If you are using Google PageSpeed Insights to test your site, you’ll see this “avoid enormous network payloads” warning if the total size of your page is more than 1.6MB.
It sounds technical, but this is actually one of the recommendations that you as the site owner have the most control over. Unlike some PageSpeed recommendations, you can fix this one!
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.
Last Updated on November 28, 2020.
There are many, many ways to sell things from your WordPress site, from physical products to digital downloads or access to content. The best solution will depend on your particular circumstance and needs. While WordPress can get quite sophisticated in the ecommerce department, a lot of folks just want to be able to sell a few items quickly and easily using PayPal.
In scenarios like this where the user wants the simplest possible solution and knows they want to use PayPal, a fully featured shopping cart / ecommerce solution such as WooCommerce might be overkill. Sometimes simple PayPal buttons will suffice.
If you work with clients using WordPress in any capacity, or even if you are a solo site owner, at some point, you will probably need to move a site from one server to another (also known as migrating).
In this guide I’ll show you 3 methods of migrating a WordPress site.
Migrations are required in numerous situations, such as when you’re switching webhosts, when turning a development site into a live site, or when making a test site. Even restoring a site from a backup has some similar steps.
Understanding how this process works will greatly empower you. There are a few moving parts but it’s completely possible to do, even if you are not a developer, and you will feel like a champ. I’d suggest practicing on a test site before handling anything that’s important 🙂
Last Updated on October 11, 2020.
I must start with a caveat – I don’t believe any one theme should be all things to all users. A few years ago, a theme used to simply be a pre-made design that you could apply to your site – an overall look and feel, not a “website in a box”. You used a theme because you didn’t have the design and/or coding skill to create your own. But, nowadays users want to be able to control every aspect of their site’s look and feel – basically design their site themselves, without doing any code. If you are not an actual designer, then there are many downfalls to this approach. But that is not the point of this post.
Now, as I write the update, Gutenberg is in full force. It’s still being improved but it’s already a very powerful tool, giving site owners a lot more control in laying out their pages. The theme landscape is evolving, and at this particular moment, it’s still figuring out what it’s going to become. The power of themes seems to be tending toward the set of blocks and pre-made layouts they can provide.
Needless to say, people like free themes and they also like flexibility. So here are 7 themes that fit the bill. I’m not saying they will do anything and everything you want, but for free, they are pretty extensive. I’ve tried to point out the features that are useful and/or unique, but that doesn’t mean I’ve included every possibility. But these themes are free, so you can try them for yourself at no risk!
Core Web Vitals are the 3 key metrics that Google believes indicate healthy performance for your web site.
Whether you agree with their selection of metrics or not, soon you will not really have a choice.
Unlike their previous PageSpeed metrics, which did not impact ranking at all, Core Web Vitals will eventually be used as a ranking signal.
Today, we’re building on this work and providing an early look at an upcoming Search ranking change that incorporates these page experience metrics. We will introduce a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals for page experience to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html
