Teaser

Joe Hall: WordPress has the freedom to allow you to make a lot of great decisions and also a lot of bad decisions.

Jesse Friedman: All that stuff was just us figuring it out as we went along.

Joe Hall: I always tell clients to stop and ask yourself, is that really what you want to do?

Jesse Friedman: There was some crazy stuff happening back then. I remember people were getting like tattoos on dares. We were going to parties.

Introduction

Jesse Friedman: Welcome to Impressive Hosting, where we seek to uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. I am your host Jesse Friedman, and with me today is Joe Hall from Hall Analysis. Joe is actually an old friend of mine as well.

He and I met, geez, it’s closing in on 20 years ago, back when I used to do SEO for an advertising firm. Joe was so helpful in getting me started in the WordPress community. I met so many folks who helped me get started in the WordPress community. Joe, you were instrumental in guiding a lot of people, I think, in some of the beginnings of what SEO took shape into. And so that was back in the early 2000s. And I thought it would be great to have you on the show here because you have an expertise in doing this for, gosh, I don’t know, decades now, and I think it would be a really unique perspective to see what it is that you think about when you start to look at hosting companies and evaluating that for your customers.

So before we dive in, why don’t you take a minute, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you’re working on, where you’re from, all that.

Joe Hall: Thank you so much, Jesse. It’s a pleasure to be here. This morning I was actually thinking about this call, preparing for this recording. I was thinking about how much of a pleasure it is to know people over the course of your career, and to watch them take on new roles and grow in their career.

It’s just been a pleasure knowing you for so long, seeing you go from this role to that role and now what you’re doing now is just so impressive.

Jesse Friedman: Thanks, Joe.

Joe Hall: Yeah. So my name is Joe Hall. I’m an SEO. I started building things on the internet in 1997, really haven’t stopped ever since then. I am a technical SEO, so I think of myself as more of like a web developer that does SEO. I still build websites, but primarily my main thing is technical SEO. That’s what I mostly focus on, and you can read more about that or check out what I do in that regard at hallanalysis.com. But yeah, I’m really happy to be here.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, no, thanks for joining. You and I haven’t had a chance to catch up recently, but for years you and I bounced around ideas and talked about the craft of SEO. I remember you and I met, I think we met at a conference. I’m trying to remember the name of it. It was back in like 2006 or 2007.

Chris from, man, what was the name of that business?

Jesse Friedman: Maybe that was it. Yeah. And then I remember Ray Drysdale, Pam Lund, that whole crew. We were all like a small group of SEOers who were really starting to come up in their career and really starting to make a name for ourselves. And at the same time, trying to really figure out what it is that SEO needs to do to grow as a business in that industry. I mean, I remember back then I was working at an advertising firm that was helping car dealerships to start to rank better. And we were doing SEO and SEM, and then also just straight-up Flash ads back then.

And one of the things that we needed to do is try to teach car dealers how to actually rank. And that’s not an easy thing to do. These guys aren’t super technical, nor are they writing a lot of content. And I remember going to this conference and it was such a welcoming group of people, yourself included. And then we created like a small little gang of ourselves, you know, just kind of trying to pull it all together and figure it out. And then, so as my career changed, I went out of SEO…

Joe Hall: Was that conference in Boca Raton?

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. It was either… it was definitely Florida. I remember it being like Fort Lauderdale or something like that. Yeah.

Joe Hall: Well, yeah, I remember that. And that really was a great community of people.

How has SEO changed?

Joe Hall: And that time period was pivotal, I think, for the SEO industry because it was when SEO was moving from a cottage industry into like an actual component. So much of digital marketing back then was not really well defined, because nobody really knew what it was or how it should operate at a company. And so I think a lot of us that were doing SEO, and any web publishing really, we were all kind of trying to find our place within the professional services area and how do we fit ourselves into the marketing paradigm. A lot has changed since then. It was a really interesting time, because it attracted, and I’m sure you remember this, it attracted a lot of very unique characters to the industry.

