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 :)
Not all WordPress themes provide a way to have totally different sidebar content on different pages of your site. Some may provide a little flexibility with, for example a sidebar for the blog and a different sidebar for static pages, but sometimes you need more comprehensive control. You may need an additional set of navigation on a certain set of sub-pages, or you may want to hide some widgets on mobile devices, or for other specific conditions.
There are several different plugins that help you gain this type of flexibility with your site.
Read more →
These days it seems most WordPress users are aware of the need for speed on their websites: conversions, SEO, user experience etc. I won’t recycle all the usual stats here ;)
Maybe you’ve read some articles and seen that you need to speed test your site. So you click on whichever tool is mentioned, input your URL and proceed to freak out at the results.
But wait! Before freaking out, make sure you’re observing these rudimentary best practices when doing a performance test on your WordPress site.
Read more →
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.
Read more →
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.
Read more →
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.
Read more →
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.
Read more →
