MainWP Blog - Sebastian Moran

Keeping your client sites’ wp-admin clean from extra admin menu items and dashboard widgets can be a pain to have to clean up. There is an easy to use plugin called Ultimate Dashboard. After you have installed and activated the plugin it will add a new menu; Ultimate Dashboard The Ultimate Dashboard plugin includes a massive number of options from admin menu editor, changing which admin dashboard widgets show or are hidden. You can even white-label the admin to make Continue reading the post...

Having reliable site emails is something that can be a major pain to deal with. Luckily there is a new plugin from the makers of FluentCRM and FluentForms. The new plugin is called FluentSMTP and using the plugin will fix the issue of having reliable site emails. After installing and activating the FluentSMTP plugin it will add a new sub-menu item; Settings > FluentSMTP FluentSMTP includes integrations with a wide range of transactional email providers such as SendGrid, Sendinblue, SparkPost, Continue reading the post...

Clean theme options are really useful when you dealing with changing a theme on an existing site or using a clean theme for a new site build for a client. One of the more recent clean themes is Kadence. The free version of the Kadence theme includes a huge range of features, whilst the premium version addon for the Kadence theme expands on those features with even more options. Some of the Kadence Pro addon features include header addon, hooked Continue reading the post...

Lazy-loading site images are one of the easiest ways to improve the perceived site load times as well as improving the customers’ or users’ experience on the site. WordPress added a lazy-loading feature enabled by default in the 5.5 release. There are a number of solid plugin options for WordPress and those plugins include additional features like image optimization and free CDN integration. Optimole is a plugin and service that we have covered before but it does cover lazy-loading. The Continue reading the post...

With the new year upon us and having a forward focus in 2021 now would be a good time to look at new security plugin options for your child sites. One of the newer plugin options for a security plugin is SecurityWP. The plugin includes a number of very useful security features and a very easy to use settings UI. After you have installed and activated the SecurityWP plugin on your site it will add a new menu item to; Continue reading the post...

With 2021 a few days away it seems about right to include some of the most useful posts over the last 12 months on the MainWP blog. Five of the most useful posts from 2020 cover subjects related to WordPress major versions like 5.6 and 5.5. How to disable the auto-updates opt-in feature that was added in WordPress 5.5 for plugins and themes. With the last post covering how to use Statically to get some decent performance gains on your Continue reading the post...

This holiday season two of the hardest to purchase tech products have been the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X/S. Major retailers have been struggling to deal with issues like their e-commerce sites crashing or creating errors on cart or checkout or having to turn cart and checkout off on the sites or adding default pages in place of product pages to cope with the demand of customers and scalper bots. We are going to deal with one of Continue reading the post...

The newest version of WordPress version 5.6 was released on the 8th of December. Some of the new features and changes added in the 5.6 release relate to block patterns in the block editor, a new default theme, application password, better video captioning, and PHP 8.0 support. To disable the application passwords feature in WordPress you can use this code snippet; add_filter( 'wp_is_application_passwords_available', '__return_false' ); The reason you might need to disable the application password feature in WordPress is that Continue reading the post...

Protecting your site from brute-force attacks, limiting login attempts, limit login errors from showing can be a pain to deal with on your child sites. There is a very recent plugin called GuardGiant which handles a whole number of those security features all in one easy to use plugin. After you have installed and activated the GuardGiant plugin it will add a new admin menu; GuardGiant > Settings GuardGiant > Whitelists GuardGiant > Captcha In the captcha settings of the Continue reading the post...

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up very soon one of the easiest ways to improve the front-end load times on your sites is to make sure that all site images have been optimized. There is a pretty recent new service and plugin for WordPress called CompressWP. After you have installed and activated the plugin it will add a new menu called; CompressWP CompressWP will be able to optimize JPG and PNG images which are two of the most Continue reading the post...