Interested in taking your WordPress game to a whole new level? Want to further develop your PHP skills and add more complex and exciting functionality to your themes and plugins? Welcome to our latest series, WordPress Development for Intermediate users. This series follows on from our popular WordPress Development for Beginners tutorials, which introduced you to the fundamentals of developing …
Inside WPMU DEV’s New Blog Design (And Why We Did It)
Say hello to our brand new blog design! Over the past few weeks, we’ve been cooking up this new look to help make reading articles on our blog a more enjoyable experience. In other words, we want you to keep coming back for more (and share our articles, too!). Since our very first post went live back in 2008, we’ve published …
Should You Use a CDN for Your WordPress Site? Your Questions Answered
Site speed is important. Like, really important. In fact, a slow site could be the death knell of your business. That might sound dramatic, but it’s the truth. When a visitor lands on your site, they want to find what they’re looking for quickly. And if your site is loading slowly, they’re much more likely to bounce off to another …
The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Caching
As a savvy website owner, I’m certain you understand how important it is for your website to load quickly. And if you run your website on WordPress, you’ve probably at least heard of the need for caching plugins before. Caching is a critical aspect of your website’s performance as it can greatly improve loading times. By a lot. In layman’s terms, a caching plugin creates …
Creating a Manual Backup of WordPress When It’s Down or Locked
So your site is down and you can’t log in… and you just realized you don’t have a recent backup. Dammit. Before you launch into panic mode, though, it’s safe to say you’re not completely screwed. In an ideal world, you would have a working backup that you could use to restore your site, but we don’t exactly live in …
How to Build Custom Faceted Search for Big WordPress Sites
Sites that use lots of categories to organize lots of content need faceted search. Without a way to filter through that mountain of content, and pinpoint exactly what they are looking for, visitors may grow frustrated and seek out other options online. eCommerce sites are the obvious application for faceted search. Ebay, Amazon, Zappos, Etsy, and virtually every other successful …
Is Smart Slider 3 the Best WordPress Slider Plugin on the Market?
I rarely write plugin reviews, and I never write about sliders. But today I’m making an exception for Smart Slider 3. It’s not just the best slider plugin available, it’s also an example to all free and premium plugin makers of how a plugin should be made. So let’s take a look at why I think Smart Slider 3 is …
Smush Solves Internet-Old Problem (By, Erm, Now Resizing Images!)
We’ve all been there, volunteered to put up a website for the parents or taken a look at the local footy club page and wondered to ourselves WHY DID YOU UPLOAD FOUR HUNDRED 2.8MB IMAGES???? Well, wonder no more! No more searching for bulk image resizing desktop utilities and no more fretting about your server space. Because now Smush, in …
Typography Tips for a More Comfortable Read on Your WordPress Site
Typography can make or break your WordPress site. The right typography makes your content more readable and keeps visitors around for longer. Bad typography is distracting, makes visitors work too hard, and pushes up your bounce rate. The web is massive. I don’t need to bore you with statistics about how much information is out there, but you can be …
How to Fix the 500 Internal Server Error in WordPress
The 500 Internal Server Error is one of the most common panic-inducing “I’ve broken everything!” catch-all errors in WordPress that can literally mean anything. The most common reasons for WordPress throwing up this error include having a corrupted .htaccess file, exceeding your PHP memory limit, or having improper file permissions, but there could also be other potential causes, such as …