WordPress

How to optimize your WordPress hosting – 9+ practical tips

Isn’t it true that, when you (start to) develop WordPress websites for clients, and you host them yourself, you find yourself in a situation where you need to know a lot about β€œstuff” other than WordPress development? In this optimizing WordPress hosting post, I provide 9+ practical tips for you, to improve WordPress hosting performance. Especially useful if you plan to develop and host WordPress websites yourself.

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17+ Useful WordPress snippets

Here are 17+ valuable WordPress snippets for site-specific plugins and functions.php to provide you a better WordPress experience. Enhance your WordPress site with these small PHP snippets: WordPress filters, actions and functions. Quickly add or extend the functionality you need for your WordPress website! Read on…

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How to add conditional analytics tracking code in WordPress Multisite

In my WordPress multisite, I use one theme for three sites and a tracking code for analytics on my websites. Whether it is Google Analytics or Piwik doesn’t matter. Here is how you can conditionally add tracking codes to your WordPress Multisite: Use a condition in functions.php to add the tracking code for Piwik/Matomo Analytics or Google Analytics.

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My WordPress web.config

Do you host your WordPress website on Windows Server IIS? And are you having trouble with your web.config? I often receive questions about how to use a web.config file in WordPress on Windows Server, and which settings are important for a WordPress site. Maybe it’s because I’m a WordPress on Windows Server IIS enthusiast, so here is my web.config for your convenience (really, it’s not that special).

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Disable WordPress comments (how-to)

The WordPress comment system can be a bless for your blog, because of the user interaction. However, when the WordPress comment option is abused by spammers, it becomes a real pain in the “@ss”. With thousands spam reactions, disabling -and removing- WordPress comments is the only way to go. Here is how to disable WordPress comments in both the WordPress Dashboard interface and in your MySQL database.

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Display commas in WordPress tags

How to use a tag with a comma in it in WordPress? Normally, in WordPress all tags are comma seperated: php, wordpress, website, functions.php. But what if you need to use a tag with commas in it? For instance “cafe, bar, restaurants”. Easy, create a filter in your WordPress functions.php, and here is how…

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Send authenticated SMTP email over TLS from WordPress

How to configure TLS for SMTP email in WordPress. I was suprised WordPress is not able to send email using an SMTP server out-of-the-box. Not to mention using authenticated SMTP or TLS transport for security. A quick Google search showed me multiple plugins to handle this, but I wanted to create something myself. Here is how to override the wp-mail() function and send email using authenticated SMTP and StartTLS from WordPress.

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Minify JavaScript, CSS and compress images

Optimizing, minify and compressing JavaScript and CSS files, the easy and fast way? With YUI Compressor on the Windows-, Linux- and macOS command line of course! Compacting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can speeds up your website because of smaller and faster downloads, parsing, and execution time.

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WordPress wp_options table autoload micro-optimization

Learn how to add an index and optimize WordPress’ wp_options table for faster database results. This probably isn’t a big issue, but today I noticed a slow MySQL query coming from a WordPress database (WordPress wp_options table). This made me investigate and to optimize the WordPress wp_options table “autoload” feature. The autoload feature loads and caches all autoloaded options, if available, or all options. The default option is to autoload, and over time when the wp_options table grows, this degrades performance.

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Install WordPress plugins without WP-admin access

Install WordPress plugins without admin access, and automate your WordPress customization and plugin installation. WordPress has a little drop-in plugin option available in the form of /wp-content/install.php. This install.php file is not present at default, but when created it can be used to install plugins without wp-admin access. This might come in handy for unattended WordPress installations, customization, and so on.

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