MainWP Blog

In this month’s World of WordPress we talk about the latest acquisitions by Automattic, Jeff Chandler’s move away from WP Tavern, the new Yoast Care program, development environments, and WP Beginner’s accelerator. Just like WordPress news, the summer has been hot! Let’s ride. Automattic acquires two companies Automattic continues to expand its influence by acquiring two companies in the past month. First, they acquired Tumblr in a move that got a lot of attention. I’m sure they have something in Continue reading the post...

Needing to use a staging site for testing client site updates is an essential practice. You do not want to send customers any site emails by accident since the site that has a staging site for testing had a membership or affiliate plugin active. To make sure emails are disabled on a staging site, use the Disable Emails plugin. The plugin has no settings and should disable site email on the staging site in most cases. One extra step to Continue reading the post...

We often call long-form content an ultimate guide. After all, who doesn’t want to read “The Ultimate Guide” to anything? The only problem is that these days we have a lot of those ultimate guides and often they are anything but. I’ll admit, every time I see a new “Ultimate Guide” of anything I roll my eyes. Why? Most of the time they aren’t worth the title Ultimate. If someone uses the word “ultimate,” I am expecting them to put Continue reading the post...

A few years ago, I ran a football (American) blog. I had a blast and probably made $100 total. Maybe. We talked about football in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where I lived at the time. One of my writers, I had a couple, asked me if I wanted us to do a podcast. I thought, “why not?” So, using Blog Talk Radio, we launched a live hosted podcast more like a sports radio show. We had people call in, and Continue reading the post...

Stream is a plugin from XWP which works, but compared to newer security audit plugins such as WP Activity Log, it is quite limited. Stream can also bloat the site database, depending on how long logs are being stored by. To  reset the database of entries that Stream has created, you can do so from wp-admin; Stream > Settings > Reset Stream Database When you deactivate and delete the Stream plugin, the two custom database tables that the plugin creates Continue reading the post...

Site image will be one of the heaviest assets on your child site. The easiest way to speed up a site is to have a CDN compress images when uploaded, and then have the CDN serve those site images for users of the site. One solid Image CDN which has an easy-to-use WordPress plugin is Gumlet. First, you will need to sign up for a Gumlet account. After you have signed and verified your account, you will need to setup Continue reading the post...

Today we are going to talk about three ways to make your WordPress consulting business easier. Notice I didn’t say easy. There is a difference. It isn’t easy to run a WordPress consulting business, but we can do some things that it more manageable. The next time you are feeling frustrated with your business, remember we aren’t in this alone. We all walk the same journey. Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels Getting clients You might put getting clients squarely Continue reading the post...

Jetpack provides a number of modules which can benefit the site it is connected to. But for Jetpack to be used, Jetpack needs to use a WordPress.com account to connect to your site. What does it mean for your site to be connected to WordPress.com to be able to use Jetpack? What is being copied over? Well, more than you’d think of the site database is being copied over to create a clone of your site on WordPress.com server. If Continue reading the post...

Hummingbird is a caching and performance plugin with over 70k active installs, but the plugin can cause issues and does not work well as a page caching plugins. The plugin deactivation in Hummingbird will not delete the advanced-cache.php drop in it adds, nor will it remove the constant added into your site wp-config.php. The file to remove if you no longer want to use Hummingbird and use another lightweight solution is; wp-cache.php in the wp-content/wphb-cache folder. You can delete the Continue reading the post...

Let me ask you a question. You might want to sit down for this. What do you call yourself? Are you a website designer? Are you a website developer? Maybe you refer to yourself as a digital marketer? We have a lot of titles for what we do here in this industry. You may refer to yourself as a freelancer or a freelance web developer. We can get hung up on names for what we do, but one this for Continue reading the post...