Sean D. Conklin

  • Discontinuing products in your store

    Products come and go while search engine caches remain. It’s a popular practice to switch a product’s status to draft (un-publish it) or delete a product when it has an undetermined status or has become permanently discontinued. Search engine caches, bookmarks, and overall “juice” for the product page can be be damaged when URLs get…

  • Emailing secure messages

    How many times have you received a text with a password, an encrypted spreadsheet file and a separate email containing the password (sitting in the same mailbox!), or an unprotected Google Sheet? There’s better solutions! Here’s some worth taking a look at: For heavier security have a look at asymmetric cryptography (like PGP) Apps or…

  • Blocks versus Page Builders

    Blocks came out in late 2018 initially for blog posts and page contents. The Block Editor project, originally named Gutenberg, has gradually expanded since. Starting January this year WordPress core introduced Block Themes (AKA Full Site Editing) where Blocks are used for templates, headers, footers, sidebars and more. That made 2022 a game changer because…

  • You’re running PHP 8 by now, right?

    WooCommerce had a little blip in this week’s release of version 7.1.0 where the PHP requirement was bumped to PHP 7.4 prematurely. They’ve fixed it, supporting PHP 7.2+ at the moment, but took the opportunity to issue a warning that PHP 7.4 is losing security support in just two weeks time. See PHP supported versions.…

  • Online store Maintenance Agreement

    I’ve adopted a new Maintenance Agreement. This came about following several occasions where I suddenly found new Administrators and plugins on a site that I was maintaining. It’s come mostly from clients I hadn’t worked with for some time. Still, surprise! I understand the reasons folks have for introducing new parties to help out. To…

  • WooCommerce Technical Growth Strategies

    Over time customers, order histories, and overall data will grow. Business conditions continually shift. Marketing experiments revolve and typically require new technical implementation to support, past ones to remove. How does one manage a growing website and keep it performing well, besides continually buying a bigger server? Following are some strategies to manage the growth…

  • Defining plugin classes

    During my plugin triage work I group plugins into different classes before digging deeper into the pros and cons of each. Whether a plugin is good or bad for a particular site depends on how necessary it is, how deeply it’s being utilized, whether there’s any preferred alternative, and how difficult it would be to…

  • Older Safari web browsers

    I’ve noticed a trend where several clients have forwarded to me trouble their users have faced using outdated versions of the Safari web browser. While it’s more typical to only support the latest version of popular web browsers that can normally be upgraded; there is meaningful traffic on the previous version of this browser –…

  • Tips on using LocalWP sandboxing

    LocalWP, known as Local and formerly Local by Flywheel, is a free, user-friendly and popular sandbox hosting environment for developing WordPress sites. Local sandboxes run directly on your workstations and are generally isolated to each machine as opposed to being available on the Internet. They also bundle useful features for site installation, migration, database administration,…

  • WordPress blocks, templates, and themes

    Full Site Editing (FSE) is here. This was just released for production with WordPress 5.9 yesterday, January 25, 2022. This follows earlier development and testing of this new core technology via the Gutenberg beta tester plugin and a variety of block based themes that made early inroads into the tech. With full-site editing now in…

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