SmartCrawl’s newest version release comes with an impressive new feature—support for Multilingual Readability.
Up to this point, the readability test in SmartCrawl could be used solely to calculate a score for posts or pages written in the English language.
Now, depending on what language you have set up in WordPress settings, SmartCrawl will use a different formula to calculate the readability score for a number of languages.
Our SEO analysis engine currently supports the following:
Czech
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Russian
Spanish
In this article, we’re going to take a look at this helpful new feature, and touch on a few related ones as well.
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:
Along with Multilingual Readability support, Post SEO Analysis will also support the above languages.
The Post SEO Analysis feature reads the page content and how it’s displayed in the frontend, then provides SEO recommendations based on the content added.
Having support for 7 languages will provide more accurate recommendations, as it uses different formulas for each one.
Let’s take a look at these settings in SmartCrawl.
Multilingual Readability
The key to learning is understanding. It’s not just about speaking in a language your audience comprehends; it’s presenting your words in a manner that is easily understood.
All of these indexes convert readability to a mathematical formula, indicating how well your readers can comprehend the text. Although the formulas differ, they consistently place heavy emphasis on these two factors: sentence length and word length.
SmartCrawl uses the Flesch-Kincaid Test. What is that exactly? Read on…
The Flesch-Kincaid Test
Lawyer, author, and writing consultant Rudolph Flesch advocated the use of phonics rather than sight reading to enable students to sound-out unfamiliar words, a method often called “look-say”.
Flesch penned many books, the most famous probably being “Why Johnny Can’t Read, and What You Can Do About It”.
In 1943, Flesch published a readability formula in his dissertation, “Marks of a Readable Style.” That formula, the Flesch Reading Ease index, was the original Flesch test.
Flesch’s work with the Associated Press helped bring the reading level of front-page newspaper stories down by five grade levels. Implementing this formula increased Publishers readership by 40% to 60%.
In 1976, the U.S. Navy commissioned J. Peter Kincaid and his team to recalculate the Flesch Reading Ease to help sailors absorb Navy training manuals faster and understand them better.
The resulting formula was the Flesch-Kincaid Test, which is now a standard for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Social Services Administration. In fact, many states now require insurance policies and other legal documents to weigh in at no higher than a 9th grade reading level on the Flesch Kincaid scale.
SmartCrawl’s Language Support
Now that we understand a bit more about readability and the test we use to evaluate it, let’s look at these features in SmartCrawl.
Once you install & activate (or update) SmartCrawl, you’ll be greeted by the splash screen, heralding the new Language Support features.
SmartCrawl Splash screen.
Navigate to your Posts or Pages content list, and you’ll see a new SEO Meta [+] link, above the classic WordPress actions menu.
SEO Meta in pages-posts list menu.
Click on the [+] to see some basic information about the post’s current SEO-optimized Title and Description. This includes colored indicators showing the character count for each.
Green highlights represent counts within the recommended range, while yellow highlights represent counts that fall outside of that.
SEO meta in Pages-Posts list menu expanded.
There are also a few new columns in the Post/Page list, as follows:
SEO – enable Page Analysis in SmartCrawl > Settings
Readability – enable Readability Analysis in SmartCrawl > Settings
Robots Meta – shows the index settings you have enabled for crawler instructions
Hover your mouse over the number indicator in the SEO column to reveal a quick overview of the recommendations SmartCrawl has for that page or post.
Readability SEO details.
If you prefer these columns don’t show on your screen, they can be toggled On/Off by clicking the Screen Options tab at the top of the WordPress dashboard. Simpy tick/untick the coordinating checkboxes. (Don’t forget to hit the Apply button to save your changes.)
WordPress screen options menu.
Additional SmartCrawl Settings
While we’re here, let’s look at a few more key features in SmartCrawl’s SEO toolbox.
In the editor screen (for any Post or Page), scroll to the bottom to access the SmartCrawl metabox.
There are four tabs available here. What you see depends on what you have enabled in SmartCrawl’s settings.These are:
SEO – customize the SEO Title and Description (that appear in search engine result pages), and run a full SEO analysis of your post.
Readability – the level of readability your content is for the average reader (determined by the Flesch-Kincaid test).
Social – customize a post’s OpenGraph elements for social network sharing.
Advanced – indexing, sitemap and automatic linking options for the post are found here.
We’ll look at each of these tabs a bit more in depth.
SEO Section
Under the SEO section, you’ll see a preview of how Google sees your post meta, with the Title at the top, followed by the post Permalink, then your post Description.
Click the EDIT META button to customize the title and description. Once again, the green underline means you’re within the desired length, while the yellow underline means you’re outside the ideal range.
Click the plus + icon to the right of either field to add dynamic data using the built-in macros from the dropdown menu. You can add as many as you like to mold the ideal structure and length for your title and description, including adding plain text to either field.
SEO meta data details.
SEO Analysis is at the bottom of the SEO section. (If it’s not showing, go into SmartCrawl settings and enable the option.)
Enter any focus keyword(s) in the text field, then click the REFRESH button to analyze the post for keywords.
SEO analysis of keywords.
You can repeat this process for as many keywords as you like, and adjust your post content accordingly to get the best keyword optimization results.
Keyword recommendations.
Click the arrow to the right of any Recommendation to see details for making improvements.
Keyword recommendation details.
There is even an option to stop getting a popup every time you run an analysis on something you know you’re not going to change. Simply click the IGNORE button on that suggestion.
Readability Section
This section allows you to manually run the Flesch-Kincaid Test.
Click the REFRESH button to see how well your post fairs for the average reader in the supported language. The ideal or target range is 70 and above.
Readability score from the Flesch-Kincaid test.
In this case, I’ve been given a 60. I should attempt to improve by clicking the arrow to the right of the Flesch-Kincaid Test, and adjusting according to the recommendations.
How to fix or ignore the Readability.
Note, you can also mute this by using the IGNORE button.
Social Section
Want your post Title, Description, or Featured Image(s) to be different when shared to social media?
No problem! Enable OpenGraph support for the post in the Social section, and configure the specifics you need for Title, Description, and Featured Images.
There is one for social networks in general (like Facebook), and one specific to Twitter.
Social section, with OpenGraph and Twitter options.
Advanced Section
In the Advanced section, you can adjust the indexing options for the post, should they differ from what you have set as the post type’s defaults (in SmartCrawl > Title & Meta).
These are the options:
Index – instruct search engines whether this post should appear/not appear in results.
Follow – tell search engines to follow/not follow the links on your page (applies to crawling them as well).
Archive – instruct search engines to store/not store a cached version of this page.
Snippet – allow search engines to show a snippet of this page in search results, and prevent them from caching the page.
Indexing, in the Advanced section.
In this sections, you can also manage Canonical page versions, 301 Redirects, set Sitemap Priority, and enable/disable Automatic Linking in a post (if you don’t see this option, you can enable it in SmartCrawl > Advanced Tools).
Additional options in the advanced section.
Linguistically Speaking
A readability score is not inherently good or bad. Simply put, it is the level you aspire to in any given piece of content based on the audience you are writing it for.
SEO readability checks analyze user posts or pages, and indicate what can be done to make them more readable. The ability to test that within a number of different languages is huge.
Try the SmartCrawl plugin today and get the simple but powerful Multilingual Language Support features, along with a stellar suite of SEO optimizations. You can take our full membership for a spin with a free trial, which includes all 11 of our Pro Plugins, Free Migration Assistance, 24/7 Expert Live Support (for ALL things WordPress), plus a lot more.
Knowing readability level helps users publish content that is more SEO-friendly, engaging, and accessible to a wider audience—therefore potentially performing better and ranking higher.
That’s a win, vítězství, overwinning, victoire, sieg, vittoria, победа, victoria!
Ridding your site of Spam comments and registrations is an on-going battle. But if you arm yourself with the best defenses, you’ll be much better poised to win the war.
Forminator is a free, easy-to-use WordPress form builder plugin that protects your forms from bogus comments and registrations at all times, using a combination of industry-leading anti-spam tools.
Preventing form and comment spam in WordPress starts by zeroing in on how it gets through. With spammers and bots growing by the day, tools that recognize (and stop) them with a high degree of accuracy is vital.
When creating a form in Forminator, like a new user registration, you can enable a combination of the most successful methods for eliminating spam.
In this article, we’re going to look at what the top tools of the trade are when it comes to the prevention of form and comment spam. Then we’ll see how to put each one into action in Forminator’s settings.
It won’t be long until you see that Forminator’s spam protections are fastidious and formidable.
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:
Let’s look at the tools in Forminator that help to keep spam at bay.
Triple Threat (Protection)
As the cunning moves spammers & bots use continue to rise, so do (thankfully) the tools to outsmart them.
Forminator takes full advantage of the most solid contenders available. The top three–while not foolproof—are highly popular and effective in their own right.
Captcha
Forminator has two different CAPTCHA options available for you to implement: reCAPTCHA and hCaptcha.
ReCAPTCHA Banner
Google’s reCAPTCHAhas been at the forefront of bot mitigation for over a decade. Applying continuous machine learning to overcome the binary logic of traditional challenge-based detection technologies, it actively protects the data of five million sites.
Using an advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive challenges, reCAPTCHA keeps malicious software from engaging in abusive activities on your website. Meanwhile, legitimate users will be able to login, view pages, create accounts, and complete transactions with little to no fuss–especially with reCAPTCHA v3.
reCAPTCHA is free, even for Enterprise accounts–for up to 1 million Assessments per month.
hCaptcha Banner
hCaptcha is a privacy focused company, providing reliable bot detection while being simple for humans to solve. They present CAPTCHA challenges that are difficult for bots but easy for people by collecting difficult-to-label data from machine learning problems, and using it to distinguish whether a website or app visitor is human.
Both reCAPTCHA and hCaptcha come with visible or invisible options in Forminator. Sign-up is required for both, but is easy and free. You can use either one throughout your site on different forms, but only one per each form. And, each form requires its own set of API keys.
Akismet
Akismet Banner
The brainchild of Automattic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Akismet is one of the most popular WordPress plugins on the WP.org repository, and has been leading the crusade against spam since 2005.
Automatically checking site comments and contact form submissions against their global database of spam, Akismet allows you to review the filtered comment spam it catches for any false positives you’d want to let through.
API keys are also needed to activate this tool, and are free for personal use. There are paid subscriptions available for Plus, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus, with different features and price points for each.
Akismet is integrated into many of the most used plugins, making for a smooth user experience.
Honeypot
Whereas the two options we just discussed are specific products, Honeypot is a method. In computer terminology, a honeypot is a computer security mechanism set to detect, deflect, or, in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems.
Honeypot uses a decoy operation to ward off spam, set up purely to attract and detect potential attackers. By monitoring the decoy, the owner of the system can detect if they are being targeted by cyber threats.
The process involves placing a hidden field using JavaScript, CSS (or similar). Spambots automatically search and fill every form, so if this form gets filled in, chances are very good that it was a spam submission.
By employing this simple coding strategy, bots landing on your website will reveal themselves; a simple and effective way to ensure that you only send messages to genuine subscribers/customers, protecting their privacy and your company’s reputation.
Forminator Banner
Set Up Spam Protections in Forminator
Now that we know the tools at our disposal in the Forminator plugin, let’s look at how we can implement each one.
You’ll need to create a form first, so we’ll have something to attach spam protections to.
This is an easy task that takes only seconds. First, make sure to install & activate Forminator, if you haven’t already.
Create a Form
Navigate to the WordPress Dashboard > Forminator > Forms, then click on the blue + Create button.
Select Registration (it will turn blue and add a checkmark in the corner), then click the Continue button.
Type in a name, then click the + Create button.
Form created! That simple. The default template added a few fields for you, which you can add to, or remove from.
Creating a Registration Form with a template… done with a few clicks!
There are a stunning array of options and personalizations in Forminator, so making it your own is a lot of fun. For now, we’ll turn our focus back to the anti spam tools.
Enable a Captcha
From the Edit Form page, click the Edit button next to your form.
Click the purple + Insert Fields button.
Select Captcha (it will turn blue and add a checkmark in the corner), then click the Insert Fields button.
Next, you’ll select which Captcha type/version n you want to use, a threshold tolerance, and more. Of importance here, we need to input the API keys for it.
API keys need to be entered to use reCAPTCHA in forms.
Note: Each different Captcha type will require its own keys in your global settings. If you haven’t yet created APIs for your site, head over to your Google reCAPTCHA or hCaptcha and set them up (takes less than a minute), then return to Forminator to finish the configurations.
Enter both of your API keys, then click the blue Save Settings button.
Setup complete. You can now check out a preview of what your form reCAPTCHA looks like.
Looks nice! We chose the v3 reCAPTCHA.
Enable Honeypot and Akismet
In order to use Akismet’s features in Forminator, you will need to install & activate the plugin, so make sure to do that first.
Navigate to Forminator’s Dashboard, then open the form you created.
From the Edit Form page, click Behavior from the left sidebar menu, then scroll down to Security.
Honeypot & Akismet one-click settings in Forminator.
Toggle the Enable Honeypot protection button ON (it will go from gray to blue).
Toggle the Enable Akismet spam protection button ON (it will go from gray to blue).
In the Akismet section, you will see two options for how Forminator should handle spam submissions:
Fail Submission – This is the message visitors will see if they fail the spam check. You can customize this to say whatever you like; just type your desired text in the corresponding field.
Mark as Spam – Entries marked as spam will be captured in the database, but not shown in Submissions. Additionally, Payments, Notification emails, and other automatic processes will be blocked.
Enable logged in submission only – Toggle this feature ON, if you want to allow only registered users to submit forms.
Additional Settings
There is an abundance of options available for your form.
So many, in fact, it would require another tutorial completely—and we already have several great ones—so I won’t go into further detail here.
I will however, quickly list some of the many other features, so you can get an idea just how robust forms in Forminator can be.
Lifespan – choose your form’s expiry (never, by date, or by number of submissions)
After Submission Behaviors – use AJAX, or reload the page
Email Notifications – send customized emails to post form submission (includes advanced features)
Third-party Integrations – connect to apps via their APIs (Zapier, MailChimp, Google Sheets, Slack, & more)
Database Storage – set auto-deletion time; multiple option values
Submissions Privacy – choose retention length; handling of erasure requests
Fields – 25 (and growing!); plus e-signatures* (*Pro version only)
Forminator is more than just a great form builder with powerful spam tools baked in.
It also comes loaded with capabilities to create interactive polls, fun quizzes, feedback widgets, and some popular payment options. Truly, something for everyone.
Spam Distress? Try Forms with Finesse
While there’s no way to completely eradicate spam from the web, at least not that we know of presently, there are some incredibly effective tools that you can use.
One great option is to use a robust security plugin—Defender, for example, which uses IP Banning.
Another is to use a Web Application Firewall, which most good hosts nowadays will provide. WAFs often have country lock-out capabilities, so known locations of spammers and bots can be completely cut off.
And of course, as showcased in this post, you can use a plugin that enables a Captcha, Akismet, or Honeypot. With Forminator, you get all three of these top-of-their-game tools, along with easy options to implement them.
Forminator will make a big difference in shoring up your defenses against the nuisance of comment & registration spam, providing a strong—and free—resource, right at your fingertips.
The SmartCrawl SEO plugin just got smarter with the latest release, and now supports regex patterns in your redirects.
URL redirection has gotten some cool new improvements in SmartCrawl, including support for regex, wildcards, and query strings. We’ve also added the ability to bulk import and export redirects using CSV files, and a time-saving search function.
In this article, we’re going to look a little further into each of these, and show you how powerful SmartCrawl’s WordPress plugin redirect feature can be.
