WordPress

  • It’s time to upgrade sites to PHP 8.0

    PHP 8.0 was released over a year ago. Version 8.1 released this past November. That’s right – most of us are behind on this one! PHP 8.0 is a significant change that improves performance with a just-in-time compiler. While there’s clear benefits to making this upgrade as soon as possible, the reality today is most…

  • Who should have Administrator access?

    I often come across sites that have questionable WordPress administrator accounts. I work with clients to reduce this exposure. It’s dangerous offering full privilege accounts to anybody besides fully trusted and technically capable vendors and staff. Regular review is recommended since there tends to be shifts in staff and roles over time. Here’s why admin…

  • Dealing with Elementor bloat

    There is a performance cost to operating a page builder, Elementor being no exception. This effect can be mitigated by paying careful attention to the following.

  • Browser-safe fonts and page performance

    Fonts are one of the more critical web page performance items. Some sites load unnecessary fonts, font styles, font formats, failing to set them to load in display:swap mode, or failing to declare the unicode-range to load. Any of these can deteriorate performance. Thirty-plus fonts most devices already have There’s no need to load the…

  • Hello Elementor. Goodbye bloated themes

    My favorite WordPress and WooCommerce theme nowadays is Hello Elementor. It’s more of a theme placeholder than a traditional theme really. Haven’t you heard? Themes are dying!

  • WordPress as a component system

    Remember component stereo systems? WordPress is a component system too. Or it’s supposed to be if you’re using it optimally. From sites I’ve inherited I’ve observed developers breaking this by: WordPress is best used as its core, hosting, theme, and plugin components. Add to that a thin layer of custom design code or business rules…

  • WordCamp LAX 2020 presentation

    Video on database cleanup, prune legacy plugin and theme cruft to free-up resources

  • Abandonment issues

    Theme and plugin abandonment is common. Themes and plugins need to be updated about monthly to reflect testing with latest core components, addressing community requests, fixing issues and developing new features. It takes a critical mass for the business side to work.

  • WordPress Santa Clarita presentation

    I’m presenting on the topic Database Cleanup at two events coming up. Everyone’s invited! The first venue will be WordPress Santa Clarita Valley Meetup the evening of Tuesday Sep 15th 7:00pm over Zoom. The second venue will be taking place mid October and will be announced soon…

  • Local WordPress development update

    Update: See my more recent post about LocalWP There’s myriad options for local WordPress development environments. Some are quite simple to set-up, usually connected to a paid hosting service that funds the local dev project. Some automatically install WordPress while others require manual installation into the web root htdocs plus database initialization. For Linux users…

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