Jesse Friedman: Oh yeah.

Joe Hall: Some of them have went on to become huge names, and some of them have kind of just disappeared. But it has been, like I was saying earlier, really just rewarding to be a part of that and then watch what has happened afterwards. I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly.

Jesse Friedman: Oh, for sure. I mean, we went from being a bunch of kids, quote unquote, you know, on party buses at conferences, learning how to do all this stuff because there wasn’t a playbook. There weren’t massive Google conferences where we were bringing big names together to teach you how to do these things. We were really kind of hacking the internet in a sense to try and figure out what it is that Google responds to. How is it that this content gets ranked? How does it get crawled? All that stuff was just us figuring it out as we went along. And when we’d get to these conferences, it was a great opportunity to learn from each other and it wasn’t set protocols or predefined curriculums or standards that we had to follow at that time. It was really, this is what I learned this year, doing this and figuring this out and everything else. And we established some good relationships and we had a lot of fun. But there was some crazy stuff happening back then. I remember people were getting like tattoos on dares. We were going to parties.

Joe Hall: It was a little weird to start your career—for me at least, it was weird to start my career in that regard because now I go to like professional events or I go somewhere where I’m surrounded by like CMOs or investment people. And I run into somebody that I literally like saw furniture into a pool one night.

Jesse Friedman: Yep.

Joe Hall: It’s like, I’m trying to be professional there, but I remember that dude back like, you know, 15 years ago when we were kind of a little crazy. So yeah, I mean, I think that’s an interesting component of this whole thing. But like I said, it’s just a real pleasure to watch how everything’s kind of come together and matured and us develop careers and everybody get a little wiser and understand what place they feel best in.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think over time our industry solidified—the ground underneath those things stopped moving so much and we kind of knew how to start building a business on top of these things. We knew how to sign clients, things got a lot more professional. And then we all started kind of going off and doing different things. You stuck in this world. You’ve been in it for a couple decades now. I kind of shifted out of SEO and I went into a variety of different areas. I got into web security and then user experience marketing, got acquired by Automattic. I’ve been working with hosting companies. The list goes on, so my trajectory has kind of been all over. But that leaves me to wonder like what has changed in the world of SEO?

Why is SEO so important for great WordPress hosting?

Jesse Friedman: It’s so funny because we talk about even just trying to get more traffic on like this podcast website or on WP Cloud or things like that. And I’m trying to draw on these old bits of information I had around SEO from the early 2000s. And I have to remind myself that that’s so outdated. It’s over a decade old at this point. So I’m curious, like, you know, when you start to take on an SEO project, what are the first things you’re looking for?

And feel free to answer that in any way, but also maybe think about that through the lens of a hosting company or like a customer who’s on a specific host. Are there things that you’re looking for that are like, immediate, we need to fix this? Or are there things that you’re like, oh, you’re on this host—that’s a good start. You’re at least in the right place.

Joe Hall: I think that WordPress itself is a good start. Some hosting companies are better than others, and we’ll get to that in a second. But just, you know, start off with WordPress itself. I think WordPress itself is a really good start for SEO. Back when, you know, when I first met you, we would joke around about how the engineers at Google preferred WordPress over Blogger. We would kind of say, oh, well, that’s kind of weird. Like Blogger is Google’s blogging platform. Why aren’t all the engineers running their personal sites on Blogger instead of WordPress installs? But really behind the scenes, they never really said this publicly, but behind the scenes, even they kind of admitted that WordPress’s handling of URLs, especially in regards to what’s called canonicals, out of the gate, is just perfect for SEO. A lot of the other CMSs out there that WordPress considered its competitors or that people match up WordPress against, they have kind of followed WordPress’s lead to a great extent. If they are doing things right for SEO, it’s because WordPress did it right first. And if they’re doing something wrong with SEO, then it’s likely that WordPress is doing it correctly or that everybody’s doing it wrong. So I think that WordPress in itself is a great choice for SEO, for a lot of reasons. But I also tell clients all the time that, you know, WordPress is what you make of it, right? So you can go wrong with WordPress. You can choose bad WordPress themes. You can overload the site with too many plugins. All those things can be detrimental to SEO. But you know, from its core, just coming right out of the gate, WordPress, I feel like is better than most other comparable CMSs on the market. As far as hosting is concerned…

