Martin Stepanek 🏳️‍🌈

In a few days, I will talk about crawl budget from a different point of view within #seocharity live stream 🐾

Would you wait in a slow checkout line? Your customers won't either 😤 If your website is slow, visitors just leave. A frustrating shopping experience means abandoned carts and lost revenue. Technical SEO and web performance aren't just about rankings. They directly impact how much money you make 💵

Why are we still using full-page overlays with loading bars in 2025? 🤯 It's basically proof that the developer know almost nothing about SEO and web performance. If you need a loading bar to fix something as a web developer, then something is clearly wrong. You should take a step back and rethink what you're doing and how you're doing it. Just make it efficient and fast. People hate waiting for anything 😤

Unlock the full potential of your website with the free technical SEO checklist: techseovitals.com/technical-seo-…

When web performance becomes a product priority, the results speak for themselves… Happy users and visitors, better conversions, and higher revenue. Is it not enough? Then check your technical SEO with my free checklist! You'll find the link in the first comment below ⤵️

Great day at Google Search Central Deep Dive APAC 25 - Bangkok. Thanks! 💜 #searchcentralive #scldd25

I do website monitoring to all my clients. Guess whose sites went down for 12 hours unnoticed? 🤦‍♂️ Even I'm not immune to making stupid mistakes. A few days ago, a small bug fix auto-update was performed on one of my servers where I host only personal websites and apps. It caused a total crash of all my websites on that server. All of them returned a 421 error. Since I hadn't visited my websites for many hours, they were down for over 12 hours. Then I immediately fixed the problem and even disabled auto-updates of server components. What's funny and sad at the same time is that I do website monitoring for my clients, but I forgot to monitor my own website.

🔔 Quick test: Take your phone right now and try buying something from your own website. Painful, right? When did you last check your website on mobile? And do you know why your mobile conversions are significantly lower compared to desktop? I've worked for years as a web developer and I remember the lack of real attention we gave to mobile user experience. Clients also didn't care much about mobile since they checked everything on desktop only. Now, I know we made a big mistake. It's time to change that and test the mobile website properly since most traffic now comes from smartphones, not desktop anymore. Your mobile user experience must be great, and even your conversions will grow!

🚨 You're telling Google to ignore 75% of your website. Here's how to fix it. I audit dozens of websites every month, and I keep seeing the same critical error. The problem: Developers are accidentally telling Google to ignore entire sections of their websites. Here's what's happening: - You have paginated content (like /category/books/page/3/) - Your canonical tag points to page 1 instead of itself - Google thinks: "This page isn't important, and the links on it also" - Result: Your subpages disappear from search results, and your articles or products are hard to find The fix is simple: Each paginated page should have a canonical pointing to ITSELF, not to page 1. ❌ Wrong: Page 3 canonical → Page 1 ✅ Right: Page 3 canonical → Page 3 Why this matters: When you point all paginated pages to page 1, you're essentially hiding valuable content from search engines. Those product listings, blog posts, or category pages? They might never get found. Quick audit: Check your paginated pages right now. View source and look for the canonical tag. If it's pointing to page 1, you've got work to do. What's the biggest SEO mistake you've seen repeated across multiple sites? Drop it in the comments 👇

Modern HTML is a disaster. It’s bloated, semantically meaningless, and hostile to browsers, bots, and users. We’ve traded structure for utility, and performance is paying the price. Semantic HTML still matters - and here’s why. jonoalderson.com/conjecture/why…

Google won't tell you this, but PageSpeed Insights scores and real-world performance often don't match 🤫 Google PageSpeed Insights is an amazing tool that can give you quick and useful information about your website. It even gives you a score for your website. It's great until you get obsessed with that score. It's important to say that the score is just a lab number. In reality, your website can behave differently. I've worked with multiple websites that had perfect scores in Google PageSpeed Insights and terrible Core Web Vitals. And also vice versa. Core Web Vitals are the things that really matter because they're calculated based on real visitors to your website. They aren't artificial lab data. Even better is real-user monitoring, which covers even more people. So try to base your next decision on the correct data. Don't fix meaningless issues from PSI. Instead, spend your time fixing issues that come from CrUX or RUM.

