Did you know that the average website is offline for 3 hours per month due to web hosting downtime? This case study by HostingFacts compares 32 web hosting services and their average uptime in 2018. To run this series of tests, John Stevens and his team have signed up for all of the 32 web hosting providers as a regular user, using the cheapest plan available. After that, they set up a basic WordPress website and start monitoring them with Pingdom.com. Their uptime check interval was set to 1 minute, which means all of the sites are scanned every minute to get the most accurate statistics.
Read more…
Climate change may not seem like an issue that should concern web developers, but the truth is that our work does have a carbon footprint, and it’s about time we started to think about that. As web developers, it’s understandable to feel that this is not an issue over which we have any influence, but this isn’t true. Many efforts are afoot to improve the situation on the web. The Green Web Foundation maintains an ever-growing database of web hosts who are either wholly powered by renewable energy or are at least committed to being carbon neutral. So, apart from powering servers with renewable energy, what else can web developers do about climate change?
Read more…
WordPress has a few significant limitations — it requires time and coding skills to create a website. Building a website used to be a complex exercise only professionals could do, but the situation changed. Today, Nick Babich will review a tool that will allow us to work smarter. Imagine WordPress without design and technical limits. In this article, Nick reviews the Visual Composer Website Builder tool that helps simplify the process of page building in WordPress.
Read more…
Have you been looking for a way to create a notification system when using WordPress? Meet the ‘Notification’ plugin, an all-in-one solution for any custom WordPress notification system. In this article, Jakub Mikita will show you how to create your own notification system within minutes with the free Notification plugin. By notification, he means any kind of notification. Most of the time, it will be email, but with the plugin you’ll be using, you can also send webhooks and other kinds of notifications.
Read more…
Is there a better way to make direct changes to your WordPress website? Yes, there is! In this article, Nick Schäferhoff will show you local WordPress development. You will learn about the benefits of building a local WordPress development environment, how to set one up and how to move your local site to the web when it’s ready. Learning how to install WordPress locally is super useful. It enables you to make site changes, run updates, test themes and plugins and more in a risk-free environment (and it’s free thanks to open source software).
Read more…
WordPress is a free and open-source software (also known as FOSS) project. There are plenty of ways you can contribute some of your time back to the WordPress project without having to look at a line of code. Pick your favorite, and you’re off! You would be surprised to find that there are many ways that people can contribute back to the project without even writing or understanding a line of PHP. Interested? Then let’s get cracking, shall we?
Read more…
Migrating to or from multisite is hard. In this article, Nícholas André simplifies the whole migration process by reducing the endeavor to a couple of CLI commands. The WordPress Importer works reasonably well for smaller, simpler sites, but leaves room for improvement. The MU-Migration tool, a WP-CLI command that helps developers migrate sites to or between multisite instances. Multisite migrations have various technical complexities, and this tool can help alleviate them.
Read more…
We asked our readers and the community to use everything they could to make their websites and projects perform blazingly fast. Today, Cosima Mielke is thrilled to show off the results of this challenge and announce the winner who will be awarded with some smashing prizes indeed! Thanks to everyone who participated in the challenge! We were quite happy with the quality of the submissions we received, and it honestly wasn’t easy to choose a winner. Keep up the brilliant work!
Read more…
All webmasters should strive for improving the performance of their website, and increasing their website’s security. If you’re looking for ways to increase your website’s performance and security, Jonas Krummenacher brings you five methods that are great options. Not only are they all relatively easy to implement, but they’ll also modernize your overall stack. Some of these technologies are still in the process of being globally adopted; however, as demand increases, so will compatibility. Thankfully, there are ways to implement some of the technologies for browsers that support them, while falling back to older methods for browsers that do not.
Read more…
HTTPS is a must for every website nowadays: Users are looking for the padlock when providing their details; Chrome and Firefox explicitly mark websites that provide forms on pages without HTTPS as being non-secure; it is an SEO ranking factor; and it has a serious impact on privacy in general.
Read more…
