Is Your WordPress 404 Page Killing Traffic & Drinking Your SEO Juice?

by Joe Foley May 23^rd, 2013 Leave a comment

A 404 page is the error page that users see when the page they’re looking for is not at the URL they’ve landed on. Some 404 pages are creative, some are useless, and some don’t even exist at all.

Users might land on a 404 page for various reasons – the page has been moved or deleted, they’ve followed a badly constructed link, or they may have typed in the wrong URL.

“Not Found” pages are more than just a nuisance, however, they may be losing you both visitors and SEO juice as well.

Is Your 404 Page Hurting You?

Community, News

The WordPress Planet Has Been Replaced

by Sarah Gooding May 22^nd, 2013 4 Responses

The WordPress Planet news feed is in some serious need of revamping. In our recent post “The WordPress Planet is Pants – and here’s how to improve it”, James pointed out what everyone was already thinking.

The WordPress Planet has been cluttered with irrelevant content for a long time. As no initiatives to improve it have been made known, the folks at WPLift has taken it upon themselves to create “A Better Planet,” a feed that includes WordPress news sources based on merit and relevance.

Introducing: A Better Planet

Miscellaneous, Tutorials

Getting help: Useful For Users or Waste of Space?

by Raelene Wilson May 22^nd, 2013 2 Responses

Let’s say you’ve just installed WordPress for the first time and you’re a bit confused about the admin area. What are posts as opposed to pages? Is the tools section the same as the settings section?

It’s easy for newbies to feel just a little bit overwhelmed. So what do you do? You click on the help drop down menu, of course. You know the one, it’s in the top right hand corner? You click it and it drops down and there’s text and stuff…? Yeah, I haven’t used it either.

News, Tutorials

The All New Post Formats in WordPress 3.6

by Raelene Wilson May 21^st, 2013 9 Responses

Post formats are set to get a major shake up in version 3.6 of WordPress.

And it will be hard to miss them – post formats will be smack bang above the editor, all in a neat row of large icons.

Community, Miscellaneous

Something is Rotten in the State of WordPress

by James Farmer May 21^st, 2013 15 Responses

To the vast majority, WordPress is the poster-child of the open source world.

With over 65 million sites worldwide, 52% of the top 100 blogs on the web and ~17% of the top million websites out there, it’s the ultimate tale of how a community driven project with a open source free-for-all GPL2 license can beat the big boys and take over the web.

It’s full of derring-do, us vs. them, the open internet versus the proprietary, and personal ownership vs. third party dependence – it’s a lesson in what happens if you ‘do the right thing’.

Mullenweg looking in no way at all like big brother...

Tutorials

Protecting WordPress from Dangerous Clients

by Sarah Gooding May 20^th, 2013 2 Responses

One of the scariest things a developer can hear from a new client is the infamous claim: “I know just enough to be dangerous.” Translation: I don’t really know much but I sure love to tinker with things! This always puts up a little red flag in my mind. However, a seemingly harmless bit of tinkering can have disastrous consequences on a live website.

Plugins

Don’t Fall Prey to Hackers With This Super Secure Tip

by Joe Foley May 20^th, 2013 Leave a comment

As the WordPress platform becomes more and more popular, it also becomes a more popular target for hackers, like the surge in attacks that took place just a month ago.

Of course there are a number of very basic things you can do to help protect yourself:

Always update to the latest version of WordPress
Keep your theme(s) updated
Keep your plugins updated
Don’t use “Admin” as your administrator login
Use strong passwords

Plugins, Tutorials

Merge WordPress Tags Easily and Quickly for a Leaner, Better Site

by Joe Foley May 16^th, 2013 2 Responses

In a way, tags in WordPress are like categories. They are meant to group similar topics together in a way that makes them easily accessible (i.e. by clicking on a tag link and seeing all the posts marked with that descriptor).

The problem a lot of people run into is that they end up assigning too many tags to their posts. This defeats the purpose of tags. If you only end up with one or two posts with that tag, it hardly deserves its own “category.”