Jesse Friedman: They’re already off to a good start if they’re using WordPress then, and this is a common theme that we actually see in this podcast too, is like we talk about performance and we talk about security as well, which actually tangentially—or not so tangentially—correlate to SEO and its performance there. But those things, out of the gate with WordPress, vanilla WordPress are quite good, right? Security is quite good, performance is quite good. And then it’s when you start to add on and extend WordPress that you can go down a road that’s quite good and it’s optimized and you’re doing a good job of it, but it can also lead you down a path where you end up deep in the woods and not knowing what you’re doing and creating a lot of headache for yourself.

Joe Hall: Yeah, so WordPress has the freedom to allow you to make a lot of great decisions and also a lot of bad decisions, right? The way I look at WordPress—and that’s why I think WordPress really does embrace the ethos of open source, not only the letter of the license, but the spirit of open source and allowing you to make choices. Some of those choices can be bad. Some of them can be really good, but the ability to allow you to make the right choices, I think also really helps with your SEO.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah, so do you only work with clients who are on WordPress? Or if a customer comes to you and they need SEO help and they’re not on WordPress, do you take on the client? Do you try to push them to WordPress?

Joe Hall: I work with anybody. I mean, I said that I would always work with WordPress clients—I probably wouldn’t have any clients. I mean, it’s true because most of my clients come to me if they’re having a problem. I do have a lot of WordPress clients. And sometimes they do come to me with issues, but rarely are those issues ever anything regarding like an SEO technical problem. It’s usually that they want to get an audit, a general audit done or something like that. But no, I mean, like the biggest SEO problems I see are clients that are not using WordPress. It’s usually just because they have like a homegrown CMS that they’ve built internally that just hasn’t implemented SEO best practices very well, or they’ve not understood how to correctly do something, you know, that kind of thing.

Jesse Friedman: People are still growing their own CMSs?

Joe Hall: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: I’m so entrenched in the WordPress industry that I don’t actually know all this stuff anymore.

Joe Hall: I think what happens—a lot of companies, this is what I see with companies that have their own CMSs—at one point or another, they tried WordPress or they tried one of WordPress’s competitors. They did a poor job of trying it. They went in and they did the typical thing that everybody does: they downloaded a bunch of free themes, a bunch of free plugins without really any understanding of how to best use those things together. They just jammed up a bunch of stuff, they got frustrated and then they decided, well, we can make our own CMS. And there’s oddly a similarity between people that don’t use WordPress correctly and then people that decide to write their own CMS. And it’s not an inexperience with programming or anything like that. It’s inexperience with managing web properties, you know, because you could theoretically build a great CMS, but the person that built it could get fired or could relocate, or could no longer be in the company for some reason. And then someone else has to come in and manage a codebase…

Jesse Friedman: You are creating a single point of failure.

Joe Hall: Exactly. And so I feel like, if you are using WordPress or another CMS and your inclination is to build your own system, I always tell clients to stop and ask yourself, is that really what you want to do? Like, ’cause that’s not gonna be the answer to all your needs as much as you think, you know. So I always tell clients like, you know, really think this through and ask yourself why is this not working on this other system, you know? But anyways, yeah.

So I mean, there are people that are gonna do that. It’s still a thing and it still keeps me in business. Like I said, most of the big projects I do are not WordPress related because a lot of the best practices for SEO are kind of taken care of with WordPress out of the gate already.

How does performance impact SEO?

Jesse Friedman: But what is it that you start to think about when you choose a WordPress hosting company? What are the most important pieces of that puzzle?

