The Google mobile first index is upon us and it will further change the way we optimize our sites. Since mobile devices have surpassed desktop computers as the dominant Internet devices in 2016, the search giant has increasingly put emphasis on mobile friendliness. These days, if you don’t know how to make your WordPress website mobile friendly, you are likely already missing out on traffic. This development will increase further with Google’s latest update, the mobile-first index. As you can glean from the name, it will prioritize mobile pages in the search index even more. If you are not prepared […]

WordPress is huge, and so is its community. What’s more, WordPress was built on collaboration and has always been welcome to new developers contributing to the project. However, while you may want to help the platform grow even further, it can be hard to know where you could apply your skills. Fortunately, getting started with WordPress development is easy, regardless of how you’d like to take your first steps. There’s almost certainly a task that will suit you perfectly, whether that’s contributing directly to the WordPress core, testing for bugs, or helping out in one of many other ways. This […]

Search engines remain one of the most important traffic sources for websites. Learning to improve organic CTR (click-through rate) is crucial for taking advantage of them. When it comes to SEO, many website owners simply focus on ranking. They think that as long as they make it to the first page of Google, traffic will sort itself out. However, achieving a high rank in the SERPs doesn’t help you if nobody ends up clicking on your content. In that case, your search rank is nothing more but a vanity metric. Plus, CTR and search rankings are intimately connected. If you […]

As practically everyone connected with WordPress knows, Gutenberg has been big news in 2018. While it hasn’t been met with universal adulation, the project is still moving forward. This means it needs the community to pull together, in order to ensure its success. There are plenty of ways to contribute to Gutenberg, including fixing bugs and implementing specific features. Gutenberg also interacts with various WordPress elements (specifically other plugins), and those all need to be assessed for compatibility. Fortunately, the Gutenberg Plugin Compatibility Database presents an easy way to do this. In this post, we’ll outline the history of the Gutenberg project […]

Co-founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg took the stage in Belgrade to give a mid-year update on where the CMS has been and where it is going. He referred to this as a “summertime update.” Over the past six years, Mullenweg has held a Town Hall during WordCamp Europe, but this year he decided to present what has been happening since WordCamp US in December, and what will happen in the coming months. He began by announcing St. Louis will be the 2019-2020 WCUS location, then he moved onto his updates. Core There have been six core releases since WCUS. Customization […]

This article is a part of a series on writing object-oriented PHP for WordPress development. So far, we’ve spent two articles on writing the code and now we will test the code and systems. It takes an enormous amount of tooling to write code and back in my day I walked uphill both ways, in two feet of snow, to write HTML, using HTML instead of writing it in Babel and transferring it to HTML. Yes, it’s a lot, but that’s why we have scaffolding tools, and we’re going to get into some of those in this article. Object-oriented programming […]

WordPress is a very user-friendly platform and a great option for creating websites. It has loads of features and is easy to customize. One of the best ways to create a beautiful and professional-looking website is to use one of the thousands of WordPress themes available in the dashboard. WordPress Theme frameworks are a foundation for several themes, which are built on a framework – as opposed to some which are built from scratch. Theme frameworks fall into two categories – one,  developed by an organization for their specific theme shop, and two, those that are free to be used […]

Over the past 20 years or so since when JavaScript was released, it has become the most popular programming language for web development today. You can understand the importance of JavaScript as a web development language from the fact that as per the recent reports, JavaScript is currently being used by more than 94 percent of all the websites. JavaScript is a client-side programming language which helps web developer to do Web Application Development and make dynamic and interactive web pages by implementing custom client-side scripts. Developers can also use cross-platform runtime engines like Node.js to write server-side code in […]

In my last article, in this series on advanced object-oriented programming (OOP) for PHP WordPress development, I showed how to setup the WordPress test suite for integration tests. Previously, I had written about unit tests, which I showed how to run in an isolated environment. These tests were not dependent on WordPress at all, so they could just run on the system’s PHP. On the other hand, integration tests cover the interaction of the plugin and WordPress, so they need a complete WordPress. I showed how to setup those tests using VVV or Docker. In the example plugin, I set […]

It doesn’t matter how much traffic your website brings, if no one is converting, you’re not generating sales. That’s why it’s important to take conversions seriously and continuously tweak your campaigns to optimize for the actions you want your users to take. Whether it’s giving you their email address or completing a sale, every website owner should have a goal in mind. Today we are going to take a look at some of the best strategies for boosting your site’s conversion rates so that you can manage a website that not only draws in a lot of traffic but also […]