Nexcess Blog

Accessibility is not often at the front of our minds when we are choosing or designing a WordPress theme. We’re more concerned with aesthetics, functionality, and conversion potential. But ignoring accessibility excludes a huge proportion of our potential users. Worldwide there are 285 million people with visual impairments, 39 million of whom are legally blind. […]

With PHP 7 around the corner, we wanted to create a dev environment to test some apps and prepare for its arrival. PHP 7 installation for CentOS is not difficult and can be found here. With the precompiled builds, we created a VM with the appropriate software to start testing WordPress: Apache2, MariaDB and PHP […]

WordPress is a complex software ecosystem. Its huge userbase and an active developer community numbering in the tens of thousands make for a potential security nightmare, but, in fact, it functions surprisingly smoothly. For users who hear only about the most recent security vulnerability, it might not appear so, but the widespread publicity of security […]

When WordPress was first created by Matt Mullenweg, he was scratching his own itch; he wanted a simple-to-use blogging engine — and that’s what WordPress used to be. Over the years, it has grown into something much more powerful. WordPress is now a superbly feature-rich content management system with an enormous collection of extensions and […]

One of the simplest methods of implementing caching for WordPress Hosting is through third-party plugins. Caching will speed up your site and reduce latency by temporarily storing frequently-requested data. Because repeated page requests can be slow and expensive in terms of resources, it is helpful to cache the results of those requests. Third-party caching plugins for […]

Ideally, search engines and social networks would be smart enough to look at a website and glean all of the information they need from the human-readable content on the page. In reality, they’re nowhere near intelligent enough; they can make guesses which are often pretty good, but they need a little help to understand what […]

Over the last few months we’ve seen a number of mobile watersheds: Facebook announced that almost half of its users only use Facebook on mobile; Google announced that there were more searches from mobile devices than PCs in many key markets and that it would be giving mobile-friendly sites a boost in the SERPS for […]

WordPress has a rudimentary revision tracking system built in. It’s great when you want to recover a paragraph you delete in haste, or check exactly who made an edit to an article. But the built-in system doesn’t have a fraction of the power of version control systems that developers are used to using every day. […]

With what is expected to be the final release before work begins on integration into WordPress core, version 1.2 of the REST API development plugin has been announced. Like many new features planned for eventual inclusion into WordPress, the new API has been developed outside of the mainline of WordPress development, freeing its developers to […]

In April, WordPress 4.2 arrived, and after a short pause to mop up any outstanding bugs and security issues, work has begun in earnest on the next release, which we can expect to land in the middle of August (officially August 18th). 4.2 brought with it a number of UI improvements, especially to the plugin […]