You’re ready to get started with a self-hosted WordPress.org website and now need a hosting provider. Or, you have a provider, but are about ready to pull your hair out from frustration. Either way, this is a checklist of what to look for when selecting your new hosting company, and a few recommendations.
In a previous article on registering domains I discussed domain registration & recommended domain registrars. Now I’ll cover how to transfer a domain from one registrar to another.
Many people have websites and offer free downloadable materials to their visitors. You could be a CPA with a PDF brochure or a custom window installer with an excel file for cost estimates. You want to provide materials, but you also want to gather the visitor’s email address and contact info before letting them download the files. This tutorial will cover how to do that with some helpful free WordPress plugins.
Domain registration is quite quick and easy to do. The largest challenge is to decide whether you want a company to just register a domain or if you also want hosting.
If there’s one thing that I hate even more than email spam, it’s probably comment spam. I’ve tried a lot of plugins over a lot of sites, and here is what I’ve found to be very effective.
So you’re a blogger or content writer for a website/blog built in WordPress but you want help writing articles with search engine optimization (SEO). You do some research and you find WordPress SEO by Yoast is considered one of the best (and free). You install the Yoast plugin and then go to write a blog post (or page) and you are completely clueless on how to use it. Well, you’re in luck because this is a step-by-step tutorial for writing posts/pages with the Yoast plugin!
We all know that we need to backup our website, but the question is always how. This tutorial covers using an excellent and free backup tool, BackWPup. BackWPup also has a paid version if you need additional features (but most people will do just fine with the free version).
You’ve lost your WordPress password and can’t log into your site. And what’s worse, the reset password feature isn’t working (either because it can’t send mail or something else is wrong). This tutorial covers how to regain access to your site by direct database manipulation with phpMyAdmin.
You’ve all heard that Google factors their PageSpeed score algorithm into rankings. But, you just haven’t been able to score well on it. So what are the reasons that you score poorly, and what can you do about it? 1. You don’t understand what Google wants you to do Google gives you a bunch of recommendations. But, if you aren’t well versed in techie speak, they are basically a foreign language. Let’s start with the headings: Possible Optimizations – this is where Google says you could, in theory, improve. Possibly. Optimizations Found – this is what you’ve already done right and Google is happy with. Good job! Here are a sample site’s PageSpeed results. You’ll see these two sections. Possible optimizations are on top with a list of 4 items. Optimizations found is lower on the page with the details hidden. Since you don’t need to improve items that are already optimized, those results are hidden. The last item on the page is the Download optimized image, JavaScript, and CSS resources for this page. That gives you the ability to download already optimized files. On the possible optimizations, if you click on Show how to fix, then it will expand and show you the details of the complaints. Below you can see that the images loaded from external twitter feed could be compressed. If you’re on WordPress and you’d like your PageSpeed & YSlow results explained to you with actionable things you can do, you can Get a WordPress Speed Audit. 2. Your images are huge Images are the most common reason for low PageSpeed scores. On most sites images account for more than 50% of the downloaded content, so you can get some really big wins by optimizing your images. As a general rule: most images on your website should
We’ve covered how to schedule WordPress posts in a previous tutorial, now we are going to focus on plugins to help you publicize your posts on social media networks. I’ve tested a number of plugins and reviewed my top 3 for you. This round-up of plugins is for both people who publish immediately and those who want to schedule their WordPress posts.