As a subscriber to SEMrush and as an SEO Pro I tend to want to use tools that other pros are using. SEMrush has been regarded as a great tool so I wanted to dive in deep and see if I can get a brand new site to not only rank but also to a 100% using their audit tool.
So this is where we start:
As I stated this is a new site, fresh install of WordPress I am using the Equity theme from Agent Evolution and IDXBroker to pull in real estate information. This is important to know since IDXBroker’s images can also have slowdown issues pulling in non-compressed images from the local Multiple Listing Service. (MLS)
The current site has 8 pages and 2 blog posts, the rest are IDXBroker pages. That the SEMrush bot has crawled.
So Let start with the 1 error.
The Issue is with Mixed Content – Meaning that this is an HTTPS secure site and there is a link to a non-https site or image, this was an easy fix it was an old iframe on the page. I just deleted the page since it was not being used. (IDXBroker provides a featured listing solution.)
Now let work on the big number 498 errors:
As you can see most of the issues are caching issues (uncompressed javascript and unminified files)
I, however, am using a caching plugin that is supposed to be doing this for me. I am using Hummingbird Pro from WPMU Dev (to start with). Here is the result of the performance test:
I am going to start with the Compression issue:
To enable Gzip compression on your site, if it is wordpress then most caching plugins will do this for you. If you don’t’ then you can add this to your .htaccess file: SCROLL DOWN TO KEEP READING
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
SetEnvIfNoCase ^(Accept-EncodXng|X-cept-Encoding|X{15}|~{15}|-{15})$ ^((gzip|deflate)\s*,?\s*)+|[X~-{4,13}$ HAVE_Accept-Encoding
RequestHeader append Accept-Encoding “gzip,deflate” env=HAVE_Accept-Encoding
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_filter.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE “application/atom+xml” \
“application/javascript” \
“application/json” \
“application/ld+json” \
“application/manifest+json” \
“application/rdf+xml” \
“application/rss+xml” \
“application/schema+json” \
“application/vnd.geo+json” \
“application/vnd.ms-fontobject” \
“application/x-font-ttf” \
“application/x-font-opentype” \
“application/x-font-truetype” \
“application/x-javascript” \
“application/x-web-app-manifest+json” \
“application/xhtml+xml” \
“application/xml” \
“font/eot” \
“font/opentype” \
“font/otf” \
“image/bmp” \
“image/svg+xml” \
“image/vnd.microsoft.icon” \
“image/x-icon” \
“text/cache-manifest” \
“text/css” \
“text/html” \
“text/javascript” \
“text/plain” \
“text/vcard” \
“text/vnd.rim.location.xloc” \
“text/vtt” \
“text/x-component” \
“text/x-cross-domain-policy” \
“text/xml”
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_mime.c>
AddEncoding gzip svgz
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
After which you can go here: https://varvys.com/tools/gzip.html and check to see if it works. (if this page is down or any reason just Google Gzip Compression Test.)
Now let’s re-run the test:
Not to bad; 390 errors down. Now for the rest of the warnings to save you another screenshot I am going to work on the 53 un-minified; JavaScript and CSS files first. Using the Hummingbird plugin I can select the files that need to be minified. I selected the files and deleted the cache and here is what I have now.
One of the biggest issues that I have, when I minify JavaScript and CSS files, is that the site will not load correctly. This is a common WordPress speed issue, so I have a browser with a private tab and I am refreshing just to make sure that the site looks ok. Also, I am finding that there are still 5 issues with JavaScript and CSS files so I don’t feel confident that I am going to be able to get warnings down to 0.
So on to the next issue that has a lot of errors:
24 HTTP URLs in the sitemap for an https site.
This was an easy fix all I needed to do was enable HTTPS in IDXBroker at the same time I also created a CNAME so instead of http://snohomihsland.idxbroker.com it will now show https://local.snohomishland.com
After making those changes the score gets worse 🙁
While there are issues with IDXBroker which a lot of them were solved just by creating sub-headers and fixing the issues. By doing this lowered the issues down to 79.
Most of which are IDXBroker issues, which I have a support ticket into to fix some of the issues, more on that later. Going through some of the other issues I noticed that I forgot to set tags and some categories no no-index.
After doing that I end up with 55 Warnings.
The 1 error is a crawl error which happens from time to time.
While waiting for support to get back to me I decided to work on other issues. Such as the robots.txt file here what mine looks like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Disallow: /feed/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Sitemap: https://snohomishland.com/sitemap.xml
After fixing just a few items my warnings have dropped:
Here are the remaining issues that we have with the site, I have found that there are some issues that are out of my control all of which are IDXBroker wrapper issues. For example images that do not have an alt attribute tag, this only happens on the printable page of each listing. Here is a link to that image – https://stats.idxbroker.com/ftestd.gif This is an error for all IDXBroker users and the hosted .gif file is on their server.
All for a dot. I have put in a support ticket to ask if they or I can fix it.
This is where I am going to call this completed since there are items out of my control. Here is the final snapshot:
