One of the first things budding WordPress developers learn is to use child themes for customizing WordPress websites. While this is a sound practice, there will also be times when you want to reuse code you’ve added to a child theme with a different theme or on a different website. The best way to package code for use with any …
Fast Gets Faster as Hummingbird Adds CloudFlare Integration
Another week and another great new feature comes to our performance optimization plugin Hummingbird – full CloudFlare integration! So, if you haven’t already heard of CloudFlare, go take a look .We think you’ll be really interested in their services (we use them for CampusPress, and Edublogs) and as with all our articles, that’s not an affiliate link – we genuinely do like …
10 Simple Ways to Convert Casual Visitors into Paying Customers
We spend a lot of time talking about how you can improve your WordPress website’s design and functionality in order to get your visitors to feel a certain way about it. In other words, you want them to want to convert. You’ve given them a quick-loading site, beautiful high-resolution imagery, and an engaging story to follow… and yet you still …
How to Add User Ratings to Your WordPress Website
User ratings are everywhere. Every popular eCommerce site provides user ratings for their products. Question and answer sites like Quora and StackOverflow identify the best answers by relying on user ratings. Books, movies, businesses, and even college professors are ranked on the basis of user ratings. There are lots of different types of WordPress sites that might want to incorporate …
Nailing the Perfect Navigation for Your WordPress Site
It’s a funny thing. We often place a large emphasis on the creation of great content and on the development of an effective design to wrap around that content. But without as much effort or thought put into your website’s navigation, your visitors may never be able to enjoy all that your website has to offer. A B2B Web Usability …
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 …
How to Learn WordPress: 7-Day Challenge
So you want to learn about WordPress, huh? Congratulations. You’ve just made an excellent decision – and one I want to help you achieve in seven days. The first time I came across WordPress I admit that I was daunted – and it took me a long time to embrace it. This was quite a few years ago – WordPress …
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 …
22 Tools That Infinitely Improve the WordPress Admin
When you think about making WordPress more useful the dashboard probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. However, if you spend a lot of time logged into /wp-admin/, and have never taken the time to customize that experience, you can almost certainly get more out of it than you’re getting right now. If you run a Multisite network, …