I hope December is treating you well! I’m in almost out-of-office mode and delighting in Christmas music, making long dinners and pots of tea, and daily 3pm dog walks to get a last glimpse of the sun for the day. We’re almost to the winter solstice, thank goodness. What’s delighting you this month?!
I’m especially grateful this time of year for everyone who has worked with me in the past 4+ years running this business. It has been such a joy to get to create websites for and with so many passionate, brilliant, grateful, inspiring people. Thanks for working with me or just being here to read along.
This Month’s Observation: To Instagram feed or not to Instagram feed?
I get requests from clients often wanting their Instagram feed embedded on their site. Here are three reasons to be really thoughtful about this before setting one up.
- It will slow down your page load time. Every new feature/functionality you add to your website risks slowing down your page load time, meaning your website users have to wait longer for your page to load, meaning you might lose them. Instagram feeds are notorious for slowing down page load times.
- You might have to reconnect it often. All the free Instagram feed tools I’ve used have to be reconnected pretty often (every month or even every week) to show the latest posts. Squarespace’s built-in Instagram widget is usually pretty decent, but I haven’t found a free & no-hassle solution for WordPress.
- They risk sending your website traffic off your site. Some businesses really want to grow their Instagram following, or their websites don’t offer much content so they want people to go to their Instagram page. If this is your goal, go for it. But if your goal is having people reach out to you, buy from you, etc., sending them to an Instagram page or post distracts from your main goal and might fragment your traffic.
If it’s really important to you, I recommend doing other speed optimizations to your website (you can do a lot more on WordPress than Squarespace or other SAAS website platforms) and being really thoughtful about where it goes on your site… maybe just on your home page or your contact page and not loading on every page.
Website & SEO Updates from Around the Web
6 New Privacy Laws Coming in 2023
I don’t worry at all about new privacy laws because I use Termageddon, a paid privacy policy solution. I recommend it to every single client I have, and the ones that sign up for it, I don’t worry about either. If you have Termageddon already, here’s how you can update your privacy policy for these new laws. If you don’t have Termageddon yet, you can get 10% off your first year through my affiliate link.
Twitter’s Layoffs Are a Blow to Accessibility
“The company recently took major steps to make the platform more inclusive after pressure from disabled users. Then Elon Musk gutted its accessibility team.” Bummer news all around with Twitter lately.
Is Your Website Accessible to People with Dyslexia?
I believe in making the internet a better, more accessible place, so I love this article’s tips on making websites more dyslexia-friendly. These are easy things you can implement even if you manage your website yourself.
How to Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience from an Email List
A helpful step by step article from MailerLite — check out the podcast below for more on Facebook Ads.
New in Yoast SEO Free: the Inclusive Language Analysis
Yoast is no longer my WordPress SEO plugin of choice, but this is an interesting new offering. This post shares more about about inclusive language and SEO.
Social Media Content Strategy: From Start to Finish
A great guide if you’re DIYing your social media content and can dedicate a bit of time to make sure you do it right.
Podcast Rec: What’s Working in Facebook Ads Now
This Agents of Change podcast offers a really comprehensive overview of best practices for Facebook Ads these days. If you’re going to do one thing from the article today, set up two factor authentication on your personal Facebook account login.
And after you do that, make sure you have 2FA set up on your website. I like Wordfence 2FA for WordPress sites, and Squarespace has their own built-in 2FA you can set up. The Authy app is my go-to.