Joe Hall: So performance is a big thing because for SEO, Google specifically has something called Core Web Vitals, which I think it’s three or four metrics. I think it’s four metrics now, that they are concerned with as it relates to performance. Essentially, these metrics, they judge things like one of them is Largest Contentful Paint, which is the largest HTML element above the fold on mobile. And then there’s Cumulative Layout Shift, which is when different parts of the page load in a delayed sequence, which shifts the layout of the page. And then there is, I can’t remember the last one. It has to do with JavaScript load times, interaction, page interaction times. These Core Web Vitals are specific metrics that you can actually get for your site within Google Search Console. So if you verify your website in Google Search Console, after the first month of verification, there is a page experience report inside Search Console, which will tell you how your site is performing for those Core Web Vitals. Those metrics are actually tied to Google’s ranking algorithm. How much of an influence those metrics have over your ranking has been a hotly debated topic since they first rolled out.

Jesse Friedman: Well, Google’s always been a black box with how much it wants to give you about what’s in its algorithm.

Joe Hall: Exactly, but when I always talk to clients about the Core Web Vitals is that if users and customers are not complaining about performance issues, it’s probably not a huge issue. The Core Web Vitals, they are very strict and they want your site to be very, very fast. And sometimes, like you’ll see, you might have a really low Core Web Vitals score, but you yourself cannot tell that there’s a problem at all. And so it’s kind of hard to understand what’s going on there. I always tell clients that Google uses Core Web Vitals as a secondary ranking factor, which means that if a page on your site is ranking alongside another page in the results, and everything is equal, you know, you have around the same number of links, you have the same type of content, everything is kind of equal, then they may look at Core Web Vitals as a tiebreaker to decide which page should rank higher. So that means basically that these performance metrics are not the top priority for SEO, and they probably are not even within the top like five or six.

Jesse Friedman: Sure.

Joe Hall: But it is something that you need to focus on and you do need to make sure that the site is just not slow. And this is just common sense for any—not even SEO but you know, to have higher conversion rates or whatever you’re trying to execute on the site. It has to work well for your target audience. So performance is a big deal. And specifically for hosting, the big thing for that is the hosting company. When I tell clients, if you use a WordPress host, they need to have the ability to support server cache or some sort of cache. Some environments restrict certain cache plugins that users can use, and some of them have their own built-in content delivery network for assets and stuff like that. They’re all different. And you know, the bottom line is they need to work. If possible, multiple layers of caching would be great. I always try to strive for some sort of database cache along with just page cache, because database cache is gonna speed up any updates to a site you’re making. If you have a site you’re updating often, the database cache will speed that up significantly. And then obviously having, for WordPress, having up-to-date PHP is always better too because, you know, when PHP 8 rolled out, that really sped everything up for WordPress specifically. So keeping everything up to date, having good cache, I think is something that for performance issues, it’s something that a host can really help with. I think that’s something that, especially like if you’re a managed host, keeping everything up to date and running smoothly, I think is good for performance.

Jesse Friedman: Yeah. You know, it’s funny, a couple episodes ago we had someone come on and they mentioned—I think it was Oliver from Patchstack. He had mentioned this idea that if it’s vital, it’s required. And so when you think about managed hosting, you talk about caching, you talked about CDN, I think a big piece of that puzzle is the fact that even if you offer it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll be turned on. And so when we think about the WordPress ecosystem, when we think about the wider internet and how accessible the internet is to everyone, you get a variety of user experiences. You get people who are very experienced in building websites. They can write code, they can do all those things. But then the vast majority of users are typically people who are trying to run their own business, doing their own things. They don’t have time to become a full-blown web designer or webmaster and all that stuff. And so they need these things to operate in a way that they can actually implement it.