Redirects enable you to forward one URL to another. It’s a smart way of sending both users and search engines to a different URL, while preserving your search engine rankings for a particular page.
When visitors request content that was previously available on your site but has since been moved, you want them to be redirected to your content’s new location, not get a 404 error.
Additionally, it’s important that search engines understand content has moved, and whether that move is temporary or permanent.
Giving visitors and search engines the right signals for your website improves user experience, and is essential to your SEO performance.
SmartCrawl harnesses this power by implementing different types of redirects.
URL Redirection in SmartCrawl
First, make sure you install the newest version of SmartCrawl.
SmartCrawl v2.17
You’ll get a popup indicating what features and fixes are new in this version. Click the blue Update button.
Boost that page rank with URL redirects.
You’ll be greeted by the splash screen afterward. Click the gray Awesome, Let’s Go! button.
Unpacking the goods.
Head to Advanced Tools > URL Redirection, and click on the purple Add Redirect button at bottom.
Alternatively, you can use the Add Redirect button at the top of the screen to open the options modal.
Creating a URL redirect.
In the resultant popup window, enter the URL you want to redirect from (the “old”), along with the one you want to redirect to (the “new”).
Out with the old, in with the new… URLs.
You can enter either domain relative or absolute URLs in the entry fields. Which means, you’re either starting with a forward slash /, or an https://.
Your redirect URLs can contain query strings as well. For example, you can take an old URL like this:
And redirect to a new URL with the same or different query string like this:
Next, you’ll select the Redirect Type.
What to do—301 or 302?
Redirect Types
For each URL redirect you create, a Redirection Type will be associated with it.
You can choose 301 (Permanent), and 302 (Temporary). The numbers refer to their corresponding HTTP status codes, which inform search engines that a page has been moved.
The more high quality links a page has (as ranked by SERPs), the more “link juice”—an industry term that describes the number of inbound links to a webpage—it has.
If you want to redirect permanently, then you want to pass the link juice. If the redirection is only temporary, then you want to keep the juice where it is, so it will be retained with the original URL when the redirect is turned off.
Summary:
301 – Permanently redirect a URL and pass the link juice.
302 – Temporarily redirect a URL and do not pass the link juice.
Examples of when to use 301/Permanent redirect types:
There’s a typo in your URL but there are already links to the page.
You’re going to remove a page and want to redirect links to a new one.
SSL has been added to your website so all pages need to move from HTTP to HTTPS.
Examples of when to use 302/Temporary redirect types:
You need to redirect users for a short period while your site goes down for maintenance.
You want to redirect users to a webpage based on their location.
You want to redirect users to a webpage based on their device.
With a 302/temporary redirect, the old URL remains in SERPs, and the redirect does not transfer any link authority to the new URL. Since they are not cached by browsers for as long, you have the option to change your mind.
Testing SmartCrawl’s redirect in the browser.
Advanced Options
There are a few additional menu items that you can dig into when creating your redirect.
To see these, click on the Advanced dropdown at the bottom of the modal.
Creating a label for your redirect is optional, but can be helpful for easy identification, particularly when you have long or similar URLs.
Enter any name in the Label field, or leave it blank.
Creating a label for redirects.
Next, you will need to choose an Expression for your redirect.
From the Regular Expressions section, you will see the two options: Plain Text, which is the default, and Regex.
If your redirect contains a regex pattern, make sure to click on Regex. (For more on Regex, see The “Catch-all” Regex section below.)
Once you’re done, click the Apply Redirect button.
Expression types in SmartCrawl.
To view or access your redirect library at any time, go to your SmartCrawl Dashboard > Advanced Tools > URL Redirection.
To Edit or Remove a redirect from your saved library, click the gear icon in the corresponding row and select the desired action.
Edit or delete your saved redirects.
The “Catch-all” Regex
SmartCrawl now supports regex patterns in your redirects. In this section, we’ll illustrate how helpful this can be.
Regex—short for regular expression—is a valuable shorthand, extremely useful for setting up large numbers of redirects.
Imagine how massive a chore it would be if you had dozens or even hundreds of URLs that you needed to individually create separate redirects for.
Like any language, you need to familiarize yourself with the basics. There are a number of sites that do a great job of this, particularly Learn Regex and Regex for non-programmers.
For learning and testing as you write, Regex 101 is a fantastic resource, providing explanations for why each string does what it does.
The key takeaway is that syntax symbols are used to add specific options to patterns, which indicate what to filter on. Once you understand those, you’re golden.
Regex Example
Consider your site has the below URLs. You want to redirect some of these to a new, consolidated page, which you’ll be calling “book-air”.
The URLs you want to redirect to this new page are the ones that have the single word “air” in them. (Shaded blue in the list below.)
The URLs you don’t want to redirect are the ones that have “air” as a portion of another word, since they’re outside of the scope of the content you’re redirecting. (Shaded pink in the list below.)
You also don’t want to include the “book-air” one, as that’s for the new redirect site itself, and would cause an endless loop. (Shaded green in the list below.)
List of URLS we want redirected.List of URLS we don’t want redirected.
The resultant regex that would meet all of our above parameters would like like this:
What in the gobbledy-gook? Regex looks funny but performs amazingly.
To see that this does indeed work, and why, check out the screenshots from Regex 101 below.
The expression/character strings I input on Regex 101.The explanation of my expression/character strings on Regex 101.
The more criteria you need to filter, the more character strings you will need to incorporate into your regex; the more basic, the fewer strings. It’s really not difficult, just a matter of learning the definitions for the syntax used.
A word of caution: be careful to avoid using very broad regular expressions, because they might end up redirecting URLs that you don’t intend to.
Bulk Options
You can bulk delete or bulk update multiple redirects that you have already set up.
To apply redirects for multiple items at once, tick the checkboxes for the ones you want changed, then click the Bulk Update button.
The bulk update menu.
Enter the New URL you wish to redirect all of them to, change the Redirect Type (if desired), then click the Save button.
Inputting the bulk update info.Viewing the bulk update results.
Now if you look at your list, you’ll see your changed redirects reflected in the New URL column.
Import & Export
SmartCrawl allows you to save and reuse any of your redirect configurations through its Import and Export functions.
Export your configurations to a CSV file, then import that file any time later for a single-click set up of your redirections.
To export your redirects, click the Export button at the top of the screen, and it will download a CSV file. You can rename any of these files, if it makes it easier to identify them later. (Just make sure it remains in the .csv format.)
The exported file downloads to your computer.
To import redirects into a site, click the Import button. From the window popup, click the Upload file button, select the desired CSV file on your computer, then click the Import button.
Uploading a CSV file with saved redirect info from your site.
If you’d like a pre-formatted CSV template for your redirects, we’ve got you! Click the Download CSV template link, then use that file (edited with your configs) for import later.
Redirect Attachments
Every time you upload a file to the WordPress Media Library and choose Link to: Attachment Page, WordPress creates a separate media attachment page for that file. This page consists solely of the media content and its own generated URL.
Redirecting WordPress attachment pages to the posts or pages they belong to makes sense in most cases, and improves your SEO.
By using SmartCrawl’s Redirect attachments feature, you enable users to skip the attachment pages, and redirect them to the post or page they belong to.
To do this, navigate to the options menu in URL Redirection > Settings.
Toggle the Redirect attachments button On (it will go from gray to blue). Tick the checkbox for Redirect image attachments only, if desired. Click Save Settings.
You can even redirect attachments.
Keep in mind that this redirect option only works if the Media Library item was initially uploaded to the original post.
Search
URL Redirection in SmartCrawl also comes with a built-in Search function.
To locate an existing URL Redirect from your list, just start typing in the Search field, and it will display only the items that match your input.
Find what you want, fast, using Search.
This is particularly handy if you have many redirects saved in SmartCrawl.
A New (Re)Direction
Adding a WordPress redirect plugin to your website is an extremely powerful flex when it comes to SEO optimization.
No matter what tools you’re using, it’s a good idea to periodically check which redirects are necessary and which can be cleaned up. Sometimes old redirects could be contributing to strange website behavior. Generally, the most important to keep are URLs that have inbound links and/or get serious referral traffic.
With all of its URL Redirect features, including bulk options, importing & exporting, redirecting attachments, and a smart search, SmartCrawl is ready to elevate and keep your site at the highest standards of SEO. And, if you currently use separate SEO & Redirection plugins, with SmartCrawl you’ll only need the one.
Like all of our plugins, SmartCrawl comes with expert, 24/7/365 support. Try it for free, and create clear, targeted content that will improve your rank with search engines—from Google to Bing.
A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a system of globally distributed servers that deliver content on behalf of other servers. CDNs cache data from the origin server, allowing users to access the data from a server near them, thus improving performance and reducing latency.
CDNs are an essential part of our modern world. The content that you view on any website or app―whether through a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone―is very likely to have been delivered using a content delivery network.
In this article, we’re going to do a deep dive into content delivery networks, honing in on exactly what it is they do, and how. We’ll also look at a handful of the most used CDNs, and then zoom in on Cloudflare in particular, sharing our thoughts on what sets it apart. Rounding this out will be some tutorials on the different ways you can get Cloudflare up and running. Spoiler: it’s easy peasy.
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:
CDNs came into existence in the late 1990s as a means for alleviating the performance bottlenecks of the internet. Since then, they have grown to serve a huge portion of internet content, including web objects (text, graphics, scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), and media (live streaming, on-demand, & social media).
Without effective CDNs, most of what you view in today’s online world, in particular content that is accessed from a distance or simultaneously with a slew of other users, would take forever to load, have regular delivery interruptions (buffering, glitching, freezing), or completely immobilize websites.
Without CDN’s delivering data from server to server, the potential for issues is high.
There are many positives to utilizing a CDN. In addition to increased speed, they also amp up site security, lower costs, allow for higher scalability, and deliver a better user experience.
Content origin servers are at a much greater risk of failure without a CDN. Since they must respond to every individual end-user request, large spikes in traffic or persistent loads pose a high likelihood of risk.
By responding to end-user requests with a server that is closer in both physical and network proximity than the origin, a CDN offloads traffic from content servers and improves the web experience, benefitting both the content provider and its end-users.
If your website is hosted in close geographical positioning to a user trying to access your content, they will see your content in fractions of a second. But for those who are further away, that distance creates issues, because the browser has to fetch content from the server in your region, then display it to someone who is thousands of miles away.
Additionally, if users from other countries are requesting the same content simultaneously, the server becomes laden with those requests, increasing the time it takes to load and serve the content. This in turn will impact the speed of content delivery to the user.
A content delivery network offers the solution to this scenario. Since CDNs are broad networks of servers deployed around the world, storing and caching your website’s assets on them provides vastly improved speeds to the end user. Users at a significant distance from you get cached content fetched and delivered to them from a much closer server when using a CDN.
Those are just a portion of the companies available. Without going too far in depth, we’ll do a quick roundup of these most popular ones.
Amazon CloudFront is one of the branches under business titan Jeff Bezos. Amazon Web Services (aka AWS, the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform), is built for high performance, security, and developer convenience. CloudFront securely delivers content with low latency and high transfer speeds, delivering data through 310+ globally dispersed Points of Presence (PoPs) with automated network mapping and intelligent routing.
To use it, you need to create a CloudFront distribution with the AWS for WordPress plugin, or create a secure static website.
Microsoft Azure CDN is an branch of tech magnate Bill Gates’ Windows software company. It provides secure, reliable content delivery, with global coverage and massive scalability. Azure lets you reduce load times, save bandwidth, and speed responsiveness—whether you are developing or managing websites or mobile apps, encoding & distributing streaming media, gaming software, firmware updates, or IoT endpoints.
KeyCDN is a budget-friendly CDN that offers a wide variety of options to improve the performance of websites. Some of the tools include unlimited SSL certificates, low latency, aggressive Gzip compression, rapid HTTP/2 delivery, traffic restriction settings, hotlink protection, and two-factor authentication. Pricing includes unlimited HTTP & HTTPS requests, and a low minimum usage charge (per month), based on the combined total account traffic volume and other services used.
StackPath has comprehensive built-in capabilities, including content protection and asset optimization. Stackpath CDN offers high speed performance (worldwide edge locations, redundant Tier-1 carrier connections, global Anycast, private network backbone between all locations), increased security (delivery control, DDoS attack mitigation, SSL), full visibility (built-in analytics & reporting, RESTful API, customization options), and lower total costs (reduce total bandwidth consumption, reduce downtime, and increase accessibility).
Akamai is one of the oldest content delivery network companies in existence. Purportedly the world’s largest edge platform, Akamai’s tagline is to “keep your digital experiences closer to users, and threats farther away”. They have fast, engaging app & API performance (enhanced by robust data and automation), and consistent delivery of streaming experiences to the largest audiences, on any device. Note: Akamai does not publish specifics on how large their CDN network is or where the POPs are.
Sucuri CDN caches your website on its edges automatically, speeding it up by 70%. Sucuri offers multiple caching options, reliable website uptime, and high availability and redundancy. They also fine-tuned settings to give maximum performance and protection, with custom options available. You can choose what best fits your needs, or get an assist from them. Their Global Anycast Network has 10 SuperPOPs in the USA, Europe, Asia, and 2 CDN POPs in Australia and Brazil.
CacheFly specializes in fast delivery of media files, promising video delivery with less than 1s latency. Aside from ultra-low latency video streaming (delivering video to more than a million uses concurrently), CacheFly also provides lightning-fast gaming (with industry-leading throughput speeds), mobile content optimization (automatic and simple), and multi-CDN (for redundancy and failover). From these specs, you can see CacheFly is particularly suited to streaming and gaming customers (though not exclusive to them).
Imperva (formerly, Incapsula) brings content caching, load balancing, and failover natively built into a comprehensive Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) platform, so your applications are securely delivered across the globe. DDoS protection and Secure CDN are combined to provide complete edge security. Imperva’s website/network defense makes it ideal for corporations that handle confidential information, such as banks and insurance agencies.
Cloudflare is a global CDN designed to make all of your internet connections secure, private, and fast. This flexible and programmable global network was built to serve companies and organizations of all sizes, from individual developers to large corporations, providing services to everyone that were once only available to internet giants. Cloudflare is robust, reliable, and smooth.
CDN and DNS
Some CDNs, such as Amazon CloudFront, require you to perform the initial server load, then use the CDNs URL when referencing the asset. The CDN will then determine which server to use to actually handle the request.
Other CDNs, such as Cloudflare, operate further upstream at the DNS level. Effectively, all of your traffic is routed through Cloudflare (by changing your nameservers to their nameservers). It then analyzes each request, serves those it has an asset for (grabbing them in an initial scan), and passes the others through to your site (mostly your dynamic content, such as posts and pages).
The DNS approach has several distinct advantages:
Quick and effortless – it’s just a matter of changing your nameservers
Easily reversed – simply change your nameservers back to your hosting provider
Improved security – Cloudflare looks at every single request and automatically filters out those that are from known suspicious IP addresses
There a no changes to the publishing process
Add to that list the fact that Cloudflare has a free tier in its product list, and using Cloudflare for your WordPress site is pretty compelling. And the reason why it’s our top choice for a CDN.
What is Cloudflare, & What Makes it So Special?
Cloudflare is a powerful CDN, who’s architecture gives you an integrated set of network services, designed to run every service on every server in every data center across their global network, all accessible from a single dashboard.
Cloudflare is an extremely powerful and popular CDN.
It’s secure. Built into every component of the network, Cloudflare’s 100 TBPS network blocks an average of 70 billion threats per day, including some of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded.
It’s private. Cloudflare complies with local regulations for data locality and storage, and doesn’t generate revenue from advertising (no collection and retention of personal data processed on behalf of the customer).
