I'm an NZ SEO expert, doing SEO in New Zealand

My first job in search engine optimisation was in 1997. So much has changed - SEO is more nuanced than ever before, with every character, every comma having an effect.

In addition to writing about SEO and speaking at various conferences, I enjoy actioning it myself too. There's nothing quite like sending a client a graph showing their organic traffic skyrocketing - without them having to increase their monthly spend.

It happens. Your WordPress installation stops behaving as it should and just returns a white screen.

It can affect the whole site or just the Dashboard and login pages.

It’s not terrible to troubleshoot though, just try the following (in this order):

1. Rename your /wp-content/plugins folder to something else, like plugins1. In most cases the white screen is due to some plugin interacting poorly with your theme or another plugin. If doing this fixes the white screen issue, then you can change the folder name back and start to work out which plugin is being problematic.
2. Reinstall WordPress core from wordpress.org. This is the next most likely thing to fix your site. Just remember to not over-write your wp-config.php file under any circumstances, and leave the wp-content folder as it is too. If you need an older version of WordPress you can get any previous version here.
3. Very occasionally your theme might be playing up. Move the folder for all the themes except one of the WordPress default (like TwentyEighteen) and see if that improves things.

The white screen of death is definitely worrying when it crops up – but it’s not hard to resolve.

There are a few features in WordPress we take for granted, like easily being able to insert a ‘Read More’ break in our posts.

But in the new WordPress 5 editor (which was called Gutenberg during its development) finding that isn’t as easy as it should be.

Like all elements in the new editor you need to add it as a block – but you will not find it by searching for a block called read more.

Bizarrely, it’s just called more.

When it actually inserts into the editor it is named read more, which suggests to me this is a an oversight that will hopefully be fixed soon!

Dear Peter Mahoney:

I don’t know if you can help me with that but my team and I noticed that emails we send from our server go automatically in Spam on Gmail.

That email issue is pretty common actually. All receiving email servers have different rules about what counts as likely spam or not. Gmail is particularly strict.

It pays to do everything possible to keep them happy, which includes (but isn’t limited to):

• DNS records (both DKIM and SPF – sorry for the acronyms!)
• Don’t use a different ‘from’ address to the ‘return-to’ address
• If possible use a real email address to send, which might require you add an SMTP plugin for sending them on WordPress

And if nothing works, then consider using Google Suite for your own email. You can get plugins that will actually send email out from your site via your own Google Mail account, which is pretty fool-proof. That’s what I do myself.

Email, basically, sucks. It’s 30 years old and has barely changed in that time. It’s just levels of geekery added on top of something that was already hella nerdy.

I’ve got a post over at Digital Kiwis dispelling some of the myths I hear a lot surrounding WordPress and speed.

The tl;dr version is that it can be very fast, but ideally you need to have a professional sort that out for you.

The longer, full version however, is much more interesting and also a bit sweary.

An increasing number of sites are using Parallax Scenes, it’s a cool technique where you layer images on top of each other so they all move independently at different speeds.

You can see an example on the homepage of the New Zealand digital marketing firm I work with. I’ve made a fair few examples recently, often with several layers to good effect.

But in my work optimising sites and speeding them up I regularly come across websites that are unnecessarily slow loading with these. They’re always going to be pretty large because transparent images need to be in PNG format which is simply a much less efficient format than JPG.

But there are a couple of tips I have to really make them fly.

1. Optimise your PNGs, using tinypng.com. You’d be amazed how much those PNGs can be compressed.
2. This might seem like common sense but almost no-one seems to do it – the main background image in your scene layers does not have to be a PNG. There’s no part of it that needs to be transparent, so make it a JPG instead!

Using those techniques I was able to optimise the example I linked to above to be less than 400kB for the entire parallax scene, including the code for it.