Creator Theme Feature Fest starts January 22nd
Why design features must be accompanied by text
Why pictures need words for SEO. And why that matters in 2024.
You’re probably focusing heavily on your content if you’re working on any website in 2024.
Everyone is recalibrating their strategy. Google is rolling out a post-cookies world. Ad networks are developing technology to work with those coming changes.
Most developers are scrambling to catch up to 2024 standards in WordPress, while actively supporting their existing clients. It’s mayhem out here, and everybody is pivoting to survive.
What Google Says
“Google extracts information about the subject matter of the image from the content of the page, including captions and image titles. Wherever possible, make sure images are placed near relevant text and on pages that are relevant to the image subject matter.”
Google Documentation
and why that feels like conflicting information in 2024
I get it. You listened to authority hackers on January 1st & now you want to review your site with a fine-toothed comb for UX & visuals.
Hey, me too. The bit about “no user in 2024 wants to see big globs of text” (I’m paraphrasing, obviously) cut me to my core for my party blog. I spent all of 2023 focusing on higher word counts for search engines.
As a result, I’m leaning into visuals and user experience for all posts & pages now. My partner, who is thankfully much smarter than I am with all things tech, had to nicely inform me that my images must accompany text for search engines to crawl them. This is not new to SEO.
We’re all learning what works in 2024
But guess what’s not going away? Google’s standards for image and SEO.
If you’re looking at a redesign, new theme, or theme adjustments…
you want to be sure that you’re considering all angles of optimization.
It’s easy to get caught up in making things pretty. I did that with my content, and I’m lucky to have a business partner who’s a development nerd.
She could not bear the sight of my homepage losing strategic advantages using her hard-earned code. She showed me how to style my text to be less “abrasive” (laughing at my offense at MY content) using our block-based editor. 🤯
Want to make a change in 2024?
I highly recommend transitioning to a theme that supports full site editing. We’ve been studying our client performance over the last year as we transition from templated, block-based custom themes to full-site editing. The content performance benefits are incredible when an FSE theme is coupled with the necessary constraints & optimizations we’ve built into Creator Theme.
Want to try custom block functionality, but you’re not ready to transition to a theme right now? Check out Small Plugins!
We’ve built several block-based plugins to support block-based, custom functionality that is totally free for users. Plus a few paid plugins… those are powerhouses. 😍
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