If visitors can’t find their way around your website, they won’t stick around for long. That’s why your WordPress menus are so important — they’re the easiest way for visitors to navigate your website. Sometimes, though, a one-size-fits-all approach to menu building simply doesn’t work. What if there’s a WordPress menu item that you only want showing up for Admin users? What about a page that’s only relevant to users that are logged in to your website? How about a menu button that sends premium members to exclusive content? This requires conditional logic functionality, which you can use to show or hide navigational menu items based on post type, category, user type, and more. Today I want to show you how to add conditional logic to WordPress menus, using the If Menu plugin. The plugin is available completely free of charge from the WordPress repository. How to Use If Menu Let’s kick things off by installing the If Menu plugin. Login to WordPress, then navigate to Plugins > Add New > search for ‘If Menu’ > Install Now > Activate Plugin. Conveniently, there are no settings to configure, so you can start using the plugin straight away by clicking Appearance > Menus. This is where you edit your navigational menus and specify what conditional logic you want to show up on your site. Choose one of the menu items, then check the Enable Conditional Logic box. Now you’ll be able to configure your conditional logic. This is actually really easy to do, thanks to some intuitive drop-down menus. The plugin allows you to specify the conditions for a menu item to be displayed/hidden. The options include: User is logged in User is Admin User is Editor User is Subscriber User is Author User is Contributor Front Page Single Post Page So, for example, you might only want to show a menu item on your homepage. In such a scenario, you would simple select the Show and Front Page options. Or perhaps you have a guidelines page for your team of writers — there’s no need for a regular visitor to see this page, is there? In this instance, you would simply select Show and User is Contributor from the list of options. When you’re done configuring your conditional logic, remember to hit the Save Menu button, otherwise you’ll lose all your unsaved changes. Before assuming the job is done, it’s well worth manually checking your website to ensure the conditional logic is working for all user levels. Final Thoughts Conditional logic allows you to build fully functional custom menus for different user roles, or for specific pages/posts. This enables you to improve navigation beyond what the default menu-building functionality is capable of. If you want to add conditional logic to your WordPress menus, If Menu is one of the best plugins for the job. This is because of the streamlined approach it takes — nothing is overcomplicated. Simply plug and play, with the intuitive drop-down menus ensuring things don’t get too confusing. A highly recommended plugin! Do you use conditional menus on your WordPress website? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!
Welcome to another edition of the Pagely 8 Questions interview series. In the hot seat today, we’re lucky enough to have a popular and well-known member of the WordPress community, Bob Dunn. Many readers will already know Bob Dunn as BobWP, thanks to his excellent WordPress training resource, BobWP.com. He’s also an active Twitter user, @BobWP. The interview with Bob will follow the same format as always — we’ll talk about how he first became involved with WordPress, how the community has changed during his involvement, and the direction he thinks WordPress is headed in the future. A big thanks to Bob for answering our questions, let’s get on with the interview, shall we? For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? For more than 20 years, my wife and I owned a marketing, graphic design and copywriting business. In the mid-to-late 90’s, I started dabbling in HTML but still spent most of my time working in print. After doing more web design, in 2007 I started exploring WordPress. The following year I made the decision to take the big step and offer sites designed in WordPress only. With each year, it became a bigger and bigger part of my business. That was when I realized something: I found that I enjoyed teaching and coaching clients in WordPress more than the design side. Eventually that part consumed my life. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? In 2007, when WordPress started getting my attention, the reason was two-fold. First, as a designer I wanted to find an easier way to create sites for clients instead of building HTML sites from scratch. Secondly, I wanted a solution that would allow clients to take charge of and manage their own sites, rather than having to nickel-and-dime them all the time with small but necessary changes. So I dove in, and by 2008 I was creating WordPress sites for my clients. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? Besides always being a WordPress evangelist via social media and my blog, I have been involved with the Seattle WordPress meetup, as both an organizer and a co-organizer. I have hosted events since October 2010. I also was the lead organizer for WordCamp Seattle 2012 and volunteered for a couple of years as well. And, of course, I have spoken at meetups as well as at other WordCamps over the years. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? It’s two-part. The first is the control I am able to give to my clients over their own sites. That has been a key benefit throughout the years I have been working with WordPress. The other piece is the teaching. I love seeing the lights go on and how excited clients get when they have conquered WordPress and launched their own site. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? That’s an interesting question. Obviously it has grown. But of course it really depends on how one defines the community. Some think of it as the hard core people who work with it day in and day out. But on the other hand, the greater, more inclusive community also includes everyone who uses WordPress in one way or another. It’s always been a very helpful community and open to outsiders. But I have found it growing in one direction that I have mixed feelings about. There have been several people who told me as they try to merge more into that core community, they are finding it a bit cliquish, with too much back patting amongst some of the so-called influencers. I know this happens in all communities, but until recently I hadn’t heard it as much about WordPress. I do think that it comes across that way much more online via social media as opposed to in-person at WordCamps and meetups. