One of the best ways to generate revenue from a WordPress site is to offer subscriptions for premium content. For general interest sites, offering subscriptions usually isn’t the best way to go, but if your site offers valuable information to an audience prepared to pay for it, then charging for access can offer better returns […]

At some point in the life of a WordPress site, its owner will want to make changes significant enough to justify blocking access to the site. It’s not a good idea to leave a site online when major changes are being implemented. A site with rough edges looks unprofessional and visitors won’t know that it’s […]

Every November, aspiring novelists come together online to write 50,000 words of a novel. National Novel Writing Month — which attracts participants from around the world — helps writers put aside their trepidation and focus on getting the words out. 2016 will be NanoWriMo’s 17th year, and it’s expected to be just as popular as […]

Images make up a large chunk of the bandwidth used by most websites. That makes them an obvious target for optimization. Any reduction in the size of images can have a positive impact on the performance of a website. Over the last couple of releases, WordPress has introduced several new image optimizations that happen by […]

Google uses incoming links as a signal of the quality of a web page. Working under the assumption that links to a page are a vote in its favor, Google uses links to determine where pages should appear in the search engine results. Links are only one of the signals Google uses for ranking, but […]

Successful WordPress sites follow a fairly predictable path. They begin with an idea, which — because no one has a clue it will be successful — is built on a small shared hosting plan. Shared hosting plans are perfect for moderately trafficked sites, but as the sites grow, they need something more. A WordPress site […]

WordPress is a complex piece of software comprising many thousands of lines of code — a mixture of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s under constant development, which means that all those files are subject to change. Often, those changes will address security issues; that is, they are edits to code that caused a vulnerability. […]

One of the major motivations for the creation of the WordPress REST API is that it allows developers to easily — or more easily — build WordPress client applications. With the API, developers can build applications that can control most aspects of a WordPress site. However, great though the API is, authentication has been a […]

Last year’s release of Magento 2 was a massive rewrite of the application on which tens of thousands of eCommerce businesses are built. The update brought Magento in line with modern web technology, and gave the Magento team a solid foundation to build on. With the release of Magento Enterprise Edition 2.1, we’re beginning to […]

It’s been more than a year since the release of Magento 2.0 — an almost complete rewriting of the enormously popular eCommerce application, and yet many eCommerce retailers have yet to upgrade. I understand why. An eCommerce store is the central plank of any modern retail business, and those businesses depend on the reliability and […]