MainWP Blog - Tips & Tricks

It can be a pain to find out when the last time any of the installed plugins on your child site were last updated, but you may find yourself needing to. You would normally need to go to the plugin’s page on WordPress.org, then check the last updated section to see when the last time the plugin was updated on WordPress.org. Another way to search your installed plugins is to click on the developer tab of the plugin page on Continue reading the post...

WooCommerce is a well-used e-commerce plugin for WordPress. You may find yourself in the position of needing to easily add additional fields to the registration form on My Account on one of your child sites. Luckily, there is an easy way to add additional fields using Advanced Custom Fields. First, you will need to install and activate the ACF plugin on your child site. Next, you will need to create a group of the fields you want to display on Continue reading the post...

If you need a lightweight option for tracking content changes made directly into a site’s database, one plugin which can help is Better Detection. Better Detection is best used In the case where a site might have been hacked, or content for malware was inserted into a site. Once the plugin has been installed and activated, it will add a submenu in wp-admin on; Better Detection Settings The plugin will add two tabs for errors and options. The errors will Continue reading the post...

WordPress (by default) will load a number of assets on the front-end of your Child Site, which will slow it down by adding a number of requests for features you may not be using. Some of the requests that WordPress core adds on load include emojis, embeds, dashicons, jQuery migrate, XML-RPC, pingbacks, generator tag, short link, Windows live writer manifest tag, and the RSD generator. There is an easy-to-use plugin called Better Speed, which will allow you to disable those Continue reading the post...

Yoast SEO is a well-known, easy-to-use plugin for SEO. Yoast SEO has a number of code snippets that can be saved to limit or disable specific functions. MainWP has an amazing extension for code snippets, which easily allows you to apply code snippets to your child sites. We have taken the time to save out a number of handy code snippets for Yoast SEO into the code snippets GitHub repo. A common bug in Yoast SEO is when you update Continue reading the post...

Gravity Forms is a solid, easy-to-use form plugin which has a number of add-ons and free plugins. Gravity Forms has a number of filters, actions, and hooks which allow you to modify most parts, using code snippets. MainWP has an easy-to-use extension for code snippets, so you can save a code snippet to any connected child site. The first of the useful code snippets for Gravity Forms is to change the default save and continue function in Gravity Forms, from Continue reading the post...

Security plugins on your child site can help find security issues and help block specific users, but one thing to be aware of is security plugins which end up causing serious performance issues. One such security plugin is Cerber Security, which has been known to cause performance issues on sites. Ceber Security plugin will end up making a number of request to plugin files, as well as causing high CPU usage, due to the amount of PHP resources that it Continue reading the post...

WooCommerce is a solid, easy-to-use plugin for adding e-commerce to an existing WordPress site. Since WooCommerce is running in WordPress, it means there are many plugin options out there. One useful plugin is WooCommerce Customer History. The plugin will track how customers browse the site, which would allow you to see the products customers are browsing. But when used on a site, the plugin will add a slow admin-ajax.php POST request on every page, which will add a delay of Continue reading the post...

Mailchimp is a solid provider for sending out email campaigns. Mailchimp recently made a change to expand out as a full service, all-in-one marketing platform, which means the pricing will increase, as Mailchimp will include the number of users who unsubscribed on a list to the total count. There is a solid alternative to Mailchimp, which also includes reasonable pricing at all list count levels, EmailOctopus. EmailOctopus uses AWS SES to send out emails, which means email campaigns are reliable Continue reading the post...

VaultPress is a backup plugin, built by Automattic. VaultPress can also cause the site installation to bloat the database for postmeta and option entries. Some of the examples of the bloat will be in these option names, created by the plugin; vaultpress vaultpress_allow_forwarded_for vaultpress_service_ips_external_cidr _vp_ai_ping _vp_config_post_meta_name_ignore _vp_config_should_ignore_files _vp_current_scan _vp_signatures The option name which can cause the most issues is _vp_ai_ping. On some sites, _vp_ai_ping  has entries which have been known to bloat the site’s options database table with 300-500MB of Continue reading the post...