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? As far as the first question, it’s as simple as saying “WordPress is not easy.” So many people sell the “easy” because that is what people want to hear. But that ends up giving new users higher expectations, so much so that they are disappointed. And good, smart people are left wondering, if this stuff is supposed to be easy, what is wrong with me? I like to emphasize that no, WordPress is not easy. But once you have learned it, it gets easier and it’s an amazing tool. I’m not sure I would do anything different to be honest. Sure there may be moments when I think I would have loved to have gotten into the teaching earlier, but that’s water under the bridge. And everything I learned before I got into the training side has just prepared me to be a better teacher. I tend to accept how things go and figure that there was a reason everything happened the way it did for me. What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? That’s a tough one because one small mistake on one site can be a much larger one on another. To be honest, I think the biggest mistake they make is thinking that they can do it all by themselves. As you may know, I’m a big fan of do-it-yourselfers, but the majority, unless they have a good mix of experience and skills in marketing and web design–and sometimes even if they do–can always use some help in one area or another. Whether it’s just an hour of someone’s time to go through a few things or hiring someone to build your entire site, it’s a wise investment in the long run. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? It’s interesting, because in both cases I often look at what issues the new or average user has, then see if the next version comes up with a solution. Myself, I can’t really say what I think will happen next. For example, Automattic purchasing WooThemes. I’m a fan of both and I see nothing but good coming out of it. But as far as the big picture and upcoming trends, what will happen with WordPress itself? It’s still the wild, wild west out there. What I would really like to see is a bunch of new ways to make the UI even better while still holding onto the key functionality and features. Final Thoughts Once again, a big thanks to Bob Dunn for participating in today’s Pagely interview. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as much as I did. As Bob mentions, for any developers out there, WordPress is a great way to empower your clients to handle the day-to-day running of their website. With minimal WordPress training, even inexperienced WordPress users can get the basics down, and this gives them the opportunity to manage their own website, at least to some extent. If you want to improve your WordPress skills, whatever your current level, I strongly recommend that you check out BobWP.com. As well as a really informative blog and podcast series, Bob runs specialist WordPress training sessions that can help you take your website to the next level — there’s workshops, 1-to-1 coaching, and even an online course. He’s also active on Twitter, @BobWP. I’ll see you again next week for another Pagely interview!
As regular readers will know, I’ve been talking a lot lately about how to make your website lightning-quick. Earlier this month, I listed some of the best plugins for speeding up a WordPress website. Today I want to take a closer look at one of the most popular plugins featured in that list — WP-Optimize. For those unfamiliar with WP-Optimize, it’s a database clean-up and optimization plugin. Why do you need to optimize your database? Well, because an unoptimized WordPress database is full of clutter — things like unnecessary post revisions, spam comments, and track/pingbacks. With all this clutter, it makes it far more difficult for your server to retrieve the correct items from your database. This slows your website down significantly. Good news for anyone looking to clean-up their database, though: today I’m going to show you how to use the WP-Optimize plugin to optimize your database and speed up your website. Using WP-Optimize As always, let’s begin by installing the plugin. From the WordPress dashboard, click through to Plugins > Add New. From here, search for ‘WP-Optimize’. You need to install the first plugin returned by clicking Install Now > Activate Plugin. With the plugin installed and activated, you can optimize your WordPress database in just a few clicks. Start by navigating to the new WP-Optimize item added to the WordPress menu. You’ll be greeted by the Optimizer screen. From here, you can manually process a database clean-up. On the left-hand of the screen, you’ll be able to select which items WP-Optimize will target. This includes: Clean all post revisions — when your post is published, do you really need six post revisions clogging up your database? Clean all auto draft posts and posts in trash — you’ve deleted a post for a reason, so make sure all traces are removed from your database. Remove spam comments and comments in trash — spam comments are no good to anyone, so make sure they’re properly deleted. Remove unapproved comments — if you have hundreds of unapproved spam comments just sitting there, the plugin can delete them all in one go. Remove transient options — these are objects stored in your cache that can clutter up your database. Remove pingbacks Remove trackbacks On the right side of the screen, under the Actions heading, you’ll have the option to optimize your database — make sure this box is checked. You’ll also be given estimates of how much database space the plugin can save — for a more detailed breakdown, click on the Table tab at the top of the screen. When you’re happy, simply click the big blue Process button. After a few seconds, the plugin will provide details of the actions performed, as well as notifying you that your database has been successfully optimized. This entire process should take no more than a minute. Automating WP-Optimize You can also automate WP-Optimize by clicking on the Settings tab. From here, you’ll be asked how long WordPress should keep your data. I recommend somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks — if you haven’t used a post revision by this point, you probably never will, so it’s just unnecessary database clutter. You can also choose whether you want trackbacks/pingbacks and comments to be disabled. When you’re happy with this, be sure to click Save Settings. Now the fun part — automation. This is controlled from the right side of the Settings screen. Make sure you’ve checked the Enable scheduled clean-up and optimization box, then specify how often you want to schedule an automatic clean-up. You can choose daily, weekly, fortnightly, and monthly. It’s up to you how often you run a clean-up, but scheduling one daily is probably overkill. The other options are all perfectly fine, depending on your preferences. Further down the page, you’ll also be able to schedule which items the auto clean-up targets. You’re given the same options as before: post revisions, spam comments, transient options, trackbacks, and pingbacks. When you’re done, simply hit Save Auto Clean-up Settings. And that’s it — all done! With the plugin properly configured, you’ll never have to worry about de-cluttering your database again. Final Thoughts If you want a super-quick website that visitors and search engines will love, you need to make sure your database is properly optimized. If you want a free plugin for the job, I highly recommend WP-Optimize. The plugin is beginner-friendly, taking no more than a few minutes to configure, and it’s almost impossible to go wrong. Have you used WP-Optimize? