Web development is not easy work. New themes. New plugins. New responsive design techniques. New platforms. New JavaScript frameworks and libraries. And so on. No matter how experienced you are, web development work can be downright frustrating and overwhelming at times—especially when you’re starting out or simply trying to nail down a new technique. Here’s […] View original post at …
Why Trying to Get a 100 Score on Google PageSpeed Insights for WordPress Is Never Going to Happen
I’m a woman obsessed. So once I decided I wanted to get that perfect 100 score from Google PageSpeed Insights, I went for it and wouldn’t. Let. Go. I challenged myself to make it happen with a larger site because, well, you gotta just go for it sometimes! I figured it would be easy given […] View original post at …
A First Look at Mergebot: Simple Database Merging for WordPress?
So you’ve wrapped up a WordPress website overhaul and you’re ready to deploy. There’s only one problem. How do you deploy your development site without losing all of the updates and new content added to the production site while you were developing? What you need is some way to compare your development database to the […] View original post at …
Will You Still Need a Child Theme With WordPress 4.7?
WordPress 4.7 is slated to arrive in early December 2016. While a lot of new features will roll out with the latest version of WordPress — the new Twenty Seventeen default theme, thumbnail previews for PDF uploads, and more — it’s the custom CSS editor added to the WordPress Customizer that caught my eye. The question this new feature raises …
Why Premium WordPress Themes are a Blessing and Not a Curse for Developers
Before premium WordPress themes were a thing, we used to code everything from scratch. When I first started my career in web development and web design, every piece of HTML, every line of CSS, every piece of JavaScript, was all done by hand. Yeah, we had some tools to help us out, but they just automated a few things here …
Kinsta Managed Hosting Review: Blazingly Fast and Solid Features
Kinsta is a relative new-comer to the WordPress managed hosting scene, but since launching in 2013 has quickly become a force to be reckoned with. Marketed as “Better, faster, stronger managed WordPress hosting,” the web host uses Google’s Cloud Platform to provide fast speeds from the web giants secure and reliable data centers, paired with Kinsta’s simple and intuitive hosting panel. …
The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a WordPress Theme Framework (Plus In-Depth Reviews)
Since I last reviewed WordPress frameworks two years ago, the nature of frameworks has evolved. My definition of a framework back then was a parent theme with an API and/or extensive customization options for non-coders. But things have changed. Not all frameworks are even themes now, let alone parent themes. Some of the frameworks reviewed here take the form of plugins, …
How to Get Readers to Actually Comment on Your WordPress Blog Posts
If you use WordPress for blogging you almost certainly want more reader comments. Posts that get a lot of comments feel successful, while those that fail to generate a conversation sometimes feel like wasted effort. Comments are a form of validation. They let you know that your readers are engaging with your content and that your writing is worth responding …
Choosing a WordPress Management Dashboard: The Ultimate Guide
Management dashboards can help you manage all your sites in bulk to increase your efficiency and productivity, saving you oodles of time. But with so many options out there, which one should you choose? Dashboards for WordPress sites list all of your sites, plugins and themes in one super convenient location. They also let you update everything in one or …
Thinking About Getting a .blog Domain Name? Here’s What You Need to Know
So Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is getting into the domain business. This fall, you can register your site with a new top-level .blog domain. But why would you want to do that? In this post, I’ll help you decide whether it’s worthwhile picking up one of these new domains. But First, Some History: Generic Top-Level Domains, aka TLDs I won’t …