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Any large WordPress blog has a hinterland of content that isn’t exposed on the homepage. Site owners use tools like “Recent Articles” widgets to surface some of that content, but users still only see a tiny fraction of published posts.

Frequently, the only place users are exposed to older articles is in Google search results. They search for a term, and, if you’re lucky, your article appears somewhere near the top. Third-party search a powerful source of traffic for content sites, but it’s not a replacement for powerful internal search.

Ideally, when users come to your site, you want them to stay there. If you don’t offer a search experience intelligent enough to surface the content the user expects, they’ll just head back to Google. Once they leave, there’s no guarantee they’ll come back — Google is just as likely to send them to a different site.

Search is hard to get right. It’s a complex problem that relies on algorithms capable of “understanding” queries, indexing content, and ranking it according to meaningful criteria. Google is dominant in the search space because it solves a difficult problem well.

Out-of-the-box, WordPress includes a reasonably good search interface. Users can search posts and pages, and they’ll usually find what they’re looking for. But, for large WordPress sites, the built-in search can leave a lot to be desired. It lacks much of the sophistication that users have become accustomed to — Google’s search, with its smart autocomplete, spelling correction, and instant results is the gold standard.

Algolia — a cloud search provider — has recently released a WordPress plugin that brings many of the features users expect from search to WordPress, including autocomplete as the user types their query, instant search results, and smart faceting that can update filters as the user types.

Its customizable search functionality integrates well with WordPress, and it’s capable of returning results of searches over thousands of articles in fractions of a second, surfacing relevant content that can be ranked according to the specific requirements of a site.

Algolia is a third-party cloud search provider. If you’re worried about sending your site’s data off into the cloud, this may not be the plugin and service for you. Relevanssi is a popular alternative. But using a cloud platform relieves your servers of the load created by search — and for large sites, search can consume an expensive chunk of resources.

A search widget is only the beginning of what a powerful search engine can do. It’s possible to build flexible WordPress themes that leverage a search API throughout the design to display content according to any number of complex criteria. The Algolia plugin is “built by developers, for developers” and it exposes a lot of the platform’s functionality through WordPress filters and hooks that can be used by plugin and theme developers.

Algolia isn’t a free service, and even the lowest tier is likely to put it out of reach for smaller sites, but for sites with large quantities of content that can take advantage of enterprise-class search capabilities, Algolia is worth considering.

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The web doesn’t have a native mechanism for protecting content from copyright infringement. Aside from complex digital rights management solutions, which aren’t really appropriate for photography sites, there’s little a photographer can do to prevent determined infringers from copying images and using them without regard for the photographer’s chosen licence.

This is a huge problem for photographers. The web is an essential tool for displaying and promoting photography, but anything published on the web is up for grabs — at least from a technical perspective. From a legal and ethical perspective, photographers have the right and the ability to protect their work. But many users either don’t understand or don’t respect those rights.

There are various routes a photographer can take to the reduce the impact of copyright infringement, but none is ideal and each has trade-offs.

The Low Impact Approach

One strategy is to do nothing at all to prevent infringement. Your work will be taken and used without any immediate benefit to you. However, there may be promotional benefits. Increased sharing can enhance the exposure of your business and your work. Although you lose direct control of the images you publish on your site, you stand to make more in the long-run. This approach can be risky, because there’s always the chance that your images will be taken and used and you’ll see nothing in return.

If you think this approach will work for your business, I suggest you consider watermarking images, and only uploading lower resolution copies to your site, using a Creative Commons licence for images, and making it easy for visitors to pay for full resolution images if they want to.

The High Impact Approach

As I’ve already said, it’s next to impossible to stop a determined individual taking your photographs, but there are ways to make it more difficult. WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click is a plugin that makes users jump over a lot of hurdles to download images.

Disabling the right-click functionality in the user’s browser means they can’t simply open the contextual menu and download an image. Disabling copy-and-paste shortcuts has a similar effect.

There are drawbacks though. Firstly, it doesn’t prevent a determined user from downloading images. The content is loaded in their browser, and if they have any technical chops at all, it won’t take much work for them to circumvent the protection.