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Today, we have Matt Medeiros with us for another edition of Pagely’s 8 Questions series. The format is the same as always — we’ll be talking about how Matt first became involved in the WordPress community, how to avoid the most common WordPress pitfalls, and what he thinks the future of WordPress holds. Want to familiarize yourself with Matt’s work before the interview? Then be sure to check out his excellent podcast series over at Matt Report, where he regularly interviews WordPress professionals. Matt also co-founded his own WordPress development company, SlocumStudios, and he’s always active on Twitter. I want to say a big thanks to Matt for answering our questions and providing us with a great set of answers! For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? I started a WordPress agency with a business partner back in 2008. My partner also happens to be my Father and we came from two generations of owning a Chevrolet & Cadillac franchise prior to spinning up this business. A few years ago, I started a WordPress podcast focused on business and entrepreneurship over at MattReport.com. My business, Slocum Studio, has expanded into the product business, launching Slocum Themes and Conductor Plugin. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? I worked at an ISP for 7 years, ending my career there as the Product Director. We had acquired another ISP that also had a web development department, primarily building on Drupal (Version 5 at the time) sites for local clients. After the acquisition, only a handful of developers stayed on and Drupal was very cumbersome. I did some research and discovered the Standard Theme for WordPress (John Saddington’s brainchild) and of course, WordPress itself. We re-organized the department to focus on WordPress solutions, so it was a natural fit when I started my own business. My first WordPress meetup came in around 2009 in Providence, Rhode Island. That’s when I met Jake Goldman (before he was 10up) and John James Jacoby of BuddyPress fame. That’s when I started to become much more involved in the local community and, eventually, the greater community. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? Of course, promoting the use of WordPress and really making it the cornerstone of our operation. Between services and products, we’re really empowering thousands of websites with the software. I attend other marketing events and I’m always the “guy” defending or promoting WordPress as the best solution. Our theme business offers up all of our themes for free on WordPress.org and we constantly create videos and podcasts talking about the software. I often talk at meetups and WordCamps, as well as attend events like PressNomics & PrestigeConf. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? I’m going to give the same answer as everyone else — community. From local meetups to my friend Mario Peshev in Bulgaria, it’s been amazing to meet so many great people, all willing to help others. It’s truly remarkable. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? Now that WordPress has hit the 12-year mark, I think we’re starting to see a shift. I think that early on, at least when I was getting started, there were a lot of paths paved in gold — growth was quite phenomenal. I won’t call it a bubble, but I think the recent shift is bringing us back down to reality. That said, introducing the API and the increased importance of the customizer is going to shift the WordPress experience dramatically. It’s going to close some doors, but open up many others. I can’t wait to see what the next 12 years bring! What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? I have a saying, “Everyone should sell cars.” There’s no other experience like it: you need to find customers daily, and you need to sell them on yourself first and foremost. This isn’t all that different to today’s market. If I were starting over, I would still start with consulting and services. I’d be a lot more laser-focused than when we were starting out, but that’s the seasoning that makes your business unique. Someone looking for a fast-track blueprint to business shouldn’t be getting into business. What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? Man, where do I begin?! Not hiring qualified developers or agencies. Not taking WordPress as a software application seriously. Not taking full advantage of WordPress as a business platform. i.e. marketing, publishing, e-commerce, etc. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? I’d love to see an official theme/plugin marketplace, backed by Matt/Automattic. Here’s why: the new API is going to, potentially, fragment the WordPress experience. This could be similar to what we’ve seen happen with Android in the early years. It’s only in recent versions that we’ve really seen Google trying to control/tailor it to a single experience. Compare this to the Apple ecosystem — one phone, one experience (short of varying versions of iOS). Back to the marketplace. The API is going to spur the innovation of JavaScript driven themes and neatly packaged WordPress “apps” that don’t have a hint of core WordPress. Imagine a world where you can buy a site that’s got all the features of Hubspot, with a single click. That world is coming and, arguably, we’re already seeing signs of it now. How will people experience “WordPress” then? Where will you get your favorite “flavor” of WordPress? I want my customers to get it at a place where they can feel confident that their software author is verified and here to stay — not just a flash in the pan. So give me my WordPress verified badge! That’s what I want. 🙂 Final Thoughts Let me say one more thank you to Matt Medeiros for providing us with a really insightful set of answers — his insights into how the new API might impact the platform were particularly interesting. I certainly like the idea of a marketplace with author verification process, as this would ensure all WordPress products are developed with WordPress best practices in mind. Users could buy themes/plugins with more confidence, and developers would be able to sell more products as a result of their verified status. Developers would have a clear incentive to improve their products, and everyone wins as a result — good call on that, Matt! Let’s finish today’s interview with the links again, just in case you missed them. Be sure to check out Matt’s business/entrepreneurship podcast at Matt Report, his development company SlocumStudios, and follow him on Twitter. Thanks for reading; I’ll see you again next week!
