from a speed perspective because they take a lot of kilobytes and a lot of megabytes to actually convey that information. And you can have a long HTML document that's like 20 kilobytes, and then you could have one beautiful photograph that's 300 kilobytes, and then you might have 10 photographs on a page. So speed is of the utmost importance and optimizing images is really a great place to start. So the trick with Retina displays is they cram more pixels into into the same amount of screen space. And so they look great. They're gorgeous. Right? You don't get the little dot pixelation, you get all that detail. Right. That comes at a cost of larger file sizes. And the kicker is if you make an image that's twice as wide, say so instead of, let's say your post content area is 680 pixels wide, which I think Fudi Pro has that dimension, if you're familiar.

Foodie Pro is the theme. It's a popular food blog theme that is a Genesis food theme.

Thank you. So the area of your post is, let's say 680 pixels wide. And the common multiplier for retina images is to make it double as wide. So what's that, 1360?

Yeah, on the fly.

So let's say you save your image at 1360 pixels wide. Well, when you double the width, you also double the height. And when you do that, you're actually making the file size four times larger because it's exponential. So it's not even just twice as big. It may not be exact because of the way compression works, but the idea is if you go to Retina images, suddenly you've quadrupled the amount of bandwidth you need to download that. Then you do that, and then you have, let's say you've got a beautiful lead photo and then five or six process shots and then another beautiful photo at the bottom of your. Your post suddenly looking at seven, 10 pictures and it's just going to run slowly. So there's that. And then the other thing to remember is you're working on a desktop computer. You've got your 17 or your 27 inch beautiful Mac retina display and you're editing your photos on there. Your visitors are not using those gorgeous, beautiful Retina displays on desktop. They're using an iPhone 7 or an Android phone. The majority of Retina displays are still on mobile devices. And when you look at the mobile device, the picture itself is about 2 1/2 inches wide or so. So you don't need that many pixels to make it look good. You take your 680 pixel image on there and it's actually still going to look great. So you're basically cramming extra pixels in where you don't need them. So there's no benefit for mobile visitors on photographs, but there's a huge speed hit. I was going to say, just real quick. So let's say 70% of your visitors are mobile. Of the 30% that are desktop, maybe 10 or 20% of them, maybe 30% of them are using Retina screens. So it's only a small fraction. So maybe 10 or 20% of your visitors would even see the benefit of your Retina photos.

And what I was going to say is for those that want to see those stats, you can go into Google Analytics and click on Audience, and then there's a little area under audience called mobile, and you can click on Overview, and that shows you how many people are desktop, how many people are tablet, how many people are mobile. And in the case of pinch of yum, 25% of the people coming are desktop. And then like you said, there's a, there's another area and it's. I can't, I'm not gonna pull it up on the fly here on the podcast, but it is where you can see the actual screen size. So you can see how many people are actually coming that have a Retina screen based on the size of it. But point being, as you're saying, there is a really small number of people that would actually benefit fully from that massive retina image. Now there is this thing called SourceSet, and I'm not super familiar with it and don't know the real specifics of it, but from a high level, can you talk about how Source Set works and how that maybe kind of helps with the problem, but maybe doesn't fully solve the problem either?

Sure. So SourceSet is built into WordPress where it basically has a little bit of code that says, hey, if your screen width is this, use this size image instead. And if your screen width is between this and this, use this size image instead. So the goal of it is to try to get the browser to ask for a smaller image. If it doesn't need a bigger image, it's imperfect. It can help for sure. So you might end up on mobile, downloading a 500 pixel wide or maybe an 800 pixel wide image when you only need a 500 pixel but you're not downloading that 1300 pixel image. The tricky part with Source Set is it looks at overall screen width. It doesn't look at your post width area, it looks at the total screen width area. So it's not really looking at the space for that particular image. And on mobile that's generally the same thing because your images are going to be full screen or full width of the screen. On desktop it's not. So your desktop might be 1200 pixels wide, but your content area is is 680. And that's where you could run into trouble if you're uploading much larger images. Got it?

