The number of things to think about when setting up your website is tremendous. Many of them are contingent plans that won’t bear fruit immediately but might save your hide later down the line. Backup is one such example. Others will silently protect your site in the background, and you’ll never even notice how much […]
Paid SSL Is Simply Not Worth It Anymore
The developments since 2018 have dealt the death-knell for pretty much all paid SSL certificates. First the big news towards the end of 2018 that Google would be giving some (small) weightage to HTTPS websites in their search rankings. The second piece of news was from mid-2020, when Google and Apple decided to limit the […]
How Spam And Bots Can Kill Your Site
When I first started hosting on a relatively low-cost server, there came a point when my site suddenly slowed down. It became pretty bad. When I contacted my host, they suggested I upgrade to the next highest tier because I’d outgrown my existing plan. But I wasn’t yet convinced, because my traffic hadn’t suddenly increased […]
How Many Website Visitors Can Your Site Handle?
Hosting companies often segregate their plans by the recommended number of visitors that they think the package can handle. For example, here are the recommendations for NameHero’s web hosting packages (per month): Starter – 10,000 visits Plus – 25,000 visits Turbo – 50,000 visits Business – 100,000 visits Metrics like this are seriously flawed, but […]
Static WordPress – Is it Still a Good Idea?
A while ago, Google instituted its “Core Web Vitals” metrics and told us that future rankings will be (mildly) impacted by page speed. At this point, I got a little obsessed with reducing my “Time to First Byte” (TTFB) metric in order to reduce my Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) time. I examined so many different […]
Disallow REST API Username Enumeration in WordPress
WordPress allows programmatic access to its metadata. This means that 3rd party software can connect to it using APIs and not directly through the web interface. It’s useful, because it allows all kinds of cool functionality. For example, Jetpack uses either XMLRPC or REST APIs to obtain all kinds of information about your installation and […]
Is it a Good Idea to Modify WordPress Plugins?
WordPress is infinitely customizable. All the code is open sourced, and you can just open up an FTP program and change anything you like – from themes, plugins, to even the core files. That doesn’t mean you should, however! Particularly, the core files are something that you should absolutely leave alone. If you want to […]
Cloudflare’s APO Is Good – But Not Good Enough
Yesterday, Cloudflare announced that they were integrating full page caching into their WordPress plugin – a functionality they term as “APO”. Automatic Platform Optimization is a concept that Cloudflare wants to explore as an avenue for monetization as it costs $5/m for free users, and is automatically included for all pain plans. The announcement is […]
Two Layers of Caching is Optimal – No More No Less
I’ve tried a lot of different caching configurations on my site over the years. 3rd party plugins, server-based caching, Cloudflare caching – and I soon hope to try LiteSpeed’s new QUIC.cloud. I’ve experimented with different configurations, combining multiple techniques, and I’ve finally settled on my preferred setup – two layers of caching. One at the […]
Using JSON In WordPress – Best Practice
With search engines trying harder to understand the context of your website, it’s essential that you become familiar with JSON and how to effectively use it in WordPress in a scalable manner. In the past, we needed to use 3rd party plugins or rely on the generosity of themes to allow us to add JSON […]