And so some of the things that we’ve done with WP Cloud, for example, is that like we have fully integrated CDN, we have fully integrated caching. They’re not optional. They’re stuff that is built in and it’s made and fine-tuned to use these very specific ingredients that we’ve built. Because we want to make sure that everyone’s taking advantage of it. The other thing, you know, and we’ve seen this with other managed hosting companies too, you know, outside of WP Cloud, it is a core component of their offering is to make sure that these things are accessible. And a lot of the things that Automattic has built, like in the Jetpack plugin, for example, we offer like a free CDN. But it’s a light switch feature. There’s no configurations. It just works. And then it automatically resizes the image based on the requesting browser size, so that you’re only serving the optimized image for that size. And I’m promoting all this stuff that, you know, we’re working on, but it’s important because the way in which we’re building it is making it so that anyone can use it at any level and then you’re basically creating that layer, that foundation for performance so that the rest of the components, you can go focus on writing better content, asking people to link back to your site, things like that. So you’re buying time back for these customers who are trying to optimize their site.

The other thing that WP Cloud does is that we serve everything through edge networks. We have 28 of them around the globe. Let me ask you this. How much of that is important to Google? Do they care about the physical distance between a requester and the serving of a file, or do they only kind of incorporate it from the perspective of performance?

Joe Hall: They used to care about that more than they do now. So your IP address used to be something Google cared about. Not anymore. Mostly because of what you’re describing—the popularity of edge networks has really drowned out that requirement, but even that requirement was so specific and so granular when it did matter, but I don’t think it really mattered that much. Nowadays, even if you’re not using a managed host, a lot of people use Cloudflare and stuff like that, and so that kind of drowns everything out. It doesn’t really seem to matter. The physical location of the box, it doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore.

And in fact I kind of think that that’s a good thing. I think we should be at a point now where, in my opinion, everybody should be a part of some sort of edge network to serve content faster. And if you think about this—sometimes I get really philosophical, but we are talking about WordPress here, so why not? But I kind of feel like if you really want to stick to the values of the open web, then kind of applying to that edge network backbone structure, I feel like is better because with an edge network like that, you’re not giving preference over—your content and your technology is accessible to literally anyone at that point. So I kind of think that we should all be moving more in that direction.

Jesse Friedman: Right.

Joe Hall: Yeah.

Jesse Friedman: Well you heard it. You heard it here. Joe Hall is recommending WP Cloud’s edge network.

Joe Hall: Well, I just, to be completely honest, I’m a huge fan of Cloudflare. I’m a Cloudflare fanboy. But that doesn’t mean—at the end of the day, most of these technologies are kind of a one-for-one, you know. And I am a huge advocate for edge networking, edge computing, no matter who you use.

Jesse Friedman: That’s okay, Joe. We’ll just bleep that part out. And no, I, you know, what Cloudflare is great because—no, but we talk about accessibility, right? Like the idea that Cloudflare is another tool that is out there that exists in a way that makes it accessible to people to be able to speed up their site. And so that, you know, that’s a key component to it. So we joke around because obviously I work for WP Cloud, but you know what’s more important is that we’re making the general WordPress ecosystem faster. That’s the key there, because then we want people choosing WordPress more as a whole.

Joe Hall: Well, I think you both are, you know, both of you guys are doing that.

Conclusion

Jesse Friedman: Absolutely. For sure. Joe, this is such a great conversation. I want to keep it going, but we do try to keep this podcast to like shorter segments. So if it’s all right, we’re gonna pause here and then we’re gonna break, and then we’re gonna come back in another episode and continue this conversation. All right. Thanks so much, Joe.

Thanks for joining us on another episode of Impressive Hosting, where we uncover the core tenets of great WordPress hosting. Do you have a follow-up question for today’s guest, thought or comment on anything we talked about, a future guest suggestion, a hosting horror story? What do you think makes great WordPress hosting? All your comments shape the show. Drop them on impressive.host. We also appreciate you following us on social media and subscribing to the podcast on your favorite platform. Finally, do check out our list of open source projects that need support at impressive.host. Whether it’s code, community, or cash, you can make a difference. See you next time.