The solution

The original author had already installed a caching plugin but the site was still slow. Waterfall analysis suggested that the site was on slow hosting because the Time To First Byte was long.

Effects of long TTFB on site speed followed by a move to faster hosting

By moving to Akriga hosting we could not only speed up the website but also the rate at which change requests were dealt with. After a smooth transition to our hosting we set about implementing a number of technical SEO changes and content fixes.

Structured data bloat and SEO

Structured data is generally considered a good thing, its the corner stone of the semantic web. You can, however, have too much of a good thing.

Our SEO expert determined the site suffered from “structured data bloat” and we set about trimming it down. Firstly, structured data (SD) is OK on the homepage, but Google doesn’t want it everywhere. In this case the SD comes from Yoast so we have

/**
        @params array $yoast_data_array, int $int
        @returns array
        If homepage serve Yoast's JSON+LD markup (Organisation, etc) BUT *only* on homepage.
*/
function filter_wpseo_json_ld_output( $yoast_data_array, $int ) { 

        // If homepage serve Yoast's JASON+LD markup (Organisation, etc) BUT *only* on homepage.
        if ( is_front_page() ) {
                return $yoast_data_array; 
        }
        else {
                return array();                 // Not homepage, return an empty array
        }
};

// add the filter 
add_filter( 'wpseo_json_ld_output', 'filter_wpseo_json_ld_output', 10, 2 ); 

Second source of extraneous SD is WordPress’ own Hentry data. Unfortunately the X theme uses the presence of certain hentry_ classes to add images via the isotope script. Thus we have

/**
 * Remove 'hentry' from post_class()
 * For posts (i.e. not pages) such as News rm hentry structured data but retain 
 * img loading.  Matching styles are in ak_fixes.css

 */
function abc_remove_hentry( $class ) {
        //if ( in_array( array('type-page'), $class ) ) :
        if ( is_page() ) {
                $class = array_diff( $class, array( 'hentry' ) );
                //return $class;
        }
        else {
                // Not a page, rm hentry but add our own tag to retain img loading via Isotope
                $class=str_replace('hentry', get_hentry_replacement(), $class);
                //return $class;
        }
        #endif;
        return $class;
}
add_filter( 'post_class', 'abc_remove_hentry' );

/**
        @params:        None
        @returns:       String replacement  of hentry structured data tag
        @calledby:      ./framework/views/global/_script-isotope-index.php, abc_remove_hentry()
        Return string constant used to remove hentry but retain styling.
*/
function get_hentry_replacement () {
        return HENTRY_REPLACEMENT;
}