Genesis

Dec 07 2020

The 4 best plugins you need in 2021 for your WordPress website

If you’re a small business owner, then it’s likely you’ve heard of WordPress. What’s WordPress? It’s a content management system, that provides the user with a dashboard to modify and change their website. Because wordpress is a dynamic PHP website, the server side rendering allows changes on the front end to ‘call back’ any changes a user makes on the back end. The beauty of it, is once the site is setup, it’s completely attainable for marketers or business people to manage their own site without touching the codebase.

In fact 35% of the worlds websites run on WordPress, including these top international and Australian brands:

There are SO many plugins in the WordPress repository these days, and whether you are starting out or a seasoned user it can be overwhelming to know which plugins are worth having on your site and which aren’t benefiting your business enough to keep them installed.

Having alot of plugins installed on your site significantly slows your site speed down, and also increases the chance of having it break. So you want to operate with high quality plugins that are well maintained (my rule is if there isn’t an update at least every 3 months, do not use it) but also a minimal amount, with these two points in mind.

I am constantly looking for ways to reduce my website plugin dependency, and whilst a few are a work in progress, there are 5 plugins that as a developer or a user you absolutely MUST have in 2021.

1. Sucuri.

Sucuri is a cybersecurity company that specialises in WordPress security and they protect your site from ddos attacks, malware, hackers and bot traffic. When you install this plugin, all of your site traffic goes through their firewall, and all the malicious activity is blocked before they enter your website. This ensures your site has only real customers, and no bots or hackers. Does this slow down my site speed? No not at all, they use a CDN, which I use alongside WP Rocket anyway to increase site speed.

One of the un-sung benefits of Sucuri is that this provides more transparency in your google analytics regarding your website traffic. I mean 40k visitors in a month looks great, until you realise they were mostly bots and your site is now compromised. Do you want to spend hours, days trying to figure out why your site is broken? Thousna d of dollars in lost business? Yeah, i didn’t think so.

The best part is the Sucuri wordpress plugin is FREE to everyone, so even if you’re not transacting online, I cannot think of any reason as to why you wouldnt install this plugin. An absolute MUST for E Commerce merchants.

2. Antispam Bee

Antispam Bee blocks spam comments on your WordPress posts, and also helps keep your google ranking in tact by not having spammy comments and links to spell casters in your website. I’ve chosen Antispam Bee over Akisme t, purely because the Bee is free, and when you have a free plugin that does as good a job as a paid plugin, I’d always recommend the free one to keep costs down.

Spam comments don’t just look tacky, they fill your database with comments you don’t need or want, and if you allow these comments to continue then over time you are bulldozing your brand integrity as well as slowing your site down.

The backend options of Antispam Bee let you choose basic or advanced filters for spam protection such as trust commenters with Gravatars, trust approved commentors, and also to delete spam comments automatically after a period of time. You definitely want to have this, it will save you time and money later on.

3. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a well loved plugin in the WordPress community and for good reason. According to yoasts website, yoast will bring your more visitors, attract more visitors from social media, and increase your readers engagement. Sounds awesome right?

I use Yoast on my site, as well as client website to ensure each page has the right keywords to maximise its visibility in search engines, and I can tell you there is a big difference in the before and after, although the results take time – 6-8 weeks usually.

Heres what Yoast looks like under the hood. Each tab gives you tasks to work on to improve the keywords and readability of your site. Yoast is user friendly, and hugely popular because anyone can do it. The premium plan suggests popular search words and related keyphrases for you to add in, to increase your Google visibility.

It’s super easy to use, you won’t regret it.

4. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is the only paid plugin on this list, but it is SO worth it. WP Rocket is a caching plugin, that minifies all your CSS + JS files, lazyloads images, clears old d atabase files, and spins up your website through a CDN for faster loading time.

