WordPress guides

  • Fixing time-to-first-byte TTFB

    Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) is one of the most useful website performance metrics. It’s also one of the hardest to improve. Caching plugins can’t do much for it; actually they contribute to it. Caching plugins don’t fix cache warm-up, authenticated sessions, submissions / processing, and administration. To improve those you need to get TTFB in range. The…

  • The most popular themes

    Recently I’ve been assessing WooCommerce sites based in California as part of a new client outreach effort. Through this process and its first 100 subjects I’ve discovered more data on where people host their WooCommerce sites, what errors are showing up (SSL, JS/console, ADA, state compliance), performance metrics, who they use for hosting/registrations/email, what all…

  • A plugin too far

    A plugin too far

    How many plugins is too many for a WordPress site? Well, there’s no real answer to that question. It depends on several rather circumstantial factors…

  • Headless / decoupled architectures

    A session I attended at WCLAX 2018 by Roy Sivan discussed headless WordPress and WooCommerce sites with a decoupled front end presentation layer.

  • Customizing with Code Snippets

    Check out my video on the various ways to customize your WooCommerce sites, particularly using the Code Snippets plugin to better organize your PHP customizations. Also, check out my open-source library of WooCommerce code snippet samples.

  • Architecting million dollar projects

    I was inspired by a webinar I recently attended, Architecting Growth–How to Crush Million Dollar Projects by Pantheon – a geek friendly managed host for enterprise WordPress and Drupal clients. This webinar is presented by their co-founder and discusses much of what they’ve learned providing infrastructure for larger scale projects.

  • Official hosting for WordPress sites

    The WordPress.com Business Edition hosting service by Automattic could be the best option for hosting your WordPress sites.

  • WordPress design hierarchy

    WordPress core – and by extension WooCommerce – cleanly optimizes design output in a very maintainable hierarchy.

Blog categories