When it comes to website design, one of the more important decisions you’ll make involves choosing the right colors. It’s a choice that can make or break your project, especially when you consider all the moving parts that go into creating a successful WordPress site. Nowadays, chances are good that if own a website, you own a business as well. And the …
Using Semantic Markup with WordPress to Improve Your Search Results
Search engines are always modifying how they do things. In just a few years’ time, we’ve gone through a strictly keyword-based search algorithm to a semantic search algorithm that prioritizes context over exact keyword matches. The days of keyword stuffing are long behind us now and if you want to make sure your website ranks as high as possible and …
Getting Your WordPress Website Ready for Facebook Instant Articles
With Facebook’s Instant Articles program open to all content publishers as of April 12, 2016, now is the time to get your WordPress website set up to push posts to Facebook using the proper markup. More than one billion people log onto Facebook from a mobile device every month, and the performance of content viewed using Facebook’s mobile app matters …
Setting Up Personalized Shortened Links Like Bit.ly with WordPress
If you spend any amount of time on social media you’ve probably noticed almost everyone uses short links in their status updates. Most of the time, folks use Bit.ly but some have gone a step further and opted for a personalized short domain. And you can, too. Aside from the ability to easily share long links and the fact that you …
Customizing Front-End and Backend Login for WordPress
Whether you want your users to log in from the front-end or backend of your websites, WordPress allows you to fully customize the experience for both. Occasionally, when building a WordPress website you might think that the built-in login page doesn’t exactly meet your needs. Sometimes, you might want the login form embedded into your site’s front-end. Other times, you …
The Ultimate Guide to the WordPress functions.php File
If you’ve started building your own theme, or maybe even creating a child theme to customize another theme, then you’ll have learned all about template files and the theme template hierarchy. But what about the theme functions.php file? The functions file is where you put all of the functionality your theme needs that doesn’t relate just to one template, so it …
How to Create a WordPress Plugin
If you’ve been building your own themes for a while, chances are you’ve been adding code to the functions.php file. Sometimes you might have wondered if you should be writing a plugin instead, but you weren’t sure how. In many cases, writing a plugin is better practice than adding code to your functions.php file. And creating a plugin is far …
CloudFlare Review: Speed Up Your Site for Free, Plus Setup Instructions
When you spend so much time building and optimizing your site, ensuring it loads fast for your visitors is a top priority. CloudFlare is a popular choice for boosting site performance – we even use it here at WPMU DEV. CloudFlare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that sends traffic through its global network to automatically optimize the delivery of your site …
Replacing Image Links in WordPress After Installing an SSL Certificate
After installing an SSL certificate on your site to amp up your security, you may notice your images suddenly don’t display at all. Don’t panic – just read on for the fix. When you install an SSL certificate, like the free one from Let’s Encrypt we wrote about recently, your site’s address adjusts slightly and even a slight adjustment means some …
9 Ways to Give WordPress Blog Contributors Helpful Stats About Their Posts
Having different contributors to your blog is a good thing. It allows different voices to be heard; different perspectives. But what if their content misses the mark? What do you do if the writing is great but the content isn’t resonating? Keyword research is one way to address this issue. Visitor surveys are another. Basically, the more feedback you can …