We all know that the key to a successful website is quality content, right? This is, of course, true, but many bloggers are missing the point about what quality content really is. We all know that blog posts should be informative and engaging, but that’s not the complete picture. These days, badly formatted, poorly organized content just won’t cut it. The way you present your content is almost as important as the content itself. This is especially true for long-form content, which requires more of a time commitment to read in its entirety. In one of my previous posts, I’ve already offered up one solution: content tabs. Today, I want to give you a different option: tables of content. Fortunately, it’s really easy to add tables of content in WordPress, thanks to the awesome free plugin, Table of Contents Plus. Today, I’m going to show you how to use it. Getting Started Before we can add table of contents to our posts, we need to install the plugin. Navigate to Plugins > Add New > search for ‘Table of Contents Plus’. When you’ve found the right plugin (see screenshot below), click Install Now > Activate Plugin. Configuring the Plugin Because the plugin creates tables of content (ToC) automatically, it’s important we configure the correct settings first. This is done by heading to Settings > TOC+. Fortunately, the plugin is super-easy to configure. Each field is relatively intuitive, so I’ll focus only on the main settings. Start by choosing where your ToC will appear relative to your content. The default setting is my favorite, Before first heading. This allows you to write an introduction before your ToC is displayed, with the ToC positioned directly above your first header tag. You might also decide to use one of the other three settings, After first heading, top of page, or bottom of page. The plugin also asks you to specify how many headings must be present for a ToC to display. This is particularly useful as ToCs can look quite silly on shorter posts, and work best with long-form content. With this in mind, consider how many headings — HTML header tags: H1, H2, H3, etc. — you want before a ToC is needed, and configure the plugin accordingly. Just below, you can also select whether ToCs will automatically display on posts and/or pages. Scrolling further down the screen, you’ll see an Appearance section. As the name implies, this is where you can customize what your ToC looks like. You can specify the width, height, font size, and color scheme used. The plugin supports five simple color pre-sets, as well as a custom option — the custom option lets you control all elements of the ToC design, with a choice of infinite colors. There is also an Advanced section, which you can access by clicking the show button. Here you can select which heading tags you want to include/exclude from the ToC. For example, you might want to only display your top level headings, H2, and ignore the rest. Others might prefer a hierarchical ToC, and include every header tag — it’s your decision! When you’ve done configuring your settings, don’t forget to hit the Update Options button. Adding Table of Contents That’s all there is to it — when a post/page ‘qualifies’ for a ToC based on your settings, the plugin adds one automatically. In my settings I specified at least four headings were needed to trigger a ToC, and (conveniently) this post uses five headings. That means that as soon as I hit the Publish button, visitors will be able to see a ToC with no extra work on my part. Here’s the proof: Now, when visitors click on one of the ‘chapters,’ they’ll be taken straight to that part of the post — awesome, huh? Widgets Table of Contents Plus also includes a dedicated widget which you can add to your sidebar. This is done by navigating to Appearance > Widgets. From here, you can use the drag-and-drop interface to place the TOC+ widget into the relevant widget area. Want to see a ToC widget in action? As you can see, the design options are far more limited, but the plugin still produces a stylish result. Final Thoughts So there you have it: a short tutorial showing you how to add ToCs to your WordPress content. The Table of Contents Plus plugin is really easy to use and creates simple simple-yet-stylish ToCs. More importantly, however, they’re fully functional, and this makes it easier for your visitors to navigate and enjoy your content. Remember: if you publish long-form content, a wall of text can intimidate readers. ToCs break your content up, allowing visitors to dip in and out as they please, and this is proven to boost your blog’s engagement levels. Have you used Table of Contents Plus? Share your experiences in the comments section below!
Today, Pagely have been lucky enough to interview Chris Perryman, the founder of Mind-Blowing Things — formerly Revelation Concept. An experienced web developer, designer, and WordPress user, Chris is the ideal person to impart WordPress wisdom. In today’s interview, she’ll be discussing her WordPress career so far, providing advice for newer WordPress users, and sharing tips for becoming more involved in the WordPress community. As always, be sure to follow our expert interviewee on Twitter — you can follow Chris @RevConcept. A big thanks to Chris for taking the time to answer our questions, this is what she had to say: For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? Absolutely. My name is Chris Perryman, I’m the founder and creative director of “Mind-Blowing Things”, a San Diego based digital creative agency specializing in custom WordPress solutions. MBT is an expansion of “Revelation Concept”, a web development company I founded back in 2007. I do both design and development and started using WordPress somewhere around 2010/2011. I eventually shifted my service offerings to exclusively using WordPress as a CMS around 2013. On the side, I’m an administrator for the ever growing “Advanced WordPress” group on Facebook, and a co-organizer of the original San Diego AWP Meetup. Additionally, I was an organizer for WordCamp San Diego 2015 and am taking lead for WCSD 2016. I’m super excited about next year’s camp after the amazing turnout we had this past March! You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? Back before WordPress was being widely used as a CMS, there was some talk going around that it could potentially be used that way. I had been hand-coding static websites for my clients and really wanted to give them the ability to manage their content, so I started doing research online — there wasn’t much on the topic at all. I cobbled together a couple of sites, it was an “okay” solution…better than what I had been offering before. A year or two later, I attended my first WordCamp in San Diego, and it blew me away. We had a pretty amazing lineup of speakers…Bill Erickson and Jared Atchison stand out in my mind — I can’t recall who spoke on what, but they introduced things like Custom Post Types, Custom Metaboxes/Fields etc. Although I didn’t quite understand the “how” yet, I knew those things would break the ceiling on my current limitations. I was SO excited! I took vigorous notes and spent the next couple of months learning all I could now that I knew what tools I needed. Shortly after that I dove completely into WordPress development and never looked back. