Making changes to your live WordPress website can be time-consuming and risky. If something goes wrong during an update, you can lose all your work and inconvenience your site visitors. Fortunately, by using a local development environment for your site, you can make changes in private. You’ll have a safe space to build and edit your website without affecting the live version. In this post, we’re going to explain more about what a local WordPress environment is. Then, we’ll explore four cases when it makes sense to use one. Let’s get started! An Introduction to Local WordPress Development A local […]

There are many WordPress hosting providers on the market. However, their services can differ drastically. From extra features you don’t need to limitations on growth, your current host may not be the best match for your site. Although, if you know what to look for, there are a few obvious signs that can indicate when you might want to switch WordPress hosting providers. For instance, slow page loading times or poor customer service may mean it’s time to look elsewhere. In this post, we’ll discuss five situations in which it makes sense to consider switching hosts. Then, we’ll take a […]

The Torque Social Hour is a weekly livestream of WordPress news and events. In this episode we talk with Felix Arntz, a lead dev on Google’s Site Kit plugin for WordPress and a founding member of the WordPress Performance Team. We talk about Felix’s upcoming WordCamp US talk and about what steps the Performance Team are taking to make WordPress faster and more responsive for all users. We also talk about some new features coming to Google’s Site Kit plugin, including integration with an upcoming product called Thanks With Google, which will allow content creators to easily accept donations from […]

It has been over a year since I published my displeasure with the Quote block. As a content producer, I frequently use and rely on this block but each time I use it, it becomes a battle that feels like David versus Goliath or me versus the block editor. Copying and pasting more than one paragraph into a block was impossible. Likewise, if the quoted text contained an ordered or unordered list, the block editor would turn everything into single paragraphs. Recently, Gutenberg 13.8 was released and among the patch notes was the following text that caught my eyes. After […]

When the world shut down in 2020, we had no idea when we would be able to get together again. Finally, after nearly three years, WordCamp US is back in person and better than ever. On September 9-11, WordPressers from all over the world will arrive in San Diego to learn, network, and connect in person. If you’ve never attended a WordCamp in person, it can be a little intimidating, but we are Torque are seasoned pros and have some tips and tricks to make sure you have the best experience possible. General WordCamp Advice First, let’s dive into some […]

In this post, we’ll talk about how to use the WordPress pattern directory for faster website development. Whether you’re a newbie to WordPress or a grizzled pro, approaching WordPress block patterns might be a bit strange. However, when used correctly, they offer a way of quickly building complex page layouts much faster. That’s why familiarizing yourself with block patterns and the pattern directory offers numerous benefits for your web development workflow.  Today, we’ll discuss what some of those benefits are, offer up details on what block patterns exist, and then show you how to use the block pattern directory to […]

Ben Meredith is the Director of Customer Service and Support at GiveWP. In this episode of the Torque News Drop, we talk with Ben about his technical support philosophy and the lessons he’s learned while doing support for his own plugins on the WordPress plugin repository. Be sure to catch Ben’s full talk at WordCamp US at 2pm PT on September 9th.

Local environments are a lifesaver for developers, and tools like Local make them easy to get up and running on your work machine. The only hitch comes when it’s time to deploy your local development site to your server. It can be a confusing process, especially if you’ve never worked with Local before. How does it work? Where to start? Stuck on the final step? Thankfully, there are an abundance of options to push your local environment live. You can do it with the Local tool itself, with a managed hosting solution like Flywheel, or with a variety of WordPress […]