WP Rocket is $49 a year- but that is a small price to pay for the results. As you know, how quickly your site loads affects your google ranking. But, it also impacts on your user experience. If clients come to your site and it’s loading slowly, they are likely to leave and well we don’t want that. If you don’t believe me, here is a before and after of this site, after I analysed it through GTMetrix.

I did all of the above, plus I deleted any unused media files, and cut down my plugin usage to reduce lag time. I also deleted some JS scripts and JQuery scripts that came with my Genesis child theme, that I wasn’t using. Now, bear in mind it is very difficult to get an “A” score on GTmetrix, in fact I’ve never seen it. If anyone has, please link it in the comments below.

Dec 07 2020

Fix your broken wordpress site by troubleshooting plugin conflicts

Whether you are new to WordPress or a seasoned user, you have no doubt had some experience with WordPress plugin repository – the good the bad and the UGLY.

If you’re starting out on WordPress, you have most likely fallen into the “more is better” trap and installed every plugin that sounds great you can get your hands on. This is a very bad idea. I’ll attempt to explain why:

“More plugins equal more functionality, and also more opportunities for your site to break”
— Jane James

Why’s that? Each plugin is build and maintained by a different developer/company. This means they all have different code structures, and some are built on http1, and newer plugins support http2, some of them are built on HTML, and others HTML5, Some do not support CSS3 and so on. On top of this, these plugins are also developed for certain versions of PHP and WordPress. Installing so many plugins without reading the docs first and referring back to your owns sites versioning of PHP and WordPress, there is likely to be a conflict between two plugins who are targeting the same WordPress core hooks, which will usually result in your site going down, or breaking in some way.

So, if you find yourself in the unsavoury position of your WordPress site breaking or not functioning as it should, here’s a walkthrough on how to troubleshoot that. Note this is a beginners guide; we will not be diving into the theme files or showing you how to debug in WordPress, as that is more advanced and most definitely not for a WordPress user.

Checking plugin conflicts, using a plugin

After ranting on about how you shouldn’t just install plugin willy nilly, and how they can break your site I’m going to….ask you to install another plugin. LOL. Let’s do this.

1. Deactivate all your WordPress plugins. You can bulk deactivate them from the installed plugins menu like so:

2. Change your theme to the Twenty Twenty or Twenty Twenty one default theme.

By deactivating your current theme, we are excluding all of the files and functions that could be contributing to your site breaking, and my process of elimination, we will ascertain whether a plugin has broken your site or if it’s part of your theme files.

3. Install the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin in your plugin repository

Click on plugins, add new, and search for H ealth Check & TroubleShooting in the wordpress plugin repository. You can also download it here and upload the zip file.

4. Activate the plugin, and then navigate to ‘Tools’ and ‘Site health’

5. Click on the troubleshooting tab, and enter troubleshooting mode.

6. Check the warnings you are given in troubleshooting mode.

If there are none that are obvious, then navigate to the front end of your site and see if the error is happening. If it is, then move on to Step 7.

7. Reactivate the plugins, one by one and check the front end of your site until the error is reproduced.

This is tedious, but it’s likely we will find the plugin that is causing issues for you, or if the error is not happening then we will know it’s code in your theme files.

8. If you have found the plugin causing issues, delete it, and reinstall your theme.

Once your working theme is reinstalled and the plugin has been deleted, your site should be working perfectly! Congratulations! At this stage I would search and test an alternative plugin to the one that was causing issues, and if that is not an option, I would log a ticket with the plugin developer and ask them to assist you in figuring out why this plugin is breaking your site. They may or may not be able to get to the root of the issue, but most will be helpful and try to assist you in anyway they can.

9. If you have arrived at step 9, then there is an issue with one of your theme files.

Most likely your style.css file of functions.php file if you have been making edits to your child theme directly from the wordpress dashboard. If this is the case, you need to contact your hosting provider, and ask them to reinstall the latest backup of the site from when the site was working. If you’re unsure I would go 7 days back, reinstall the files and see if it is functioning properly.