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? As I mentioned earlier, I admin the “Advanced WordPress” Facebook group and co-organize the San Diego Meetup. This past WordCamp San Diego was the first camp I was a part of, it was an amazing experience. Working with that group of people was so rewarding. Our fearless leader, Michael Bastos, had to step back so I’m taking lead for the 2016 camp. Most of our organizers will be back, plus a couple of new ones, so it’s going to be in great hands! I also do the occasional Meetup presentation in and around the greater San Diego area. Other than that, I try to give back by writing tutorials on my blog — which happens, like never 😉 What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? By far the best thing about WordPress is the community. Everyone is so supportive. I was extremely intimidated in the beginning…as a self-taught newbie AND a woman, I really felt like an imposter. But chatting in the halls and at the after-party of my first WordCamp, my expectations were completely shot down. People were NICE to me. More than nice. Speakers spent time giving me advice and pointing me to resources — I had never had anything like that before. As a solo business operator, I never had piers to consult with, and suddenly I had an innumerable count of friends from all over the world who gave advice for free and seemed to genuinely want to help me learn and grow. I remember explaining this to my mom at one point, she kept asking, “but why?”…I don’t know why!!! No one is benefitting from this and they are all just helping each other — and essentially helping their competition. It’s baffling. Especially if you come from a background in the business world. I still don’t fully understand it, but I LOVE it. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? The community has just been growing and getting stronger. There are some many resources now — both online and at things like Camps and Meetups. There is an answer to almost any question on the web, and really great, quality tutorials are dime a dozen. If you want to learn something new, you’re almost never at a loss for resources if it’s WordPress related. I think the community has also become more aware of itself. People understand how special and unique it is. We all want to preserve it, but at the same time make it even better. I think as long as we continue to keep helping the guy behind us (in the learning process), it will keep growing exponentially. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? Get involved! Online forums and resources are great…but you really can’t beat meeting these people in person. Look online for a WordCamp near you and make arrangements to go. If it’s a drive, make it a weekend trip — bring your spouse, get a sitter…do whatever you need to. I promise, it will be SO worth it. Look on Meetup.com for Meetups in your area, and if there aren’t any, consider starting one! Don’t think you can’t because you don’t know enough or you’re too new…there are other people JUST like you, and probably even more people who know even less than you do that want to learn — you’re a teacher too! If I were starting again, I would have gotten more involved more quickly. I held back for a while, I’m a bit introverted and I still get red and shaky when I speak in public…but I have so many friends/colleagues now, and we’ve done some amazing work together. I do wish I would have stepped out of the shadows sooner. What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? Being cheap. Ha. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that you can install WordPress and setup a commercial theme and essentially get going for $50. And that does work for some people (my husband, my brother, all my husband’s friends haha). But when you’re a professional and you’re trying to do too much yourself because you don’t want to hire help, or you hire help based on their rates and not their reputation, you’re typically doing more damage than good. We’ve had countless clients come to us with a huge mess of a site: sloppy content, bad code, 1000000 plugins etc. Cleaning up the mess ends up costing more than if they would have worked with a professional in the beginning. My dad gave me great advice a few years back: stop trying to do it all yourself! You’re not an accountant, so why are you doing your accounting? Leave professional jobs to the experts so you can concentrate on what you’re good at. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? The future is bright because the people are on fire 🙂 There’s a lot of passion in the community for what WordPress is and what we’d all like it to become. With that drive behind it, this platform can keep growing and excelling for years to come. I’d like to see more crossover between WordPress enthusiast and say, Drupal/Joomla etc. developers. I think we can all learn from each other and use our strengths and weaknesses to improve what we’re doing. Final Thoughts Let me say another big thanks to Chris for providing us with an interesting, informative set of answers. As Chris and many of our other interviewees have highlighted, the WordPress community is one of the friendliest you can possibly find. If you want a career in WordPress, get involved! There are WordPress meetups all over the world now, so I’m sure you can find one close to home. WordCamps are one of the best places to improve your WordPress skills, plus you can never underestimate the importance of networking — and, best of all, they’re great fun! Let’s wrap things up, as always, with the all-important links. Be sure to check out the great work Chris is doing over at Mind-Blowing Things, and keep up-to-date by following her on Twitter. I’ll see you next week, when I interview another WordPress expert!
