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At the highest level, search engine optimisation is about three things: creating great content, promoting that content to generate links, and making sure that Google and other search engines can find it. It’s the last of these tasks I’m going to talk about here — specifically, how WordPress site owners can make sure that when Googlebot comes knocking, the door is open and every page the site owner wants in search results can be found.

What does it mean to be findable by a search engine crawler? The most important factor is links. Crawlers work by following links. They load a page, process its content, and follow links on the page to new pages, where the process is repeated. To be crawlable is to be connected in such a way that every important page on a site is reachable by a link, which brings us to the first part of creating a crawlable site.

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“Premature optimization is the root of all evil” is a (mis)quotation that anyone who has seriously studied development knows. Coined by Donald Knuth, it’s intended to convey the idea that some optimizations are better than others, and that wasting time on minor optimizations is an inefficient use of time that could be better spent elsewhere. I’m often struck by how much time some WordPress site owners spend working on minor performance optimizations to no great effect, while they ignore major performance optimizations like moving their site to faster hosting. There are many sources of optimization information online, and for the most part they provide advice that is good in theory, but that may mislead site owners into spending undue resources on optimizations that don’t give them the best bang for the buck.

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Users of the popular Jetpack WordPress plugin collection should immediately update. A recently discovered cross-site scripting vulnerability may put Jetpack users at risk of having their site compromised. The vulnerability was present in Jetpack as far back as 2012. A patch that fixes the vulnerability has been released with version 4.0.3 of Jetpack. WordPress site owners who don’t update to the most recent version of Jetpack are at risk.

The vulnerability is in the Shortcode Embeds module of Jetpack. Shortcode embeds allow WordPress users to embed content from other sites into their site’s pages – they’re especially useful for quickly embedding video content. An attacker may be able to leverage a vulnerability in the way these shortcodes are handled to inject arbitrary code into WordPress pages via a carefully crafted comment. Read More »

With PHP 5.5 end-of-life (EOL) just over the horizon, it’s worthwhile to catalog the versions still living in the eCommerce wilderness. Ben Marks started a poll recentlyand the results, to put it kindly, were discouraging.

Also, Composer creator Jordi Boggiano, ‏also known as @seldaek, released detailed stats that twisted the knife.

The chart below shows all PHP versions for all Composer users as of May 2016, when more than a third were still using PHP 5.5 or older. This confirms our experience as a web host, as we see plenty of sites running old versions of both PHP and Magento. These sites will be slow, and worse, they will stop receiving critical security updates.Refer to the PHP website for details on the shelf life of PHP 5.5 and other versions. Read More »

If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, it’s possible you’ve experienced the white screen of death. When you or another visitor to your WordPress site tries to load a page, they get a blank screen instead of the content. It’s not a common occurrence, but it’s common enough that a WordPress user should know how to diagnose the cause.

First a little about how WordPress works. WordPress dynamically creates content when a page is loaded. The page doesn’t exist until it’s called into being by a browser request. Most of the content is stored in a database, and when the user requests a page, WordPress runs a series of PHP scripts that access the database, retrieve the content, and use the content and some templates to build a page. It’s a fairly complex process, and there’s plenty of room for something to go wrong. When it does go wrong — when a PHP function fails to do what it’s supposed to, for example — one possible result is the white screen of death. Read More »

In the early days of the web, every site’s domain name was prepended with “www”. It’s nowhere near as common today — many sites choose to simply use the naked domain, but I’m often asked whether there is any particular reason to choose one option over the other. Is there any advantage to having “www” in your site’s domain?

The most common reason to discard “www” is for branding. The naked domain is snappy, looks better on promotional material, and most brands don’t want something as important as their domain name cluttered with unnecessary and unrelated letters.

What exactly is the “www”? Technically, it’s a subdomain traditionally used to indicate that a site is part of the web, as opposed to some other part of the Internet like Gopher or FTP. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it is traditional to include an indication of the services offered by a server in the domain, and Tim Berners-Lee used “www” for the first web pages at CERN.

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Unless you’re a PHP guru, WordPress theme development has a steep learning curve. WordPress is popular among users with a modicum of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge, but unless you have a fair bit of PHP under your belt, attempting to develop a WordPress theme can be a confusing endeavor.

Drag-and-drop page builders exist to reduce the difficulty of developing semi-bespoke WordPress themes, but they tend to be resource hogs, to say the least. The best option for users with a little web development knowledge who want to get started in the WordPress world is a tool likeTimber or a starter theme. One of the most popular starter themes isUnderscores, which is developed by Automattic. As Automattic puts it, Underscores gives developers a thousand-hour head start. Read More »

The web has come a long way since the days in the early nineties when Tim Berners-Lee first published his ideas about a new way to organize information. But the web as we know it would be recognizable — if astonishing — to its early users because the core technology of the web, the link, is still the tie that binds the world’s information together.

But the humble hyperlink has a problem — content tends to disappear. All-too-often a link leads nowhere. If a piece of content stays on the web for long enough, a proportion of its links will be broken. The longer it’s up, the more likely it is that the links will break; a process known as link rot. Read More »

If you are a relatively successful blogger who wants to enhance the revenue your site generates, what are your options? Premium content is the obvious avenue, with many bloggers opting for paywalled articles, podcasts, and ebooks, but one of the best revenue spinners for bloggers — and one that I see used relatively infrequently — is the online course. An online course can be a great way to develop a consistent stream of income from your site.

An online course is a natural extension of blogging, especially for bloggers who already write educational content. Whether you blog about travel, woodwork, fashion, or anything else, an online course can provide a solid alternative — or complement — to a reliance on advertising income. Read More »