We Just Made This Template Ridiculously Better

You know that feeling when you build something, put it out into the world, and then immediately think of ten ways to make it better?

Yeah. That's been me for the past few weeks.

I couldn't stop thinking about this template. Not because it was broken or anything.. it was working well. But I kept seeing opportunities. Little things that would make a real difference for anyone using this to build their blog.

So I went back to work.

And honestly, I got a bit carried away. In the best way possible.

We just pushed a massive update to the template, and I'm genuinely excited about what we've added. We're talking nine major features that make this thing faster, smarter, and ready for the way people are actually searching in 2025.

Let me walk you through what changed and why it matters.

The AI Search Problem

Here's something that's been keeping me up at night.. Google's rolling out AI Overviews everywhere. ChatGPT launched their search feature. Perplexity is growing like crazy. People are literally changing how they search for information.

And most blog templates? They're still optimized for search engines from five years ago.

That felt wrong to me. If we're building a template that's supposed to help people succeed with SEO, it needs to work with how search actually works today. Not how it worked in 2020.

So I implemented AI search optimization with entity clustering. Basically, we're now structuring content in a way that large language models can understand and reference more easily. When an AI is summarizing information or answering questions, this template gives it clean, well-structured data to work with.

It's not about gaming the system. It's about making sure your content is accessible to the new generation of search tools that people are actually using.

Video and Voice

I was looking at analytics for a bunch of sites I work on, and I noticed something interesting. Videos embedded in blog posts were getting way more engagement than text-only posts. Makes sense, right? People like watching things.

But here's what caught my attention.. those video posts weren't showing up in video search results. They weren't getting rich snippets. Google had no idea there was video content on the page.

So I added VideoObject schema. Now when you embed a video in your blog post, search engines know exactly what it is. They can show thumbnails in search results, display duration, show upload dates. All the things that make people actually want to click.

Then there's voice search. I have a Google Home in my kitchen, and I use it all the time when I'm cooking. "Hey Google, how do I dice an onion?" or whatever. And I started wondering.. how do search engines decide what content to read aloud?

Turns out there's a schema type for that. Speakable schema tells voice assistants which parts of your content are good for speaking. I added support for it because voice search is only getting bigger, and we should be ready for it.

I also added Event schema while I was at it. If you're writing about conferences, meetups, webinars, whatever.. now Google can show that properly in search results with dates and locations and all the relevant details.

We went from six schema types to nine. Each one solves a specific problem I've actually run into.

Performance Stuff That Actually Matters

Okay, this is where I probably went a bit overboard, but hear me out.

I added support for AVIF and WebP images. These are modern image formats that are literally 20 to 50 percent smaller than JPEGs with the same quality. That's not a small difference. That's the difference between a page that loads instantly and one that makes people wait.

I also implemented mobile-first responsive images. Most of your traffic is probably coming from phones, right? So why are we serving desktop-sized images to mobile users? Now the template automatically serves appropriately sized images based on the device. Smaller images for phones, larger ones for desktops. Makes perfect sense.

Then I got into some more technical stuff. I added preconnect for third-party resources. When your browser needs to load something from another domain, it has to do this whole dance.. DNS lookup, TCP connection, TLS handshake. Takes time. With preconnect, we do all that ahead of time so when you actually need the resource, it's ready to go.

I implemented the Speculation Rules API for Chrome 121 and up. This is genuinely cool. It lets Chrome prefetch pages before you even click on them. The browser gets smarter about predicting where you're going to navigate and loads it in the background. When you click a link, it feels instant. Like magic.

And here's something that really matters for understanding real user experience.. I added LoAF API monitoring. That stands for Long Animation Frames. It tracks when your page is doing too much work and causing janky animations or delayed interactions. This data goes straight to Google Analytics 4 so you can see exactly when and where users are experiencing slowdowns.

All this performance work was about one thing.. making sure your blog feels fast. Not just scoring well on Lighthouse tests, but actually feeling snappy and responsive when real people use it on real devices.

What This Means for You

If you're already using this template, these updates are waiting for you. Pull the latest changes and you've got all of this.

If you haven't started using it yet, well.. now's a pretty good time. We've gone from a solid foundation to something I genuinely think is one of the most SEO-ready blog templates out there.

I added 498 lines of code across eight files. Created four new components. Integrated two new performance APIs. And somehow managed to do all this without increasing the build time or bundle size. Still builds in about 8.5 seconds. Bundle is still around 184KB.

That last part matters to me. It's easy to add features. It's hard to add features without making things slower or more bloated. I wanted to do this right.

The Goal

Here's what I'm really going after.. I want this to be the best SEO blog template out there. Period.

Not just good. Not just solid. The best.

That means staying ahead of how search is evolving. That means adding support for video and voice and AI search before most people even realize they need it. That means obsessing over performance in ways that actually impact user experience.

I'm not there yet. There's more work to do. But these nine updates? They're a big step in the right direction.

We're now optimized for Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT Search. We're ready for voice assistants. We support modern image formats. We have monitoring that shows real user experience. We prefetch pages for instant navigation.

This template is built for 2025 and beyond, not for the web of five years ago.

What's Next

I've got more ideas. Always do. But I wanted to get these updates out and stable before moving on to the next round of improvements.

If you're using the template and run into issues, let me know. If you have ideas for what would make it better, I want to hear them. This is open source because I believe we build better things together.

And if you're just getting started with your blog, welcome. You're starting with something solid. Something fast. Something that's actually optimized for how people search today.

Let's build something great.