As you probably know by now, Joomla 4 was released officially last week. A great event for the Joomla community and we are all thrilled to start using it over the next months.
However, Joomla 4 is not compatible with Joomla 3. Many, if not all extensions and templates must be modified or sometimes rewritten from scratch to work on Joomla 4. This is an important factor to take into account before upgrading any Joomla 3 site to Joomla 4.
What about Weeblr's extensions, sh404SEF, wbAMP and 4SEO?
sh404SEF, wbAMP and 4SEO, the short story
4SEO is easy, it already runs on Joomla 3 and 4 the exact same
sh404SEF will not be ported to Joomla and instead be replaced with a new extension: 4SEF
wbAMP has been modified to run on both Joomla 3 & 4 and will be released in the next couple of weeks
sh404SEF and Joomla 4, the longer story
sh404SEF has been a staple of Joomla SEO for nearly 15 years now. I released it's first version publicly at the end of 2006 and it really took off the next year, when a I started a website to support my various Joomla extensions.
4SEO version 1.3 has just been released and it's an important one because it marks 2 things:
with the addition of the FAQ Page structured data type, we have completed our first round of rich snippet types support
K2 and Hikashop are the first 3rd-party extensions for which built-in support is added.
Structured data support
Structured data is a set of invisible - to your visitors - codes that can be added to pages to help machines in general - and Google and Bing more specifically - better understand the content of your pages. This will generally result in better SEO results, bringing in more interested visitors. And it can also triggers the display of Rich snippets in search results:
In the above example taken from SEMRush article on rich snippets, you can see how beneficial rich snippets can be for additional exposure in the search results:
4SEO version 1.2 is out today and comes with multiple features. It has improved sitemaps creation (you can now auto-expire content and have it removed from sitemap automatically) and more efficient crawling of your site.
Let's not forget as well a full Dutch translation!
For a quick intro, here is a 3 minutes video on what's new in 4SEO. [EDIT 2021-10-08: I have added a full transcript of this video below]
We just released version 1.1 of 4SEO and its main new feature is the ability to automatically measure and identify pages from your website that fail Google new Core Web Vitals speed checks.
It's an important feature for anyone concerned with Joomla SEO as it replaces previous speed measurements in Google rankings. Measuring actual Core Web Vitals values is hard and you basically have to rely on Google Search Console to get some values.
4SEO automatically measures your site Core Web Vitals and flags all pages failing the test for you.
But how important are in fact Core Web Vitals, how do you measure them and how can you improve your score? We have put together this short video to help you understand better this change and what to do about it.
3 weeks ago we quietly released the first stable version of 4SEO and I am thrilled by how well it was received by our existing subscribers, who were the first to know about it. Thank you all, especially all beta testers who worked with 4SEO 6 weeks before that release!
4SEO is the all-in-one extension for all of Joomla SEO, both on Joomla 3 & 4. With 4SEO you get:
structured data generation
meta data management
sitemap with only relevant URLs
broken links identification
redirection engine, canonical rules
content replacement (auto linking for instance)
several other tools needed for SEO (analytics snippets, custom code insertion, put some pages offline or 404)
work on the frontend
a fast and modern, single-page application interface
all in one single extension, making your site faster than if assembling several extensions
Since that initial release, we had a few small maintenance versions but development also went on, and today I'm happy to announce the first feature version of 4SEO: version 1.1 brings Core Web Vitals measurement to Joomla, in a fully automated way.
What in the world is Core Web Vitals, you may ask? well, CWV are what the SEO world is all excited about, and has been for a little while. It's a new way of measuring website speed that Google just started using to rank pages in their results, as part of their Page Experience update.
The thing with Core Web Vitals is that they are hard to measure for websites owners because they rely on how fast your site is for your visitors, not when you run a speed test yourself.
So far, the only way to get real CWV values was from the Google Search Console but now 4SEO includes real-world Core Web Vitals measurement, taken using Google's exact methodology.