Did you think about the connection between technical SEO and AI tools? 🧐 Probably not, but you should pay attention now. Why? Because these modern AI tools depend on perfect technical SEO optimization even more than traditional search. AI tools work differently and bring their own rules to the game. You've probably already heard that most of them don't render JavaScript at all. However, AI crawlers are ruthlessly efficient. They want clean, structured data they can process cheaply and quickly. While Google's bots have gotten pretty good at handling messy websites, AI tools are pickier. They'll skip over broken schema markup, ignore poorly structured HTML, and completely miss content that's dynamically loaded. It's the perfect time to check your business website right now, before the train leaves and you get left behind for a long time.

Stop treating your website like a Christmas tree for plugins 🎄 That fancy new plugin is destroying your website's performance. Sound familiar? You install a new plugin and suddenly your website crawls along at a snail's pace. I see this every single day. The thing is, these people didn’t make a mistake. They don't know how to spot a good, well-optimized plugin. But some people do know. So don't hesitate to use this perfectly legal shortcut: hire skilled consultants for your business. Every script and plugin adds weight to your website. It's like stuffing more gear into your hiking backpack. Start by auditing your website to find what's hurting your web performance and user experience. These fixes often deliver amazing ROI since you'll see improved performance translate to better conversions almost immediately.

Unlock the full potential of your website with the free technical SEO checklist: techseovitals.com/technical-seo-…

Your website loads slower than Netflix on dial-up, and you're wondering why nobody converts 😱 Do you remember how frustrating it is to wait for Netflix to load a movie when you're on a slow connection? Now imagine your website visitors feel the same way. Most clients I've worked with never think about their websites from this perspective. The business website was always on the back burner. However, when they realize how good their website can be after optimizing it for web performance and technical SEO, they never want to go back. A slow and under-optimized website kills your conversions and motivates visitors to leave, often before they even get a chance to see what you offer. You can start fixing these issues with my Technical SEO Checklist, where I cover the most important problems. Grab the free copy and start optimizing your website.

The best freelancers aren't selling their time. They're investing in their clients' futures 🤫 When I decided to start freelancing last year, I wanted to be different. Most freelancers are just service providers. They deliver a service and nothing more. After the service is delivered, everything ends. However, I wanted to be a partner for my clients. To always be here for them. To help them even outside my core business. Why? Because their success is also my success. If their business grows, my business grows too. It's great synergy and brings long-term, trustworthy relationships. Simply put, we should be here for our clients as equal partners.

Small tweaks on the checkout page can boost conversions by 10+% 📈 When you finally get a visitor to your website, it's terrible to let them leave right before the final step. Focus on making your checkout page and your entire website as fast as possible. Make the buying process as simple as you can: - Use large fields and buttons. - Enable autofill - Offer easy payment options like Apple Pay or Google Pay One small change like increasing button size can boost conversion by around 10%. Statistics prove this again and again. You can even A/B test to see the real differences for your specific case. Have you tried implementing these suggestions? How did they work on your website? Let me know in the comments ⤵️

GDPR accidentally created a new way to kill your website's conversions 🤦‍♂️ Years ago, GDPR in the EU brought a new problem to the world of web performance. Cookie popups required by GDPR are often loaded as external JavaScript library. This isn't ideal since these cookie popups lower your conversions and reduce your website's overall value. However, there's a solution that lets you follow the law while maintaining good performance: native integration of cookie popups. Unfortunately, this requires a web developer who can help you with implementation. But it's definitely worth it. Native integration gives you better control over all your other scripts, which is perfect and can boost performance even further. And you know what? Your visitors deserve a great experience on your website while you follow the law. That's exactly why they convert better.

The “modern“ web is actually more broken than it was 15 years ago 🤯 Over the last decade, we've had a significant problem across almost all websites on the internet. The problem is JavaScript. I'm not saying JavaScript alone is bad. It's actually an amazing helper. However, the problem is overusing it for literally everything. This results in tons of problems with crawlability and even overall performance. Both are killing your business since your visibility and conversions aren't as good as they could be. What can we do? We should use JavaScript only where it should be used. Simply focus on having clean, server-side rendered HTML. Also use modern CSS for many elements where you don't need JavaScript anymore, such as modals or carousels. Clean HTML with CSS can do most of the job. Use JavaScript just for the rest.

How often do you encounter these annoying external activities that potentially drain your crawl budget? I recently spotted this in one of my client's GSC.