This approach also degrades the experience of everyone using your site. The right-click menu holds a lot more than just a “download” option. Hijacking and subverting browser functionality will annoy a lot of visitors, while doing little to prevent determined content thieves.

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If you’re a WordPress pro, the awkwardness of deploying from a testing or dev server to a live server will be all-too-familiar. It’s easy enough to replicate a WordPress site, and there are plugins that will do the job for you, but the reality is usually messier than a simple migration.

Ideally, a WordPress staging installation is in the same state as the live site, and that includes the database. However, when both the staging site and the live site are constantly changing, keeping the two in sync is a real headache. You can’t simply copy the staging site to the production server if posts and pages have changed in the meantime.

Mergebot aims to solve this problem by making it easy to sync changes between sites, including merging databases. It works like this: the developer creates a copy of the production site on their staging or test server and installs the Mergebot plugin on both sites. Mergebot records all changes made to both sites. When the developer is ready to go live with their changes, Mergebot can sync the staging site to the live server while also retaining any changes that have been made to the live site.

In theory, that should make deploying to production a breeze. In practice, it’s not quite so simple, largely because of plugins. Plugins create their own database tables, and the most complex plugins can create many new tables. Without help, Mergebot can’t handle plugin database tables because it knows nothing about each plugin’s schema. In the most recent release of Mergebot, that problem is being addressed. Mergebot uses schema files to understand how plugins use the database. Many of the most popular plugins already have schemas available, and it’s not too tricky to create schemas for less popular plugins.

If the functionality offered by Mergebot sounds familiar, that’s because it does basically the same job as VersionPress, although the way Mergebot goes about syncing sites is different. Unlike VersionPress, Mergebot doesn’t require git, which makes it more likely to be compatible with shared WordPress hosting. VersionPress is somewhat more flexible and feature-rich than Mergebot, although that may change as Mergebot matures.

Another key difference between VersionPress and Mergebot is the way they’re made available by their respective developers. VersionPress is an open source plugin and is free to use. Mergebot is a SaaS product that requires a paid account. Both are perfectly legitimate business models, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

Both Mergebot and VersionPress are promising additions to a class of solutions that has been lacking in the WordPress ecosystem — tooling for developers. It’s exciting to see new tools that make life easier for developers and WordPress professionals.

Mergebot is still in closed beta, and is under active development. It’s not quite ready for production work, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on its development and, once it leaves beta, I plan to write a more thorough review of its capabilities.

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Most WordPress users realise they should backup their site. It’s a dangerous world, and if a business depends on its WordPress site, a backup — or preferably several backups — is a necessary safety net.

However, a backup is worthless if it isn’t tested and verified. I’ve come across many sites where the owners have gone through the motions of creating a backup, but haven’t checked to make sure that the data they have stored can restore their site to its former glory.

I’d like to discuss some of the ways a backup can go wrong, and the basic procedure for checking the viability of your WordPress site’s backup.

What Can Go Wrong With A Backup?

Naïve WordPress users often don’t understand that their WordPress site has two distinct parts: a set of files, and a database. I’ve encountered sites where the owner was confident in their backup because they’d used FTP or some other method to download the site’s files to their PC. This is not an adequate backup.

A WordPress site cannot be reconstituted from the files alone: they’re necessary, but not sufficient because the site’s content —and other important information — is stored in the database. A simple test restore would have revealed the problem.

Another problem I’ve encountered is backups that simply fail to run. One WordPress user I tried to help used a script to automatically backup their site to an external server. Unfortunately, they didn’t check on the updates for several months. The script kept running, but the drive they were backing-up to was full and the update failed silently.

There are a million things that can go wrong with an automated backup. The only way to make sure you aren’t caught out is to regularly test the backups.

If you don’t keep several month’s worth of regular backups, you’re going to lose data when something goes wrong. Consider the case of a hacked site. Hackers are sneaky and they don’t want their malware to be found. Often, site owners are unaware their site has been hacked for several months. That’s not a problem if you have backups for the last few months, but if you don’t have a clean backup, restoring your site will take a lot more work.

Testing WordPress Backups

Testing backups is usually as simple as running a complete restore against a new installation of WordPress. The process is essentially identical to restoring a site from the backup or copying a site to a new hosting environment. You can run the restore on your home PC or on an external server, staging area, or hosting plan.