Yeah. So, point being, the size of your image is really important and the smaller the better. Up to a point. So what would your recommendation be for people in terms of what image size should they upload and how can they figure out that specifically for their blog? Because I'm guessing it might be different for each blog.

Sure. I get that you want your images to be beautiful and that's important. There's this balancing act of making the images look good and making them not too big or making them small enough. Maybe what I should do is walk through sort of my ideal workflow of how to do an image on your site. You take these beautiful photos, you edit them in Lightroom or Photoshop, and then the first thing we do is to scale them down to the width of the largest width that will be displayed. So like with the Foodie Pro theme, that's 680 pixels wide. Most sites are in the 680 to 750 pixels wide range. So you literally resize the image in your image editing program and get it looking good at that size. Then obviously the height will auto adjust to keep your proportions the same. Then what you want to do is export the image with compression. So you save for photographs. You want to save in the JPEG format. And the way JPEG compression works, it's a lossy compression. So the more you compress, the more quality you lose. And that's the balancing act. So what you want to do is compress it as much as you can tolerate, but not make the image look like crap. You can try an experiment actually and just crank up the compression to the maximum, export the image and then do no compression, export the image and maybe do something in between. And then what you do is you save all those files on your computer and look at the image quality and also look at the file size, you might see a massive difference. So an Image might be 20 kilobytes, all the way up to 500 kilobytes, depending on how you export it, it could be much larger.

With the image size, do you have a recommendation or something that you try and shoot for? Like, always try and get it under 100 kilobytes.

Ideally, it's a little tricky because of the way JPEG compression works. It's not going to be the same every time because the amount of detail and texture in an image, the larger it's going to be. So if you have something, say, with a smooth white tablecloth and not a lot of texture and a lot of detail, that image is going to compress really, really well. And it might come out at, let's.

Say, 30 kilobytes, because it doesn't have 9,000 colors. Like, it's just. It's a simpler image.

And if you instead have something with, like, a burlap tablecloth with lots of detail, or, like, I don't know, a pheasant with, like, lots of feathers. Right, right. That image may, at the same level of compression, may come out to 150 or 200 kilobytes, because the algorithm knows it needs that much detail and there's so much changing. So there is an option in Photoshop to say, always set to 150 kilobytes. And I don't recommend that because what's going to happen is they're all going to end up at 150k and quality will vary. So instead, what you want to do is experiment a little bit and you'll find a quality level that's about right. If the scale is 1 to 100, usually 75 or so is about right, but you'll have to tinker with it and just do a little experiment. But once you figure it out, generally you can stick with that level of compression. So if you're consistently exporting images that are under 100 kilobytes, you're probably in really good shape.

And then after that, load it straight into your blog. Or do you also. I know some bloggers will use a compression plugin that they have installed that helps to save some or get rid of some of the weight of images after. So would you recommend that people do that as well?

Absolutely. I've been using Short Pixel lately. I used to use imagify, which is good, but in my tests, Short Pixel actually performs better. So the way this works is you install a plugin that automatically optimizes your images when you upload them and what they do is they take your already pretty well optimized image and they send it to their servers, they do their magic and then spit the image back and squeeze out a few more kilobytes and they can actually do a really good job. Most of the time, the quality loss is not noticeable or very slight. Most of the time, it might be a slight softening of the image. And again, that takes some experimentation. But the key here is you also want to make sure you optimize your thumbnails. And what happens when you upload an image to WordPress is in the background, it actually generates a bunch of other images that are smaller. So it'll scale down your original image to maybe something that's 500 by 500 and maybe 300 by 300 or 150 by 150. And that's going to be different on every site because your theme will tell WordPress, Hey, I need thumbnails of this size. And you might have some plugins that say, hey, I need thumbnails of this size. Like the Tasty Recipe plugin will generate three images based on what Google wants to see in the recipe rich cards.

Right?

