WordPress

  • It’s just like using a word processor

    Think of the WordPress block editor as an ever-expanding word processor for your website.

  • Co-organizing WordCamp Santa Clarita

    WordCamp Santa Clarita 2020 #wcscv website is now live and the call for speakers is up! Our call for sponsors, volunteers and opening of attendee tickets is forthcoming. Please stay tuned or subscribe for updates (see footer). I hope to see folks there in early April.

  • Making good plugin choices

    Plugin decisions tell me a lot about how the site was put together. Each plugin consumes resources and slows down a site, particularly on weaker hosting. Plugins can also clog-up the database by caching a bunch of data or storing oversized settings…

  • PHP 7.4 is here and performing well

    WordPress hosting companies are notoriously behind in upgrading PHP – the web service that processes a website’s data and logical code into HTML output. The cost of this delay is enormous in terms of website maintenance and performance. The jump from PHP v5 to v7 was a big one that required software updates and often…

  • Giving out Administrator access

    Let’s say you’ve reported a bug that you’ve observed in a theme or plugin. Good job by the way! Should you provide the developer admin access to your production site so they can diagnose or repair the issue? ABSOLUTELY NOT!

  • 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…

  • Splitting a store from a website

    Recently a client brought in an interesting request to split their store off onto a subdomain, for example https://store.mywebsite.com. There are both advantages and disadvantages to this idea. I thought I’d share those insights with my audience. Pros The plugin load gets split, so each site runs less plugins or customization risks above the core…

  • 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…

  • WP Plugins A-Z podcast

    I joined John Overall on his podcast WP Plugins A-Z for Interview 32 discussing WooCommerce and Code Snippets. Give it a listen and let me know how I did! Podcast description: Today’s interview is with Sean Conklin from CodedCommerce. We previously reviewed some plugins Sean has worked on. For example: Benchmark Email Lite, all the…

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