Intermediate
Intermediate tutorials may include code modifications, or use of tools like FTP. If you’re not a full-on developer, but you’re also not scared of getting your hands dirty, these tutorials are good for you :)
Measuring the loading time of your WordPress site is a critical step in optimizing for speed. You have to know how your site is performing to understand where the bottlenecks are and to measure the impact of optimizations you’re making, or the content you add to your site. There are numerous tools available for measuring the performance of your site, each of them providing a different result, which is understandably confusing. Which one is “right”?
So which speed testing tool should you use? The real answer is that it depends on what you want to measure
in how much detail you want to measure it.
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Password protection of posts and pages in WordPress is a nice feature, but can be a little limited. Here’s one way you can expand on it – by showing some custom content on a password protected page. Using a custom field and a little code, you can create a custom excerpt for each piece of protected content.
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There are many ways to password-protect content in WordPress. Basic password-protection is built-in and there are other free plugins to expand upon that. But if you want to generate revenue from protected content, you’ll need a fully-featured membership plugin. There are many to choose from and I can’t say I’ve tried them all, but of the ones I have tried, I really like MemberPress. It has a lot of features and capabilities, but it’s also pretty easy to get up and running with. That said, learning a new system will always present some hurdles. Here are a few basic concepts I needed to get my head around to get going with MemberPress. Hopefully this will be helpful for you.
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Learn how to handle unexpected WordPress problems, find the source and get your site back online.
When something goes wrong on your WordPress site, how do you react? Do you freak out, or have a mini panic attack? Don’t worry, that’s a fairly typical reaction from the normal WordPress user ;) With this post I’d like to change the way you look at and react to WordPress problems :)
With WordPress, as with many things in life, we learn a lot when things aren’t going smoothly; learning to deal with technical problems pushes us out of our comfort zone and forces us to develop new skills and a deeper understanding.
Much of what I’ve learned in WordPress over the years has happened through things going wrong and me having to figure out how to fix it. Every time you face a problem and learn how to deal with it, your confidence is boosted and your problem-solving toolkit, and resilience, expands. The next time an issue crops up you are better equipped to handle it and you feel less panic.
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Ever raised an eyebrow at some of the sites showing up as Referrals in your Google Analytics reports? Analytics spam is a pervasive problem. There are 2 primary kinds of spam data you’ve probably seen show up in your Google Analytics reports. In some cases you may not have even realized it was spam.
There’s spam sites that show up in your referrer reports, and there’s spam that shows up in the browser language report. This post describes how to deal with both kinds of spam so that you can enjoy clean Analytics data! If you haven’t checked your Analytics for a while, I recommend doing so, to see if you’ve been subjected to any of the above.
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Automattic’s Jetpack plugin has come a long way! It’s been much-maligned in the past for being bloated and slow and for that reason many developers wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot keyboard. These days it’s much better – it’s more truly modularized to give you more control over exactly what’s activated. From the code side of things, developers will be pleasantly surprised to discover that it has been sprinkled with lots of actions and filters. So, while Jetpack is still generally marketed to entry-level end users, there are actually some nice Easter eggs for developers who want to customize things a little bit for their clients.
This article provides some code snippets and examples of a few ways to customize Jetpack modules.
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