So all of those thumbnails get generated when you upload an image, and you want to make sure those are also getting optimized. So you'll upload your image to WordPress. Short pixel in the background will optimize all of those images. So it might be 10 different files.

Actually on your server for one single image.

For one single image, Right.

To explain that for people. So the idea is, and maybe it's easiest to look at Pinch of Yum as an example, is if you're on a desktop computer and you go to Pinch of Yum, there's images right at the top that says make this for dinner. And then below, it's kind of the blog post and it says the latest and greatest. And there's recipe images that go along with that post. But that little square image, if you look at that image, like if you were to right click on it and say copy image URL and then paste it in another tab, you can see that the address for that Image ends with 740by740.jpg, which means that it's a square image and we didn't upload that, WordPress just automatically created that. And so what you're saying is, if you're optimizing just one image that you're exporting from Lightroom, that's just that single image that will be used in the post. But there's all these different places throughout your blog where images are also used and you aren't optimizing those unless you're using a plugin. Is that right?

Exactly.

Got it.

Thank you.

Yes. The one that you recommend is called Short Pixel which we can link to in the show notes. Is that an automated process?

Yeah. Once you have it installed and configured, it just runs. It's. They have a free tier but it's really minimal. So you probably will need to spend about five bucks a month to be on their next tier up. The other thing you can do with Short Pixel and Imagify is batch processing of your existing images. So when you first install it, you configure it the way you want and then you can go back test a few images, make sure that it looks good, but then you can actually go through and optimize everything you've ever uploaded in the history of your blog. So that that will be a big speed benefit.

And do they, do you have to pay extra for that if you're going to do that one batch edit it?

Probably. You have to look at their plans. They have like one time credits and so it may pay to like get the base plan. That's five bucks a month and then to batch process. Short Pixel is pretty good. It says hey, you've got 40,000 images to optimize and it'll say hey, buy this plan, you'll be covered.

Got it?

Yep.

Cool. Anything else on the image front that you would recommend in terms of optimizing images? It's a lot of really good information.

To go back to retina for a second. I don't hate Retina. I just want to make that clear.

We didn't get that impression.

I've got two 4K monitors in front of me so I like nice images. Where it is really I think ideal to use retina and higher resolution images is things like your logo and some of the other little graphics around your site where you can get a nice extra sharpness and that I think is worth the extra little bit of a performance hit because everybody sees a nicer image that way. The other big thing with images is you don't need 10 photos that look almost identical of that cake. I can't tell you how many sites I scrolled down and the bloggers so excited about the table setup and the dish and it's gorgeous and they've got the best light and it. And it does. Their photos are gorgeous but they give like six different angles of basically the same thing.

Sure.

And all they're doing is shooting themselves in the foot. People don't want to scroll that much. They've, you know, and I know it's really hard to kill your darlings and pare that down, but I generally recommend like one beautiful shot at the top. Process shots are really good. People really want process shots now, especially if it's something that's harder to make. You know, if it's, if it's something that doesn't need a process shot, don't put one in. But for anything that's a little tricky or is better explained with a photo, definitely work those in. And then you can do another nice photo of the finished dish. But you don't need like eight more of that.

Yeah. And more isn't necessarily better when it comes to photos.

Yep, got it.

And it's interesting. Even with some of the mega popular recipe sites you can look at, like Allrecipes, for instance, it's like they'll just have tiny little thumbnails and then one usually crummy image. And, and not to say that that's what you want to do, but it's. I'm always interested to see the, the super popular recipe sites that are more corporate than individual blogger to see what are they doing from an optimization standpoint. And almost always they're pretty lean with how they use images. So it kind of lines up with what you're saying where, you know, there's a, there's a huge potential performance hit. And it's a good challenge for us to think about personally for Pinch of Yam, how do we want to handle that and move forward with it? So it's a good reminder. Next question that I wanted to ask you about is kind of looking at this number three thing that we were talking about, the idea of recipe details or this fully enhanced recipe rich card. And we've done a couple recent podcast interviews. One with Raquel, who is leading the charge at WP Tasty, and one with Casey Markey, who's a fellow food blogger, pro, expert and talking about SEO. So we've kind of touched on this a little bit, but I think it's worth spending some more time with it. So can you talk about what a fully enhanced recipe rich card is and why it's a mistake to not have that complete?

