WP 4.1.2 Deployment – Yearly SLA Acknowledgement

Today’s deployment includes bug fixes, plugin updates and accessibility improvements.

SLA Acknowledgement

Starting today, you’ll see a quick pop-up in the WordPress dashboard asking you to acknowledge our Service Level Agreement (SLA). This acknowledgement is required once each year. The SLA clearly defines what you can expect from us in terms of performance, support, and availability, and what we require from you to help keep our systems stable and secure. Please take the time to read the SLA in full before acknowledging it. Your annual acknowledgement confirms that you understand and agree to these responsibilities.

Slider Block Upgrade

The website audit highlighted several ways we can improve the accessibility of our existing themes and blocks. We’ve updated the Slider Block to make it easier to meet accessibility standards, but it only works if the content is set up correctly. Slider images that link to another page or website, must include Alt Text or a caption so screen reader users know where the link goes. Even if the image isn’t linked, Alt Text may still be needed. The WordPress Guide for more tips on accessibility, including how and why to add Alt Text.

Staff List Block

We’ve updated the URL format for individual Staff List profiles. Instead of using “staff-member” in the link, they’ll now use “people.” For example, a profile that was at wfu.edu/staff-member/jane-doe will now appear at wfu.edu/people/jane-doe. Redirects have been put in place so any links to the old URLs will work correctly.

What We Learned From Auditing 20,000 Web Pages

Our recent audit found 680 pages with duplicate meta descriptions. Meta Descriptions are the short text that appears in search results under your page title. The culprit was that some site had default setting in the Yoast SEO plugin, which we’ve now removed. Without the default, search engines will pull the first 160 characters of your page instead. If you want to improve SEO performance of a page you can add a custom click-worthy description. The WordPress Guide has more help for using Yoast SEO to improve a page’s search engine performance.

As always, feel free to reach out using the Digital Request Form if you have any questions about this deployment or any of the topics we’ve shared.