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Our blog deals with page speed optimization, page loading, web performance, WordPress tutorials, PHP code wrangling, JavaScript tutorials and code snippets. Our web insights series allow designers and developers to discover the latest and most significant stories on the web, while sipping a hot coffee.

Monday, June 24, 2024

An Extreme Approach to Speeding Up WordPress

This tutorial applies to a specific use case: WordPress as a minimal CMS, highly optimized for SEO.

Friday, July 14, 2023

How to Generate Quality Leads From Facebook

This is a guest post from 4Property, a leading provider of technology and market intelligence services for estate agents and…

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Google Pagespeed Insights vs GTmetrix vs SpeedFactor: Which One Is Better?

Google Pagespeed Insights, GTmetrix and SpeedFactor are all great tools to help identify speed related issues and fix them. All…

Friday, June 24, 2022

How to Optimize WordPress’ Native Settings for Performance

WordPress comes with default settings and options, suitable for blogging. Part of the “Decisions, not options” philosophy, they might not…

Thursday, July 7, 2022

How To Update Your WordPress Plugin From GitHub in 2020

I have coded three of these before, but I have finally coded and optimized the perfect one. A GitHub plugin…

Thursday, July 7, 2022

How to Upgrade Your GitHub API Authentication

If you’ve been getting lots of email notices when using GitHub API calls related to: Deprecation notice for authentication via…

Tuesday, November 7, 2023

Work-From-Home Office Setup Inspiration for Coders & Developers

Minimalistic or grandiose? Or cluttered? What’s your preference when working from home? As most of us have been forced to…

Thursday, June 23, 2022

How to Work Remotely: Practical Tips

😎 These tips are obviously biased and focused on developers. Home Office Designate a room as your office. This helps…

Friday, May 3, 2024

How Not to Get Affected by Google Algorithm Updates

It’s common sense. I’ve heard a lot of complaining from SEOs who have sites that have plummeted over the past…

Thursday, May 1, 2025

How Many Assets Should a Website Have?

How Many JavaScript Files Should a Website Have? A maximum of four. And I would still argue that is too…

Thursday, May 1, 2025

Why Is Web Page Size Important?

As of 2021, web page size is the most important factor to measure, as the bigger a page is, the…

Thursday, May 1, 2025

Plugins Slow Down Your WordPress Site

“There’s a plugin for that” is a long-time notion in the global WordPress community. It’s a very positive example of…

Thursday, March 3, 2022

10 PHP functions and code snippets to work with dates

Get current time, formatted This is a super basic function, takes no parameters and returns the current date. Format a…

Thursday, May 1, 2025

How to Improve DNS Lookup Time

There are two major issues when it comes to DNS lookup times: 1. Number of external requests A complex website…

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Estimated Reading Time in Web Design

Users don’t read (more than 18%) About 11 years ago, Jakob Nielsen wrote an “Alertbox” titled How little do users read?.…

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Why Growth Hacking? How Product and Marketing are Directly Correlated

This is a guest post by Casey Armstrong. It’s 7am. You roll over and grab your phone to start checking on…

Saturday, October 12, 2019

How do you struggle with blog growth?

Hundreds of thousands of blogs are on the internet now, and most likely there are many in your own industry,…

Thursday, May 1, 2025

17 Tips for Emailing a Cold List Without People Hating You

OK, so you have this large, “targeted” email list. So you say to yourself: “Self, I’ve got this list of…

Saturday, October 12, 2019

How do you identify trustworthy businesses/clients to work with?

Primarily as a freelancer or contractor, what criteria do you have for identifying trustworthy companies to work with? For instance,…

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

An Unnamed Project – A Technical SEO and Performance Auditing Tool

I’ve been working on a super secret project in the past weeks, a technical SEO and performance auditing tool. The…

Friday, August 21, 2020

Tiny WordPress

Tiny WordPress – tinywp.php – is a quick (but not dirty) PHP script which auto-installs WordPress on any host. Just…

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

How to Migrate bbPress to Mingle Forum

I’ve recently taken over a WordPress website, having a combination of bbPress and BuddyPress. Not my cup of tea, although…