There are any number of decent WordPress backup plugins. I tend to recommend BackupWordPress, which has proven itself reliable and easy to use. Restoring backups for testing is clearly explained in the BackupWordPress documentation.

An alternative option is VaultPress, a backup service owned by Automattic. VaultPress is more sophisticated than BackupWordPress, and is capable of automatically restoring a backup to a testing site.

Of course, you can also backup manually by copying the files to a secure location and dumping the database with a tool like PhpMyAdmin, but in my experience, manual backups aren’t reliable because they’re easy to forget. An automated solution that is tested regularly is more reliable.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how you backup your WordPress site. What’s important is that you backup regularly and frequently test the backups to ensure you can restore your WordPress site should the worst happen.

All Hostdedi Managed Hosting plans include daily backups for the last 30 days. Hostdedi hosting clients can also choose our Extended Backup plans, which include 90-day and 365-day plans.

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Content, WordPress

Monetizing WordPress blogs has become increasingly difficult over the last few years. If you want to blog for a living, throwing up a few Google AdWords units next to your content is unlikely to cut it unless you have a huge audience — and even if you do, ad-blockers will take a bite.

There are, of course, plenty of alternatives. Native advertising — of which sponsored posts are a popular example for bloggers — has the potential to earn decent revenue. Membership sites with subscriptions are another option. Some of my favorite bloggers have taken this route and are doing well with it. And then there are the less savory techniques like paid reviews.

Micropayments

Micropayments are another option bloggers have to monetize content. Users pay a small amount, typically less than a dollar, to access premium content. There are no recurring fees, which is both good and bad. It’s good for users who don’t want to increase the number of site memberships they’re paying for. But for bloggers, it may not be so great: recurring revenue is hugely important to anyone who makes a living blogging — it helps create at least a little consistency and security.

Micropayments don’t work for every blogger. If you’re a blogger who publishes frequent, short articles, it’s unlikely users will be willing to pay by the article. But, if you publish longer, in-depth articles, or articles that are particularly valuable within your niche, micropayments may be a viable option.

Drizzle

Drizzle is a micropayments platform that aims to make it easy for bloggers to set up micropayment paywalls on their site. Drizzle provides a plugin for WordPress users, and once it’s installed and you have created a Drizzle account, implementing micropayments is as simple as setting a few options and wrapping content in a shortcode. It works for any content you publish on your WordPress blog, including text, podcasts, and video.

Drizzle is a third-party service, which means users have to sign up for a Drizzle account to access paywalled content. The sign-up process is simple, but it might be off-putting to users who just want to support your blog.

A quirk of using Drizzle is that you don’t get to set your own price for access to content. The price charged by Drizzle is determined by the popularity of your content within the Drizzle platform. All articles start at $0.20, and, if they prove popular, the price is hiked to $0.40, or $0.80 for the most popular content. Drizzle doesn’t take a cut of that, but it does add a fee on top which is charged to the user.

Drizzle also allows users to pay a regular subscription if they’d like to access all paywalled content.

If you think micropayments are a viable option for your site and you don’t want to deal with the technicalities of managing them, Drizzle is worth looking at. If you’d prefer to retain full control of the process, and don’t like the idea of asking your users to sign-up to a third-party service, check out Pay Per View from WPMU Dev.

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If you develop plugins for WordPress, you’ll be aware of the controversy caused by the removal of plugins from the repository for breaches of its guidelines.

Many such incidents are caused by developers stepping over the line with “growth-hacking” or data collection, a prime example being incentivized reviews. Some developers offer free or discount premium upgrades if users agree to review their plugins. Obviously, incentivized reviews are harmful — who can trust a review that’s been paid for.

However, the guidelines have never been sufficiently clear about what constitutes unacceptable behavior and enforcement has been inconsistent. In the absence of clear guidelines, enforcement by the repository team can seem arbitrary.

In an effort to help plugin developers understand what is and is not acceptable, the repository team has revised and expanded the guidelines. The new guidelines have been published on GitHub so developers and other interested parties can review them and submit commentary and pull requests.

