WordPress

Have you ever navigated to your website, and found an unexplained 404 error? Sometimes you try and load several pages, and none of them work! The site isn’t down however, since the homepage seems to be working fine. It’s understandably easy to panic. But calm down. The answer is probably just that the permalinks settings […]

The Jetpack plugin is one of the most staple plugins on any WordPress installation. Ever since its release in 2011, it’s been a runaway hit with millions upon millions of downloads. It’s developed and maintained by Automaticc themselves, and so doesn’t run into any trust issues. I’ve been a staunch advocate of Jetpack for years […]

One of the challenges in creating a content heavy website, is about retaining your visitors. When you have a lot of posts, chances are that a reader will be interested in more than just the current article. Of course, a well-crafted piece of content will have internal links to all parts of your site, and […]

I’m a big fan of responsive WordPress themes – ones that have it built in right from the start. In fact, I’d previously written about how we need to stop using separate themes for mobiles, and instead maintain the same code base for all devices. Unfortunately, sometimes our themes don’t give us that luxury and […]

Imagine you take all the effort to optimize your site, ensure that no extra scripts are loading, and that you’ve asynchronized all everything you can. You get a nice page speed score and are happy. Then one day you check out your site speed reports in Google Analytics, and you find that your pages are […]

When Gutenberg came out, it brought with it, a vastly expanded selection of default content types, we call “blocks”. Previously in the TinyMCE editor, we had buttons at the top, each of which represented a different type of content – headings, lists, and those inserted by plugins. In time though, the developers felt that this […]

It seems that every day there’s a new story about someone’s site getting hacked. Typically, these stories are light on details about how exactly the site was compromised. What was the attack vector? Did it involve a rogue editor or author, or was it a brute force attack? Is there anything we as users could […]

WordPress has a number of “hooks” that you can use to insert code into different parts of the theme. These hooks remove the need to manually modify the theme files. Using this, we can do all kinds of cool things like inserting custom content into the header, the title, and the footer. For example, I’d […]

Subscribing to a CDN is just half the battle. The next challenge is finding a way to rewrite the URLs of all your static assets to the new CDN URL. In this article, I’ll share the best plugin I’ve found for the job, and why other solutions don’t work. Note that you don’t need to […]

It’s no secret that people don’t upgrade WordPress, even when they should. We usually put this down to laziness or ignorance, but believe it or not, there are sometimes valid reasons to hold off on the upgrade. Valid business reasons. But of course, that comes at a price. And sometimes that price is higher than […]