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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.
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…
How to Upgrade Your GitHub API Authentication
GitHub deprecated authentication via URL query parameters back in 2020, and developers who still rely on the access_token query string…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Tiny WordPress
Tiny WordPress – tinywp.php – is a quick (but not dirty) PHP script which auto-installs WordPress on any host. Just…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Product Sans
What is Product Sans? The new Google logo and identity system was developed by creating a custom, geometric sans serif…
How to Build an Awesome Pricing Table/Matrix Using HTML/CSS
Part of the CSS-Only Techniques guide. Here’s a quick sample of an awesome pricing table/matrix I built a while ago for…
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…
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…
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…
Cross-browser CSS object-fit
Part of the CSS-Only Techniques guide. June 2021: I have updated the CSS rules to remove IE11 support. My latest…
gbRichEdit5
gbRichEdit5 is a rich text editor plugin for jQuery, easy to attach to HTML textarea elements. It creates the most basic…
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…
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.
WordPress Primary Category
Set a primary category for your (custom) posts and query them in your template using native WordPress queries. This plugin…
Personal Livescore Development and Future Plans
The Personal Livescore plugin for WordPress has been discontinued. Here’s a bit of history. The plugin has been created years…
How to Find Malware in Your Server Files
This script will run and display all potential malware files in your selected directory path. Make a backup before deleting…
Google Sans
Updated on July 3d, 2019, and added the Google Fonts API URL. Google Sans (Product Sans) web font Google Sans…
Thoughts on WordPress
I need a fresh WordPress. I need a light WordPress. What would it take to fork WordPress and remove all…
WordPress SEO
Introduction WordPress is used on ~43% of the sites out there. WordPress is very easy to install and has very…
WordPress Management Checklist
I’ve been using this management checklist for my WordPress clients for more than 10 years, with various additions, changes, and…
Changing or Updating Your Version of PHP for WordPress
If you want to keep your website running smoothly and securely, it’s a good idea to change or update the…
Search for an element until found using JavaScript
A nice piece of code to use for A/B testing to look for a certain element every 50 milliseconds, execute…
Pure JavaScript tabbing functionality with linkable tabs
This script shows you how to create vanilla JavaScript tabs anywhere, physically linkable without any external JavaScript library. 305 bytes…
AJAX Request Using Vanilla JavaScript
This is how you create an AJAX request with optional GET parameters in JavaScript. Note that you need to be…
Plugin Spam, Plugin Adoption, Plugin Takeover
A recent Wordfence investigation brought up the fact that one of my plugins, Finance Calculator, has been taken over by…
PHP/MySQL Tutorials
Our PHP/MySQL tutorials and code snippets allow you to extend the power of your site. Our step by step PHP/MySQL…
WordPress Tutorials
Our WordPress tutorials allow you to extend the power of WordPress. Our step by step WordPress tutorials are easy to…
Switching from Debian to Ubuntu: Beginner’s Guide
I just switched my development server from Debian to Ubuntu. I decided to use Ubuntu 16.04, nginx 1.10, PHP 7…
How to Create/Move an SSL Certificate
Here's how to move an SSL certificate if you've never done it before. You need to reissue the certificate based…
How to personalize ownCloud | Quick guide
How to personalise ownCloud and remove the references, change the ownCloud logo and edit the header, footer and the slogan.
Branding, Marketing & Corporate Guidelines
Branding Guidelines Checklist Professionals know that a brand reaches its audience through many channels, and consistency of expression plays a…