Beginners

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

How To Create A Member Directory On Your MemberPress Site

How to create a member directory on your MemberPress site

MemberPress is one of my go-to plugins for easily protecting and charging for access to your content. I appreciate the fact that they stay focused on this core goal and don’t overload it with extraneous features. So it does not have a member directory feature built-in, but by using an additional free plugin you can add this capability.

In this use-case the requirements of the directory are simple: a front-end listing of site members, that other users can browse.

When people register for your MemberPress offerings, they are added to the existing user system within WordPress.  That means that any plugin which taps into that to display WordPress users, should work fine with MemberPress. You don’t have to look for anything that is MemberPress-specific.

There are several fully featured and fairly complex directory plugins available on the WordPress repo, they are generally aimed at being all-in-one solutions for creating and monetizing the directory. They aren’t really designed to be used in conjunction with an existing membership site.

But there are fewer plugins that take a simpler approach, and even fewer that do a good job.

Read on for my recommendations.

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WordPress Image Positioning, Spacing & Alignment – Common Problems And Fixes

WordPress Image Positioning, Spacing & Alignment – Common Problems and Fixes

Wrestle no more with images in the WordPress editor. This guide to working with images in WordPress has now been updated to include tips for the new Gutenberg editor, released with WordPress 5.0. Don’t worry, if you haven’t updated yet just scroll down to the Classic Editor section of the guide. This tutorial shows you how to wrangle images with ease: alignment, positioning, spacing and more.

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WordPress Speed Optimization Glossary

WordPress Speed Optimization Glossary

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!

Browser caching

Imagine your web page is like a puzzle. The puzzle pieces are CSS, JavaScript and image files. When you visit a web page, the browser has to retrieve all those puzzle pieces from the server, then assemble them correctly to make your web page.

Browser caching allows the browser to keep some of those puzzle pieces in place, that is, stored in the browser itself (on your computer), so that the next time you visit that page, it doesn’t have to fetch them again from the server.

The purpose of browser caching is to make repeat visits to the same site much faster for the visitor.

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Troubleshoot Your WordPress Plugins With Plugin Detective

Troubleshoot Your WordPress Plugins with Plugin Detective

Many issues that arise on your WordPress site will be plugin-related. Whether it’s a conflict between plugins, between a plugin and your theme, a buggy update, or whatever else may happen,  the standard troubleshooting procedure is to deactivate all your plugins, then turn them back on one at a time until the issue reappears. This process lets you isolate exactly which plugin is at the source of the conflict. However, if you have more than a handful of plugins on your site, which almost everyone does, this can be a time-consuming and frustrating process.

Enter….. Plugin Detective

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How To Have Different Sidebar Content On Different Pages Of Your WordPress Site

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

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.

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7 Simple WordPress Performance Test Best Practices

7 Simple WordPress Performance Test Best Practices

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.

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