It's only a mistake if you want to maximize your opportunity with Google. If you don't care about Google's traffic, then it doesn't matter.

If you don't care about search traffic, you can stop listening to number three.

Well, you know, some people might not care. Maybe that's not their thing. But Google, this is another place where Google has said, hey, we want you to provide this information. And they literally give us a list. They want to see the title of the recipe, the description, the author, the cook time, the prep time, the calories. There's this list of details or recipe metadata, you could call it that. They say, give us all of this and will be happy when you do that. What they do is if you give them all of the information they're asking for, you can get what's called a fully enhanced recipe rich card. And that means that they've got all the information they need to work with. And then in the search results, they can make your recipe look better in the search results. We're all familiar with seeing the search results where it's just text and then there's the next line down is another chocolate cake. But there's a picture and there's a rating and there's the time and the calories, and those are shown directly in the search results. So Google is pulling that information and putting it into the search results. And, you know, that creates a better user experience. It helps people search for what they're looking for. You know, maybe somebody wants a low calorie chocolate chocolate cake.

Yep.

So they can scan and see which one has the lowest calories. You know, I don't expect that to be too accurate, but you get the idea. Ratings is another one. They call it the aggregate rating. So if you have, you know, the one to five star ratings, it'll actually show, oh, 3.5 average rating. And that helps people make a determination of, oh, do I want to click on this in the search results or do I want to keep looking?

Yeah, it reminds me a lot of my ebay days when I was selling all sorts of things on ebay. And you'd have to pay extra if you wanted it to be bold or if you wanted to put stars next to it. Basically all of these things that impacted people clicking on it or not to look at it. And I see that transfer over really clearly with search. But the only thing is you don't have to pay for it. You just have to include the information, which is great. And I'll just include the, in the show notes, a link to the page that you're talking about where Google talks about this. But if you want to search for it, you can actually just search recipe data Google. And that first result is what for the listeners, what Andrew's talking About here, where Google outlines all of the things that they would like to see and then they give examples of what that looks like for a fully enhanced recipe card. So for those that want to make sure that they're doing that, how would you go about doing it? And then is there a way that you can check to make sure that you, that you're getting that?

Yep. So the first thing is you can't just type this stuff into a blog post. You can't just say, hey, my recipe is this and here are my ingredient lists and just make it a bullet pointed list. Google is looking for specific markup in the code of the page. So the way to do this really is a recipe plugin. There are a number of them out there. Obviously WP Tasty would be at the top of the list.

Yes, of course, I appreciate that. And there's other ones out there that are.

There are other ones.

What we don't want to do is make people feel like that's the only option. We think it's awesome and it's well supported and we've worked super hard on it. I know you've worked with WP Recipe Maker, which is another good plugin.

And so the thing is you want to make sure whatever plugin you're using gives you all of those fields to fill out. A lot of people used to use Easy Recipe. That plugin was basically abandoned, unfortunately. So if you're still using Easy Recipe, now is a good time to think about switching to another plugin. I know WP Recipe Maker and wptasty can both import your existing recipes and convert them over for you so you don't have to manually retype everything.

So there's these recipe plugins and you'd install one just by using those. Will the information automatically show up or is there more involved with it?

So once you put the information in, it's going to be coded correctly in your site. What you want to do is then check it. If you just search Google Structured Markup Tool, Structured Data Testing tool I think they call it, because ultimately this is called structured data. Recipes are one example of that. There's lots of other structured data and markup out there, but that's the space we're in. You can actually run an individual blog post through their Structured Data testing tool and it will give you the results and say, hey, I found a recipe and it's got this. Oh wait, there's a warning. You're missing your calories and it actually tells you what you're missing. And then you can Go back to your recipe, edit it and figure out the calories. I know in WP Recipe Maker, if you go to the management page, it'll actually have a traffic light indicator of red, green and yellow. And if you hover over that, it'll tell you right there what's not been filled out. So you can look in the back end. And that's a little faster than going one at a time.