It’s fast. It has connections to all major cloud providers, and interconnections with nearly every service provider around the world. Plus data centers in over 250 cities that deliver sub-50-millisecond latency to 95% of the internet users in the world.
It’s hassle-free. Cloudflare is designed with maximum ease in mind:
setup takes less than 5 minutes
anyone with a website and their own domain can use CF (regardless of platform)
no additional hardware or software is required
no code changes are needed
you can keep your current hosting provider (or choose any one you prefer)
Cloudflare also lays claim to an amazing feature that is unique to them—APO, or Automatic Platform Optimization. The effects of using APO are similar to hosting static files on a CDN, but without the need to manage a complicated tech stack.
In addition to caching your static assets (images, JavaScript, CSS), APO caches the actual content on your site (the HTML) using Cloudflare’s massive edge network.
With your entire site being served from cache, your visitors will get near instant load times. Cloudflare reports that its testing shows APO delivers consistent load times of under 400ms for HTML Time to First Byte (TTFB).
Content creators retain the ability to create dynamic websites, without any changes to their workflow for the sake of performance.
If you’re currently using Cloudflare’s free plan, you can get the APO add-on for a low (single-digit) monthly fee. If you’re on their Professional, Business, or Enterprise plans, APO is already included in your subscription.
The plans and prices listed on Cloudflare’s website are under the top menu header Application Services > Overview. The APO feature is under Application Services > Add-ons.
Now that we have a clear picture of what Cloudflare can do, let’s move on to implementing it.
Cloudflare Setup
As mentioned prior, setting up Cloudflare in a simple process. There are multiple options for implementation, and we’ll do a walk-through for each one.
The first step required is…
Creating a Cloudflare Account
Whether you are going to use their free service or purchase a plan, you will need to have a Cloudflare account.
If you already have a Cloudflare account, you must login first to add a site.
If you don’t already have one, you need to create a Cloudflare account:
That’s all there is to account setup. Next we’ll look into putting Cloudflare in motion using three different methods.
Setting Things Up Through Cloudflare’s Website
Once you have created an account and/or logged in, Cloudflare asks you to add a site. You can also add multiple sites at once with CF’s automation, if you’re so inclined.
Let’s add a single site now.
Adding a Site to Your Cloudflare Account
Once you’re logged in on your account page, click Add a site from the top right of the Home page/dashboard.
Enter your website’s root domain, then click Add Site below. Example: if your website is www.mysite.com, type mysite.com.
Choose the domain you want to be proxied through Cloudflare.
Select one of the plans, then click Continue at bottom.
Selecting a plan during Cloudflare account creation. They have a free one!
Cloudflare does a quick scan for existing DNS records, then loads the page Review your DNS records.
A window into your DNS records management on Cloudflare.
Verify that DNS records in the query results are configured correctly. (These records will take effect in Cloudflare after you update your nameservers.)For a free account, your status will be Proxied: Accelerates and protects traffic, which is indicated by the orange cloud icon.
To finish setup and activate your domain on Cloudflare, your nameservers must point to them. Which brings us to the next section.
Changing Your Domain Nameservers to Cloudflare
Nameservers have to be revised to work in Cloudflare.
You can point nameservers from any registrar to Cloudflare through your account settings.
Cloudflare does have its own registry service, meaning you can purchase a domain directly from them, if you like. (Cloudflare’s domain registry service currently supports common TLDs (top level domains) only.)
Login & navigate to Cloudflare’s dashboard, then click on your newly added domain.
Your websites on Cloudflare’s homepage.
Cloudflare will take you to their Overview > Complete your nameserver setup page. Copy (or memorize) both nameserver 1 & 2 under Replace with Cloudflare’s nameservers.
Step right up, and get your nameservers from Cloudflare.
Log into the administrator account for your domain registrar. If you are unsure who your domain registrar is, you can go to ICANN to find out.
ICANN will locate your domain registrar if you don’t know who it is.
Replace the current nameserver records in your registrar account with the information you copied from Cloudflare.
Presto, change-o, you’ve repointed your nameservers.
Here is a handy list of detailed instructions & links for the most common registrars.
Wait for your registrar to update your nameservers; this can take from a few minutes up to 24 hours.
Confirm your site activation by logging into the Cloudflare dashboard.
If you no longer see Complete your nameserver setup, you have successfully updated your nameservers and your domain is active at Cloudflare.
If Complete your nameserver setup still appears, ensure the nameserver output correctly spells the Cloudflare nameservers, and confirm Cloudflare’s nameservers are the only nameservers listed.
If the nameserver output is correct, select Re-check now.
You should now see—or will soon see—the green check mark on this domain in your Cloudflare account. You will also receive a confirmation email from Cloudflare once your nameservers are active on their site.
Cloudflare confirmation gives you something to shout about.
For DNS records proxied to Cloudflare, Cloudflare’s IP addresses are returned in DNS queries instead of your original server IP address. This allows Cloudflare to optimize, cache, and protect all requests for your website.
Verifying Your Traffic is Routed Through Cloudflare
Though not required, you can check that your domain nameservers are now pointing to Cloudflare through other means. There are a couple of different methods for doing this.
Note that most DNS tools online use cached query results, therefore it may take longer for them to show the updated nameservers.
Method 1: Use the following text in the operating system command line/prompt.
On Linux/Unix:
dig domain_name +trace @1.1.1.1
dig domain_name +trace @8.8.8.8
On Windows:
nslookup domain_name 1.1.1.1
nslookup domain_name 8.8.8.8
Be sure to replace the generic “domain_name” with your actual domain name.)
What my Windows command prompt nameserver check revealed.
Some online tools such as GTmetrix don’t recognize Cloudflare as a Content Delivery Network, due to the fact that Cloudflare doesn’t operate like a traditional CDN.
To confirm your domain traffic actively proxies through Cloudflare:
Copy this URL >> https://www.mysite.com/cdn-cgi/trace, then replace the “www.mysite.com” portion with the domain proxied to Cloudflare.
Paste the edited code into your browser, and enter to load the page.
If proxied to Cloudflare, output similar to the image below will appear in your browser:
Example text to confirm domain traffic is proxied through Cloudflare using cdn-cgi trace.My result, confirming traffic is proxied through Cloudflare using cdn-cgi trace.
If you don’t observe similar output:
Confirm your DNS record has the orange cloud icon in its row.
Enter your domain at ICANN to confirm the nameservers only list Cloudflare nameservers for your domain.
In this section, we’re going to look at how to activate Cloudflare through the cPanel customer interface.
Many hosting providers have support for Cloudflare built into cPanel, so installing Cloudflare is as simple as filling in a short form. Depending on how your hosting provider handles cPanel, this may look slightly different, but should follow the same basic steps.
After the Cloudflare plugin is installed, you should see a Cloudflare icon in cPanel. Double-click to open the application.
Locating Cloudflare in the software section of cPanel.
Login to your Cloudflare account through the login screen. (If you skipped over the account creation part of this article and don’t yet have an account, click on Sign up.)
Your Cloudflare account will likely be configured for you, again dependent upon your hosting provider. However, you should be able to select which sites you want to use Cloudflare with.
The Cloudflare plugin for WordPress, ready for installation.
Use of the plugin is not necessary by any means, whether or not you have already set up Cloudflare. It simply serves as another point of access to some of Cloudflare settings, allowing you to view or adjust them from within WordPress. Not all options are accessible under the free plan, rather require a Pro/paid plan.
Let’s do a quick walkthrough of how the plugin installs and works.
Go to the WordPress repository, and search for Cloudflare (or, do it directly from within the WordPress dashboard, via Plugins > Add new).
Install and activate the plugin, then click Create Your Free Account, or Sign in here.
Logging in through the WordPress Cloudflare plugin.
Enter your Cloudflare account email address and API key; click on Save API Credentials.
Cloudflare’s API credentials entry field in the WordPress plugin.
After sign-in, you’ll be taken to the Cloudflare plugin’s Home page. There are two other pages you can access here, which you’ll see identified by blue icons at the top—Setting, & Analytics.
Home and Settings will keep you in the plugin, while Analytics connects you to the Cloudflare.com website.
The landing page of the Cloudflare WordPress plugin.
Here’s a short video of what the plugin options offer on each page, once you are signed in.
Options available through the Cloudflare plugin for free and paid plans.
Options available through the Cloudflare plugin for free and paid plans.
Now that we’ve looked into setting up Cloudflare in a variety of ways, I’d like to show you how to boost it even further by…
Optimizing Cloudflare in Hummingbird
Hummingbird, if you’re unfamiliar, is our WordPress speed optimization plugin—and it’s completely free.
If you use WPMU DEV’s hosting, or have one of our memberships, Hummingbird Pro is automatically included in the package of services & products we provide (along with our other premium plugins).
The Hummingbird plugin banner on WordPress.org.
Hummingbird is a full performance suite, with world-class caching, one-click minification, and a slew of other premium optimization tools.
Hummingbird and Cloudflare work in tandem to give you an incredible amount of speed and protection.
Cloudflare’s APO for WordPress is a paid feature. (See prior section, “What Makes Cloudflare So Special”, for more information on features, plans, and pricing.)
However, you can still integrate Cloudflare in Hummingbird on their free plan, with no paid add-ons. The benefit you would gain is the ability to clear Cloudflare’s browser cache from within Hummingbird.
In the end, it’s a personal choice whether or not to get APO, but it is a robust feature, well worth investing in for the small fee it requires.
Let’s look at how to set up Cloudflare integration in Hummingbird.
Navigate to Cloudflare.com, and make sure you’re logged in.
From your main account page, choose the domain you are using for this, then click on it. On the resultant page load, scroll to the bottom, and click on Get your API token.
Though you can use your Global API Key or API Token from Cloudflare for the Hummingbird integration, the API token is recommended, because it’s isolated per zone. The Global API key gives admin access to your account, which isn’t really required.
Getting an API token from Cloudflare’s website.
From the API Tokens section, click on Create Token.
API token creation in Cloudflare.
Scroll down to WordPress in the list of API token templates, then click on Use template.
WordPress is one in a list of many pre-configured permission templates.
Now we have to create a zone for this token. Scroll down to Zone Resources, then click the dropdown menu under All Zones, and select Specific zone.
A new selection menu will pop up on the right. We need to pick the specific zone from this dropdown, which will be the domain we’re going to connect through WordPress and Hummingbird. Click Continue to summary.
In Zone Resources, select the type of zone, then the specific zone.
Cloudflare will display a summary displayed in tiered format. Click on Create Token below it.
Cloudflare’s WordPress API token creation summary.
The API Token Key has been created. Click on the Copy button to copy to clipboard.
Copy the API token Cloudflare creates for you.
You can view the tokens associated with your domains on Cloudflare any time. The list under each domain will show you what tokens are active.
Just click on the ellipses “…” to see the options for View summary, Edit, Roll, and Delete. This makes it quick and easy to revoke a token if you ever desire to do so.
Cloudflare’s API token management page.
The Roll option is what you’d choose if your API token (Cloudflare calls this “the secret”) is lost or believed to be compromised. Rolling your secret key into a new one will invalidate the previous one, but the access and permissions will be the same as the previous key.
Now that we’ve got our token, we can head back over to the Hummingbird plugin in our WordPress website.
From the dashboard, navigate to Hummingbird > Caching.
Hummingbird Integrations are available from the Caching page.
From Integrations, click the blue plus + button on the right of the Cloudflare row, and the Hummingbird popup wizard appears.
Make sure the email associated with your Cloudflare account is in the email field, then click API Token. Paste the key you copied into the Cloudflare API token field, then click Connect.
Entering the credentials required in Hummingbird’s popup integration wizard.
Hummingbird presents a message, indicating you need to activate a zone.
From the dropdown menu for Select zone, choose the domain we just got the API token for on Cloudflare, then click Enable Cloudflare.
After inputting credentials, you need to tell Hummingbird which zone (domain) you’re connecting.
Tada! You’ve now successfully integrated Cloudflare with Hummingbird.
The green indicators under Status let you know your Cloudflare account is connected in Hummingbird.
One last bit of housekeeping to take care of—if you subscribe to Cloudflare’s APO feature.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and toggle the button for Enable APO. And there you go!
If you don’t pay for Cloudflare’s APO service, this toggle button will be grayed out, but a link is provided to purchase it from Cloudflare’s site for your convenience (if you’re interested).
Hummingbird integration settings for Cloudflare allow you to Cache by device type.
Once enabled, you can also select an additional option inside to cache content according to the device types used by your site visitors. Cache by device type ensures that only needed assets are cached and delivered to the user’s browser depending on the device type used: mobile, tablet or desktop.
Hummingbird and Cloudflare will now work in tandem to give you an incredible amount of speed and protection.
On Cloud(flare) 9
In today’s world, almost all websites and applications rely on a CDN to help serve content to their users. Which makes sense, given that CDNs have proven their many benefits, including these top four: better performance, increased reliability, cost savings, and resilience against cyber attacks.
There are many options for choosing a CDN, so if you don’t like one you tried previously, don’t give up! Cloudflare in particular is such a good choice, especially due to their amazing and proprietary APO feature.
As you’ve seen in this article, setting up Cloudflare in WordPress can be done in a number of different ways (none of which are difficult), and afterward you will continue to reap its rewards.
Considering the power and prevention that CDN and Cloudflare bring, there seems little reason not to give them the old college try.
If you’ve been waiting for us to spill the beans… your patience is about to pay off! We’re coming in hot with the latest, greatest, and best that’s yet to come from WPMU DEV’s world.
It’s crazy that we’re days away from 2022. Where did this year go? With the holiday season upon us, and the last page of the calendar showing, we knew we were due for a roundup.
A lot has happened in the back half of this year. Quite a few big and exciting features in our family of plugins and services were released, and we have even more in the pipeline being polished for the near future.
When all is quiet on the release front (because we’re hunkering down in the code lab), you can always check out our regularly updated product roadmap, to see what’s currently in the works.
Today, however, we’re bringing that info directly to you in one fell swoop―a compilation of all the plugin updates & service boosts we’ve had since this past March, as well as a sneak peak at what’s just around the corner.
It wouldn’t be a proper roundup if we didn’t get a lead-in from the man behind the curtain in Oz, our Farmer in armor―WPMU DEV’s CEO, James.
Busy Busy Busy
“What a year! Courtesy of The World’s Longest Lockdown (thanks Melbourne!) I don’t think I’ve ever done so much work, and it felt like everybody at WPMU DEV was pretty much doing the same, hitting product goal after product goal.
From a raft of timesaving new site management tools in The Hub, to a fully featured client billing system, to our managed hosting topping the TrustPilot reviews chart and – of course – some absolutely epic plugin development… it’s been a hoot.
But as my job is basically reading, email, and Slack… you’re much better off hearing from the people actually making this good stuff happen, so read on…”
Huzzah, James! If you’d like to hear James speak on the landscape of hosting and maintaining WordPress websites, check out his guest spot on Josh Hall’s podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
“We have added a few significant tools in the past few months, like the Reset WP, Blackfire profiling, and NewRelic monitoring. We also added advanced options in our Static Site Cache feature, which strives to improve site speed & performance.”
“Another big change is the addition of Pro Plugins, now automatically included in our Hosting packages. That’s over $500 worth of premium WP plugin value yearly―free with every hosting account! And they come pre-installed, accessible via the WPMU DEV dashboard plugin.”
“Last but not least… New, Bigger Hosting plans! Five more have been added, providing multiple options to members who need more powerful droplets than Platinum.”
Here’s a closer look at the hearty list of features Hosting rolled out this year:
White Label Temporary Hosting Domains – Now instead of an automatically given temporary domain name of insertnamehere.wpmudev.host, new sites you set up will be named insertnamehere.tempurl.host, which aligns much better to a full white label experience.
