MainWP Blog

I enjoy the ability to meet people online. There is very little like bonding with someone on Twitter or Facebook because of WordPress, content, or love for a sport. The person may be hundreds of miles away or on a different continent, but ultimately we can see how small this world is sometimes. Such is the case with Ben Townsend. I met him on Twitter last year. One thing I really appreciate about Ben, aside from his love for WordPress, Continue reading the post...

If you are looking for a very lightweight plugin to help improve your site performance. The PhastPress plugin is worth taking the time to check out. After you have installed and activated the plugin it will add a new sub-menu under settings in wp-admin; Settings > PhastPress The PhastPress plugin settings are broken down into plugin, Images and HTML, CSS and JS. The plugin includes image optimization using a free image optimization service API, being able to inline critical CSS, Continue reading the post...

Flying Images is a fairly recent plugin which by default will enable a lot of image-based gains for your child site. After you have installed and activated the plugin it will add a new sub-menu item under settings in wp-admin; Settings > Flying Images The tabs it will add are broken down as the following; Lazy load CDN Responsive Compression WebP The default lazy loading enabled is native and JavaScript. Native is only for supported browsers like Google Chrome at Continue reading the post...

Frustration. Have you ever been frustrated by working with clients? They don’t follow your instructions. Maybe they just aren’t technically savvy enough.  Getting feedback can be a struggle. Consider what Vito Peleg told me last year, We tried everything from creating elaborate spreadsheets, long google docs, video tutorials, project management systems and so on. It became clear that the available solutions, while great for our side, were rarely followed by the clients. They were too complex and bloated. Vito set Continue reading the post...

Trust me when I say this, Facebook posting is an enigma for many of your customers. Some customers don’t use Facebook on their own, so they don’t care. This is a mistake as their customers are already on the platform, regardless the age. Facebook has over 2.5Billion users. They can’t dismiss it. Some customers are disinterested because they don’t use Facebook. Some are believers, and only believers in traditional marketing. Some are afraid to use it, and they will often Continue reading the post...

Jetpack is a well-used plugin on a number of sites and has over 5+ million active installs. But will all modules active it can cause extra requests on load as well as adding a number of extra external requests on load. When you uninstall the Jetpack plugin it will not remove any of the 108 created options that will be left in your sites options database table. You can search for the option_name which matches the following option name patterns; Continue reading the post...

A basic security change to make on your child sites is to change the WordPress database prefix. The default WordPress database prefix is normally wp_. An easy plugin to be able to change all of the database tables on a sites database as well as update the prefix table value in the sites wp-config.php is by using the Brozzme DB Prefix & Tools Addon plugin. After the plugin has been installed and activated it will add a menu item; Tools Continue reading the post...

When I worked for an agency, guess who got to do a lot of pre-launch and post-launch checklists for websites? You guessed it, me. That’s okay; I’m a stickler about getting all the boxes marked; however, over time, I learned others didn’t see the value. Anyway, we had some fairly mundane things to do, like making sure the timezone was correct, adding something for the website title in the settings. Something that would come up regularly was what to put Continue reading the post...

WooCommerce is a very heavily used plugin to turn your WordPress child site into a full eCommerce store. MainWP offers a very easy to use code snippets extension which makes it easy to run code snippets over all of the connect child sites. A couple of common of handy code snippets if you needed to temp disable all products from being purchasable on your child site you can use this code snippet; add_filter( 'woocommerce_is_purchasable', '__return_false'); You would then need to Continue reading the post...

I’ve been trying to do more videos for my business. One thing I’ve done is launch a Youtube show. In 2019 I experimented with some Facebook lives. Sometimes we just need to be comfortable being in front of the camera. Using video can be a huge help for our business. For example, recording or taking a pic of your screen or desktop can be helpful to our customers. Screencasting is something that benefits them and helps us stand out from Continue reading the post...