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How To Back Up Your WordPress Site To Dropbox

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.

In this guide I’ll show you how to set up either the BackWPUp plugin, or UpdraftPlus, to back up your site to Dropbox for free.

A Guide to Moving WordPress Sites

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!

How Will Google’s Core Web Vitals Affect Your WordPress Site?

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.

Create Custom WooCommerce Layouts with Beaver Builder

Continuing the series looking at options to customize your WooCommerce product pages, this time we’re looking at Beaver Builder.

If you don’t mind a small learning curve and a different WordPress editing experience, Beaver Builder is really powerful. You can control most aspects of your WooCommerce store layouts, and easily apply templates in bulk.

Design WooCommerce Product Pages with WooBuilder Blocks

This is the first post in a series that looks at the state of WordPress plugins for customizing your WooCommerce store.

Here I look at WooBuilder Blocks which is a great choice for owners of small stores that want to handcraft their product pages.

Google PageSpeed Insights – A Guide for WordPress Users

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:

Keep your pages light and simple.
Avoid unnecessary fanciness.
Consider mobile users, particularly those who pay for every byte of data.

How to improve the Time To First Byte (TTFB) of your WordPress site

The Time To First Byte (TTFB), or server response time, of your WordPress site can be an important indicator of performance. It doesn’t represent the whole picture, but a very specific part in the process.

Time to First Byte is a measure of how fast your server responds when someone tries to visit a page on your site. Specifically, it’s measuring how long it takes from the time the browser asks the server for the page, to when the browser receives the first piece of data from the server.

Visitors want sites to feel fast, so the sooner some meaningful content is displayed on the screen, the better. TTFB can influence this – the faster the server responds, the faster content can get to the user.

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.

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.

Troubleshooting WordPress Issues

Learn how to handle unexpected WordPress problems, find the source and get your site back online.

When something goes wrong on your WordPress site, how do you react? Do you freak out, or have a mini panic attack? Don’t worry, that’s a fairly typical reaction from the normal WordPress user ;) With this post I’d like to change the way you look at and react to WordPress problems :)

With WordPress, as with many things in life, we learn a lot when things aren’t going smoothly; learning to deal with technical problems pushes us out of our comfort zone and forces us to develop new skills and a deeper understanding.

Much of what I’ve learned in WordPress over the years has happened through things going wrong and me having to figure out how to fix it. Every time you face a problem and learn how to deal with it, your confidence is boosted and your problem-solving toolkit, and resilience, expands. The next time an issue crops up you are better equipped to handle it and you feel less panic.