The content of the guidelines won’t come as any surprise to experienced developers — plugin code must be GPL compatible, for example — but they make concrete rules that were previously vague or implied.

Some of the guidelines developers should be aware of include:

• No use of external JavaScript. With the exception of SaaS plugins, Javascript and other resources should be part of the plugin rather than being loaded from an external server or CDN.
• Don’t push updates too frequently. The WordPress Subversion repository should be considered a release repo, not a development repo. Excessive updates may be considered an attempt to game the Recently Updated list.
• No user tracking without explicit opt-in. This issue has caused problems for a number of plugins of late. The message here is simple: don’t do anything to to track users without their explicit permission.
• No illegal, dishonest, or morally offensive behavior. This is the broadest guideline, and it includes behavior like incentivized or fake reviews, attempting to exploit loopholes in the guidelines, and SEO trickery.

Explicit and comprehensive guidelines have been a long time coming, but better late than never. The vast majority of WordPress plugin developers understand the limits of reasonable behavior. But an ecosystem as big as WordPress’ is bound to attract bad apples who want to exploit the enormous user base.

The clarified guidelines give moderators and the repository team a useful tool to combat malicious behavior without getting involved in endless logic-chopping arguments about what is acceptable.

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PHP 7 is a clear win compared to earlier versions of PHP, yet, unlike Hostdedi, many WordPress hosts haven’t upgraded. It’s difficult to get a clear view of the exact adoption rates of PHP 7, but according to figures from Jordi Boggiano, developer of Composer, PHP 7 adoption rates are hovering around 20 percent, with nearly 40 percent of PHP sites based on PHP 5.6, 30 percent on PHP 5.5, and, worryingly, a substantial number based on even older versions.

WordPress accounts for about a quarter of all sites on the web, far more than any other PHP-based content management system or web framework. Many of the PHP 5.6 and older deployments are hosting WordPress sites.

PHP 7 offers numerous benefits compared to older versions of PHP. It’s faster, it introduces new features, and by the end of this year, it’ll be only actively developed version. There are a few reasons the vast majority of WordPress users are stuck on older versions, and most of them have to do with shared hosting companies not doing their job properly.

The speed benefits PHP 7 brings are not negligible. We should always take benchmarks with a pinch of salt, but testing has shown a 2-3 times performance increase for a WordPress site based on PHP 7 compared to one based on WordPress 5.6. That doesn’t mean your WordPress site’s pages will load three times faster, server-side processing is only one part of getting a web page loaded in a browser, but it’s a big part.

WordPress has occasionally been criticized as intrinsically slow, but that’s never been the case for a properly configured WordPress installation, especially when compared to the other benefits it brings. WordPress was limited by the performance of the underlying PHP engine, but with the release of PHP7 , many of the historic problems with PHP were solved.

The web is always slow to change. The vast majority of WordPress sites use low-cost shared hosting, and many hosting providers don’t have the right incentives to upgrade their platform. Even though PHP 7 is more-or-less a drop-in replacement for earlier versions, there’s some work to be done, and the majority of shared hosting providers simply haven’t made the effort, in spite of the obvious advantages to their users.

PHP 5.5 support ended last July, which means it’s no longer under active development, and, even worse, it’s no longer getting security updates. Any vulnerabilities in that version of PHP will not be fixed. PHP 5.6 will be actively supported until the end of this year, and will receive security updates for another a couple of years, but given the obvious benefits of upgrading, why are WordPress hosting providers holding back?

Hostdedi cares deeply about the performance of all of its WordPress hosting plans, which is why we’ve supported PHP 7 on WordPress (and Magento) since it was released.

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I’m a heavy user of RSS. Every day, I peruse dozens of websites in my feed reader, searching for content by writers and publishers that have, over many years, created content that appeals to me both professionally and personally. I know this is an unusual habit these days. RSS use has declined, and many sites no longer offer an RSS feed at all. Instead, they rely on Twitter and other social networks. But Twitter isn’t a replacement for RSS — Twitter feeds are too hectic and crowded.

There is no direct replacement for RSS, but push notifications provide some of the immediacy and reliability of RSS for a site’s most committed users — those who want to know as soon as a new piece of content is published.

