MainWP Blog - Archives

In this month’s Q&A, we visit with Kathy Zant, a long time geek who started creating websites with Active Server Pages. Kathy is the Director of Marketing at StellarWP. When she isn’t wrangling WordPress products, she loves hanging out with her husband, her dog, and fosters kittens. What is your WordPress origin story? I actually started developing data-driven sites before it was cool to do so. Active Server Pages and SQL Server, but moved to PHP/MySQL around 2000 for my Continue reading the post...

The WebP image format is commonly supported in most major browsers, and in most cases, the images can be smaller than the original JPG format file. WebP images are about 30% smaller than PNG and JPEG images at equivalent visual quality. WordPress 6.1 introduced the WebP image generation feature. But, if you don’t want to use natively, you can easily disable it using a code snippet and the CDN at the edge, such as Cloudflare or the locally generating plugin Continue reading the post...

In today’s roundup, we are going to discuss the end of an era, what’s new for Gutenberg in WordPress 6.1, the new WordCamp Accessibility checklist, the Great Plugin Data Saga, and how you can apply for a diversity scholarship for WordCamp Asia. You ready to ride? Giddy up. End of PHP 7.4: what it means for enterprise WordPress It is the end of an era. PHP 7.4 was released November 28, 2019. As of November 28, 2022, it will reach Continue reading the post...

Wordfence is a security plugin that can help protect your site. The database tables that the Wordfence plugin uses should be checked for size as part of regular maintenance checks on the site’s database. Wordfence plugin uses many database tables, which were covered before in this article. Below is the Wordfence database table to regularly check for the size; wp_wfHoover You can use a plugin such as WP-Optimize to check the database size. With the plugin installed and active in Continue reading the post...

Every year Orbit Media Studios led by Andy Crestodina runs a blog survey. The first survey was run in 2014 so they have been hosting this survey for almost 10 years. Recently, the 2022 Blog Statistics was released.  In my mind, I see the MainWP Web Care Survey as something that can be hosted every year like the Orbit Media Studios Blog Statics survey.  Original research is a hallmark of good content marketing. I thought we could do a survey Continue reading the post...

Some unmanaged hosts provide cPanel on their hosting plans, or you might have some client sites hosted on a VPS with cPanel. cPanel includes many performance options built-in and supported that you may not be aware of. Make sure that server-side compression of assets is enabled in cPanel this will use the mod_deflate module in Apache. You can select to have all content compressed or specify which MIME type should be compressed. Smaller site assets being server-side compressed will improve Continue reading the post...

WordPress 6.1 is scheduled to be released on the 1st of November and contains many feature improvements. Database queries made using WP_Query will now be cached by default in WordPress 6.1. To disable caching globally on query improvements (extreme case), use this code snippet; function disable_caching( $wp_query ) {    $wp_query->query_vars['cache_results'] = false; } add_action( 'parse_query', 'disable_caching' ); Also, in the WordPress 6.1 release, new cache checks are being added to the site health, and a new filter was added so Continue reading the post...

Earlier this year, I started the Messaging Matters Show. I believe, you know, that your business message matters. I did a YouTube show a few years ago called Copychat. It was fun, but it was lots of work, and I was not very good at video editing. I recorded the show, uploaded it, and I had a little introduction. This time I decided I would do my YouTube show as a livestream. I felt there were advantages to doing the Continue reading the post...

GridPane is an easy-to-use and reasonably priced service to self-manage servers. GridPane supports Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, Amazon Lightsail, UpCloud, and a custom VPS. GridPane makes it simple to create WordPress sites that are highly performant and optimized for solid WordPress performance. In this example, we use a free core account on GridPane to create and manage a server to host a WordPress site. The free core account will use an NGNIX server stack with server-side caching and Redis object Continue reading the post...

In this month’s WordPress roundup we discuss superfans, the history of page builders, and deceptive marketing practices. Buckle up. Let’s ride. Let’s Ride WordPress succeeds by embracing the superfans, not dismissing them masterwp.com/wordpress-succeeds-by-embracing-the-superfans-not-dismissing-them Rob Howard from MasterWP wrote a nice article comparing some decisions by Automattic to abandoning superfans. He makes a very valid point. The article starts with the drama around removing the chart that showed data about free plugins and their popularity. You may remember that happening in Continue reading the post...