Yep.

And I'm guessing wptasty has something similar.

Yeah, we. Nope, we don't have a built in. It's similar to Yoast where you'd have like a red, yellow, green, any type, like a feedback light that says if you need to optimize or not. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's a, there's basically a quick way to tell at a glance, you know, hey, I need to work on, I need to fix these 10 recipes. Got it.

Yeah.

The other way you can tell is in your Google Search console. So if you haven't already set up your site in Google Search Console and in there you can actually, it'll run a report of showing you all of the recipes it's identified on your site and it'll say, hey, these are enhanceable or these are fully enhanced. And so it gives you a tool to check all those as well. The one big caveat on that is it is slow to update. It can take a couple of weeks to update in there. So don't expect instant changes if you're making stuff and making changes there.

Got it. And then the one thing I was going to point out with that the only thing you can't update on your own would be the ratings. That would be the one thing that you'd have to have somebody else or a close friend go in and leave a rating or review on the recipe. That's the one thing that you yourself can't impact.

Yes. Although you can leave one rating.

Sure.

You can decide that your recipe is five stars. And I know in WP Recipe Maker there's two ways to leave ratings and you may have to turn this option on. But if you're looking at the rating itself in the recipe card in the blog post, you can just hover over the star rating and just click to leave a five star rating. Or the way you can leave ratings is with a comment. There's a little option of like leave a comment and a rating.

And one more thing to point out with that we've seen this happen. It was, it happened with a. This was maybe a year or two ago. But if you are have. If you do have ratings displayed on your recipe card, it's really important that you make it easy and accessible for people to leave those ratings. Because it's possible with sites if there is a rating option on the post, but there isn't a way for people to leave that rating, then Google has. We've seen sites that have had a manual action, which means that Google kind of shakes its finger at you and says something is wrong. But the idea being that the. That would be the one thing that's a little bit harder to add or manipulate on your own.

Absolutely. Great.

So the fourth thing that we wanted to hit on, the fourth mistake that people are making that you see often is this idea of site not being secure or an SSL certificate. Can you talk about what an SSL cert is and why it's important for people to have one of those and how they know if they can they have that or not?

Sure. So more and more people have done this already, which is great. But if you haven't yet, this is hugely important. I would put it at the top of your list. That is, when you're browsing a website, whether you get that green padlock at the top that says it's HTTPs for secure. I would imagine most people are familiar with that. Now, with E commerce, you always want to make sure you have an SSL site. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. Technically it's actually not ssl, it's tls, but the abbreviation SSL is stuck, so we're using that. But what you want to see at the top of your site is HTTPs with the S there and a green padlock or something that says secure. Like I know in Chrome, it'll actually show both to really make it clear. Because you can be HTTPs and not secure if you have what's called mixed content, where there are some resources like images on the page being loaded with just HTTP. And what we're talking about here is basically whether or not your data is being encrypted as it's being sent across the Internet. So SSL lets you encrypt data from your server all the way to the web browser. And that means nobody can spy on the information that's being sent back and forth. So it's really important for a whole host of reasons. You wouldn't think about it with food blogs. It's like, oh, why does it need to be encrypted? But the entire web will work better once everything is encrypted. I could do a whole Podcast on why it's going to be SSL from a big macro, protecting journalists in war zones kind of level. When all traffic is encrypted, you don't know what to look for. But sticking to food blogs. One of the advantages right now is SSL actually can be faster. So with the new HTTP 2 protocol, you can have more resources like images downloading simultaneously in the browser. So there's also a speed benefit that's relatively new. It used to be that SSL was slower, but now it's actually faster. Of course, Google is really pushing for ssl. They have said clearly sites that are SSL will actually get a bump in the rankings. If that doesn't get people to set up a notice, I don't know what will. They're taking it a step further. Now they're starting to. In their Chrome browser, it's starting to say not secure. It's a big warning on pages that are not secure. Right now it's like if there's a form field like a mail opt in or something, it'll give that warning. Later this year, the Chrome browser is going to update so that every single page that's not SSL will say not secure. And you certainly don't want that right at the top of your site when somebody's browsing around.