So if you made it through this tutorial, and you gave this a go, please let me know in the comments how it worked out for you, or what additional steps you took to find the source of your site errors.

Aug 03 2020

Why I use the Genesis Framework

1. It has a high coding standard and is very well maintained.

Each release of Genesis solves not only bug fixes and compile errors that the development team have found, but also new features requested by the genesis community to make building web projects with Genesis easier. New releases of Genesis range from every few months to daily. You can view the changelog here.

From a professional standpoint, I know that when I run into development problems with Genesis, I have a variety of support options available. Those options range from logging a ticket with Studiopress, starting a thread in the community forum, or even reaching out to my personal mentor Bill Erickson who is arguably one of the best Genesis developers out there.

2. Its easier to keep your site updated

So a lot of agencies in Australia and around the world, pride themselves on building WordPress websites from scratch. To clarify, from scratch means using bare bones starter theme like BonesWP or Automattics underscores theme. It could also be your own customised starter theme such as Bill Erickson’s genesis child.

Now there are huge pros and cons to both development strategies, and sometimes using an existing child theme to build a site with a lot of custom functions and plugins is like trying to squash a square peg into a round hole. In these cases, then no doubt a custom theme is required. And the project cost is definitely reflective of the amount of work done.

However, if you build a custom site then you need to be prepared for ongoing costs to maintain the site in the form of debugging and code updates. Because in a nutshell, a custom theme that is not maintained is essential a deprecated web app, and there are going to be issues over time. You wouldn’t refuse to update the ios on your phone now would you?

You should apply the same mentality to a custom site build.

For small businesses and smaller budget projects, having the Genesis parent theme updated regularly squashes a lot of these issues, and means a business without much of an ongoing maintenance budget can have an update site with each Genesis release.

3. There are many ways to skin the genesis cat

The term “WordPress development” can encompass many things, from customising existing child themes, building a starter theme, building plugins, maintaining plugins and so on.

And within the first category you can build a website with:

no code using an extensions such as the Beaver Builder
you can use and modify a purchased Genesis child theme by altering the stylesheet and functions.php file
you can use the Genesis sample theme and import the demo content as a base
or use your own starter theme
You can build a site with Gutenberg and style the blocks
You can call in a variety of widget areas and use raw html
You can use Genesis simple hooks to hook in your markup to specific areas
You can create custom blocks with ACF and style them in SCSS.

This list isn’t exhaustive, and I’m sure there are cross combinations of these that can be applied too. The point here, is that Genesis is accessible to people from all levels of experience, and there are options for you even if you’re just starting out.

4. There are Genesis dedicated extension plugins to help you

Whether you are a seasoned developer who wants to save time or a newbie who is less comfortable editing your functions.php file, there are an array of Genesis plugins with additional functionality to make your development process feature rich without a lot of effort. Studiopress has a library of plugins you can checkout here. Certainly, starting out the Genesis simple hooks plugin certainly assisted in learning which actions and filter hooks applied to each page section, and that has been incredibly helpful.

5. Its easier to use Genesis for all your projects than jump around from one them to another

The phone call that fills me with dread is the one where a client has a third party theme and page builder that was used to build their site, and now they want changes to their site. Ugh. Every theme is built so differently, and it can take you a whole day to get your head around how the site was built and figure out the file ecosystem. Plus some third party page builders are horribly slow and very limited in functionality.

This is a problem because website changes are usually a small job, but suddenly the client wants functions and customisations that aren’t possible with their current setup. So I then find myself explaining it will cost significantly more, and usually we end up looping back to the available functions and making compromises to get the result. This all adds to unforeseen development hours, and at this stage I haven’t made any money on this job, and both the client and myself are unhappy.

Staying with one framework like Genesis, means you get to know the ecosystem and whether it is built this way or that, you are familiar and can make changes fairly easily without pulling your hair out.