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).
Moving your WordPress site around can be an intimidating process at first. In this guide I’ll show you 3 different ways to do it, so you’ll be equipped for any scenario!
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When building their site, many people want a beautiful design, and the ability to customize that design any way they would like.
Navigating the free themes in the WordPress directory can be a bit of a minefield and it’s hard to know what you’re actually getting. So here are 7 of my top picks for free themes that are solid choices with lots of flexibility.
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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.
In this post we’ll look at what the metrics are and how to check your site’s performance.
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If you run Google PageSpeed tests on your website, you may have seen the recommendation to “Preload Key Requests.”
This post explains what that recommendation means, the advantages as well as the pitfalls, and most importantly, how to do it.
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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:
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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Without boring the pants off you, HTTP/2 is an updated and more efficient way of delivering web site components from server to browser. There are 3 conditions:
Now that it’s becoming increasingly widespread, most articles on the topic make sweeping promises of faster performance, “just like that”, simply by enabling it. But there are fewer articles which actually back up these claims with test results.
I recently converted a couple of sites from HTTP to HTTPS and decided to take the opportunity to see what difference, if any, enabling HTTP/2 made.
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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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