Intermediate | Web Training Wheels

Design WooCommerce Product Pages with WooBuilder Blocks

Last Updated on March 28, 2021.

A lot of online stores look very similar these days. It’s not really a WordPress-specific issue – websites in general kind of look the same. When it comes to ecommerce, WooCommerce has become the default plugin to use because of its enormous power and market penetration.

But if you install WooCommerce and do nothing else, everything does look the same. Even if you use an ecommerce theme, in many cases the product galleries are laid out the same way, the information is organized on the page in the same way etc.

Some themes do offer more unique and creative layouts. But if you’re someone used to using page builders, for example, or you want to be able to customize your product pages without switching themes, you’ll need a plugin to help you. And honestly the state of this in WordPress is not as advanced as I was anticipating.

Given that page builders are a fairly mature concept at this point, I was expecting to find some really good ones dedicated to WooCommerce. That’s not really the case. So I’m going to do a series of posts where I test out some of the available options for customizing your WooCommerce product pages.

What’s Making Our Websites Slow? We Are!

Audience: Beginners, Developers, Intermediate

Speed Optimization

This is the blog post that accompanies a talk I gave at WordCamp Seattle in 2019. You can see the slides here. The video of the talk is up on WordPress.tv

Additionally, the HTTP Archive Web A l manac was published around the same time so I’ve also interspersed some of the insights from that report since they dovetail really nicely.

Providing excellent context for this post, the CMS chapter shows how sites built with a Content Management System (and WordPress sites comprise almost 75% of those in the report) tend to:

be more bloated with heavier page weights
use more 3rd party resources
use heavier images

Additionally it reported that WordPress sites tend to have slower performance metrics.

Now this is not really the fault of WordPress itself, it’s really due to what we site owners have done.

While it’s possible to build bloated pages and use techniques to make them seem fast, that shouldn’t be the goal. Let’s just build lighter pages to begin with!

Google PageSpeed Insights – A Guide for WordPress Users

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate

Speed Optimization

Google PageSpeed Insights Guide for WordPress Users

Last Updated on April 15, 2026.

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 principles that PageSpeed Insights is trying to communicate are:

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

These are solid principles but PageSpeed communicates them in somewhat obscure ways.

Will HTTP/2 Make Your WordPress Site Faster?

Audience: Advanced, Intermediate

Speed Optimization

Will HTTP/2 make your WordPress site faster

What is HTTP/2?

Without boring the pants off you, HTTP/2 is an updated and more efficient way of delivering web site components from server to browser. There are 3 conditions:

Browsers have to support it – most of them do now.
Servers have to support it. Many do, ask your host about it. If they don’t, using Cloudflare will enable HTTP/2
Your site has to use HTTPS

Now that it’s becoming increasingly widespread, most articles on the topic make sweeping promises of faster performance, “just like that”, simply by enabling it. But there are fewer articles which actually back up these claims with test results.

I recently converted a couple of sites from HTTP to HTTPS and decided to take the opportunity to see what difference, if any, enabling HTTP/2 made.

WordPress Speed Optimization Glossary

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate

Speed Optimization

Trying to make your WordPress site faster is an already technically complex process, further obscured by all the jargon you have to understand. Here’s an overview of some commonly used site “speed up” terms. I hope it helps demystify the process!

General web terms

Browser

The program you open to get on the internet: Chrome, Firefox, Safari are the most common examples.

Server

A special computer, provided by your hosting company, where your website actually lives. By “lives”, I mean where all the files and the database are stored. This machine delivers your website to all your website visitors.

Just like your phone and computer run on a certain software – Windows or MacOS for example – there are a few different types of software your server may run on.

Normally you don’t have to worry too much about this – it’s a decision made by your host and you don’t need to get your hands dirty. But if you get really into optimization, there can be a few differences depending on your server environment.

How to Have Different Sidebar Content On Different Pages of Your WordPress Site

Audience: Beginners, Intermediate

WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials - Basic

Updated: April 2018

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.