Did anyone notice?

[Jonathon]

waltons.com looks a little different? We made a theme change this weekend to help us with some SEO (search engine optimization) stuff and it went freakingly SWIMMINGLY! Our SEO scores shot through the roof and the website is loading fast, more stable and personally I think it just looks cleaner.

RPrince and I came in on Sunday to get some of it done but (and this is going to kill me) there is zero chance we could have done all of this in-house with Austin He was the one who 1st recognized a change was needed (though to be honest we were all aware but he was the one who basically just said get it done no matter what) and then some of the coding stuff we could not have done without him. I give him a lot of grief with his edits of the existing code but we are finally climbing back up to where we used to be when he had us on Magento and managed everything himself.

So, check out waltons.com and let us know what you think!

[Tex_77]

Great job Austin and RPrince!

[lkrfletcher]

Jonathon - Nice!

[wdaly]

Thanks for the improvements. Looks good.

[processhead]

Upgrading graphics and themes is always nice, but enhancing the SEO should yield major dividends, and I am sure the team at Walton’s understands the benefits of that.
Without getting too deep in the weeds, can you explain what changes were made to make the SEO function more effectively?

[Jonathon]

processhead Google changes its algorithm all the time as most people know. Recently they have started focussing on 3 major ones and one of them, the Cumulative Layout Shift was a huge issue for us, but the other 2 Largest Content Paint and First content paint weren’t amazing either. This new theme loads images fast and does some other stuff but the biggest change is that is preloads space for every element, so there is no noticeable shift when loading the page. We also made some other changes as well at the same time to help but this was the big one.

[bocephus]

Jonathon Just got back on line after being away for a long weekend. Just noticed new set up, it loaded very good.