Why would a developer build all page content in php?
-
Picked up a new client. Site is built on Wordpress. Previous developer built nearly all page content in their custom theme's PHP files.
In other words, the theme's "page.php" file contains virtually all the HTML for each of the site's pages. Each individual page's back-end page editor appears blank, except for some of the page text. No markup, no widgets, no custom fields. And no dedicated, page-specific php files either.
Pages are differentiated within page.php using:
elseif (is_page("27")
Has anyone ever come across this approach before? Why might someone do this?
-
Thanks Bryan! I appreciate the time you took to respond to this. I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner!
Cheers!
-
The only reasons I can think of are:
- the developer might have been unfamiliar with Wordpress back-end editing.
- the developer is rooted mostly in PHP and thus favors that structure.
- there was something specific to the client's website that requires this method.
There are several possible reasons, and I think the only way to proceed safely would be for you or your client to get in contact with the previous developer and ask. Aside from that, looking through the PHP to see if there's a genuine reason is the next safest option.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Adding picture and new layout on jobs-overview page
Im running a castingsite today, where the jobs-overview page is the highest ranked on google on the important words. There is a big of reasons for that, it's updated daily, the domain is old and wellknown and so. Anyways, the today is this: (Yes it's ugly and old-school :))
Web Design | | KasperGJ
Current design:
http://www.onlinecasting.dk/auditions.asp I've created a new design, which is much nicer and with added pictures. The pictures in the new design, will be somewhat unique to the specific jobs, so the current ones are mostly for testing New design: (Not implemented)
http://www.onlinecasting.dk/auditionsnd.asp Question:
So my question is. Do you think this NEW design could affect my site / page in a bad way in SEO or?
I'm planning basically just to overwrite the old auditions.asp file with the new code. What do you guys think.0 -
Https pages indexed but all web pages are http - please can you offer some help?
Dear Moz Community, Please could you see what you think and offer some definite steps or advice.. I contacted the host provider and his initial thought was that WordPress was causing the https problem ?: eg when an https version of a page is called, things like videos and media don't always show up. A SSL certificate that is attached to a website, can allow pages to load over https. The host said that there is no active configured SSL it's just waiting as part of the hosting package just in case, but I found that the SSL certificate is still showing up during a crawl.It's important to eliminate the https problem before external backlinks link to any of the unwanted https pages that are currently indexed. Luckily I haven't started any intense backlinking work yet, and any links I have posted in search land have all been http version.I checked a few more url's to see if it’s necessary to create a permanent redirect from https to http. For example, I tried requesting domain.co.uk using the https:// and the https:// page loaded instead of redirecting automatically to http prefix version. I know that if I am automatically redirected to the http:// version of the page, then that is the way it should be. Search engines and visitors will stay on the http version of the site and not get lost anywhere in https. This also helps to eliminate duplicate content and to preserve link juice. What are your thoughts regarding that?As I understand it, most server configurations should redirect by default when https isn’t configured, and from my experience I’ve seen cases where pages requested via https return the default server page, a 404 error, or duplicate content. So I'm confused as to where to take this.One suggestion would be to disable all https since there is no need to have any traces to SSL when the site is even crawled ?. I don't want to enable https in the htaccess only to then create a https to http rewrite rule; https shouldn't even be a crawlable function of the site at all.RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTPS} offor to disable the SSL completely for now until it becomes a necessity for the website.I would really welcome your thoughts as I'm really stuck as to what to do for the best, short term and long term.Kind Regards
Web Design | | SEOguy10 -
Does anyone have data on the effect of multiple H1 tags on a page?
One of my website's sub-domains is fed information from a job board master-template, thus my site (and hundreds of other sites) is just branded styling pulling from one external source. Because of the way this master template is set up (not very concerned with SEO best practices), I have found the need to hide the H1 coming from the master template, and display a new separate H1 in my styling. This is being done with user-experience in mind, but how will search engines respond to having two H1s (one hidden, one visible) on a page? I understand that a single H1 is usually ideal, and hidden page components are typically frowned upon because they don't add user value... but in this case, the hidden component is solely for the benefit of the user. I would like to find the best balance of SEO and UX, so I am very interested in any experimental data or case studies on a similar situation.
Web Design | | pbailey0 -
What to Look for in a Magento Website Developer?
I am considering moving 1 of our sites to a Magento e-commerce platform. If I went down this route we would be keen to find someone who we can hire in-house. However I have never hired a web developer before. What should a developer with experience of launching and building Magento-based e-commerce websites have on their CV? What should I be looking for in terms of knowledge? Any help or advice welcome!
Web Design | | DHS_SH0 -
Best course of action when removing 100's of pages from your site?
We had a section on our site Legal News (we are a law firm). All we did there was rehash news stories from news sites (no original content). We decided to remove the entire Legal News section and we were left with close to 800 404's. Around this same time our rankings seemed to drop. Our webmaster implemented 301's to closely related content on our blog. In about a weeks time our rankings went back up. Our webmaster informed us that we should submit each url to Google for removal, which we did. Its been about three weeks and our Not Found errors in WMT is over 800 and seems to be increasing daily. Moz's crawler says we have only 35 404's and they are from our blog not the legal news section we removed. The last thing we want is to have another rankings drop. Is this normal? What is the best course of action when removing hundreds of pages from your site?
Web Design | | MFC0 -
One big page vs. multi-step pages
Hi mozers! Brand new to SEO and LOVING it! Having several key questions that I don't see answered yet, but I'll start with one we've been very curious about. Consider this guide we have for Forming a Delaware Corp.
Web Design | | Mase
https://www.upcounsel.com/Free-Legal/Guide/17/Form-A-Delaware-Corporation This is our overview page, giving you a breakdown of what this process involves. We love this page, but (Question1:) does it lack better real "content" rather than lots of links to the guide process itself? Then, you can start to walk through the guide beginning with step one, where each step has crowd sourced answers to it. But as you see, the step pages are all very similar, except for the answers and step info. (Question 2) Would it be better to put all our answers into the one overview page and skip having separate pages for each step? We like the process and simplicity of seeing one step at a time, but then these pages don't seem to have enough unique content on them. Related, at what point (if any) is a page too big with too much content and considered bad for SEO? We're recovering from a big hit from Google, and slowly recovering by nailing down various SEO mistakes. We DO have great, unique and valueable content - now we just need it to rank!0 -
What is Best Platform to Build Website - SEO in mind
Hello... I am going to be creating two new websites shortly that will need to be built with SEO in mind. These will not be e-commerce sites, but instead will be informational with a couple pages of content on each. One will be used to get people to input their contact info and that info will be sent to our call center where we will call them back from. The other site will be heavily used for graphics, but still needs to have room for content (seo purposes)... Can you guys please recommend what platform i should have these sites written on (and please remember I need to do this on whatever is the most SEO-Friendly)... Thanks
Web Design | | Prime850 -
Websites with only one "html file" and page href # is good for SEO?
I bought one website from templatemonster that contains only one HTML and the pages are generated by links (PROGRAMACAO) My website: www.nextformaturas.com.br This is good in term of SEO? or it is better an website with deveral pages with diferent contents? What are the pros and cons? I really lost on this.
Web Design | | Naghirniac0