Archive: July 2021

Optimize My Website with Page Insights

28 July 2021
Dwayne Grimes
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Categories: Uncategorized

We look at how fast our website loads and generally try to keep the load times under 7 seconds. Some people want the sites to load faster, but we do have a fair amount of content to display on the home page plus Google Analytics, a Translation widget, and we pull a couple of RSS feeds. We have often used Google’s PageInsights to get a general idea of where we can shed some weight from our site.

Today while doing a check on our site I see PageInsights has added “view treemap” button which takes you to Google’s Lighthouse. This was incredible handy to get a big picture of what is taking up the most bandwidth. Here is what we saw.

We can see the “translation” widget is too large for us to use. We are using the Google TagManager widget, that we are going to stop using since our site has a tag component built-in.

Simply turning these items off took our page score from 69 to 83. Still not in the Green; however, pretty good. Using the new “Treemap” is awesome.

Let us know if this helped you….

AutoCAD crazy lines importing PDF

27 July 2021
Dwayne Grimes
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Categories: autocad

This doesn’t happen to us all the time, but sometimes after importing a PDF drawing into AutoCAD there are lines connecting objects that shouldn’t be there. The lines didn’t show in other programs. This turned out to be a simple setting in our AutoCAD. We needed to turn off “linesmoothing”. Here is the article we used to fix our issue.

In AutoCAD go down to the command line and type in “linesmoothing” and hit enter. Next type in “off” and hit enter. Import the PDF again and the lines should be gone.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Unwanted-linework-appears-when-opening-drawings-in-AutoCAD-2015.html

Let us know if this helped you.

WordPress 5.8 Update Could Not Be Verified

22 July 2021
Dwayne Grimes
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Categories: Security, Wordpress

While working on a WordPress site we were prompted to update to 5.8, but the manually pushing the button to update keep failing. The process would start, but would run into errors and stop. We tried just manually moving the directories “wp-admin” and “wp-includes” from a downloaded zip of the latest version, but this didn’t help. We ended up fixing everything by removing a few plugins we had installed and were not using. Once this was done the update button worked fine. On screen the update got to the end and read “updating database…” and hung there, but going back to the Dashboard everything was fine. The site was updated to 5.8 and running fine.

Let us know if this helped you….

Ampersand in SEO character count

15 July 2021
Dwayne Grimes
1 Comment
Categories: Google Listing, Search Console, SEO, Web Rankings, WebmasterTools

Writing for Search Engines limits you to a certain character count, so we wondered if was better to use the Ampersand versus the word ” and “? Part of the reason is the ampersand gets converted to HTML entities and is listed as ” amp& “ which equals 6 characters. Using “and” would be ” and “ which only equals 5 characters. Will using Ampersand versus the word “and” use less characters in our search results?

Our research lead us many different articles with different ways to look at. There were a lot of old information that lead us nowhere. We realized we could use our website’s data to figure this out. What we found out is it is better to use “&” versus “and“. The HTML entities doesn’t play a part in the character count.

Let us know if this helped you….

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