Web Performant WordPress
In January, I interviewed Kyle Simpson on Episode 4 the ATX Web Show. We discussed Web Performance and Google’s plan to “Make the Web Faster”. Since then, Google has announced they will start rewarding your site’s page speed. And in their Webmaster Tools they hint that the bar is set at ~1.4 seconds.
80% of the time users wait for a web page is because of the frontend.
Web Performant
I was sort of thunderstruck with fear. Although we always strive for better, I typically found a 3-5 second page load great and up to 7 seconds acceptable. After recording the show, I stayed up a few hours that night fiddling with The ATX Web Show and increased site performance by ~500%1.
Since seeing those results, I only think about Web Optimization. I see the web in milliseconds now. If you’re like me and never considered optimization a necessity maybe now is the time to re-evaluate that. And don’t act like this isn’t your problem because 80% of the time users wait for a webpage is because of the frontend2. The goal isn’t to fit under some imaginary kilobyte threshold, the goal is to make sure that everything is as small as possible. Reduce Filesizes, Reduce Requests, and Enable Caching.
10 useful new WordPress hacks
WordPress is the platform of choice for most bloggers, and WordPress hacks is one of the most popular topics on CatsWhoCode. This is why I’ve decided to compile 10 new and extremely useful hack for WordPress.
Optimizing WordPress
Remove comments autolinks
If someone leaves a comment containing a url, the url will be automatically transformed to a link by WordPress. This can be useful, but personally I don’t like to see many links in comments, especially when they’re a bit spammy.
Top Social Bookmarking WordPress Plugins
Writing for a website used to be simple where all you need to do is produce high quality articles and your site will usually be noticed, rewarding you with a good amount of traffic and eyeballs. However, this could be an expiring ideology. Today, without a good amount of social marketing effort, chances are people will not come across your website because you are basically free from acknowledgment.
Social Bookmarking WordPress Plugins
To be fair, not everyone is a social media genius but there are definitely tips and tricks to utilize social marketing tool on your website and blog to increase attention for your articles.
It is pretty common to see sharing and voting buttons of Facebook, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon or others social marketing tool in a website. If you are yet to have any of these install in your website, you are potentially missing out tremendous amount of traffic your website may deserve. However, these buttons are not magic buttons.
Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines
So, you have this amazing WordPress site, but for some reason the search engines just don’t show you much love.
Optimizing WordPress
You post killer content, make it easy for users to share via their social networks, and people are subscribing to your RSS feed, indicating that they’re like what they’re reading. If you’ve tried everything to drive traffic to your website, and search engines still ignore your site, maybe you need to evaluate how search engine friendly your website is.
In this article, I will go over a few steps you should take to optimize your WordPress installation for search engines. While WordPress has good SEO features out of the box, these tips will help you maximize your search engine results while also making sure your site is the best it can be.
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How to Customize the WordPress Admin Area
WordPress is one of the best CMSs out there — if not the best (but of course, I’m biased because I’m a WordPress fanatic). It has loads of handy features that make site administration a breeze. WordPress is a publishing platform with a comment system, a GUI for creating, editing and managing posts and pages, handy built-in tools like the “Export” feature to back up your content, user roles and permissions, and more.
WordPress Admin Area
But how much of these features do we really use? Though already simple and user-friendly by default, we might want to customize the WordPress Admin interface to make it even simpler and more manageable for our clients, our co-authors, and ourselves.
Why Customize the WordPress Admin Interface?
Lately, WordPress has reached phenomenally high usage rates. There are over 25 million publishers[1] who use WordPress, making it a popular publishing platform.