This week on the WP-Tonic Roundtable show, John Locke, Chris Badgett and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood for Episode 270. The covered several articles covering online topics from pondering if websites are dead to evaluating tips for making your website faster.

This show’s sponsor is IntelligenceWP (https://intelligencewp.com/) as WordPress plugin designed to give you more insight into your Google Analytics statistics.

Story 1 The sudden death of the website

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/the-sudden-death-of-the-website/

The author of this story proposes that websites are quickly moving to become a thing of the past and predicts that the first major brand will shut down its website in 2018.

The team pointed out that while online marketing is growing and changing, they don’t see the death of websites as imminent.

They agreed that conversational marketing, having real conversations with your customers which the author touts, is a powerful marketing/sales tool and it will continue to grow, however, that doesn’t mean that websites are dead.

As Chris pointed out, even if you have an online business and are doing sales online, learning the basics of classic sales techniques can serve you well.

Story 2 On AMP for Email

https://www.rodriguezcommaj.com/blog/on-amp-for-email

The team sees many members in the web community who are skeptical of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and distrusting Google’s intentions.

The author brings those concerns to the email aspects of AMP as opposed to the mobile web page structure the team has discussed before.

Story 3 - How to Show Your Web Design Clients You Care about Their ROI

https://calderaforms.com/2018/02/show-web-design-clients-care-roi/

Everyone agreed that the ROI (Return on Investment) of their website is what’s important to customers. Sometimes in development, there is a lot of focus on tools, but remember the tools are a means to an end. Customers are paying you to get them that ROI.

In this article, Caldera is defining ROI as getting qualified leads. That’s what the client cares about not that the site wins design awards.

Positioning yourself as a developer or agency who cares about a customers return, understands the need for conversions, and helps customers understand this ROI using Google Analytics may be used as a competitive advantage.

Story 4 Reconsider Blogging on Medium if You’re Worried about SEO

One of the author’s main concerns was that Medium uses no follow links. Generally with SEO, you want to have follow links as opposed to no follow links.

The team viewed this differently. While follow links are desired for page rank, they see Medium as another channel for building your brand like YouTube and another place to find potential customers. This goes beyond the specific value of Google Page Rankings. It’s about finding new readers and gaining traffic.

If someone finds you on Medium, clicks through to your site, joins your mailing list, and maybe becomes a customer, there is value in that link.

Story 5 - Historical yearly trends in the usage of content management systems for websites

https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y

For many who are part of the web development community, this report might be startling. While most in the WordPress community know that WordPress powers over 29% of the Internet, they may not realize that over 50% of websites are still not using any CMS (Content Management System).

The team agreed that based on these numbers that Content Management Systems are still not part of the mainstream.

One thing they found interesting was that Wix only powers approximately .5% of websites. Based on the YouTube advertising by some of their proponents you would think they held a larger piece of the pie.

The main takeaway was that there is still room for a lot of growth and many changes.

Story 6 - 13 Performance-Boosting Site Speed Tips for WordPress

https://torquemag.io/2018/02/13-performance-boosting-site-speed-tips-wordpress/

While the team has covered this in the past, Jonathan pointed out that it’s always a topic of interest with his clients.

It was felt that the article had some good information, and they added two other big points that they find important.

While the article mentioned selecting responsive themes, the team covered the importance of well written themes that load fast. A favorite of both Chris and Adam is the Astra theme (https://wordpress.org/themes/astra/).

They also agreed that selecting the proper web host is critical. Slow servers at the web host along with outdated PHP and other server configurations can negatively impact your site performance.

Kinsta hosting is a web host that focuses on performance and security for WordPress websites. They are also the sponsors of the WP-Tonic Wednesday show, and the WP-Tonic website runs on Kinsta hosting.

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