Bruteforce Protection – All WPMU DEV hosted sites have measures enabled at the server level to help prevent your site ever going down due to a bot attack. Enabled by default, you can add specific IP addresses or ranges for exemption, or disable it completely.
Semi-automated adding of DNS records & some basic text improvements in DNS/Domains tab with “How to Go Live” documentation
Reset WordPress Feature – Allows members to reset their site back to the default / new WP installation. It works for Production or Staging sites.
NewRelic and Blackfire tools – One-click connect NewRelic or Blackfire to debug performance issues.
PHP 8 released – keeping you up to date with WP recommended versions.
Pro Plugins included – 7 of them now come included with our managed WP hosting.
User Templates – Added the ability to create and sell your own site templates (up to 25) for free with our hosting.
HUB Manual migration form & some minor tweaks in the FTP migration tool – A new feature where users can directly submit a ticket for manual migration in The Hub.
Advanced options in Static Site Cache feature – several advanced options for FastCGI added.
New WPMU DEV Templates – Added 20 new DEV templates, consisting of various themes or builders, along with a search & filter option to simplify finding what you want.
New Hosting Plans – Five different tiers have been added, scaling our world of hosting to fit larger needs.
Coming Soon
Neel had some cool bits to tell us about in this area.
“We’ll be refining some existing features, while adding some new ones. And as always, we’re constantly working to improve our hosting in terms of speed, security, user experience, and all the essential hosting tools that provide faster site creation, to give you the best overall hosting experience.”
Here’s a quick recap of what’s in the pipeline for Hosting:
PHP 8.1 – initial testing began earlier this month.
Hourly Backups – big upgrade from our current daily backups. This is critical for ecommerce & membership sites.
UI Options for redirect – smoothly direct traffic from one URL to another; great for accurate SEO following changes, avoiding errors like 404, and general rerouting within your site.
Other server performance tweaks/optimization and UX/IX improvements – we continually work on these, and 2022 will be no different.
The Hub
What do you get when you cross The Hub with a recap? A Hubcap!
Oh, what a shiny, functional beauty this one is.
The Hub is our snappy, sophisticated site manager, for all of your hosted sites (ours, or third party) in a single, well organized place.
Recent Releases
Product Manager Mukul was pumped about all the recent and upcoming features for The Hub and The Hub Client.
“Leading with the headline… Client Billing!”, Mukul enthused.
“This was one of our biggest features released in the back half of this year. It’s been high on our most requested list since we launched Hosting, so we’re thrilled to have put it into motion.”
Client Billing is feature packed. Here are just a few topline items:
Q3 & Q4 brought big updates for Plugins Integration. Mukul continued, “Members can now install WPMU DEV Pro plugins, WP.org plugins, upload plugin ZIP files, or use the URL method to install plugins from publicly accessible repositories (e.g., GDrive, Dropbox, etc.). Additionally, all existing plugins can be managed from The Hub 2.0.”
Moving on, he added, “Since the last roundup in March, we have added configs for other plugins and services as well.”
The Hub’s robust list of releases from earlier this year follow:
Ignore Updates – Plugin and theme updates can now be ignored until members decide to update them.
Site Template Manager – After releasing the Hosting Templates, a dedicated area under Sites > Site Templates was also added to view and manage them. Also, a recent Templates Manager update allows members to upload a thumbnail image to their custom site templates.
New Hosting Templates – The new default templates library has been growing. There are currently 23 default templates, and we’ll continue to add more.
Manual Migration for Hosting – Members can now request a free manual migration to WPMU DEV hosting for their sites hosted elsewhere.
Create New Sites On Any Plans – Until recently, all member sites were first created on the Bronze plan then upgraded to a higher plan afterwards. Now creating new hosting sites can be done on any plan.
SmartCrawl’s Lighthouse Integration – The SEO service tab on the Hub was adjusted to add support for the SmartCrawl integration with Lighthouse for SEO scans.
Support Page Migration – from Hub 1.0 to Hub 2.0. UX was improved as well.
Improved Help Bubble – The UX was updated, and its styling matched with Hub 2.0.
UI Preferences – Members now have the ability to hide/show certain site services as preferred.
Multiple UI/UX changes were made across different parts of the Hub, to improve the UX.
Coming Soon
Mukul also shared a handful of goodies that are currently in the works, the most notable being…
“Domain Reselling!! Members and their clients will now be able to search and buy new domains… directly from the Hub!”
Check out the other upcoming Hub features below:
Global IP List (Security) – Members will be able to create a global IP Allow/Block list that will be synced to all of their websites.
Accounts Page Migration – from Hub 1.0 to Hub 2.0
DNS Improvements – Specifically, the UX setup will be improved.
The Hub Client
The Hub Client has seen a bit of newness as well…
Recent Releases
From Mukul: “Earlier this year, we integrated LiveChat and tawk.to, which members can use to provide real-time chat support to their clients”.
Coming Soon
As for what’s in the pipeline, Mukul shared, “The Hub Client will be tying into the Reseller Platform and Automations. The Hub & Hub Client teams will be working in tandem to ensure a seamless reselling experience for our members and their clients.”
Smush
Time to get mushy over Smush-y. We’re just so proud of our blazing fast, compression crushing, highly rated image optimizer.
Recent Releases
Lead Developer Anton says, “We’ve been hard at work to improve Local WebP Compatibility with as many hosts and servers as we could find!”
Next up, Anton says, “Making sure CDN continues to provide the best in class performance and stability is the object of our focus right now.”.
No doubt we’ll continue to see new records Smushed.
Hummingbird
Our fast flying, feat of engineering, full speed optimizer. If those wings could talk, here’s what they’d say…
Recent Releases
Lead Developer Anton shared, “Hummingbird has had some amazing features added to its arsenal this year.”
Among them: Asynchronous Loading, Preloading & Preconnect for Assets, Cloudflare APO Integration, a Browser Caching Wizard, and Font Optimization.
Anton continued, “We added a new Performance Report for Database Cleanup, so now you can schedule and send reports for regular cleanups of your DB. We also added Performance Reports for Subsites, so they’re now available in every subsite in multisite installs.”
“We also created a brand new, unified section in the dashboard UI for Notifications, eliminating the need to visit each one individually.”
“A Browser Caching wizard was added as well. It automatically configures your settings if you host with WMPU DEV, and offers options and information for setup if you host elsewhere.”
“Page Cache Integration with WP Ultimo is another new automated feature, helpful for those who use this popular tool.”
Rounding out the list, Anton indicated upgrades in Asset Optimization. “We now have Asset Optimization in multisite, which allows you to choose where Hummingbird should store your modified assets. And, the Asset Optimization Engine is more robust and error-free.”
Great strides for Hummingbird. What’s on the projected flight plan?
Coming Soon
“Our next big goal is to automate and simplify the Asset Optimization (AO) Engine”, says Anton. “We want every user to be able to set up their sites without the fear of breaking them.”
“We’re testing out a New Safe Mode feature, as well as enhanced automated configurations, and presets, which will include: adding font optimization to automatic mode in AO, an improved UI for manual mode in AO, and a new onboarding wizard.”
If it wasn’t already clear, Anton drove it home with, “2022 is going to be a big one for Hummingbird!”
Defender
Who likes their security like their coffee? Strong, bold, and sets you up for a great day. Here’s the tea on our most able protector, Defender.
Recent Releases
Product Manager Nastia had plenty of intel on Defender.
“This was a big year for the Defender plugin team. I’m really proud of everyone for working together and making great steps forward.”
“During the second quarter of 2021, we focused on the user by protecting passwords. Passwords are the weakest link when it comes to security; we’re all guilty of re-using our passwords on multiple sites. Unfortunately, data breaches happen all too often, exposing billions of records. That’s why we’ve added Pwned Password Check, and in the event of a data breach, the option to force all users to reset their passwords.”
“Alongside this, we’ve made improvements to Malware Scanning, and will continue doing so.”
Nastia continued, “Our third quarter was all about providing anti-spam solutions. Here came support for Google reCAPTCHA, a widely known bot mitigation service. We’ve made this flexible enough to work with all default WordPress forms, including logins, registration, and comments, but most importantly, it has been Integrated with the WooCommerce Plugin.”
“For even better protection against malicious bots, we’ve introduced User-Agent Banning, with a list of known bad bots already blocked by the Defender plugin. It protects not only against spambots, but also DDoS, XSS, and SQL injections.”
Coming Soon
Nastia gave us a peek into Defender’s pipeline…
“We’re hardening security against vulnerabilities, implementing New Ux Improvements for Malware Scanning & Scheduling, and integrating with The Hub 2.0’s new Global Ip Allowlist/Blocklist feature.”
Stay tuned!
Forminator
Do you wanna build a snowman? Take a poll to find out. Or a quiz to see who knows the source of that quote. It’s all possible with Forminator.
Recent Releases
Product Manager, Mohammad had lots to share about Forminator.
“In Q3 & Q4, we’ve released a lot of features and improvements. Topping the list is Bulk Import/Edit Options for the Select/Radio/Checkbox fields. In addition, we now have Image Support in Radio and Checkbox fields, as well as Polls.”
“We didn’t forget our quiz lovers out there. In the last quarter, we added Pagination Options, and a Question Description Html Field, which supports any type of media content―even videos!”.
“We’re also excited to mention improvements to Registration Forms. You can now conditionally assign user roles during the registration based on registrar selections. And, we’ve added the option to Bulk Approve Registrars, in addition to other improvements.”
“Also, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve added two more conditional features. The first one allows users to Assign Submissions to any Integration conditionally based on the submitter’s selections. The second allows users to Change After-Submission Behavior, based on the submitter’s selections―which is very handy for redirecting submitters to different pages (post-submission), based on their selections and other scenarios.”
Mohammad closed out this section saying, “Let’s talk about our recent awesome Payment improvements. Forminator Pro now has Stripe Subscriptions for Recurring Payments, and you can create multiple recurring pricing plans (fixed or dynamic). Oh, I almost forgot to mention, you can now conditionally use Stripe or PayPal payments on the same form, so your users can select their preferred payment method.”
If you haven’t tried Forminator yet, you’re really missing out on an eye-catching, multi-functional customer interactive plugin.
Coming Soon
Mohammad had this to say about what we can expect soon from Forminator…
“We’re going to be adding a great timesaver, Global Appearance Presets. This will allow users with multiple forms added to their sites to set their appearance settings (once applied) to all their forms, and avoid wasting time styling each one individually.”
“And finally, by the end of this year, we’ll be rolling out TWO of the top requested features: Grouping Fields, and the Repeater option. Grouping fields will allow grouping a number of fields to apply the same rules once, instead of adding to each field individually (such as visibility conditions, required or optional, and custom Appearance settings). Then you can enable the Repeater option on the frontend, so users can repeat a field or group of fields manually or conditionally.”
Sounds awesome! Can’t wait to try all of these out.
SmartCrawl
The CEO of SEO, the diva of schemas, taking you on a brilliant run through Google’s Rich Results Test tool… it’s SmartCrawl.
Recent Releases
“We’ve been cranking things out this year!”, said SmartCrawl’s Project Manager, Mohammad.
“Most recently, Schema Builder got a big upgrade. Local Business support has been added, along with the option to add Multiple locations. And SmartCrawl now has 60+ subtypes to cover most types of businesses.”
In addition to local business, the following types have been added, as requested from WPMU DEV users:
Recipe schema
Job Posting schema
Movie schema
Course schema
Book schema
Software Application schema
Mohammad continued, “In addition to the WooCommerce custom schemas presets we added, we’ve improved the default WooCommerce schema, which now supports open graph product tags (price and currency), and added Recommended Rules to Robots.txt and No-index Hidden Products.”
“Another feature we released over the summer, which we’ve gotten great feedback on, is the Lighthouse SEO Scan in SmartCrawl. We added a new and more reliable SEO audit tool, the Lighthouse SEO Checkup. It’s designed to ensure that pages are optimized for search engine results ranking, and is built with contextual help for each audit. Also, we improved our SEO Audits reporting system to support conditional reports.” For example: If score is less than 70%, send a report.
Rounding out the features released earlier this year are:
SmartCrawl Configs – Configs can be set to apply automatically on newly created sites.
Multisite Sitewide Permission – with the new permission module, Super Admin can decide who has permission to access SC settings on subsites―Super Admins or Site Admins―and which modules should be activated on Subsites.
Google News Sitemap – has been added, to list news articles and posts published in the last 48 hours so that they show up in Google News.
Coming Soon
Mohammad filled us in regarding what’s on the horizon for SmartCrawl.
“Redirection Module Improvements is coming. This will add bulk import and search functionality to the Redirection module, as well as supporting regex redirections and more.”
Hold tight…
Snapshot
Snapshot’s got you when it comes to safe and efficient WordPress backups. Access, manage, and restore in a snap.
Recent Releases
Product Manager Nastia shared the Snapshot team’s accomplishments this year…
“In the second quarter of 2021, the main issue raised by our members was that they had insufficient WPMU DEV storage. We listened, and doubled the storage space for all new members―at no additional cost. Alongside this, our team worked hard to resolve issues with backups taking too much storage space. We’ve also added an option to limit the number of backups and improve the rotation process.”
“Another member request was the ability to restore a site through the Snapshot UI when the site was inaccessible. As a result, we came up with the FTP Restoration Method, where a site can be restored directly to a server by simply providing FTP credentials.”
“Additionally, in the third quarter, we developed our most requested destination: Dropbox. We also added Configs, and integration with The Hub 2.0.”
“Lastly, you can now upload your backups to an FTP/SFTP destination, and back up password-protected sites.”
Coming Soon
Nastia had this to say about Snapshot’s future…
“Currently in the works are some some big design improvements, and a super secret feature we can’t share yet, but know this―it’s BIG.”
Two snaps up!
Dashboard
It’s your WP Dashboard, but on steroids. Link your sites to our super servers for added features, more control, and one-click access to our 24/7 support, all while making your site more secure.
Recent Releases
Lead Developer Joel gave us the rundown on Dashboard.
“One-Click Bulk Install & Activate options for Plugins was a big deal this year. Users have long been clamoring for this one, and we’re getting a lot of positive feedback on it.”
“Another major update was upping Support for PHP to 8.0. We also presented a new UI for user permissions management.”
Here’s the full list of releases from earlier this year:
One-click Bulk Install & Activate
PHP support upgraded to 8.0
Link custom logo using a URL for White label
Supports premium plugins and themes updates (Hub and Automate)
Optional data and settings cleanup on uninstallation
Force sync from Hub
Ability to hide support tickets in Dash plugin from Hub
Improved Analytics Widget UX
Coming Soon
Joel hints that 2022 is shaping up nicely.
“We’re planning improvements in premium plugins and themes updates support, as well as for Analytics. Also coming is the ability to install plugins from the Hub using zip, plus various improvements in white label support.”
Dash-ing through the snow, more goodies comin’ your way…
Comics
Because smiling is contagious, and laughter is good for the soul, we added a new category to WPMU DEV’s portfolio this year: the funnies.
Lead comic artist (and fellow blog writer) Nate was eager to chat about it.
“Back in early September, we released The DEV’s Pixels. It’s a new feature that includes original comics created in-house, then shared on our site and available to download.“
“Covering a variety of tech topics, from development, computing, internet, and client relations, to other relatable material for agencies and freelancers, we publish one new comic a week, and add it to our inventory.”
When asked what spawned the idea, Nate replied: “Comics can benefit your agency in many ways. They are great marketing tools for your email, social media, blog, etc., and ours can be used and shared freely.”
Nate didn’t stop there… “In addition to the regular comics, we also launched our own Caption Contest! Anyone can submit an entry (or multiple entries) for a chance to win. It’s already rather popular, with submissions rolling in as soon as we publish. In fact, due to participation growing so rapidly, we just added reaction emojis so everyone can get in on the fun.”
