These tutorials are appropriate for those new to WordPress, or for non-coders.
This is the first post in a series that looks at the state of WordPress plugins for customizing your WooCommerce store.
Here I look at WooBuilder Blocks which is a great choice for owners of small stores that want to handcraft their product pages.
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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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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:
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:
The Time To First Byte (TTFB), or server response time, of your WordPress site can be an important indicator of performance. It doesn’t represent the whole picture, but a very specific part in the process.
Time to First Byte is a measure of how fast your server responds when someone tries to visit a page on your site. Specifically, it’s measuring how long it takes from the time the browser asks the server for the page, to when the browser receives the first piece of data from the server.
Visitors want sites to feel fast, so the sooner some meaningful content is displayed on the screen, the better. TTFB can influence this – the faster the server responds, the faster content can get to the user.
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In the past few weeks, several people have emailed me in various stages of panic about the new look of their WordPress admin area. They had updated to WordPress 5+, which features the brand new Block Editor AKA Gutenberg, and were flummoxed by the new changes.
This guide introduces the new editor along with some of the common questions and issues.
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