Welcome to another edition of the Pagely 8 Questions series. Today, we’re lucky enough to have John Hawkins in the hot seat, the owner of WordPress development specialists, 9seeds. We’ll be interviewing John in the usual format, asking him about how he got involved with the WordPress community, how the community has changed during his involvement, and what he foresees for the future of the platform. If you’re new to WordPress, John will also be providing some beginner-friendly tips for those starting out. As well as running 9seeds, John also contributes regularly to his personal blog, VegasGeek. He’s very active on Twitter, too, so follow him @vegasgeek. And, if written content isn’t your thing, you should definitely check out John’s popular podcast series, Hawk Talk. A big, big thanks to John for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions! For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? My name is John Hawkins and I’ve been a WordPress user since roughly 3 months after its initial release. I am the founder of 9seeds.com, a WordPress development shop based in Las Vegas, NV. We’ve been fully dedicated to WordPress development for nearly 6 years. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? I first got introduced to WordPress because I was already blogging and had tried every piece of software I could find to try and make the process simple. That includes a short stint of using Front Page to write blog posts and upload them manually. Talk about painful! A friend who knew I was in to blogging told me about WordPress. I installed it and basically never went back. Eventually I started wanting to customize things, so that meant getting under the hood and messing around. Yeah, that probably means I hacked core back in the day. But eventually I started creating themes and plugins for myself, and then creating websites for others. Which was already something I had been doing pre-WordPress. But once I started building sites in WordPress, I never went back to using anything else. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? In the community I’ve done a bit of everything. I used to spend more time in the support forums, but that hasn’t been the case recently. I need to get back to doing that. Here in Vegas, I organized the first WordCamp in January 2009 and have been involved at some level with every local WordCamp since. I have turned over the reins to a new set of organizers this year, but still hope to present, if they’ll have me. In 2011 I started the WordCamp Las Vegas meetup group which has grown to nearly 800 members. Up until last month, I had been the lead organizer of that group since its beginning. I’m excited to hand it off to a group of folks who are going to pump new life in to it! Outside of Vegas, I’ve been an attendee and frequent presenter at other WordCamps all over the country. I’ve lost count, but have been to well over 50. For the past year or so I have been helping out with WordPress Foundation by being a mentor to first-time WordCamp organizers. So, yeah… I’ve done a bit of everything. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? That’s an easy one; the friends I’ve made in the community. I could type for an hour and probably not get close to listing all the amazing people I’ve met and become friends with over the years. People who run businesses who should be my competitors are actually some of my dearest friends. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? Well, when I ran WordCamp Vegas 2009, I knew hardly anybody in the community, so I’d probably have to say the size of the community. It’s freakin’ huge! And obviously the maturity of the community. I think we’ve all seen recent postings talking about some of the bigger players in our group who have been making some serious cash. I don’t think that was going on (at least not nearly to the same level) when I got started with it. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? Get involved with your local community. Attend meetups. Attend WordCamps. Learn from the amazing folks who give so freely of their time and knowledge. If I was starting over, that’s a great question. I honestly don’t know. Ha! Try to get hired at Web Dev Studios, I guess. 😉 What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? I see a lot of “set it and forget it” websites. People think that a shiny new website is going to be the answer to their business prayers. But, they forget that building the new site, while it’s an important step, it’s not the end of the road. Fresh content is the lifeblood of a website. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? I think the next 12-18 months are going to be some of the most exciting for WordPress. The new Rest API is going to open a lot of doors to some amazing things. I think we’re going to see a bunch of tools aimed at making the on-boarding of new WordPress users even easier. I wouldn’t be surprised to see native Mac/Windows apps that simplify the content creation process. Final Thoughts Once again, a huge thanks to John Hawkins for answering our questions — I hope you enjoyed reading his answers! We certainly have an interesting few months ahead of us, especially with the new Rest API on its way. If you need help with any WordPress projects, John’s fantastic 9seeds service is highly recommended by many well-respected members of the WordPress community. If you’d like to learn more from John, be sure to check out his personal blog, VegasGeek, and listen to his Hawk Talk Podcasts. And, as always, be sure to follow him on Twitter. I’ll see you again next week, when I’ll be talking to another WordPress big-hitter!
If you work in a fast moving niche like WordPress, a post’s publish date has a big impact on its relevance. Google understands this, and factors publish date into its ranking algorithm. It also displays the publish date in the SERPs, informing searchers as to how timely the post is. Of course, the older a post is, the fewer clicks you’ll get — for example, a WordPress article from pre-2012 is practically redundant. Just because an article was written a while ago, however, doesn’t necessarily mean the information is bad. These days, many of us focus on creating evergreen content — content designed to stand the test of time. Even if your content is as relevant today as the day it was published, Google searchers will still regard a two-year-old post with suspicion, though. To get around this problem, many WordPress users will update their best content regularly. Sprucing up your older content will keep your visitors engaged, but, most importantly, it ensures the content is still relevant. Unfortunately, WordPress won’t display that your content has been updated — not by default, at least. Good news, though: it is possible – and all it takes is adding one tiny snippet to your theme’s functions.php file. If you want to try your luck with an out-of-date plugin called WP Last Modified, you can…but I don’t recommend it (which is why I’m not even going to link to it). Adding the code snippet is simple and will never go out of date because it uses core WordPress functions. Just follow these easy instructions. Display Last Modified Time in WordPress To display your post’s last modified time at the top of your post, you’ll need to add a short code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file. Remember – you should always use a child theme to make these additions. To do that, head to Appearance → Editor and select the functions.php file for your child theme (or go to your custom plugin if you’re using one). Then, just paste in this code snippet: function display_last_updated_date( $content ) { $original_time = get_the_time('U'); $modified_time = get_the_modified_time('U'); if ($modified_time >= $original_time + 86400) { $updated_time = get_the_modified_time('h:i a'); $updated_day = get_the_modified_time('F jS, Y'); $modified_content .= '<p class="last-modified">This post was last updated on '. $updated_day . ' at '. $updated_time .'</p>'; } $modified_content .= $content; return $modified_content; } add_filter( 'the_content', 'display_last_updated_date' ); Wondering what the code snippet actually does? All the code does is: Get the original publish date Compare the original publish date to the date you last modified the post If the post was modified more than 24 hours (86,400 seconds) after it was published, then it tells your theme to display a message saying “This post was last updated on day at time“ Here’s what that looks like on the front-end: If you want to change your last modified message, you can edit the text in the code snippet. Just make sure to only change the text – don’t remove any apostrophes or quotation marks. Similarly, you can add custom styling to your last modified date by using CSS to style the last-modified class. And that’s all there is to it! While it’s not quite as simple as just installing and activating a plugin, it’s hard to break anything with this method. Final Thoughts Displaying the last update stamp can have a big impact on your website’s success: visitors will trust updated content more, and the search engines will update their records the next time your website is crawled. That means better rankings, more clicks, and more engagement. With this in mind, if you regularly update your content, displaying when it was last modified really is a must! Do you display last modified dates? Share your thoughts in the comments below! Featured image courtesy of Dafne Cholet.
