Clients often ask me about how they can make their site faster. If you do a Google Search, you’ll find endless articles on the topic, and in general if you follow their advice you can eek out a few seconds of reduced load time.

The truth is, on most of sites that I work on, the quickest, easiest, and most dramatic way to speed up your site is to upgrade your web host. This is especially true if you have a shared server on one of the “budget” web hosts. [Read more…]

If you updated to the latest version of WordPress (4.9.8), you might have noticed a big message at the top. My wife says those are always a little scary and she delegates them to me, and I wanted to check in with you all to make sure you have a little roadmap to navigate new changes.

A new editing experience called Gutenberg is on its way to WordPress. It’s quite the change from what you’re used to and may significantly impact your blog. Read on for more details. [Read more…]

In the 4.7.4 release of WordPress (May 2017), a new feature was added that changes the code behind any link you use that opens in a new tab. As a security precaution, these links will no longer send along their origin when clicked (ie, your site, known as the referrer). This is done by adding the code rel=”noopener noreferrer” automatically to these links. This change was reverted to just rel=”noopener” in 4.9, but noreferrer is now been put back with the release of WordPress 5.0.

This might be a problem with your Amazon affiliate links, because the program policies & guidelines state that Amazon needs to know where the link originated from. Also – this prevents the destination site from knowing where the link came from – meaning your site is not getting all the credit it deserves for referral traffic in Google Analtyics. [Read more…]