WordPress, Blogging & Tech Tutorials | Web Training Wheels

WordPress Black Friday Deals on Hosting, Plugins and Themes

Thanksgiving is a great time to stock up on some new WordPress treats :) Many WordPress shops are discounting their products for a limited time. There are many, many deals out there, but here are the ones I recommend.

Web Hosting

WP Engine

5 months free on a pre-prepaid annual plan!

Rock-solid hosting, security, reliability, one-click staging sites, daily backups…..just a few of the reasons I love WP Engine. If you have a mission-critical business site, paying a little extra for Premium WordPress hosting is absolutely worth it.

The deal: For Cyber Weekend they are offering 30% off your first monthly or annual payment, and 5 months free if you pre-pay for an annual plan!
Coupon code: cyberwknd

Get This Deal

Expiration: Monday Nov 28th

Bonus: If you are a WordPress developer, or create sites for clients, I recommend looking into their Developer Program, which features automatic migrations, git integration and much more.

Maintaining Your WordPress Site

Audience: Beginners, Consultants

Tutorials

Launching your WordPress site is just the beginning of its life on the web. You’ve conceived and birthed your baby… but now you’re in charge of feeding and protecting it.

Owning a website is a responsibility.

There’s a lot to consider, more than most people realize when they are just starting out. Neglecting your site means it could get hacked, suffer from broken links, or an unplanned update breaking your contact form. Any of which could result in lost search engine rankings, decreased traffic and/or lost leads.

Here are some of the main tasks you’ll have to do on a regular basis to keep your site in excellent health.

Syncing Content Between WordPress Sites

Audience: Beginners, Consultants

WordPress Plugins

In situations where you are working with a development/text site and a live site, there are often times when you want to be able to sync up individual posts/pages, without having to migrate the whole site, or even the whole database. Until now there really hasn’t been a good, user-friendly tool to allow this.
Enter: WP Site Sync
As you’ll see from the quick demo video, syncing content is now a matter of clicking a button!

How To Set Up a Free Download with Email Capture in your WooCommerce Shop

Audience: Intermediate

Email Marketing, Tutorials

I’ve had some clients in the past who wanted to set up a free download in their WooCommerce store, as an email list building strategy.

In reality it can be a little cumbersome to do a free download in exchange for an email address within a store context because it takes several more clicks on the part of the user, than it would for a typical opt-in form. The steps I provide here will significantly streamline the process. I wouldn’t recommend it as your only opt-in process, but if you really want/need to use your WooCommerce store for this, the method below will certainly ease the pain points.

2 Ways To Safely Customize Your WordPress Site Without A Child Theme

Audience: Beginners

WordPress Tutorials - Basic

Last Updated on March 8, 2025.

When you are using an “off the shelf” WordPress theme (i.e. one that you didn’t code from scratch or have built for you), there may be circumstances where you want to customize it beyond the scope of the controls it gives you.

There are best practices for customizing WordPress without doing anything that will break your site or make it a nightmare to maintain.

Learning from the beginning how to customize the right way will make your future-self’s life much easier:

Your changes will be future-proofed to keep each layer of your site update-able: WordPress core, themes, plugins.
Using WordPress best practices means that if you are building the site for someone else to maintain, or if you will have someone else helping you in the future, they won’t have be Sherlock Holmes to figure out how the site works.
You’ll have confidence and peace of mind when experimenting with your site, knowing that you’re not going to break something beyond your own ability to repair.

Holiday Discounts on WordPress Learning, Themes, Hosting & Plugins

WordPress

It’s Thanksgiving weekend here in the US which means retail craziness. Some of your favorite WordPress theme, plugin and hosting providers are getting in on the action and providing deep discounts that only come around once per year. Most of these will expire at the end of Monday or Tuesday so act right away!

WordPress Learning Resources

Lynda.com – Get a free 10 day trial

Lynda.com has some great WordPress video courses from great teachers like Morten Rand-Hendriksen and Carrie Dils, and they are currently offering a free 10 day trial. No coupon code needed, just click through the link:
https://webtrainingwheels.com/recommends/lyndacom/ (aff. link)