I’ve talked a lot about security over the last few weeks. This week, though, I want to talk about another important website attribute: speed. For anyone who experienced 56k dial-up, you could be forgiven for thinking today’s super-fast broadband connections have solved the problem of website speed. After all, most websites load within a few seconds. We’ve become accustomed to lightning-quick websites, though, and this has made us more demanding than ever before. So let’s make this clear: speed matters. Why is it so important? Because Google loves fast websites. On more than a few occasions, the search engine giant has confirmed that website speed is an important ranking factor. In other words, making your website faster will improve your website’s ranking in Google. This raises the important question: how do I make my website faster? Good news: there’s lots of ways! Today, though, I want to focus on speed optimization plugins. A quick warning: having too many plugins is a common cause of a sluggish website. You should only install a plugin if you absolutely need it, and you should never, ever have more than one plugin that performs the same functionality. That said, some plugins really can make your website super-fast, and today I want to show you 14 of the best! Caching Plugins Caching plugins serve a static version of your website to your visitors. This is far quicker than loading the dynamic version from scratch every time. Best caching plugins: WP Super Cache (free) W3 Total Cache (free) WP Rocket (from $39) Lazy Loading Plugins Unfamiliar with lazy loading? Essentially it means that the images above the fold — the ones your visitors will see straight away — are prioritized. Images further down the page are only loaded when the visitor scrolls down, just before they appear on screen. Best lazy loading plugins: BJ Lazy Load (free) Rocket Lazy Load (free) Unveil Lazy Load (free) Content Delivery Network Plugins Did you know that the physical distance between you and a web server will impact how quickly a website loads? Big distances tend to result in big load times. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) solve this problem by storing a website on servers all over the world. The user then connects to the server geographically closest to them. Best CDN Plugins: CloudFlare (free) Jetpack Photon module (free) Image Compression Plugin The file size of images means they take far longer to load then text. You can trim some of the file size off your images, without losing quality, by using an image compression plugin. Best image compression plugins: WP Smush (free) EWWW Image Optimizer (free) WP Smush PRO (from $19/month) Database Optimization Plugins By default, WordPress stores all sorts of unnecessary clutter in your database. A good database optimization plugin can completely clean-up your WordPress database, and this can speed up your website substantially. Best database optimization plugins: WP-Optimize (free) Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions (free) Revision Control (free) Final Thoughts If you take website speed as seriously as you should, these are the plugins you need. Each plugin performs a different speed-enhancing functionality, so consider getting one from each category (most of the plugins I’ve listed are free, so go ahead and experiment). If you want to track how much faster your website becomes, try running your website through Pingdom before and after installing the speed optimization plugins! Do you have any speed optimization tips? Share them in the comments section below! Featured image courtesy of SuperCar-RoadTrip.fr
The Pagely 8 Questions series hits a milestone today, with the tenth edition of our WordPress expert interviews. This week we have Ryan Sullivan, the founder of WP Site Care, with us. (Ryan is also a Pagely Brand Ambassador) For those unfamiliar with Ryan’s service, WP Site Care is one of the leading WordPress support services. They are the guys to take care of your website’s security, back-ups, and performance optimization — you won’t need to lift a finger! If you want to see more of Ryan, he’s a regular contributor to the WP Site Care blog, and he’s also active on Twitter, @ryandonsullivan. Today Ryan speaks about how he became involved with WordPress, his experiences in the WordPress community, and the future of the platform. He also provides some useful tips for anyone just starting out. A big thanks to Ryan for finding the time to answer our questions. Let’s get on with the interview, shall we? For readers less familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself and your WordPress background? I’m an avid Utah Jazz Fan (it’s been a rough decade), live near Salt Lake City, and like to hang out with my wife Jackie and 3 boys when I’m not busy building a company. I started in WordPress as a freelancer building websites for friends and family as a side job about 5 years ago. About 3 years ago I started offering monthly retainers for updates, backups, and the like. Then, about 2 years ago I officially started WP Site Care, and our team has grown to 7 now, which I’m super happy about. You’ve been in the WordPress community for several years now, but could you tell us how you first became involved with WordPress? My friend had a band and they needed a website. I was working in IT security at the time for a healthcare company, so of course, I knew everything there could be to know about building websites 😉 I was pretty familiar with Blogger but my friend’s site needed some static pages, so I found WordPress. I was able to dig in and start changing things around pretty quickly, and since then I’ve been hooked. It hasn’t always been the right tool for everything, but I enjoy using it so much (most days) that it’s the only type of work I do anymore. During your time in the community, what different areas have you been involved with? This is a great question since my community involvement probably hasn’t been what it has been for a lot of folks. I have spent a decent number of hours in the support forums, but I’d say the majority of my time is spent connecting people within the community to each other. You’ll see I’m overly active on Twitter trying to help people get noticed, and I’m constantly making introductions behind the scenes. This year we put together the first premier conference for WordPress developers. We called it LoopConf and it was another awesome way that the community was able to come together. What has been the best thing about working with WordPress for you? This one is easy. The