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 :)

How To Make A WordPress Test Site In 4 Small Steps, For Free

How To Make a WordPress Test Site In 4 Small Steps, For Free

Every time a new version of WordPress is released, some people will experience compatibility problems with their sites. These can be minor and easily resolved, or they can be more tricky to diagnose. Either way, especially for non-developers, such problems are a little scary, particularly if they make your website inaccessible or unusable. One way to ease the stress of an upgrade, or to experiment with any changes you may want to make on your site, is to create a sandbox, or testing site. The video in this post shows you how you can easily do that using free tools.

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How To Preload Key Requests In WordPress

How to Preload Key Requests in WordPress

If you run Google PageSpeed tests on your website, you may have seen the recommendation to “Preload Key Requests.”

This post explains what that recommendation means, the advantages as well as the pitfalls, and most importantly, how to do it.

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Create Custom WooCommerce Layouts With Beaver Builder

Create Custom WooCommerce Layouts with Beaver Builder

Continuing the series looking at options to customize your WooCommerce product pages, this time we’re looking at Beaver Builder.

If you don’t mind a small learning curve and a different WordPress editing experience, Beaver Builder is really powerful. You can control most aspects of your WooCommerce store layouts, and easily apply templates in bulk.

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What’s Making Our Websites Slow? We Are!

What’s Making Our Websites Slow? We Are!

I’ve been working in customer support for a premium caching plugin (WP Rocket) for several years now. I’ve seen a lot of websites and helped a lot of customers. Every day, many times a day, in our ticket queue, we receive some version of this question:

“Why isn’t my site faster?”

Depending on the site there may be many answers to this question. However the answer is almost never anything to do with caching.

A caching plugin, nor any one optimization technique can fix all performance issues. In fact, as site owners we can be our own worst enemy when it comes to speed, due to all the content we’ve put on our pages.

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Google PageSpeed Insights – A Guide For WordPress Users

Google PageSpeed Insights – A Guide for WordPress Users

I’ve updated this guide based on the recent changes to the PageSpeed tool.

Listen, let’s keep it real, PageSpeed Insights is a tool best used by developers. Its intentions are good but it’s not targeted at the average WordPress site owner. Even with the recent introduction of some WordPress-specific messaging, many aspects of the report are too technical to be clearly actionable.

In this guide I’ll try to translate what PageSpeed is talking about and let you know which factors you can control, as a WordPress site owner, and which you can’t.

The basic message of PageSpeed Insights could be translated as follows:

  • Keep your pages light and simple.
  • Avoid unnecessary fanciness.
  • Consider mobile users, particularly those who pay for every byte of data.
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