How would people go about adding that? Is it difficult? And what are the things that they need to make sure that they're doing and watching for if they do make that switch?

Yes. So the first step is to install an SSL certificate, and that's something your host can help you with. In the past couple of years, there's been a movement, it's a nonprofit called let's Encrypt. And it actually makes it so much easier to install a certificate. And most hosting companies have actually incorporated it now. So you can basically just say, boom, click, install my certificate. Whereas you used to have to purchase a certificate and then validate and then get the files and cut and paste. It was a nightmare. Now you can just install let's Encrypt certificate that gets you the ability to be ssl. Then there's a bunch of steps where you need to basically change your site over and change the primary URL. I actually wrote a blog post about this that walks through the steps to do because it's a little too involved, I'd say on the podcast. But we should definitely link to that in the show notes because there's basically a handful of steps where you want to install the cert, change things over and then you want to do a search and replace in your database to replace all of those hard coded internal links from HTTP to HTTPs. Then there's a couple of potential gotchas in there that I list in my blog post. So it's, it's something people can do on their own if they're, you know, technically minded. That's also another one of those things though, that it's got a little bit of a learning curve. You're only going to do it once, so it might make sense to have a professional help you with that.

Yep, that makes sense. And that's actually a really good lead in to this last one here. Speaking of professionals, we kind of teased this a little bit, but this idea of getting somebody to help out and you can talk a little bit about what you do, but maybe just in general too, why that's important for bloggers to think about getting people that can help them do what they do best.

I think to start, it depends on what your goals are. You know, I work with a lot of bloggers who want to quit their day job and make this their full time career. You know, that's one end of the spectrum. And then there's people who are like, I just like posting recipes for my family and that's a hobby. Right. But no matter what, you want to be successful at your goal. So for the hobby blogger, it might be that the tech stresses them out and they just want to post recipes and so they're willing to invest in their hobby and hire somebody to help with the stuff that they don't like or get or care about or don't want to spend their time on. For the professional, it comes down to treating your website like a business and not like a hobby. And so you're going to invest in things. It's unreasonable to think you can do it all yourself. Even if you can do it all yourself, even if you're capable of that, that might not be the best strategy. You can't scale that, you can't really find what you're best at. If you're scrambling around trying to figure out how to switch over to ssl, and that's not your jam. Beyond that, what I recommend is if it's a one time thing where there's a steep learning curve, that's the first place to hire help. If it's a server move, switching ssl, stuff like that, get somebody who knows what they're doing, have them do it right the first time and make sure the redirects are correct because you don't want to learn the hard way on your own site. I've seen people's traffic tank because they did a changeover and they didn't put in the right redirect and they literally fell out of the Google search results. Nightmares like that can be avoided. Then what you want to do is really focus on the stuff you're doing day in and day out, getting better at that, learning how to do it right, and then it becomes second nature. So when you're writing a blog post, understanding some of the SEO strategies for content where doing a little keyword research, say, and working those keyword phrases into your content in a way that's natural, that's not stuff you can hire somebody else to do so much as you need to learn how to do that correctly and work that into your workflow.

And so obviously with Blog Tutor, that's something that you offer is the kind of thing where somebody's like, hey, I'd love to get an SSL cert. I'm going to reach out to Andrew and have him take care of that for me. What does that look like with you? Specifically to work with you? And if people are interested in connecting with you, what would be the best way to do that?

