By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways The average small business WordPress site I audit has 22–35 active plugins. That is 3–4x what the site actually needs. Every plugin is code that runs. Runs slowly, on someone else’s schedule, with someone else’s security discipline. Plugins are the #1 cause of slow…
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By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways “Domain Authority” is a Moz invention, not a Google metric. Google has said, out loud, dozens of times that it is not. SEO agencies love DA because it’s easy to sell. A rising DA feels like progress even when your traffic is flat. What…
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By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways AI Overviews now show on roughly half of all Google searches, and on many local queries they push the map pack down — sometimes off the first screen entirely. Some East Texas businesses have seen 30–50% drops in map-pack driven traffic since the shift.…
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By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways AI chatbots can genuinely lift conversions — studies show 30–40% increases when implemented well. But “implemented well” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A bad chatbot loses you customers faster than no chatbot. The right use case for most East Texas…
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By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways The LCP target dropped from 2.5s to 2.0s in March 2026 — what passed in 2025 may fail in 2026. Only about 44% of WordPress sites on mobile were already passing the old 2.5s threshold. The fix is usually the hero image and the…
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