Beginners

These tutorials are appropriate for those new to WordPress, or for non-coders.

Improve Your WordPress Site With The Site Health Tool

Improve your WordPress site with the Site Health Tool

The Site Health tool was introduced in WordPress 5.2. It’s designed to give you, the site owner, some valuable information about your site and server performance. It’s also useful in the event you have to contact the support team for your theme or a plugin you’re using.

In this post we’ll have a quick look at this tool and highlight the most important recommendations.

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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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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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How To Update Old Content On Your WordPress Site

How to Update Old Content on Your WordPress Site

Maintaining a steady flow of traffic to your WordPress site isn’t only dependent on constantly producing brand new content. Updating old content is a great practice to keep benefitting from the posts you’ve already worked on. It’s possible to take advantage of Google’s freshness algorithm and generate a new burst of traffic for the updated content, as well as provide a better user experience for visitors to your site ensuring they never find old or irrelevant information. 

In this post I’ll cover:

  • The easiest way to update existing posts in WordPress
  • How to push your content to the top of your blog feed again
  • How to let Google know your content has been updated without pushing it to the top of your blog feed again
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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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