Your brand doesn’t have an expiration date, but the code you have supporting it might. Software evolves at a pace that keeps even the most experienced developers on their toes. The average lifespan of a newly built web stack is about four years. How do professionals keep up with this lifecycle? By regularly assessing the status of a website’s core health metrics and iterating accordingly.

You’re not a developer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the same insights. Valet’s Deep Dive Assessments dig into the foundational pillars that drive your user’s experience online and give you a solid list of recommendations to ensure your tech stack can live up to the promise of your brand.

Includes:

• Dedicated developer to research and assess your site
• PDF deliverable (8-10 pgs) complete with an explanation of what we look for and what we found
• List of actionable recommendations
• Video call to discuss findings and next steps

Plugins are the most convenient and easiest way to power-up WordPress. They offer fantastic extensibility to WordPress core and make WordPress capable of becoming a full-fledged application in some cases. At the same time, plugins can cause compatibility and performance issues due to the code needed to support their powerful features.

Every plugin on your website is code written by a different developer. There is no official process that determines if a plugin is well coded and whether it would be a healthy addition to your site. There is also no guide to tell you if certain plugins shouldn’t be on the same website together.

It’s common for us to find sites with three or more active plugins that do the same thing, causing chaos in the database. We also see sites with multiple resource-intensive plugins and sometimes with very poorly coded or unsupported plugins. The compounding effects of these scenarios is a poor user and website administrator experience.

The solution to this dilemma is a Plugin Review and Recommendation. We will inventory the current plugins on your site, and then identify their specific contribution. We will look for trouble spots in site performance, and opportunities to simplify and streamline. We will deliver this assessment to you as a pdf report. You can then have us implement these recommendations or follow up another way.

Site speed is a critical factor in site success. It affects a visitor's user experience and may impact Google’s ranking and crawl frequency.

A Valet will run several assessments and create a report for you of issues and opportunities in these areas:

• Image optimization
• WordPress plugin issues
• Render blocking resources
• Script and style minification
• Caching
• Gzip compression
• Slow queries
• Web hosting or CDN issues

We will review your report and identify areas that can be improved within this initial assessment. If we identify “quick wins” such as installing a caching plugin or optimizing the loading order of scripts to improve performance we will implement them immediately.

If your site needs more effort, we will give you a list of recommendations and the next steps.