One of WordPress’s great strengths is the plugin ecosystem. Developers have created thousands of plugins — most of which are free — that add any functionality you can imagine. Many businesses are built on WordPress, and some of those businesses depend on the plugins they use. What happens if those plugins go away? What do […]

If it seems as if WordPress websites are hacked more often than others, there’s some truth to that theory. WordPress vulnerabilities are common – the security firm Sucuri found that a significantly large portion of websites compromised during the first three months of 2016 ran on WordPress. Sucuri investigated 11,485 compromised sites, and 78% of […]

Passwords are an unquestionable means of defense against hackers. A compromised WordPress site can damage your clients’ business reputation — the kind of harm that takes a long time to recover from. Yet no matter how complicated you make a password (adding numbers and symbols), it’s still not the strongest form of protection. Hackers can […]

I’m sure you’re all aware of the Panama Papers: a leak of epic proportions that exposed the offshore dealings of the rich and famous. Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca was breached, and well over a terabyte of data handed over to journalists, who are going through it with a fine-tooth comb. The leak has given […]

Soliciting and collecting donations are the core fundraising activities of many nonprofits. It’s also the most expensive. Traditional nonprofit fundraising techniques include event hosting, direct solicitation, mass mailing, and cold calling. Some of these techniques have a high chance of securing donations, but also a high associated cost that eats into the money available for […]

If you’re new to WordPress and want to create custom page layouts, the learning curve is steep. At the very least you need a passing familiarity with PHP, HTML, and CSS — possibly JavaScript too. All of which might seem a bit much if all you want to do is create a custom landing page […]

WordPress professionals often find they need to work on a copy of a client’s site. It’s almost never a good idea to work on a live site — too many things can go wrong. When changes are needed, it’s better to copy the client’s site, make the necessary changes, test them, and then integrate any […]

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 […]

“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. […]

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 […]