Things change rapidly in the WordPress world. The content in this post is more than a year old and may no longer represent best practices.
Here are some links and notes from the open Q & A part of the April 2016 East Bay WordPress Meetup.
Analytics for Landing Pages
SumoMe provides an awesome suite of analytics tools. There are WordPress plugins, but you can use SumoMe on any website. There’s a free version, a $40/month version, and a $100/month version.
For A/B testing, try Unbounce, which lets you build landing pages as well as testing them. Plans start at $49/month. 30-day free trial.
Opinions on Visual Composer
Page building tools like Visual Composer can add a lot of overhead to your site and decrease performance. They’re also not wonderful for SEO. If you deactivate Visual Composer, all that’s left of your content for those pages will be a collection of shortcodes. And there may be times when it’s actually a lot faster to write code than to build something with Visual Composer.
That said, Visual Composer is very popular and it can help non-coders to create different page layouts quickly. If you are going to use it, make sure you install it as a separate plugin rather than having it bundled into a theme. Plugins that have been bundled into themes can’t be updated separately and pose a security risk.
Creating your own SEO-friendly HTML output
If something like Visual Composer is giving you trouble with managing your on-page SEO, have a look at Rendera from Heroku.
Type in your HTML code and see it rendered in realtime. Then style it with CSS. You can use any of the HTML5 or CSS3 tags your browser supports.
How to tell bots to go crawl themselves
(A nice trick courtesy of SiteGround support, explained in more detail on the WP Fangirl blog.)
# BEGIN Tell bots to go crawl themselves
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (bot|crawl|robot)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !(bing|Google|msn|MSR|Twitter) [NC]
RewriteRule ^/?.*$ "http\:\/\/127\.0\.0\.1" [R,L]
</IfModule>
# END Tell bots to go crawl themselves
Mac tool for creating diagrams
Omnigraffle is for creating precise, beautiful graphics. Like website wireframes, an electrical system design, a family tree, or mapping out software classes. For artists, designers, casual data-mappers, and everyone in-between.
Mac desktop: $99
iOS: $49
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