I spent much of 2022 revamping this site for Atlanta Pro AV, and tackling a list of SEO-related issues. The site was well built but established just before the era of mobile/responsive focused design. My first project was simply creating a new home page that would translate better to a host of screens. I found a new plugin to handle the slideshow and set it to only appear on larger screens. A new section was added highlighting services and this became the central content on mobile devices. The testimonials were enlarged and removed from the footer area to allow better visibility. Finally, the footer was simplified and made less obtrusive.
Once the home page was established I then went through the site’s interior pages optimizing and improving layouts across the menu. I also made some big changes on the backend as the existing site was running 24 plugins. I was able to consolidate functions and rebuild some pages that required special plugins and brought the plugin load down to a more manageable 14.
Next up I linked the site to both Google and Bing Search console accounts. This gave me an opportunity to see how many pages had been indexed, find missing alt and H1 tags, as well as deeper performance stats on core web vitals. One thing that kept coming up was the slow page speed at PageSpeed Insights (web.dev). Initially mobile was scoring close to a 13 and desktop around a 60. This was alarming since slow page speed can often lose potential customers, so I spent several months on this issue alone.
Several smaller adjustments were made to improve performance including implementing image optimization tools and slowing converting to webP image formats. Recently a major breakthrough occurred with a shift to a cleaner more modern WordPress theme and installing the WP Rocket plugin. These 2 changes improved performance overnight! The site now passed core web vitals testing and was loading dramatically faster.
So, 8 months later APAV has a top to bottom site rebuild! Performance is up, more pages are indexed and the design is now responsive.