best thing about working with WordPress for me is the people I’ve been able to connect with. My team at Site Care is the best group of people I’ve ever worked with, period. I’ve met some incredible people who have been clients, at WordPress conferences, and even through local meetups. How has the WordPress community changed since you started? A lot is the same and a lot is different. For a start, it’s a lot bigger. There’s a lot more focus on business and numbers and software licenses. There’s some kind of drama almost weekly, where emotions run high and I don’t remember a whole lot of that early on. Even with all of that though, the community as a whole still remains inherently good, and has the best interest of the WordPress project and its users in mind. What advice would you give to anyone getting started with WordPress? Which direction would you yourself go if you were starting over again? My advice would probably be to not listen to too much advice. Doing the thing you’re most able to do night in and night out is the thing you should focus on, even if it doesn’t seem like the most strategic or most lucrative path. The reality is that this stuff isn’t easy, so you have to choose something that you really love, as cliché as that sounds. If I were starting over I’d invest in WooThemes in January 2015 😉 What do you think the biggest mistakes WordPress website owners are making? We see a lot of mistakes in our line of work. Probably the most common mistake we see is people not working with professionals early enough. It’s totally fine to not know all the right answers when working with WordPress. I pay an accountant so I can defer that stress, and I think a lot of site owners could benefit from the same by making some financial investments if at all possible. Whether it be for quality hosting, professional development or design help, or even basic upkeep, hiring pros would probably eliminate a lot of the other mistakes that crop up. What do you think the future of WordPress holds? What would you like to see? The cool thing about WordPress is that the future is literally what we make it, and it’s independent from its history (Nathan Hagan said that at WordCamp Tampa 2014 and it’s been the background on my Twitter profile ever since). I’d like to see a collaborative effort on improving the user experience for new users. We work with a lot of new users and would like to get to a point where we start out of the box with very few available options, so we can help users get websites up and running as quickly as possible, with as little frustration as possible. Final Thoughts Once more, a huge thanks to Ryan Sullivan for answering our questions! As Ryan mentions, many WordPress users go wrong by trying to do too much themselves. There’s nothing at all wrong with saying, ‘hey, I’m not an expert at this, so I’ll get help from someone who is.‘ I know what it’s like to work to a strict budget, but if you can make a few smart investments, you can take your project to the next level more quickly. Before I go, let me share the links again with you: check out Ryan’s fantastic WP Site Care support service, learn more about WordPress from the excellent Site Care blog, and above all else, follow him on Twitter to see what he has to say. Thanks for reading, and I’ll be back next week with another WordPress interview!
<p align="justify">This article covers our public notifications related to major security issues our clients and the WordPress community should know about. We are always focused on <a href="https://pagely.com/solutions/secure-wordpress-hosting/">prevention and the mitigation of risk to our clients</a>, and keeping you updated here is part of that process.<!--more--></p> <h3 align="justify">List of Vulnerable Plugins During This Month</h3> <p style="text-align: center"><style type="text/css" name="visualizer-custom-css" id="customcss-visualizer-21824"></style><div id="visualizer-21824-67403824"class="visualizer-front visualizer-front-21824"></div><!-- Not showing structured data for chart 21824 because title is empty --></p> <h3>Plugins Closed by WordPress Security</h3> <p style="text-align: center"><style type="text/css" name="visualizer-custom-css" id="customcss-visualizer-21828"></style><div id="visualizer-21828-621535244"class="visualizer-front visualizer-front-21828"></div><!-- Not showing structured data for chart 21828 because title is empty --></p> <p align="justify">WordPress security team decides to close a plugin when a security issue is found and the developer doesn’t release a patch in a timely manner. You can read more about this <a href="https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/alerts-and-warnings/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>.</p> <h3 align="justify">Relevant Vulnerabilities</h3> <p align="justify"><a href="https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/10478" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">secure-file-manager</a>:<br /> <b>Authenticated File Upload</b></p> <p align="justify"><a href="https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/10471" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ait-csv-import-export</a>:<br /> <b>Unauthenticated File Upload</b></p> <p align="justify"><a href="https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/10457" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">augmented-reality</a>:<br /> <b>Unauthenticated File Upload</b></p> <p align="justify">These plugins have critical vulnerabilities that when exploited would give an attacker complete control over your website. All of them are closed, which means no new installs are allowed but old installs will work without any issues, thus, please check if you have any of them installed <i>(</i><b><i>even if it’s not activated</i></b>) and remove them from your plugins folder.</p> <p align="justify"><a href="https://wpscan.com/vulnerability/10479" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">woocommerce-anti-fraud</a>:<br /> <b>Unauthenticated Order Status Manipulation</b></p> <p align="justify">Versions < 3.3 of this plugin have a bug that when exploited could cause unnecessary damage to your online store. An unauthenticated attacker would be able to change the status of all the orders making it difficult to handle them since the data will not be reliable. On <strong>November 23</strong> the developer released a <a href="https://dzv365zjfbd8v.cloudfront.net/changelogs/woocommerce-anti-fraud/changelog.txt" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">new version</a>.</p>
