Debugging in WordPress is annoying. It’s turned off by default, and there’s no GUI for viewing the errors. Turning it on requires you to add lines to the wp-config.php file – something not everyone is comfortable doing, particularly given that it’s so sensitive and can easily destroy your entire site if you’re not careful. As […]
Google’s Disdain for “Random Affiliate Sites” Betrays Us All
All website owners are SEOs, whether they know it or not. Those of us who have been running websites ever since we started working have seen how our content models evolve with time. Website design has changed so much as well! But the promise of the web was always this – every business is on […]
Using the New Autoptimize Aggregate Inline JS
On the 26th of July, 2021, the well-known plugin Autoptimized released a new update that allows for deferring in-line JavaScript. Here’s the new option as seen in the settings screen: This new ability, lets you final defer inline JavaScript so that it doesn’t mess up your page load times. But should you enable it? And […]
Site Owners: Be Suspicious of Google’s Link Spam Update!
On the 26th of July 2021, Google announced that it would be rolling out something called the “Link Spam Update” over the next two weeks. Unlike most core updates, however, this time Google is actually asking website owners to change their behavior – namely add rel=”sponsored” to their affiliate and guest post links. Last year, […]
How To Minimize Scraping Of Your Site
Have you ever come across a website that’s almost an exact duplicate of yours? It can be a somewhat disorienting experience! It seems incredible that a 3rd party would take your content and claim it as its own without attribution. They even copy the images! These people are called “scrapers”, and site scraping can be […]
How To Use Blocks In The WordPress Widget Area
In April, I had written about Full Site Editing (FSE) coming to WordPress. The idea is to expand the notion of widgets to outside just the post or page content area, and allow users to place them in other areas of the theme like the header, footer, and sidebars. While we haven’t yet reached FSE, […]
How To See The WordPress Blocks Outlines
WordPress Gutenberg changed the focus of the editor from writing, to “page building”. While a lot of people including myself hated it at first, its benefits have begun to grow on me. And with the bugs ironed out, I can unequivocally say that it’s far better than the original editor. Now I use blocks myself […]
Three Link Practices That Are Bad For SEO
I’ve been writing on the web since 2008. And since then, I’ve seen websites come and go. It’s often dizzying to see how quickly a site can rise, only to fall and never be seen again. I’ve seen pages that rank for a year or more for certain keywords, and then simply…vanish. Sometimes I’ve been […]
Tawk.to – A Simple Live Chat Widget For WordPress
The goal of every website is different. Some just want to provide information. Others are looking to persuade you into taking some kind of action. In the latter category, we have products and services that customers are considering, and about which people might want more information. How do we get it to them? How do […]
Unpopular Opinion: Yoast SEO Premium Isn’t Worth It
I have very positive feelings towards Yoast. I remember switching to it years and years ago and have been using it continuously on all my websites since. It’s one of the first plugins I install and I still use it on my sites today. I’ve often considered buying the Yoast SEO premium version – because […]