Sign-ups are available through email, if you want to get notified when a new one drops and add your quip to the queue.
Another fresh component we introduced this year was a crossover between our member forums and our company blog.
Here to tell us about it is Lead Editor, Martin.
“Earlier this year we launched The Blog XChange, a collaborative forum where members can post original and useful content ideas for new articles and tutorials from their personal knowledge and experience of WordPress. If selected, WPMU DEV gives the contributor a shoutout, and links promoting their business in the published post, plus generous hero points ―which can be used to earn free hosting credits…or even a lifetime membership!”
Martin continued, “Since launching The Blog XChange, we’ve received 80+ submissions from over 20 members, and published several new articles and tutorials as a result. We’ve also got a number of new post ideas in the pipeline for next year, so we’re pretty excited.”
“The Blog XChange is a win-win initiative for members and WPMU DEV. I encourage all members to read our guidelines for posting, and submit their content ideas.”
If you’re not already a regular reader of our blog, you’re missing out on a lot of great content. We publish new articles multiple times a week. Come check it out!
Phew! That was quite a lot to unpack, but totally worth the trip.
Final Round
Cheers! We hope you enjoyed this literary libation as much as we enjoyed serving it to you.
As hard as we work and as much as we accomplish, we also know that tech is constantly evolving, which means our products and services are never done and dusted. There are always new goals in front of us, and we’re ever in motion to clear that next hurdle.
This is what we love to do… but it would mean nothing without our WPMU DEV-ers.
So a quick note of appreciation to you, our devoted members, for continuing to provide valuable input and feedback. We take your comments and suggestions to heart, giving them all due consideration in the boardroom and developers room.
Our well-loved page speed optimization suite just got even suite-er with a new version release!
Hummingbird is here to make your holiday brighter. We’ve added a slew of new features and improvements, from a browser cache wizard (which automates the process), to a brand new Notifications dashboard widget―with all of your reports and notifiers combined.
Keep reading to check out all the newness, or jump ahead using these links:
Hummingbird has had Notifications, Performance Reports and state of the art Caching features for some time now, but we’ve upped the ante on all of them.
We’re gonna dive into the details, starting with…
New, More Useful and Unified Notifications Module
Notifications have been revamped, and are more functional than ever.
You can use notifications to automate your workflow, sending reports and notification messages directly to any inbox, and at the schedule of your choosing.
There are four types of Notifications:
Performance Test – schedule and send regular performance tests of your site
Uptime Reports – send reports of any of your sites’ downtime in a given timeframe
Database Cleanup – schedule and send reports for regular cleanups of your database {NEW}
Uptime Notifications – instant notification of any downtime to allow for timely action
It used to be that you needed to visit each specific feature to set up or view notifiers. Now they are all grouped in one section, which saves time and effort. And looks spiffy, too!
You can access Notifications two different ways, from the WordPress dashboard main menu:
Hummingbird, then scroll down (last module on right)
Hummingbird > Notifications
Two options for getting to the Notifications module.
Click on the Manage Notifications button to access settings.
To create a new Notification for any report type, click the plus + icon from the desired notification type row. This will open the scheduling wizard.
Enabling notifications in Hummingbird.
Configuring is fast and easy through the Notifications wizard.
Scheduling options for Performance Tests, Uptime Reports, and Database Cleanup types are identical. You can set the Frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly), the Day, and the Time you’d like the report to run.
Scheduling options for Uptime Notifications is a single setting only, for Threshold. This enables you to trigger email notifications based on the amount of time your site is down (5, 10, or 30 minutes).
Choose what Threshold time will trigger email notifications when your site is down.
Note that any recipients for Uptime Notifications will receive an email invitation to subscribe, and must confirm that subscription (via the clickable link) in order to receive them.
Subscribers who’ve not yet accepted your Uptime invite (pending) will have a stopwatch icon.
For notifications you’ve already set up, you will see a blue Enabled status and a cog icon instead of a plus sign. Click the cog icon to Reconfigure―or Disable―any notification, and simply revise at will using the same wizard you originally set it up through.
Reconfiguring is as easy as a few clicks.
Performance Reports Get a Greenlight for Subsites*
Performance reports have been a part of prior Hummingbird versions. However, now this option is also available in every subsite in multisite installs.
You can schedule regular performance tests of your site and send reports of the data to any recipients you desire. These can be for desktop only, mobile only, or both. You can also specify the test Results you want included in your reports: Score Metrics, Audits, and Historic Field Data.
Sample Performance report delivered via email.
Schedule Database Cleanups, & Get Reports*
This feature will allow you to schedule regular cleanups of your database, and send reports with this information to recipients of your choosing.
The Database Cleanup settings enable you to specify which Tables should be included in your scheduled cleanups and corresponding reports. The options are:
Post Revisions
Draft Posts
Trashed Posts
Spam Comments
Trashed Comments
Expired Transients
All Transients
To set up, navigate to the Hummingbird Notifications module. Then from the Database Cleanup row, click on the plus + sign.
From the Scheduling window, select Frequency, Day, and Time, then click the Continue button.
Choose your desired options in the Scheduling window.
Next is the Recipients window. Add people one at a time―from site users, or invite by email―then click the Add Recipient button after each. Once your recipient list is complete, click the Continue button.
Add Recipients from site users or email addresses.
Finally we have the Customize window. Check the boxes for the Tables you’d like to include (likewise, uncheck any to exclude), then click the Activate button.
You get to decide which Tables you’d like to be in the Database Cleanup report.
That’s it! You can view or revise your settings anytime from the Notifications section of the dashboard module in Hummingbird.
*Reports are available in the Pro version of Hummingbird only.
Browser Caching Setup is a Wiz with This Automation
The new Browser Caching wizard will get you set up properly, and is a cinch to use.
If your site is hosted with WPMU DEV, Browser Caching has already been configured and no further action is needed.
To access the wizard, navigate to Hummingbird > Caching > Browser Caching, then click on the Configure button.
Hummingbird’s Browser Caching wizard makes setup a breeze.
The first step is Choosing Server Type.
Hummingbird will automatically detect the server type used by your site, however you can manually select another option if need be. (If you have CloudFlare integration enabled, the wizard will skip this step.)
Server type is automatically detected in the browser caching wizard.
Click the Next button to proceed to step two, Set Expiry Time.
Here you can select All file types or Individual file types, along with more than a dozen incremental time frames ranging from one hour to one year.
It’s ideal to Set Expiry Time to the longest value possible.
Click the Next button to proceed to step three: Add Rules for your server type.
If you have enabled CloudFlare integration, the wizard will apply the rules directly to your CF account for this site, and no further action will be required.
On Apache servers, the wizard will attempt to apply the browser caching rules automatically to the .htaccess file.
However, if your .htaccess file is not writable or if the wizard encounters unexpected issues, you’ll be prompted to copy & paste the code generated by the wizard. Once done, click the Check Status button.
If your site is running on any of the below servers (and not hosted by WPMU DEV), Hummingbird cannot automatically configure browser cache, so you will need to set it up manually. Contact your hosting provider if you’re not sure what server your site is running on.
Guidance for setting up other server options, follows:
Hoorah for WP Ultimo users! This new feature is automatic, so you won’t see the settings for it, but rest assured we’ve got you covered.
Hummingbird automatically works behind the scenes to ensure cache is cleared on domain-mapped subsites, as it should be.
One Last Enhancement (Hint: AO)
There is one last enhancement in this version release…
You can now change the file location for Asset Optimization in multisite.
This allows you to choose where Hummingbird should store your modified assets. This is helpful for those who prefer to store assets in custom directories, perhaps due to internal company policies, or in order to change the hummingbird-assets path for whitelabel purposes.
Choose where you want your modified assets to be stored.
If you’re using WPMU DEV’s CDN, this feature is inactive.
Keep Your Site Humming
The new features and improvements in this latest version of Hummingbird continue to make it a must-have tool.
And, we already have the next set of new features in the works, which as of right now includes:
Adding font optimization to automatic mode in asset optimization module
Improved UI for manual mode in asset optimization
New onboarding wizard
Safe Mode in asset optimization
many more improvements to asset optimization
We always keep a running list of upcoming features in our roadmap so you can take a peek anytime and see what’s in the pipeline.
The free version of Hummingbird is feature-packed, and definitely worth implementing on your sites. But if you want to really blow your speed out of the water and switch on more premium features, check out Hummingbird Pro.
You will see a vast improvement in load times once you install and activate either version of Hummingbird, and can continue to tweak your settings for optimal performance.
Our well-loved page speed optimization suite just got even suite-er with a new version release!
Hummingbird is here to make your holiday brighter. We’ve added a slew of new features and improvements, from a browser cache wizard (which automates the process), to a brand new Notifications dashboard widget―with all of your reports and notifiers combined.
Keep reading to check out all the newness, or jump ahead using these links:
Hummingbird has had Notifications, Performance Reports and state of the art Caching features for some time now, but we’ve upped the ante on all of them.
We’re gonna dive into the details, starting with…
New, More Useful and Unified Notifications Module
Notifications have been revamped, and are more functional than ever.
You can use notifications to automate your workflow, sending reports and notification messages directly to any inbox, and at the schedule of your choosing.
There are four types of Notifications:
Performance Test – schedule and send regular performance tests of your site
Uptime Reports – send reports of any of your sites’ downtime in a given timeframe
Database Cleanup – schedule and send reports for regular cleanups of your database {NEW}
Uptime Notifications – instant notification of any downtime to allow for timely action
It used to be that you needed to visit each specific feature to set up or view notifiers. Now they are all grouped in one section, which saves time and effort. And looks spiffy, too!
You can access Notifications two different ways, from the WordPress dashboard main menu:
Hummingbird, then scroll down (last module on right)
Hummingbird > Notifications
Two options for getting to the Notifications module.
Click on the Manage Notifications button to access settings.
To create a new Notification for any report type, click the plus + icon from the desired notification type row. This will open the scheduling wizard.
Enabling notifications in Hummingbird.
Configuring is fast and easy through the Notifications wizard.
Scheduling options for Performance Tests, Uptime Reports, and Database Cleanup types are identical. You can set the Frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly), the Day, and the Time you’d like the report to run.
Scheduling options for Uptime Notifications is a single setting only, for Threshold. This enables you to trigger email notifications based on the amount of time your site is down (5, 10, or 30 minutes).
Choose what Threshold time will trigger email notifications when your site is down.
Note that any recipients for Uptime Notifications will receive an email invitation to subscribe, and must confirm that subscription (via the clickable link) in order to receive them.
Subscribers who’ve not yet accepted your Uptime invite (pending) will have a stopwatch icon.
For notifications you’ve already set up, you will see a blue Enabled status and a cog icon instead of a plus sign. Click the cog icon to Reconfigure―or Disable―any notification, and simply revise at will using the same wizard you originally set it up through.
Reconfiguring is as easy as a few clicks.
Performance Reports Get a Greenlight for Subsites*
Performance reports have been a part of prior Hummingbird versions. However, now this option is also available in every subsite in multisite installs.
You can schedule regular performance tests of your site and send reports of the data to any recipients you desire. These can be for desktop only, mobile only, or both. You can also specify the test Results you want included in your reports: Score Metrics, Audits, and Historic Field Data.
Sample Performance report delivered via email.
Schedule Database Cleanups, & Get Reports*
This feature will allow you to schedule regular cleanups of your database, and send reports with this information to recipients of your choosing.
The Database Cleanup settings enable you to specify which Tables should be included in your scheduled cleanups and corresponding reports. The options are:
Post Revisions
Draft Posts
Trashed Posts
Spam Comments
Trashed Comments
Expired Transients
All Transients
To set up, navigate to the Hummingbird Notifications module. Then from the Database Cleanup row, click on the plus + sign.
From the Scheduling window, select Frequency, Day, and Time, then click the Continue button.
Choose your desired options in the Scheduling window.
Next is the Recipients window. Add people one at a time―from site users, or invite by email―then click the Add Recipient button after each. Once your recipient list is complete, click the Continue button.
Add Recipients from site users or email addresses.
Finally we have the Customize window. Check the boxes for the Tables you’d like to include (likewise, uncheck any to exclude), then click the Activate button.
You get to decide which Tables you’d like to be in the Database Cleanup report.
That’s it! You can view or revise your settings anytime from the Notifications section of the dashboard module in Hummingbird.
*Reports are available in the Pro version of Hummingbird only.
Browser Caching Setup is a Wiz with This Automation
The new Browser Caching wizard will get you set up properly, and is a cinch to use.
If your site is hosted with WPMU DEV, Browser Caching has already been configured and no further action is needed.
To access the wizard, navigate to Hummingbird > Caching > Browser Caching, then click on the Configure button.
Hummingbird’s Browser Caching wizard makes setup a breeze.
The first step is Choosing Server Type.
Hummingbird will automatically detect the server type used by your site, however you can manually select another option if need be. (If you have CloudFlare integration enabled, the wizard will skip this step.)
Server type is automatically detected in the browser caching wizard.
Click the Next button to proceed to step two, Set Expiry Time.
Here you can select All file types or Individual file types, along with more than a dozen incremental time frames ranging from one hour to one year.
It’s ideal to Set Expiry Time to the longest value possible.
Click the Next button to proceed to step three: Add Rules for your server type.
If you have enabled CloudFlare integration, the wizard will apply the rules directly to your CF account for this site, and no further action will be required.
On Apache servers, the wizard will attempt to apply the browser caching rules automatically to the .htaccess file.
However, if your .htaccess file is not writable or if the wizard encounters unexpected issues, you’ll be prompted to copy & paste the code generated by the wizard. Once done, click the Check Status button.
If your site is running on any of the below servers (and not hosted by WPMU DEV), Hummingbird cannot automatically configure browser cache, so you will need to set it up manually. Contact your hosting provider if you’re not sure what server your site is running on.
Guidance for setting up other server options, follows:
Hoorah for WP Ultimo users! This new feature is automatic, so you won’t see the settings for it, but rest assured we’ve got you covered.
Hummingbird automatically works behind the scenes to ensure cache is cleared on domain-mapped subsites, as it should be.
One Last Enhancement (Hint: AO)
There is one last enhancement in this version release…
You can now change the file location for Asset Optimization in multisite.
This allows you to choose where Hummingbird should store your modified assets. This is helpful for those who prefer to store assets in custom directories, perhaps due to internal company policies, or in order to change the hummingbird-assets path for whitelabel purposes.
Choose where you want your modified assets to be stored.
If you’re using WPMU DEV’s CDN, this feature is inactive.
Keep Your Site Humming
The new features and improvements in this latest version of Hummingbird continue to make it a must-have tool.
And, we already have the next set of new features in the works, which as of right now includes:
Adding font optimization to automatic mode in asset optimization module
Improved UI for manual mode in asset optimization
New onboarding wizard
Safe Mode in asset optimization
many more improvements to asset optimization
We always keep a running list of upcoming features in our roadmap so you can take a peek anytime and see what’s in the pipeline.
The free version of Hummingbird is feature-packed, and definitely worth implementing on your sites. But if you want to really blow your speed out of the water and switch on more premium features, check out Hummingbird Pro.
You will see a vast improvement in load times once you install and activate either version of Hummingbird, and can continue to tweak your settings for optimal performance.
In this definitive how to SSL guide, we’re going to explore the topic in detail, and provide some great resources, so you can secure your website with confidence and ease.
Your site is a valuable asset that you’ve poured time, thought, and energy into. Protecting it is vital.
The best way to accomplish this? Hands down–with the presence and power of HTTPS.
