WordPress Development in Alaska

In practice it's four things: an oversized theme loading assets no page uses, unoptimised images served at full resolution, a plugin stack where each addition injects its own scripts, and no caching layer so every visit rebuilds the page from database queries. We ship a minimal theme, convert images to WebP at correct display dimensions, keep the plugin count deliberately low, and enable full-page caching plus a CDN. That combination is what gets a typical build under a 1.8-second load.

We recommend managed WordPress hosting or a well-configured VPS, typically around $25 a month. Budget shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one server, so your response time depends on what everyone else's traffic is doing, and server-level caching, staging environments, and automatic backups are usually absent. Since server response time feeds directly into Largest Contentful Paint, hosting is one of the few places where spending slightly more produces a measurable ranking-relevant improvement.

We use a clean post-name permalink structure, keeping URLs short, lowercase, hyphenated, and descriptive of the page's topic rather than its position in a menu. When an existing site changes structure, every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its closest new equivalent. Skipping that step is the single most common reason traffic collapses after a rebuild — the rankings were attached to URLs that now return 404, and a 404 passes no authority to anything.

No. AMP was a workaround from an era when most mobile sites were far too heavy, and Google removed the AMP requirement for Top Stories in 2021. A well-built responsive site now meets the same performance bar without the maintenance cost of a second parallel version of every page or AMP's constraints on your own markup. Effort is better spent on image optimisation, caching, and reducing JavaScript.

They're three measurements Google uses as a ranking signal: Largest Contentful Paint (how long the main content takes to appear, target under 2.5 seconds), Interaction to Next Paint (how quickly the page responds to a tap or click, target under 200 milliseconds), and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much content jumps as the page loads, target under 0.1). We design around them by setting explicit width and height on images so nothing reflows, reserving space for embeds, keeping JavaScript minimal, and preloading the hero image.

Yes. We copy the database and files to the new environment, verify the site fully on a staging URL, then cut the DNS over — a change that propagates while both copies are still running, so there's no window where the site is unreachable. Posts, pages, media, users, and settings all move intact. The step that needs the most care is redirect mapping when the URL structure changes, and that's planned before the migration starts, not after.