Despite the thousands of hours that have gone into making sure WordPress is secure and stable, the default platform still has certain aspects that are vulnerable to attacks. It’s vital to know what those attacks are, so you can take steps to bolster your security and provide needed peace of mind. As we discussed in a previous article, code injection attacks – such as Cross-Site Scripting and SQL injection – remain a high-priority concern for many website owners. Fortunately, protecting your site from these intrusions is simply a case of using some common-sense techniques, along with a snippet or two […]

This weekend WordPress turns 15. Since it’s creation as a blogging platform, the CMS has grown to be able to power the largest enterprise digital experiences. Check out 15 WordPress milestones that made the CMS what it is today! To get the party going, we created a Spotify list using music from all of the incredible jazz artists who lent their names to WordPress Core updates. Celebrate the history of the most powerful CMS out there. From strong eCommerce solutions to personal blogs, the platform can help anyone realize their dream. WordPress powers 30 percent of the web and has over […]

One-page sites are becoming popular in 2018, mainly due to the rise in mobile device browsing and the subsequent need for short, impactful information. They’re also perfect for developers who need to offer a summary of their services to potential clients. However, knowing what to include on a one-page site isn’t always easy. One-page sites are similar in many respects to landing pages, in that they both feature a prominent Call To Action (CTA) and straightforward contact information. When implemented correctly, a one-page design can turn your sprawling website into a streamlined conversion machine. In this piece, we’ll provide some […]

In my previous articles in this series, I showed how to structure a WordPress plugin using object-oriented PHP. Then I covered unit testing. Unit tests cover each component, totally isolated from all other parts of the system. Unit tests should not be concerned with how the object interacts with any dependencies including the database and WordPress. Instead, once we have unit tests, we use integration tests to cover the effects of our code on the environment it is in. In general, we use phpunit for both types of tests. We just use them differently. We can think of phpunit as […]

Website security: two words that should be of paramount importance for all site owners. Security is big business online, mainly because it’s so vital that to ignore it can mean catastrophic consequences for your website and its user base. However, some security issues are more pertinent than others – and figuring out what’s most important to focus on is a task with no clear starting point. Fortunately, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) exists to help improve software security. Recently, this organization published an invaluable top-ten list of security vulnerabilities from the past year (2017). This can give you a […]

Merely having a website as a freelancer is not nearly enough. If you want to be taken more seriously and command higher rates from customers and prospective clients, then you should really think of building a freelancing portfolio online; one that stands out. When it comes to building a freelance portfolio, two things are the most important: The layout design, and the content, in that order. In fact, statistics have shown that visual presentation of content might just be more important than the content itself. So much for ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. You will definitely get more […]

Recent trends show why SEO should always be the cornerstone of your WordPress traffic acquisition strategy. Everyone wants traffic, and there was a time when one of the best ways to grow it was through social media. However, that particular party may be over. Twitter accounts for less than 2.5 percent of traffic to publishers, and Instagram and Pinterest barely supply 1 percent together. But the big story is Facebook. Once the single biggest source of referral traffic for many sites, it now represents just 22 percent, and that share has been falling dramatically for more than a year. Data […]

Translating your WordPress website into other languages is a smart way to reach a wider audience and increase your traffic. If your site is only available in a single language, you could be losing out on a lot of potential leads and conversions. Fortunately, you don’t need to speak multiple languages to translate your site – the process of doing so is simple with the Weglot Translate plugin. Using this, you can automatically translate every part of your WordPress site, and manually fine-tune your translations in a snap. In this article, we’ll discuss why you might want to translate your […]

If you’re not collecting emails on your website, you should be. If you’re currently collecting emails on your site, you could be collecting more. We all could be. That’s where conversion optimization comes in. Email list building is important for any website, but particularly for those publishing content (no matter what business type). If email signups are valuable to you, this article will cover a four-step process for increasing your email signup rate. The Money is in the List Most marketers intuitively understand the importance of a healthy email list. It’s an owned asset. It won’t shut down on you, […]

Starting completely from scratch when developing themes naturally means that you are free to do anything you’d like. This opens up plenty of room for creative freedom, but getting started can take up a lot of time. Many of the initial tasks you’ll carry out are necessary, yet time-intensive. The good news is that WordPress ‘starter’ themes or frameworks (also called ‘blank’ themes) can do some of the initial heavy lifting for you. This is because they include foundational base code for you to work from. They can help you implement essential functionality, and start you off with some best […]