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:
There’s a fair amount of ground to cover here, so let’s get started.
Domain Security Value
You have probably noticed the shift of many website URLs going from HTTP to HTTPS over the past decade, in particular, the last half-dozen years. There’s an interesting wiki article on the timeline if you’re keen on more specifics.
So what is it that makes HTTPS so good?
A WordPress HTTPS site makes your online business more trustworthy to visitors. From the moment your site loads in their browser, they see a visual cue that their personal information will be highly guarded in your corner of the world (wide web).
You’ll also get an SEO boost, as search engines favor HTTPS websites. According to Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, SSL is part of Google’s search ranking algorithm.
Being rewarded with improved page load times is another awesome part of the package. Who doesn’t want performance gains?
HTTPS, aka end-to-end encryption, can help prevent all types of online attacks, including the big baddies known as APTs and MitM attacks. Here’s a quick rundown on these:
APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats) are attack campaigns in which intruders use continuous, clandestine, and sophisticated techniques to gain access to a system, and remain inside for a prolonged period of time. These have potentially destructive consequences.
MitM (Man in the Middle) attacks are when a cybercriminal gains access to an unsecured or poorly secured Wi-Fi network to intercept and read transmitted data, capturing login credentials, banking information, and other personal information. The attacker might also impersonate the person or entity you think you’re talking to, in order to steal information.
Sadly, these cyber attacks don’t seem to be slowing down.
While not completely fool-proof, having HTTPS on your website will greatly improve your defenses against APTs, MitM attacks, malware, direct hacker attacks, and a host of other vulnerabilities.
Next, let’s look at how encryption actually works.
HTTP vs HTTPS
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) allows communication between different systems―like your browser to a web server―so you can view web pages or transfer data. HTTP moves data in plain text, but is unsecured/readily available for anyone to read.
HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is HTTP with an added layer of security. It uses SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates to encrypt the information flowing between your browser and the server, protecting sensitive information from being stolen.
When a website is secured, HTTPS appears in the URL through an SSL certificate. This is indicated by a lock symbol in the browser bar.
You can click on that little lock to see the certificate information, which provides more details, including who the cert is issued to (website owner), who it’s issued by (the certificate authority), and the valid from/to dates.
SSL certificate details will be revealed by clicking on the padlock icon.
The extra layer of security in HTTPS comes from TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol. TLS is just an updated, more secure version of SSL. Nine times out of ten you will hear security certificates referred to as SSL, mostly because it’s the term people are used to.
How does HTTPS actually work?
In a nutshell… a browser reaches out to a server, and a “handshake” connection is made. During the handshake, the server sends an SSL certificate that has an asymmetric public key to the client, and a private key that is stored at the webserver (self) end. This ensures that all data in the stream is encrypted.
How to HTTPS: connecting to secure the SSL certificate.
HTTPS uses two types of end-to-end encryption, which we’ll now examine in finer detail.
End-to-End Encryption
Asymmetric encryption is known as public-key cryptography. A public key is used to encrypt the data, while a private key is being used to decrypt the data. The two keys are connected and are actually very large numbers with certain mathematical properties. If you encode a message using a person’s public key, they can decode it using their matching private key.
Symmetric encryption is when only one key is being used to encrypt and decrypt the data. The entities will share the same key during communication for encrypting and decrypting the data.
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
Both TLS and SSL use an asymmetric PKI system. Data encrypted by a public key can only be decrypted by private key or the other way round.
Private keys should be kept very securely and never distributed or made accessible to anyone other than the website owner.
Public keys can be distributed to anyone who needs to decrypt information that was encrypted with the private key.
The client will create a session key based on algorithms. This session key will be encrypted using the public key. Then it will be sent to the server.
The server will use the asymmetric private key to decrypt the encrypted session key and will get the session key. The browser will use the session key for encrypting and decrypting the data for the session.
Now the data is secured as the session key will be known by the client and server. Once the session has expired, the process will be repeated again, since the session key will no longer be valid.
Today we use the AES encryption algorithm, which was adopted and published as the federal standard by The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) uses a single key as a part of the encryption process. The key can be 128 bits (16 bytes), 192 bits (24 bytes), or 256 bits (32 bytes) in length. Given that the fastest computer would take billions of years to run through every permutation of a 256-bit key, which is valid for such a short time, hijacking the session key is extremely difficult. That’s why AES is considered an extremely secure encryption standard.
What is SSL?
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and is the standard technology for keeping an internet connection secure. It safeguards any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems, thus preventing data in the stream from being intercepted by unintended recipients who may have criminal intent.
This is done by making sure that any data transferred between users and sites, or between two systems, remains impossible to read. It uses encryption algorithms to scramble data in transit, preventing hackers from reading it as it’s sent over the connection.
This includes anything sensitive or personal, such as names and addresses, logins, emails, credit card numbers, and other financial information. And it extends over FTP, web apps, cloud-based computers, hosting planets (e.g., cPanel), VPNs, intranets, extranets, and DB connections.
To quickly clarify a point: Although the terminology is used interchangeably, and they are intrinsically connected, HTTPS is not SSL. HTTPS is a combination of HTTP and either SSL or TLS. So more accurately, HTTPS is one common instance of SSL.
Diagram of an HTTPS stack.
With that said, let’s move on to SSL certificates.
What is an SSL Certificate?
An SSL certificate encrypts the information that users supply to a site, which basically translates the data into complex code. Even if someone managed to steal the data being communicated between the client and the server, it would be a mess of gibberish impossible to decipher.
SSL Certificates are small data files that digitally bind a cryptographic key to an organization’s details. When installed on a web server, the HTTPS protocol (over port 443) allows secure connections from a web server to a browser.
SSL Certificates bind together:
a domain name, server name, or hostname
an organizational identity (i.e., company name) and location
An organization needs to install the SSL Certificate onto its web server to initiate secure sessions with browsers. Depending on the type of SSL Certificate applied for, the organization will be vetted at the appropriate level.
Once HTTPS is installed, all traffic and communication between the web server and the web browser will be encrypted and secure.
Types of SSL Certificates
SSL certificates are used for encryption and validation.
Encryption ensures that traffic cannot be tampered with by eavesdroppers and enhances the confidentiality and integrity of the information in any transaction. Validation ensures that the two communicating parties are actually who they say they are.
SSL certificates are categorized by the level of validation provided, and the number of domains or subdomains under the certificate.
Certificates are processed by a Certificate Authority (CA), using software specifically designed for running and granting these certificates.
The encryption levels are the same for each type of certificate, meaning, none are less secure than the others. The difference between them is in the vetting and verification processes needed to obtain them, the assurance value that comes with that, and the type and number of domains that are included.
SSL certificates fall into two categorical areas:
Validation Level
Number of Domains
The SSL Certificate Validation Levels are:
Domain Validated (DV)
Organization Validated (OV)
Extended Validated (EV)
The SSL Certificates by Number of Domains are:
Single-domain
Multi-domain
Wildcard
We’re going to get into a more detailed description of each of these certificates, along with some basic suggestions on who they’re best for, as well as a broad idea of associated costs. (Pricing is ballpark, as it not only varies by type, but by the vendor it’s purchased from.).
SSL Certificates by Validation Level
1. Domain Validated (DV)
Domain validation SSL certificates are the lowest level of validation. The Certificate Authority simply verifies that the organization has control over the concerned domain. Verification is usually done via email, either by making changes to a DNS record or uploading a file supplied by the CA to the domain. This usually takes a few minutes to a few hours to complete the process.
DVs are often used by blogs or informational websites that primarily entertain or inform.
Cost is free to minimal. DV certificates are one of the least expensive to get.
2. Organization Validated (OV)
OVs provide a medium level of validation. This certificate’s primary purpose is to encrypt sensitive information during transactions, and to validate business credibility with a high-level of assurance. The Certificate Authority validates the ownership of the domain along with organization information (like name, city, and country), which usually takes a few days.
OVs are often required for commercial and public-facing websites that collect and store their customers’ information. Ideal if you sell merchandise or provide paid services online.
Cost is mid range. OV certificates fall between DVs and EVs in price.
3. Extended Validated (EV)
EVs are the highest-ranking SSL certificate type. For these, the CA validates the ownership, organization information, physical location, and legal existence of the company. It also checks that the organization is aware of the SSL certificate request before approving it. Documents are required to certify the company identity along with many checks. This usually takes a fews weeks.
Web security experts recommend EVs for sectors like e-commerce, banking, social media, healthcare, government, and insurance businesses. Basically, any entities that handle user payment details or large quantities of sensitive information should get an EV cert.
Cost: Expensive. EVs are the priciest to get.
SSL Certificates by Number of Domains
An SSL certificate may be associated with one or more domains (aka, hostnames). Once it has been issued, it’s not possible to change its name type (e.g., switch from a single-name to a wildcard name).
Single-domain SSL certificate
Just like it sounds, this SSL certificate protects a single domain/hostname. The single name certificate is only valid for the domain specified with the certificate.
However, if you secure a single-name certificate for www.myspecialsite.com, most certificate authorities will issue the signed certificate with an entry in the field for myspecialsite.com as well. Browsers will then trust the certificate with or without preceding www.
Multi-domain Certificates
Multi-domain SSL Certificates have changed a lot over the years. Originally created to support new-at-that-time Microsoft platforms, they are also known as Subject Alternate Name (SAN), and Unified Communication Certificates (UCCs).
A multi-domain SSL certificate allows adding, editing, and deleting the domain in the current certificate. They are available for DV, OV, and EV types.
Like ice cream, go single or multi scoop (domains), or wild(card) with sprinkles.
Wildcard SSL certificate
Wildcard SSLs ensure that if you buy a certificate for one domain, you can use that same certificate for subdomains. Thus, you secure a base or primary domain along with unlimited subdomains.
Because wildcards cast a larger net than traditional single-name certificates, their benefit is three-fold:
It reduces the work for the certificate owner to cover the number of subdomains associated with their domain.
It allows much greater flexibility in adding new subdomains to existing sites than alternative options.
It tends to be cheaper than if you had purchased a separate certificate for each subdomain.
Wildcard SSL certificates only secure subdomains at one level of the URL. Things get more complicated as you get to the second and third levels of the URL. If you want to secure multiple levels, you’ll either need to use multiple wildcards or a multi domain wildcard certificate, which can also function as a multi-level wildcard.
The wildcard certificates use an asterisk symbol to indicate the subdomain.
If you purchase a wildcard certificate for *.myspecialsite.com, you can use it in any first-level subdomains, such as:
www.myspecialsite.com
personal.myspecialsite.com
only.myspecialsite.com
However, you can’t use it for these:
www.personal.myspecialsite.com
personal.only.myspecialsite.com
Any attempt to serve multiple, grouped subdomains with the certificate will result in a security warning in most browsers.
The cost for wildcard certificates is commensurate with OV or DV prices, depending on which one is opted for. EVs are not available for wildcard SSL certificates.
Name Attributes
You can associate multiple domains to an SSL certificate using two different attributes:
the Common Name (CN)
the Subject Alternative Name (SAN)
The Common Name allows specifying a single entry (either a wildcard or single-name), while the SAN extension supports multiple entries.
In theory, every certificate issued today is effectively a SAN certificate, as the CA requires adding the content of the common name to the SAN as well. Even if the certificate covers a single name, it will still use the SAN extension and include that single name.
In practice, the terms “SAN certificates” and “multi-domain certificates” are synonymous, and generally indicate a certificate product where issuers can associate more than one domain by specifying the content of the SAN (directly or indirectly).
Any number of different domain names can be included in the SAN field of the certificate, enabling it to work on any of the included domain names.
Unlike a wildcard, a UCC can cover a relatively high volume of domains. A wildcard certificate can only cover one domain, which will include a given number of subdomains for the portion of the domain name represented by the wildcard asterisk in the certificate.
Some providers can include wildcards in the SAN field, or issue an EV, multi-domain certificate. This allows protection for up to 100 domains with the help of the same certificate.
This can provide significant cost savings in many situations.
What Type of SSL Certificate is Best?
SSL Certificates are always a good investment, however, it’s important to think about which one will best suit your business needs.
Here are a few items to ponder when deciding which type of SSL certificate to get:
Number of domains
Level of assurance required for your business & clientele
Budget considerations
Issuance time
A standard SSL certificate will usually suffice for the majority of individuals and businesses. If you’re in the finance or insurance sector (regulated industries), or require PCI compliance, prioritized email support, or enterprise-grade security/performance, you’ll likely need an OV or EV.
Encryption Types
There are also different kinds of encryption that you may come across when searching through Certificate Authorities:
Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) – Named for the surnames of its creators, it’s the most common form of encryption and comes in 128-bit, 256-bit, and 2048-bit encryption.
Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) – Government standard of encryption necessary for sites which are required to meet this criterion.
The higher the bit rate of encryption, the better the security. Although, ECC is stronger than RSA, so an ECC 256-bit certificate is stronger than an RSA 2048-bit certificate.
The difference between RSA and DSA is that the former is faster at validating signatures, which are encrypted keys that are used in the process of issuing an SSL certificate. RSA is also slower at creating signatures. DSA encryption is the opposite since it’s faster at creating signatures, but it’s slower when validating them.
The validity period of a certificate is also a key consideration. Most purchased, standard SSL certificates are available for one to two years by default. You can get a more advanced type with extended time periods, if you feel the need.
The costs of purchasing SSL certificates varies, but you can get DVs for free, or pay per month to obtain a custom certificate.
SSL certificates are also obtainable at no cost. There are currently several free SSL certificate providers online, such as ZeroSSL and SSL for Free. Our personal recommendation goes to the highly trusted and very popular, Let’s Encrypt.
Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority who offers free SSL certificates. They offer DV type only, and these expire every 90 days, so you will need to keep up with regular renewals. To do this, you could use the Certbot ACME client, which automates this process with relative ease, and provides instructions on how to do so.
Many top hosting providers have partnered with Let’s Encrypt to make installing SSL certificates a painless process for website owners. (Hey! WPMU DEV is one of them.) If your hosting provider offers Let’s Encrypt support, they can provision a certificate on your behalf, install it, and keep it up-to-date.
While the Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates are free, hosting providers are absorbing the administrative and management costs to provide those certificates (obtaining them, implementing them, and keeping them valid through regular renewals). However, that should be part of what they offer you in hosting value, not something for which they charge additional fees.
Case in point: Let’s Encrypt currently recommends that you don’t get their SSL certs through GoDaddy hosting. This is because GoDaddy offers automated renewal with their own certificates only―as an added-cost feature. (At WPMU DEV hosting, we will never tack on fees for SSL cert renewals.)
If your hosting provider doesn’t integrate Let’s Encrypt, but does support uploading custom certificates, you can install Certbot on your own computer and use it in manual mode. Check out Cerbot’s documentation for more on how to do this. Or, see this helpful tutorial from The SSL Store on cPanel installation.
Hosting Setup Walk Through
To give you an idea how easy installing an SSL certificate through a hosting provider is, we’ll do a quick walk through of one now.
The specifics on this will of course depend on who you host with, as the finer points of SSL certificate provisioning are unique to each company.
I’ll share how WPMU DEV’s process works since I’m hosting with them.
Any time a new site is created with a temporary tempurl.host domain, or a custom domain added to any existing site, WPMU DEV automatically provisions and installs a regular SSL certificate for it.
For most sites, this happens in a matter of minutes, but can take up to a couple of hours. The wait time is based on how quickly your DNS settings take to propagate around the world.
As soon as the certificate is added to a site, WPMU DEV forces all traffic over HTTPS only.
Verifying a provisioned SSL certificate type via WPMU DEV’s hosting tab in the Hub.
For a single site certificate, that’s it! You’d be all done.
