SEO on a static site
Moving a site to static files must not cost its place in search engines. Static publishing writes the files search engines read, keeps every old address working and can make the files smaller and faster.
What you'll have at the end
A static copy with a sitemap, robots rules, absolute canonical links and a small page for every old address that sends visitors and search engines on.
The files search engines read
In the wizard, step 7, Extras:
- sitemap.xml: every page at its public address with the date its content changed. It needs the public address of the target.
- robots.txt: everything may be read, and the sitemap is named.
- 404.html: the site's own "page not found" page.
Canonical links, hreflang alternates and social card images (og:image, twitter:image) are rewritten to the
public address, so they never name the address the build was made from.
Old addresses: redirect pages
A static host has no URL aliases. Tick redirects and every build writes a small page for:
- each old address of a page (the history kept when content is renamed or moved);
- each custom alias that points to a page (Setup > URL translator);
- each URL wildcard without
*that leads to a page of the copy.
Such a page sends the visitor on at once (a meta refresh), names the new address as canonical and asks search engines
not to index it. An address where the copy has a page or file of its own never gets one. Wildcards with * cannot be
expressed as files and are left out.
Faster files
In step 7, Post-processing:
- minify: less white space and no comments in the pages (the content of
pre,textarea, scripts and styles is left alone). - precompress: a
.gznext to every page, style sheet and script of 1 KB or more (and a.brwhen PHP has the brotli extension), for hosts that serve them (GitHub Pages compresses by itself). - fingerprint: style sheets and scripts are named by the hash of their content (
site.3f2a9c1b.css) and every link to them changes with them, so a host may let browsers keep them. Never a?v=query. A partial build keeps the names it has.