Posts in the category: WordPress

Taking ownership of your WordPress hosting could save your business money, as well as a great deal of time and stress. When I began freelancing I made the decision not to offer web hosting. I was, and continue to be insistent that clients purchase their own web hosting and domain registrations. Now that probably sounds counter intuitive for anyone developing websites. After all it’s an oppor...

One of the easiest ways I’ve found to improve my WordPress development skills is to stop installing plugins. Instead I started focusing on writing them and learning more about WordPress filters and actions. When you start out it might be more convenient to quickly install a plugin which solves your problem. However every time you add another plugin you increase your technical debt. This coul...

Keeping your WordPress development website password protected is an important requirement that shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s a useful way to keep progress and information secure from outside sources should they stumble onto your development domain. Previously I have been using the WP Maintenance Mode plugin to achieve this. And whilst it’s good at what it does, it requires you to...

Recently I’ve been using the All-in-One WP Migration plugin for hassle free database migrations between local, staging and production environments. I have also found it helpful for copying clients existing websites when a local development version is needed. So far I like the straight forward nature of it. It’s easy to run a find and replace on domain names so turning mywebsite.local i...

Whilst doing some research on WordPress performance I came across this excellent article from Kinsta® It’s in-depth and long read but there’s some great value in here if you want to get your head into the technical aspects. https://kinsta.com/learn/speed-up-wordpress/ ...

Whether it’s your website or a clients it’s important to have responsible practices for WordPress backups. You need to be proactive about backing up your WordPress website. Do not not rely on the chance that nothing will go wrong. Ideally you want to choose a web hosting supplier who has backups built into their service. My recommendation is to always look for WordPress specific packag...

Learning the WordPress visual editor shortcuts can really save you time. It will help you get the most out of your content creation experience, and keep you in the flow when you’re writing. You don’t want to be searching for buttons on the toolbar when you’re trying to express your thoughts. With that in mind I’ve compiled a cheat sheet of the most common shortcuts I use. Y...

The WordPress admin provides a rich editing experience with a variety of features and tools at our disposal. However there are times when these features just aren’t required for our websites – so wouldn’t it be nice if we could hide them? Less clutter keeps us focused, so fewer menus and options should make our path to completing our tasks a little more straight forward. Removing...

Have you ever needed to rollback a WordPress installation to a specific version? If so, WP Downgrade might be the plugin you’ve been missing. It allows you to simply specify the target version of WordPress you want to install. You can then click Save Changes and initiate an update from the provided prompt. As always, remember to backup your website before making any changes. ...

WordPress makes it easy for us to upload images to our websites, but I wonder how often we stop and consider the impact of these images. Your websites page load time is a key metric that isn’t going away anytime soon, and we’ve seen time and again that lowering it can improve conversions and other KPIs. Image choice and optimisation is an important consideration for the web. Images tha...

If you’re looking to create a new website in 2020 make sure you consider WordPress. Whether your building a website for yourself or your business it’s got some great options to help you achieve more online. Did you know WordPress is the CMS of choice for over 30% of the web? It’s also open-source, has an astonishing list of plugins which give you access to some excellent features...

Remember to be selective over the plugins you choose for your WordPress website. One of WordPress’s biggest appeals is the vast array of plugins available to help achieve the functionality you want. There’s a plugin to do pretty much anything you can think of on WordPress, and there’s definitely a temptation to keep adding plugins to increase what your site is capable of. But the...