If you want to get free wildcard SSL certificates for both subdomain and subdirectory multisite networks as well through WPMU DEV, you absolutely can. Even if you have a subdirectory multisite, you can map subdomains to subsites in it, and have them all covered by the same wildcard certificate.
A subdomain multisite can be developed without a wildcard certificate, but make sure you take the network live, or your subdomains will show a security error when visitors attempt to access them.
To generate a free wildcard certificate, you only need to add a single record to your primary domain’s DNS, then recertify the SSL.
Registered domain reminder and action prompts in WPMU DEV hosting, via The Hub.
Locate the row of your custom added domain that you want to use as primary, and hover your cursor over the 3-dots menu icon; you’ll see a regular certificate has been automatically provisioned. There is a prompt there to remind you that if you want to use a wildcard certificate instead, you need to add the required CNAME to the DNS records of your domain.
Once the required CNAME has been added, hover again over the 3-dots menu icon, and click on the Recheck ACME option from the dropdown. The system will automatically verify the DNS, and generate the wildcard certificate for that domain.
To get the info you need to add to your domain’s DNS, scroll down to the bottom of the screen to find the site’s DNS records. Locate the CNAME record (optional for wildcard SSL certificates), which has two parts: a hostname of _acme-challenge, followed by the actual record.
Wildcard ACME challenge – not a poker game, but a sure bet.
The hostname and the record must be copied to your domain name system. If your DNS is connected to the Hub 2.0 DNS Manager, follow the guide to quickly update it.
If your DNS is managed elsewhere, such as your domain registrar, refer to our Registrar Guides documentation, which covers a selection of popular providers.
That’s it! Domain security → activated.
Troubleshooting
If your hosting provider handled the switch, chances are that nothing will be amiss.
If you did your own installation, or your host didn’t quite seal the deal, it’s possible to encounter some issues.
We’ll take a look at the most common one, and how to find and fix it.
Mixed Content Warnings
Mixed content warnings happen when your site has incorrectly assessed images and/or content as insecure. Basically, both HTTP and HTTPS content are being loaded to display the same page, while the initial request was secure over HTTPS.
Should this happen, your first clue will be visual. Images and content that had appeared normally will now seem to be non-existent or broken. It will also prevent the padlock (indicating your site is secure) from showing in a visitor’s browser.
There are two types of mixed content:
Active – these are resources that can greatly change the behavior of a website, such as JavaScript, CSS, fonts, and iframes. Browsers refuse to load active mixed content, which often results in affected pages appearing completely unstyled or broken. Browsers treat these very aggressively because of the consequences if they were compromised.
Passive – these are resources whose impact on the page’s overall behavior is more minimal, such as images, audio, and video. Browsers will load passive mixed content, but will likely change the HTTPS indicator.
To fix this, you need to make sure WordPress SSL is set to display mixed content.
Tools That Can Help
SSL Insecure Content Fixer is a highly used, highly rated WordPress plugin, designed for this specific purpose.
SSL Insecure Content Fixer plugin by WebAware.
Using the SSL Insecure Content Fixer plugin will solve most insecure content warnings with little to no effort. The remainder can be diagnosed with a few simple tools.
Upon installation, SSL Insecure Content Fixer’s default settings will automatically perform some basic fixes on your website, using their Simple fix level. You can select more comprehensive fix levels as needed by your website.
You’ll get a network settings page if you use WordPress Multisite. Through this you can change settings for all sites within a network, if you have requirements differing from the network defaults.
WebAware has a fantastic walk-through resource on their site, which is basically the below bullet points, expanded on in great detail. Here are the top-level steps:
Install & activate the plugin on your website
Run the test tool (to verify that WordPress can detect HTTPS)
Select the appropriate fixer settings for your content
Test your website (with a browser tool or online test)
Clean up your HTTPS insecure content warnings
SSL Insecure Content Fixer’s options for detecting HTTPS to suit your website configuration.
If you prefer, you can investigate what’s causing insecure mixed content warnings by checking your web browser’s error console. See the following:
Make sure to refresh your page after opening your browser’s console, so it loads the insecure content again and logs any warnings to the error console.
There are two other free tools that will report problems with your website. They can be more detailed than the browser consoles, and provide suggestions for resolving found issues.
Topline report for the content tested in whynopadlock.com.Overall grade for the content tested in ssllabs.com.
These testing websites are both great for diagnosing certificate problems, and producing clean, clear reports.
Whynopadlock.com looked for insecure mixed content as well, which is just what we wanted here.
SSLlabs.com, in particular, had tons of material, just not for mixed content. Potentially valuable though, so worthy of a look-see sometime.
If you’ve gone with a reputable host for implementing SSL on your sites, you shouldn’t have to worry about any issues. Either they won’t exist to begin with, or the support team will quickly resolve any that crop up. (WPMU DEV excels in support, and we’re available 24/7/365. If you’re looking, try us with a no-risk free trial.)
Don’t SSLeep on This
A more thorough understanding of what SSL does definitely gives a deeper appreciation of the multi-level impact it makes.
Considering all of the pluses it offers, putting HTTPS into place across all of your sites is a no-brainer. Businesses who want to become or remain successful can’t afford to be without the digital force field that SSL provides.
As you’ve seen in this article, there are some great options for getting SSL protection. The fastest and easiest is to align with a solid host who takes care of this for you. There’s also the option of tinkering in your own WordPress files, if you enjoy that sort of thing.
However you get your HTTPS on, do it, and do it now. You’ll sleep better knowing your customers’ data (and your business reputation) is safe and sound. Then you can catch ZZZ’s instead of hacker’s fees. Or count what you’ve reaped instead of sheep.
Yep, we’re going there. While we haven’t completely abandoned local development, we believe that in today’s current WordPress environment, online staging is the way to go.
Local development in WordPress is really good―in theory. While you could spout a list of its pros, they could easily be flipped to cons.
Up for a good debate? Taking one point at a time, we’ll explain why we think online hosting is the better option in developing environments.
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:
First, we’ll cover a few definitions, as they can be used differently, and we want to unify context.
Localhost is used by most people when they’re referring to their PC. But all tech with access to the internet has a localhost―from smart refrigerators to hosted servers. For more clarity, we’ll use online versus local.
Staging is a copy of your website where you do edits/test/changes and the like.
Production is your live website.
Both staging and production can be online or local.
We could wrangle over the meaning of these words, but kindly consider them as outlined above, at least as it pertains to this article.
Now on to the heart of the matter.
Deconstructing the Environment
You can get started with your own environment in WordPress using one of two approaches: local development, or remote hosted development (online).
Local development (your PC) versus online (remote hosted server).
Because we are taking the stance of pro online development in this article, we’ll posit the following points that express developing locally isn’t the best way to go.
1. Dinghy vs Cruiser
It’s much more likely for you to experience issues on your own PC, as opposed to an online, hosted server. So with local development, there’s a greater risk of losing progress made during any given session, or even the full lot of your work.
In online development, the environment can be handled by industry professionals (a reliable host), leaving you to focus on the work itself.
2. Resource Rift
Your own PC rarely equals that of an online server, meaning the same code will run very differently in each environment.
Since your local system might give unlimited access to resources, the site and code will process much faster and with greater freedom (i.e. not hitting any kinds of limits). Not so in an online server, especially with lower resources. Imagine a 64 gig personal computer vs a 1 gig hosting plan.
With online development, staging is pretty much exactly the same as production environments, in terms of specs. That means you can properly test your code, and know with relative certainty it will act the same in both. There is no confusion for you in regard to what works and what doesn’t.
To be more specific, you might have 10 minutes of execution locally, while a server might have 300s PHP execution (e.g. 5 minutes of a code running). If it doesn’t finish it’s going to error out. Hence the same code would run properly locally, but won’t work on a production server.
This may sound counter to the argument, pointing out that local resources far surpass those of online servers, but in this case it’s not about more voluminous specs. It’s vital that in staging (development), you always have equal or lesser specifications than production. In this way, you can test your code/site/etc., and know that if it handles well with smaller resources (e.g. a 1 GB server), it won’t have issues with larger resources (e.g. a 64 GB PC). The same can’t be said of the reverse.
3. (Not Han) Solo Setup
On local, you have to set everything up yourself, which can become a tangled mess pretty quickly, even with 1-click apps. Unless you’re an advanced dev/techie, you aren’t likely to find easy solutions, and are likely to spend a lot of time on trial and error.
4. Needles in a Haystack… Or More Accurately… Code in a Dev Stack
It’s easier to just edit a WP site on a staging environment that is pre-set to work with your server, than do it locally and have to try to replace your database back and forth manually between local -> online.
Consider the following… You create a new post on your site, and attach 2 images to it. This means multiple files (because WP generates thumbnails from the images as well), and multiple database entries in various tables.
You have to know what you are doing to get those changes from your local site to an online one, much like a migration. You either replace the whole site from the ground up, or you have to pinpoint the necessary changes behind the scenes and move those over. It’s usually easier to just create the post online again, than trying to navigate those changes. Why double your efforts?
5. Theme Threats & Plugin Problems
The same goes for themes and plugins. Why not just make changes in an online environment, and when it works, sync from staging to production within a matter of seconds? Avoid needing to upload all those things and do all the configuration from scratch. Sidestep the likelihood of forgetting something in the re-setup.
You can’t completely validate in your local environment anyway. Even for simple theme changes, you won’t be able to run a GTMetrix scan without first pushing it somewhere online, then running the tests. Again, this begs the question, why not do it in an online staging environment straight out of the gate, and remove the extra step?
6. Alternate Access & Redirect Rules
As stated previously, a local setup can be very different from a hosted, online one.
For example: AMP stacks use an Apache server, while other hosts/servers use Nginx, LiteSpeed, etc. These use different redirect rules via the .htaccess file. So any plugins set to use Apache locally, won’t work properly when you push that site to a server with Nginx, (or LightSpeed, etc). In this case, they’d all have to be re-setup.
For this reason alone it’s preferable to develop online. If you have a staging option which is essentially built on the same (or equal) system, it will simply work in production, since it’s 100% compatible. You know exactly how your site/plugins/themes etc. are going to behave.
7. (Not Harry) Potter-ing Past
For some folks, developing locally is a leftover remnant from an era of slow-as-molasses dial-ups. These were unstable and costly, which made it easier to set up a site locally and push everything online in one go. With today’s vastly superior connectivity options, this is no longer the case.
8. Epic Ecosystem
Big, heavy projects can involve all kinds of development. They are rarely local, almost always on a 100% similar copied staging server that includes Git and other development tools―which are much more complicated if you’re not fully versed in them.
Paired Platforms
There’s another route you could choose. That is, using a hosting provider-associated platform for development, like DevKinsta (>> Kinsta), or Local (>> Flywheel or WP Engine).
These offer great ease of use (no intimate coding knowledge required), and run on your PC, with online and localhost environments to match your preferences.
Local and DevKinsta are free to use. However, you will incur costs if you use their hosting when you eventually deploy your site. If you opt out of paying for their services in lieu of another company, you’re likely to run into those compatibility issues we discussed earlier, when you’re ready to push to production. If you are interested in using Flywheel, this is a helpful article we wrote about it.
Instead, you could select a hosting company to begin with that offers a simple staging-to-live online solution. For example, WPMU DEV offers the convenience and ease of a hosted staging platform on our servers, so you can work out all the kinks, then go live with one-click sync.
Pick, click – slick! (Featured in WPMU DEV’s hosting options.)
(AMP)le Coverage
If you’ve read through the full article, thanks for hearing us out! Hopefully we’ve presented a clear, compelling case for why we prefer online (over local) development, while still respecting those who might choose the latter.
We recognize there are decent resources available for developing locally in WordPress. You’ve got your free AMP (Apache-MySQL-PHP) stacks, such as XAMPP, MAMP, & WAMP, which simulate what managed WordPress hosts would provide for you on their web servers.
AMP stacks for developing locally in WordPress.
While these are devised to work with a selection of other software, tools, & operating systems, they also entail installing, configuring, and updating them yourself. This is a time-consuming, on-going task, made that much greater should you be unfamiliar with them.
If you’re still of the mind to go the local route, we have quite a few helpful articles on our blog with valuable information on the subject:
Chances are you have enough to do building and managing your sites, without the added hassle of fixing the unexpected outcomes that tend to come with an unassisted move from local to online.
If your website is revenue producing (for you personally, or your clients), you’re probably going to go for a quality hosting service anyway. It makes sense to use one to begin with that incorporates an all-in-one solution, with a smooth, clean sync for staging to production.
Website development can be a joy or a hardship. In the end, you should opt for the environment that best suits your needs and skill level, and syncs easily on a reliable server.
Google Chrome wasn’t the first web browser to enter the arena, yet despite a growing number of competitors over the years, it continues to hold the title of most popular.
Since arriving on the scene in 2008, Chrome steadily closed ranks, then easily surpassed the once-dominant Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer (the latter of which had upwards of 90% market share in its heyday).
Even diehard Foxophiles and Gate(s)keepers―currently retaining barely 5% of the browser market combined―have long since switched to the metallic maven. Whether surfing from a desktop or a mobile device, Chrome is definitively the most-used browser in pretty much any country.
Chrome’s immense popularity far exceeds all other available browsers. Source: Gs.statcounter.com
As a web developer, you want to be sure that what you’ve designed is able to adapt to any device or browser. Google Chrome, as the most used browser, should be at the top of that list.
Aside from using Chrome as part of your browser testing, it’s also helpful in terms of the tools (or extensions) that were specifically created for web developers.
To that end, we’ve put together a handy list of Chrome web developer extensions that we feel really pass the muster. Keep reading to find out what they are, or use the jump links below to go to any section.
Aside from using Chrome as part of your browser testing, it’s also helpful in terms of the tools/extensions that were specifically created with Chrome web developers in mind.
WordPress developers know how powerful the CMS is on its own, but you can make it even faster and more efficient directly from your Chrome browser with some sweet extensions.
Chrome makes easy work of this with one-click installs, and conversely (if you’re not happy with any), one-click uninstalls. You can also pin any you want to get to more quickly, easily identifiable as shortcut icons in the browser bar.
So let’s get started, and delve into the best Google Chrome extensions for web developers.
If you’ve ever been bothered by the WordPress admin bar that appears when you try to view your site’s front end (sometimes it blocks important components of your site that you want to be able to view while you’re previewing posts), we feel you.
This extension does one simple thing, but it does it well. You can hide the admin bar when you click its icon next to your address bar. It’s a super speedy way to see what you’re missing without having to resort to logging out or opening an incognito window.
Don’t let the lack of recent updates scare you away. It does exactly what it’s supposed to, and as the saying goes… if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
This Chrome Extension will store your WordPress site information and allow quick and easy access to your site’s main pages. It also provides more functionality to the WordPress theme editor by turning it into a CodeMirror editor.
Once you enter your login information once, you can access your stored sites with the WordPress Site Manager extension. You can edit main pages, add sites to your network, make adjustments to your theme and other basic changes.
All the available changes are neatly organized on the page to make quick work of edits and amendments.
Grammarly is one extension we’re hooked on. Not only does it accurately help you identify spelling mistakes (with a red underline), it also points out grammatical ones (with a green underline).
The most helpful feature is how it conveniently displays correction suggestions when you hover over the word in question. Just click on the suggestion you want to use, and it automatically replaces the original text or punctuation.
It doesn’t just work for WordPress posts, either. It works anywhere you can input text so improving your copy, pages, products, and even your emails is a breeze.
There is a premium subscription available which extends outside of Chrome, if you would like access to advanced corrections and writing improvements.
Have you ever gone to a site where you were instantly drawn to the shade palette? ColorZilla makes it really easy to find the hexadecimal code for any color on the site you’re currently visiting.
