WordPress Plugins Archives - Wheaton Website Services Blog

Top Reason to Use Microdata on Your Website

February 22, 2017 by Jim King Leave a Comment

Never heard of microdata? You’re not alone but knowing what it is and using microdata on your website will improve page rankings, click-through rates and user experience.

Microdata is an HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_%28HTML%29

Microdata is not intended for the user to see. It’s there to help search engines better understand the content on your page. Some examples of the hundred’s of elements are:

Product Price
Product Image
Product Name
Reviews
Availability, i.e. in stock.

Yelp uses microdata to tag star ratings, number of reviews and price range on their website. This lets Google understand what those elements are and allows them to display that data specifically in the search results. This data makes it easy for a searcher to understand quickly.

What is Microdata

People don’t read websites (you’re the exception reading this), they scan them looking for what they want and where to click next. If you can provide information in an easy to read/scan format, more people will notice and take action.

Microdata elements for anything

No matter what you are selling or offering on your website, there’s a good chance there is a microdata element for it. The hundreds of elements are broken out into groups, such as:

People
Recipes
Products
Place
Organization
and even Thing

As searchers get better at searching and more precise in their search terms, providing more precise data to the search engines will only help those people find you more often.

Zen Cart and WordPress and most other platforms all allow microdata in one way or another. If you are not using it, at least some of your competitors are. As the saying goes, if your standing still, someone is passing you by.

Caching Plugin for WordPress

August 18, 2016 by Jim King Leave a Comment

There are MANY factors that affect the way your website pages rank. Many of those are outside of your direct control. For this reason, it’s so important to take full advantage of the factors you can control.

One of the ranking factors is page speed. How quickly does you website load for a visitor? Visitors want them to load fast. If it’s too slow, they will simply leave your site and go someplace else. This is why Google ranks faster sites higher than slower sites, it’s a better user experience.

W3 Total Cache WordPress Caching Plugin Some of the factors affecting site speed are your website platform, hosting company, hosting plan and template design. Changes to any of these are not so simple and involve significant business processes.

That’s the beauty of a caching plugin.

A caching plugin works on top of all of these items. It doesn’t much care about these details. It will do it’s job regardless. So what is it’s job?

The way caching plugins work is by saving the dynamically generated pages and serving them from a saved copy, the cache, whenever a page is requested, rather than loading all of the website scripts and running database queries every time a page is viewed.

This is much faster for the visitor, reducing page load times, improving the customer experience and helping to increase your page ranking. The W3 Total Cache plugin is one of the most popular for WordPress.

W3 Total Cache is simple to install.

One of it’s biggest advantages is the level of customization if offers. There are twelve tabs on the settings page. This allows us to tweak the settings for your store to achieve the best results. Each site is a little different with different customizations, themes and plugins. Each hosting environment is a bit different. These differences mean the right settings for someone else may not be ideal for you. This is were having a professional install and configure it for you can be well worth the investment.

If you’re looking to improve your site…better user experience and better rankings…contact us to install and configure W3 Total Cache for your WordPress site.

Shipping Automation

January 18, 2016 by Jim King Leave a Comment

Small business owners wear a lot of hats. Some we like, some we don’t. Some we’re good at and others not so much. If the task is not generating revenue, it should be delegated or minimized.

Shipping automation is one such opportunity

Think about the time you spend each day printing packing slips, printing shipping labels, updating order status’s and sending customers their tracking numbers. Now add it up for a week and for a month. Could that time be better spent finding new customers?

Companies like Ship Station and Ship Works offer solutions to make your life easier. They offer a plugin for many website platforms, like Zen Cart and WordPress, that will:

Import orders from most any marketplace, cart or sales channel

If you run a Zen Cart, an Ebay store and an Etsy store, these tools will import all of those orders into one interface so you can process them all at once. A consolidated interface from all platforms saves time and reduces mistakes.

Print discounted shipping labels for any carrier

They generally offer discounted shipping rates for USPS, UPS and FedEx. This savings will go right to your bottom line, in addition to the time savings. Your shipping label and packing slip can be customized. Consider including phone or email for customer service or a coupon good for their next order.

Send detailed tracking info to your stores and customers

Once labels are printed, you can automatically update each store by marking the order as ‘shipped’ and email your customer to let them know their order is on the way. This is a great place to include a thank you message, invitation to provide any feedback or concerns and further market your business while your business is already top of mind.

The obvious benefit to these shipping automation tools is the time savings. The hidden benefit is the additional marketing and improved customer service that can integrated into these solutions. You’re improving your business two steps at once allowing more time for revenue generating tasks.

We’ve also talked about order process automation and data import / export. Have questions? Contact us!