Typically, this will be a small proportion of the site’s users — those who are happy be interrupted every time an article is published — but the most engaged and loyal users are often happy to opt-in to push notifications.

Web Push Notifications

To be clear, in this article I’m talking about browser push notifications, not the mobile push notifications managed by iOS and Android. It is possible to create WordPress mobile push notifications, but it usually requires users to install an app, either a third-party notification app or an app created for the publisher.

Browser push notifications let users receive notifications while their web browsers are open. Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome support push notifications on the desktop, and Chrome supports them on Android.

When a user visits a WordPress site that offers push notifications, it will present them with a dialogue asking if they’d like to opt-in to browser notifications. If they choose, they’ll receive notifications whenever an article is published.

There are several web push notification solutions for WordPress, but the one I’ve had most success with is OneSignal, which provides a WordPress plugin. OneSignal offers a custom opt-in message and automatic notifications. It also has a number of useful extras, including the ability to target notifications to segments of your audience, A/B testing, and scheduled notifications.

Don’t Go Nuts With Notifications

Publishers should remember that being allowed to send push notifications is a privilege, and it shouldn’t be abused. I’ve opted-out of many website’s push notifications because the volume of notifications became onerous.

Notifications are great for informing the most engaged readers about your content; they shouldn’t be used to broadcast daily “We miss you!” messages or other promotional messages that are unlikely to have broad appeal. If you overuse push notifications, there’s a good chance of alienating the users who would otherwise be the most engaged and loyal.

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When I first used WordPress, several years ago, I bought a premium theme from a well-known marketplace. I decided on that particular theme because I liked the way its demo site looked. Most theme developers and marketplaces provide a demonstration site so that potential buyers can take a theme for a spin before they buy it.

However, when I installed the theme, I was disappointed to discover that my site looked nothing like the demo site. The basic components were all there, but it looked nowhere near as impressive as the site that had influenced me to buy the theme in the first place.

After several years using WordPress, I understand why this happened. I was recently talking to a friend of mine who was trying to set up a new WordPress site — her first — and she encountered exactly the same disappointment. I’d like to explain why it happens and what new site owners can do about it.

Demo Sites Are Built To Sell

In the worst cases, demo sites are simply dishonest. The theme developers put a lot of time into perfecting the demo site, which can include adding plugins and features that don’t come with the theme. After all, these are web designers and developers — they know how to make a site look good with or without a theme.

But it’s not always, or even frequently, the case that a demo site misrepresents a theme. They represent the best possible end result, but it can be quite easy to achieve the same outcome. It all depends on the theme and the developer. Before you spend a cent, take a close look at the theme’s ratings and its support forum, both of which you’ll find on the theme marketplace. Satisfy yourself that there are happy users out there.

Install The Sample Content

A newly installed WordPress site has next to no content, so even the best themes will look underwhelming compared to the demo site, which is full of text and professional photography.

The best developers make sample content available to users, often the same sample content used on the demo site. If the developer makes sample content available, you should be able to find out how to install it in the theme’s documentation. If not, ask in the support channel.

Installing the sample content will give you a much better approximation of the theme’s appearance and capabilities as you work with it to add your own content.
If the developer doesn’t make sample content available, take a look at the WP Example Content plugin.

Keep in mind, you should not use the sample content on your live site — it may be an infringement of several people’s copyright.

Read The Documentation

Themes come in many different types, ranging from bare-bones theme frameworks to comprehensively designed layouts with almost no flexibility. If you’re a WordPress novice and want to get up and running quickly, I suggest choosing the latter — all you’ll need to do is fill in your content and you’ll be good to go.

Whichever type of theme you choose, make sure that you read the accompanying documentation. Any theme worth the money will come with a comprehensive set of instructions that explain how it’s supposed to be used.

Hire A WordPress Professional

If you don’t have the time or the patience to learn how to set your theme up properly, there are many WordPress professionals who would be happy to help. Most will be capable of installing and configuring a premium theme quite quickly, so it needn’t be an expensive step.

Don’t be discouraged because your site doesn’t look exactly the way you imagined it when you install your theme, with a few tweaks and some great content, it will come to life.

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