Sure. So I offer WordPress support subscriptions because I'm interested in long term relationships with my clients. I think it's, it's better for everybody. Obviously it's better for me to have somebody to work with a long time, but I found it's better for my clients too because we're both invested in the relationship and each other's success. So I do everything on a subscription basis. If you go to blogtutor.com and click WordPress Help right at the top, that'll show you some information about what's included in our support subscriptions. We have a few different tiers, but all of them cover the really unsexy stuff that nobody else wants to do. You can probably tell in my voice I kind of geek out on this stuff and I like it and I enjoy it and I like making things work a little bit better. What I found is my clients, they don't want to deal with that. So we start with backups. Backups are the most important thing. I actually do two different types of backups because that's my get out of jail free card. If anything goes wrong, we can always restore. We do security scanning. If a site's ever hacked, we'll help unhack it. We do uptime monitoring, we do WordPress updates, which is really important. And also not fun, especially if you don't know how to fix something that breaks during an update. That's really scary. One of the things is we'll handle the updates and if something does break, we'll usually have it fixed before you even know something went wrong. The idea really is to free people up to do the fun stuff on some of our plans. We also offer what I call quick support requests, which are anything that we can help you out with that takes 15 minutes or less. I'm not super strict about 15 minutes, but the idea is we're a trusted research for, excuse me, a trusted resource for all those little things that come up from time to time. Earlier today I had somebody asking me about a conflict with their ad network and I had experienced it two days prior with the same ad network on a different client site. So I had a real quick answer. She didn't have to spend any time stressing about it. I was able to say, oh yeah, ask them about this, this and this and you'll be good. So it's a way to sort of tap into our expertise and experience to enable you to kind of get on with your day.

Yeah, for sure. Yep. That's a case in point. It's an example of what you're talking about where because of your connections with other bloggers, the work that you're doing on a day to day basis, especially people in a similar niche, you'll see those things come up and you'll be able to respond to those in a way where for somebody on their own it's a completely new thing, but for you it might be familiar. So we know lots of people that have worked with you and have said really good things. We've actually had a handful of emails that people send to us and just say thanks so much for introducing us to Andrew and he's done such a good job with us. So we appreciate you and the work that you've done for the people that have connected with you through us. And also for being a member of Food Blogger Pro Expert, an official expert on the community and for Food Blogger Pro members. They could connect with you there. Is that correct? Or what's the best way to follow up with you and to reach out?

Supportogtutor.com is probably the best way to get ahold of me.

Perfect, simple.

Oh, and I don't want to neglect to mention, speaking of being grateful to work with you guys, I do offer a 10% discount to food Blogger Pro members. So if you log into the Food Blogger Pro website and Click on the deals section. There's a discount code in there to get you 10% off the subscriptions.

Awesome. Yeah. And a good reminder for members that we have that deals and discounts page for different services and tools that we recommend and appreciate you being a part of that. So, Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really great to talk to you.

Oh, it's always a pleasure. Hey.

Hey, beautiful people. Alexa here bringing you the review of the week and also asking you for a favor. So first, the review of the week, which comes from Jodi from Growing book by book. And it says, I look forward to each episode and there's always a great takeaway from each interview. Bjork does a great job at interviewing the guests, making sure the listeners are always getting the information they need. I'm not even a fan food blogger and I still listen every week. We love to hear that food bloggers and non food bloggers all can benefit and learn and grow with the Food Blogger Pro podcast. So thank you so much, Jodi. And now the favor. So if you know anyone who's just absolutely killing it with their food blog right now, or maybe you know someone who's just super knowledgeable about the food blogger niche, or maybe it was somebody that we had interviewed before and you just want to hear where they are now and kind of an update on their food blogging journey, we would love to hear from you. And we're always looking for new people, new exciting stories to share on the Food Blogger Pro podcast. So if you have any suggestions or ideas, just let us know by emailing us@podcastoodbloggerpro.com thank you so much for listening, friend. We really appreciate you. As Bjork always says, make it a great week.

Sam.