Nexcess Blog

Let’s be frank: web performance on mobile leaves a lot to be desired. With responsive design, we have a solution that makes websites look great on mobile and desktop alike, but there’s still a long way to go if mobile websites are to compete with the performance of native applications. It’s a problem recognized by […]

With the release of iOS 9, Apple introduced Apple News — a combined news interface intended to be the place iPhone and iPad users go to read news. Apple News isn’t limited to traditional news publishers; bloggers are quite welcome to add their content to Apple News too. If you’re not an iOS user (or […]

Selling digital content is an excellent way to make money with a WordPress site. Or, to put it another way, WordPress is an excellent platform for selling digital content. Indeed, many WordPress blogs exist to provide promotion and content marketing support to a business that makes its real money selling digital products. Sales aren’t the […]

Customer support is one of the biggest expenses for any provider of online services and products. It’s also a key factor in creating a positive customer experience. Support matters a great deal to customers, so much so that customers unsatisfied with support are likely to take to social media with their complaints, damaging the company’s […]

Webfonts are a boon to theme developers. They opens up a vast landscape of potential typefaces — a far cry from the bad old days when there was only a handful of web safe fonts to choose from. But webfonts have drawbacks: most significantly, page weight inflation. For many themes, fonts come second only to […]

PHP — the programming language behind WordPress, Magento, ExpressionEngine, and thousands of other applications — recently got its first major version bump in years. The move from PHP 4 to PHP 5 happened a decade ago, although the language has seen multiple minor version bumps in the intervening years, culminating in PHP 5.6, which was […]

WordPress was originally created as a blogging engine. It had posts and pages, which gave it all the flexibility it needed to support traditional blogs. To be properly regarded as a content management system, WordPress needed a more flexible way to arrange content. Custom post types were introduced way back in WordPress 3.0 and allowed […]

When first installed with its default theme, WordPress offers an excellent user experience. In many cases, it doesn’t last for long. Because it’s so easy to add new features, pages, and content, there’s no barrier to introducing complexity and confusion. That’s partly why mature WordPress sites can be difficult to navigate and why it can […]

It’s been a long time coming, but with this commit it seems we’re nearing the end of a journey that will give WordPress an API appropriate to the modern Internet. If all goes well, I expect to see the partial API released along with WordPress 4.4. WordPress is hugely popular, but its lack of a […]

WordPress site owners who use the Akismet comment spam filtering plugin should update to version 3.1.5 of the plugin as soon as possible. Older versions of the plugin are vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack that could put WordPress sites and users at risk of compromise. Sites with automatic updates activated should already be running […]