Last week, the latest version of Gutenberg was released to the public – version 9.1. It can be a bit difficult to separate the versions of Gutenberg from the one that’s bundled with WordPress itself. In fact, it’s not easy to find out exactly which version your using. But if you’d like to test out […]
WordPress
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 […]
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 […]
WordPress Structural Decisions To Make For Your Site
If you’ve chosen to host on WordPress, then most of the framework decisions are already made for you. You don’t need to choose the development language, the security framework, and many other things that you would normally have to choose in order to start a site from scratch. But for optimal performance there are still […]
Is Yoast Good Enough for Your SEO Efforts?
At NameHero’s we’re big fans of Yoast SEO. We use it for all our posts, and it provides us with useful guidance to keep us on track. Even on my own website, I’ve switched to using Yoast after trying all the others. These days it seems, there’s no other game in town. When you think […]
Converting From A Free WordPress Site: Pros And Cons
During these few months of quarantine, I’ve been approached by several members of friends and family on how to start a new website. These are mostly “spur of the moment” personal blogs – or perhaps a space to post some images and share them. For these basic use case scenarios, I always recommend free wordpress.com […]
Pros And Cons Of Writing WordPress Posts In MS Word
I’ve been using WordPress since 2008, and I’ve followed the evolution of its in-house editor for a long time. The latest Gutenberg editor has changed the way I write and compose posts from within WordPress, and the Automattic team deserves kudos for that. However, I still use MS Word to compose a lot of my […]