Monday, July 8, 2019

Convert Hex2RGBA For Your CSS Selectors

I’ll just leave this here. It’s an old piece of code I used for a theme, where users selected a…

Monday, December 16, 2024

How to Code the Ultimate Landing Page For SEO and Conversions

🐻 Bear with me. I know it sounds like link bait, but it’s not. It’s true. I’ll prove it with…

Monday, July 8, 2019

Google AI – Making Google Think You Have the Best Site

I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day about how Google ranks a site. His idea was…

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

From Web Development to Growth Hacking

I pivoted. I stopped doing freelance web development and started focusing on an older side project of mine, growth hacking…

Monday, June 24, 2024

Deconstructing Neil Patel’s WordPress SEO Article

I’ve recently had an article from Neil Patel land in my inbox. The title was link-baity enough to make me…

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

How to post to Slack using a third-party script

Or Google Tag Manager, whichever is handier. Here’s a short snippet of code I used to use to notify my…

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

How to Install WordPress Plugin Dependencies

This is a lightweight alternative to TGM Plugin Activation class, which is currently the best way to require and recommend…

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

9 Innovative Ways to Improve Your Product Photos

If you want to examine an online product, you can’t just pick it up off the shelf. On top of…

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

11 Navigation Tips for Smoother Sailing on Your Site

There’s no limit to how good your navigation can be — there’s no risk to it being too comprehensive, too…

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Why SEOs Need to Stop Saturating the Web with Content

Ever since I started working in the SEO/SEM industry, the mantra I would say I have heard the most is…

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

How and Why I Removed IE11 Support From Our Product

Developing a product from scratch takes a lot of compatibility code, code maintenance, cross-browser testing and user testing. Building a…

Monday, June 24, 2024

West Cork Dream Properties

I have recently finished the third iteration of West Cork’s estate agents and valuers site for Charles McCarthy. After almost…

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

The Journey to PHP 7

I have updated my free WordPress plugins to PHP 7+ and removed support for anything lower than that. I decided…

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

About WordPress Forks, b2, b3 and Future Projects

A lightweight CMS, based on WordPress pre-5.0, with no bloated code, no external resources, no extra JavaScript libraries, no JavaScript…

Monday, June 24, 2024

Product Sans

What is Product Sans? The new Google logo and identity system was developed by creating a custom, geometric sans serif…

Sunday, September 30, 2018

How to Build an Awesome Pricing Table/Matrix Using HTML/CSS

Here’s a quick sample of an awesome pricing table/matrix I built a while ago for a service that’s no longer live.…

Friday, September 28, 2018

Do You Really Need Wordfence (Apache Edition)

Nope! What you need is an up-to-date WordPress, up-to-date plugins, the latest server software, a bit of common sense and a…

Friday, June 24, 2022

Cache & Compress Your WordPress Site Without a Plugin

WordPress caching and compression is mostly common sense. If you have a powerful caching solution on your server, and you…

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

How to Code an Assistance Request Plugin for WordPress

Internal, client-oriented plugins are mostly used by maintenance agencies. They supply a plugin to their clients, allowing them to submit…

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Cross-browser CSS object-fit

June 2021: I have updated the CSS rules to remove IE11 support. My latest project required a cross-browser cover video.…

Saturday, September 22, 2018

2018 Blog Awards Ireland

Guess what? getButterfly is a finalist for the 2018 Blog Awards Ireland in the Business Blog > Digital & Tech category.…

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

ASP.NET Header Cleanup, HSTS Implementation and Browser Security

Here's how to improve the security of an ASP.NET powered web site, with no access to the underlying code (controllers…

Thursday, May 9, 2024

gbRichEdit5

gbRichEdit5 is a rich text editor plugin for jQuery, easy to attach to HTML textarea elements. It creates the most basic…

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

roo! Framework Development and Future Plans

The roo! Framework plugin for WordPress has been discontinued. Here’s a bit of history. The plugin is a mix of three…

Monday, April 28, 2025

What Makes WordPress a Good SEO Tool?

Check out my latest WordPress Dublin presentation, regarding search engine optimization using my CMS of choice, WordPress. Read more here.…

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

WordPress Primary Category

Set a primary category for your (custom) posts and query them in your template using native WordPress queries. This plugin…

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