On some websites you may see an arrow in the bottom left or right corner. When you click this, it jumps you back up to the top of the page with one click. This is helpful on pages with long form content, or infinite scroll, so that you don’t have to manually scroll back to the top of the page.
Accessibility is something that I’m really into… in theory. I believe everyone should have full access to the internet no matter what challenges they face or if they are using different devices to navigate and access the web.
But in reality I have not put as much work into this as I need to. So when I received the pitch email about the Accessibility Checker plugin, I thought it was a good opportunity to figure out just how badly I’m sucking at this, and find a starting point to try to address some of the issues.
Last Updated on January 24, 2021.
Backing up your WordPress site is a necessity, but it can be hard to find an affordable, easy-to-implement solution that covers all the bases. There are a lot of possibilities out there, but the following have served me well over the years. I usually only have to use them on shared hosting plans. Some of my sites are on managed WordPress hosts who take care of backups as part of the plan.
Here are my criteria for a backup solution:
My preferred solution is to backup sites to my DropBox account. You can get 2GB of storage with a free account.
I typically use one of the following 2 plugins to back up my sites:
Both are free plugins that meet the criteria described above.
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.
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.
In the past, I’ve had mixed feelings about StudioPress’ Genesis framework. It was frequently recommended to beginners and non-developers, but the problem was that they would install it, and even with a nicely designed child theme, they would then complain, “but, where’s all the options?”
People immediately wanted to change things and when they didn’t see a massive options panel, they felt shortchanged. “I have to do CSS to customize this thing??”
But, herein lies the beauty of the Genesis framework. It’s not supposed to be Avada, Divi, X or any of the other “be everything to everyone” type of themes. When you purchase a Genesis child theme, you’re paying for the expertly-designed look and feel you see on the demo. They are not intended to be completely customizable by the user through an options panel. Of course, if you have the chops, you can certainly do anything you want with Genesis and its child themes, you just have to use their hooks system and know some CSS and PHP.
Some of you may be asking, “Well, where’s the beauty in that?”
Since working with WP Rocket (a premium caching plugin) I became painfully aware of just how badly some themes drag down a website’s load time. While researching a blog post to showcase some of our customers’ fastest pages, I found that most of the fastest sites I looked at ran on Genesis.
Because it doesn’t try to be everything to everyone, it’s really fast out of the box. And that’s the beauty.
“Yea, yea…..but…..customize! Fonts! Colors!” you may be grumbling at your screen.