With over 5 million downloads and 1.3 million users, ColorZilla is one of the most popular Google Chrome extensions available. Despite no updates since 2016, it still works like a champ.
All you have to do is grab the eyedropper icon, hover over the color, then click on it to generate a color code.
ColorZilla features a multitude of color tools for just about any needs you may have, including: an eyedropper, color picker, palette viewer, and a gradient generator.
Fonts Ninja identifies fonts from any website, so you don’t pull your hair out thinking, WTF? (“What’s that font?” )
They have a proprietary algorithm that analyzes font files to get more accurate results, and recent updates have dramatically improved the processing speed as well.
Rollover any text to get the font name and CSS properties. The main extension window will also display a summary of all fonts used on a website. You can also get more information about fonts, such as how many styles are available, their foundry, and price (if available for purchase).
You can even bookmark fonts, and manage them within the extension.
A premium version is available. It allows macOS/windows apps to install trial versions of fonts you discover on websites, which you can then use in any software.
QR Code Generator is super handy, and highly rated.
It converts your current page into a QR Code with one quick click. You can generate QR Codes from free text and URLs on the fly.
Key features include automatic Dark mode, ability to download the QR code as an image, ability to create custom QR code with logo, hotkey support, and more.
Because the devs turn the raw URL to a QR code and don’t include any third-party material in it, any QR codes you create are permanently active/never expire. (And more importantly, safe, because they do not track your data or traffic.)
Playing around with QR Code Generator. Go ahead―scan it!
Nimbus Screenshot & Screen Video Recorder is a very helpful, highly versatile tool.
Use Nimbus Capture to take screenshots―full web pages, or any part of the screen. Record videos of your entire desktop or browser tabs, or create videos using your webcam. Use the full suite of editing tools to annotate, crop, add drawings, arrows, stickers, or highlight text.
This extension offers an incredible amount of options. Here are just a few:
Supports scroll & capture for screenshots
Record video of another active program, or a video screen from a webcam
Customize video screen resolution and frame rate
Trim & crop screenshots and videos
Share screenshots and get a sharable link to them
Send screenshots to Slack, or upload to Google Drive and Google Classroom
Save screenshot captures to a PDF
The free version feels premium, considering all you can do with it. However, they also offer a paid version (around the price of one fancy cup of coffee, per month) which adds even more functionality, such as adding your own watermark, and converting WebM to MP4 and GIF.
Page Ruler Redux is a core web developers extension and designer tool that allows you to get pixel perfect measurements of web elements for website front-end development, web design, or any task you may have that requires exacting pixel measurements.
This extension also allows you to resize the ruler, and adjust color for perfect contrast on dark and light websites.
WordPress Theme Detector and Plugin Detector can detect installed WordPress Themes and WordPress Plugins on the website you are currently viewing.
This extension is extremely fast because it uses the developers own, server-side API, not your browser.
If you click on Theme Used on / show more from the extensions icon dropdown, you’ll see examples of other websites using the detected theme, including child themes (if there are any).
NASA’s blog uses WP’s popular Twenty Sixteen theme, along with many other sites.
WordPress Theme Detector and Plugin Detector extension pulls together a list of examples (shown above).
Another cool little feature: when using the extension, its icon turns blue if it detects a WordPress site, grey if it doesn’t.
Asana users rejoice. You can now extend the usual functionality of Asana on any Chrome website, further boosting your productivity.
You can add tasks while perusing the web, and even enter the site you’re viewing as a task. That’s not all, either―you can assign team members, workspaces and descriptions. It’s the perfect tool to help keep you organized and focused on your tasks.
Here’s another reason for you to cheer, that is if you’re an avid Evernote user. With the Evernote Web Clipper extension, you can save entire web pages or simplified clips to your chosen notebooks.
You can also annotate your selection or take a full screenshot. It’s such a great way to keep track of your ideas and inspirations as they happen.
The Toggl Track extension puts a timer into any web tool, allowing quick, real time productivity tracking, with all the data stored on your Toggl account.
Whether you use Trello, Slack, Asana, Todoist, Jira, Notion, or one of the 100+ integrated tools, start tracking time without opening a new tab. Toggl Track timer can now also fill your Pomodoro needs through automated reminders.
We’ve all been there… you find yourself with too many open tabs, and the jumble becomes confusing, obscures text, and drains memory.
OneTab’s solution? Save up to 95% memory and reduce tab clutter. Simply click the extension icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually, or all at once.
They also provide privacy assurance, stating the information about your tabs is never transmitted or disclosed to the OneTab developers.
With over 800K customers raving about this extension, Hubspot Sales is a widely popular―and quite useful―chrome extension.
Schedule emails, track opens & clicks, log messages from your CRM to Gmail, and share email templates with your team, using Hubspot’s Sales productivity tools. You can also book meetings, which will sync through your Google calendar. It even has mobile apps, for both iOS & Android.
You’ll need an account with Hubspot to use the extension, but it’s free to get one. There is also a paid version, which adds functionality for automated personal outreach, as well as increased limits on templates, meeting scheduling, email tracking, and more.
This particular set of tools comprises the company’s “Sales Hub”. It’s one in a larger suite of CRM platforms which Hubspot divides into categories (such as Marketing, Service, Operations, etc), each with its own integrations and associated fees.
Similarweb is the ultimate competitive digital intelligence tool for a complete 360-degree view of your industry, competitors, and customers.
Access traffic and key metrics for any website, including engagement rate, traffic ranking, keyword ranking, and traffic source.
The Similarweb extension provides you with the full breadth of similarweb.com directly from your browser toolbar. With a single click, you can get in-depth statistics for any website you visit.
It’s important to note that not all sites on the entirety of the internet are stored in SimilarWeb’s database, so you may not see your site’s stats if you’re just starting out, or don’t currently have many page views.
App.telemetry makes it easy to quickly test your site’s speed by clicking its icon in your browser, once installed. You can see exactly where you can improve your site’s speed with the categories listed for you along with the total load times.
Its Page Speed Monitor shows offset and duration of each step during the page load, based on W3C navigation timing. As soon as you access a page, you see the load time in the status bar, and detailed information is a click away.
Some of the categories you can see include redirects, cache, DNS lookup and on load events. While it doesn’t show detailed stats, it’s a great solution if you need a quick way to check the progress of your site while you’re in development.
One of the most helpful tools for developers, Toptal’s Web Developer Google Chrome extension, analyses and checks your webpage for any major violations of web design best practices.
It looks for SEO, usability, accessibility, and performance (page speed)—among others.
Open SEO Stats (formerly called PageRank Status), helps you get a snapshot of where you stand on the internet by displaying the page ranks for Alexa, Google, Compete, and Quantcast, when you click its button in your browser.
It also has the ability of showing WHOIS information, and the number of pages that are indexed in search engines (including Google, Bing, & Yahoo).
Additionally, it shows cache stats (Archive.org, Google), as well as getting information on backlinks, socials, Geo IP location, and more.
If you opt for a premium account, you can unlock several more helpful features.
Ubersuggest offers a quick way to get an overview of the SEO of the sites you are browsing, and the keywords it ranks.
Once installed, go to Google, YouTube, or Amazon, and perform a search. That is where you will see data around the keywords and search terms. On any given keyword you searched for, click “view all” next to the search bar to get access to even more keywords and SEO insights.
Ubersuggest SEO extension also has graphs and trends, backlinks data, related keywords, “people also search for”, trending & long-tail keywords, and customization of your location and language.
While WMPU DEV’s SmartCrawl is more thorough in evaluating the performance of your website, you might want to know the average performance of some other third-party websites. This is where the Lighthouse developer extension comes in handy.
When auditing a page, Lighthouse runs a barrage of tests against it, and then generates a report on how well the page did. From here you can use the failing tests as indicators on what you can do to improve your app.
Simply install the plugin, click on its icon, and it automatically starts analyzing via Lighthouse.
Tag Assistant for Conversions Beta helps validate your website implementation used to measure conversions for Google Ads.
Tag Assistant enables you to step through the entire user journey by simulating a click on an ad, arriving on your website, navigating the site, and ultimately converting.
The step by step guidance will highlight potential problems or misconfigurations, and ultimately let you know when the conversion is being recorded correctly.
This isn’t your typical extension – a button doesn’t show up in the top of your browser. Instead, a button displays for pages in the WordPress plugins directory.
Underneath the usual download button, you’ll also see an SVN Repository button once this extension is installed. Once clicked, you’ll be able to check out the plugin’s code first-hand.
You’ll be able to take a look under the hood and view the code’s quality before deciding to download the plugin. You’ll be able to have the opportunity to catch bloated or malicious code before installing the plugin, helping you to avoid disaster before it strikes.
This Google Chrome developer extension makes it easier for you to manage your MySQL database. It provides you with the administration GUI of the MySQL server, similar to phpMyAdmin, Sequel Pro.
MySQL Admin features include:
Connecting to MySQL server (4.1 or later), connecting to MySQL server with SSL, connecting to MySQL server via SSH2 Port forwarding
Displaying the statistics and process list of connected server (refresh automatically), table list, and rows of selected table
Creating and dropping tables, inserting and updating rows
Link Redirect Trace was built to replace all other “partial solution” extensions, and is the all-in-one redirect path analyzer that gives you the full picture on every redirect―HTTP Headers, Rel-Canonicals, robots.txt, link power, trust and risk analyzed.
Perform advanced, comprehensive, and―most important―correct analysis of links, redirects, and REL-canonicals. Use this extension for your SEO analysis, On page SEO, Off page SEO, competitor analysis and more.
Before installing another Chrome extension, note that this functionality may already be included as part of an SEO tool or WordPress plugin you already use.
Inspect styles in a simple, well-organized, & beautiful way with CSS Peeper.
CSS Peeper is a Chrome CSS extension viewer tailored for designers, that allows you to focus on design instead of digging in code.
Need to know the line-height, font, or button size on a website? Check the hidden CSS style of objects, colors and assets on the web easily using this extension.
With almost a million users and a 4.5-star rating, it’s safe to say that Web Developer is one of Google Chrome’s best extensions for web developers.
Developed by Chris Pedrick, this extension adds a little toolbar with various web developer tools pertaining to images, information, resizing, forms, and much more.
Clockwork provides a set of development tools for PHP developers. It provides a new panel with all required information for debugging and profiling PHP scripts, including request data, application log, database queries, routes, and the visualization of application runtime.
Clockwork uses a server-side component that gathers all relevant data and easily integrates with any PHP project. It includes support for Laravel, Slim 2, and CodeIgniter 2.1 based applications.
This Google Chrome extension helps with debugging, profiling, and tracing PHP code instead of struggling with POST/GET variables or cookies.
XDebug Helper is very useful for PHP developers that are using PHP tools with Xdebug support (like PHPStorm, Eclipse with PDT, Netbeans and MacGDBp), or any other Xdebug compatible profiling tool (like KCacheGrind, WinCacheGrind, or Webgrind).
Important: you need to be in Developer mode (on chrome: // extensions/ page) for this to work.
Don’t be worried by the last update indicated (2016). WP reviews as recent as July 2021 were 5-star ravings, and we concur―it’s still great.
A tool developed by Elbert Alias in 2009, Wappalyzer is a Google Chrome extension that allows developers to identify the various technologies that make up the back end of a website.
Wappalyzer is an open-source and cross-platform utility that is able to detect over 1000 technologies, including content management systems, ecommerce platforms, web frameworks, server software, analytics tools and more.
Thanks to Google’s mobile-first index initiative, it’s more important now than ever for developers to test websites for responsive design—this is where Window Resizer comes in.
This Google Chrome extension resizes the browser window so that you can test your responsive design based on various resolutions. The most common screen sizes are available (for laptop, desktop, and mobile), but you can also enter in your own customized window sizes.
You only have two eyes, which will inevitably be looking at the same place. Even so, it can often be very useful to split the screen between several windows, either to copy the content or even to follow a tutorial. With this extension, you can split the screen between four windows, or between two, vertically and horizontally.
It also has the options of “empty tab”, which automatically creates other empty tabs, or “single tab”, which changes only the current tab. Resize the CURRENT tab and tabs to the RIGHT into layouts on separate windows.
With multi-monitor support, Tab Resize makes split screen easy.
Thus ends our recommended list of best chrome extensions for developers.
There’s No Place Like Chr(H)ome
Considering the wide usage and popularity of Google’s Chrome browser, coupled with its ease of use, speed, reliability, and vast selection of tools in the form of extensions and themes, it’s a well-informed choice to make it your browser for development.
Chrome has been busy proliferating a vast array of the best chrome extensions for web developers for more than a decade―from the most elemental and general design & development tools, to those geared to programming languages (such as HTML, PHP, CSS, etc.).
The sky’s the limit here… build your collection to fit your personal workflow. It bears mentioning that some of these extensions require you to enter personal information, such as your site’s login. While we’ve had no problems using free versions of these extensions, always exercise due caution before providing personal credentials.
With a hunger for continued learning and a killer tool kit at your disposal, honing your developer skills is potentially limitless. As WPMU DEV member, Lucas Ondata Marketing, put it: you’ll have an enviable “utility belt for heroes working with websites”.
There is plenty of humblebragging when it comes to WordPress hosting support. While self-promotion is important and expected, it’s also a chance to be transparent, honest, and realistic.
So how do you tell the semper fi’s from the polished lies?
A lot of criteria go into defining good web hosting, but one that tops most lists is support. To really shine you need to be better than good; you need to be fantastic!, outstanding!, phenomenal!
In this article, we’re going to look into the various aspects that make for great web hosting support, then focus on how to make sure you are getting it.
Customer support is the heart and soul of any business. You can offer flash & slash deals to usher in new customers, but if you can’t keep them, you won’t be successful for long.
People often won’t remember specific things you said or did, but they will most certainly retain the residual feelings of any interactions they had with you. Because how you treat people leaves a lasting impression.
Let’s look at the specific areas that comprise great web hosting support. Some are rather basic, but all bear mentioning.
Not just more channels; quality channels.
Channels
There should be a variety of different avenues available for you to seek support from, such as:
Documentation
This should be easy to locate and read, and written in plain language―not mired in technical jargon.
It should cover the full range of topics as applicable to the company’s offered services. It should also be easily navigable (jump links or table of contents), and smartly organized.
Tutorials & Articles
An active blog is an invaluable resource. Its content should be timely, engaging, and useful. And while it’s normal and acceptable to promote oneself, the whole of each article should be without bias.
Articles should cover a variety of concepts, topics, and how-to’s, with key insights on what the company (and comparatively, savvy competitors), have to offer.
Forums
Unless a company is brand new, there should be a decent amount of Q&A’s accumulated, with both historical and current posts.
Look for patterns in response and resolution times. It’s not a good sign if people are left hanging for days or weeks on end.
Also check for the tone and language used to convey information; does it appear to be easy-going and respectful? Is the response fleshed-out and pertinent to the subject?
Open a Ticket
It should be a straightforward process to fill out and submit one of these.
Post submission, is a confirmation link to a forum-created-post provided, or an email with ticket content sent?
There should be a definitive path to easily check back at any time for status checks or posted updates.
Live Chat
In today’s day and age, this tool is essential, and should be readily accessible, 24/7/365.
The initial entry request should require only the basic information necessary to funnel the chat to the correct department. Having to complete a lot of detailed questions or compose a mini novel isn’t reasonable or necessary this early on.
The chat software/plugin itself should be solidly dependable (so sudden cut-offs happen rarely to never), and have well-thought out features (like emailing transcripts after the chat is completed).
Availability
Here are some important questions to consider when it comes to engaging with support:
How easily can you get in touch with them?
Making that first contact should be simple; if you have to wade through menus/submenus to find a viable channel, the rest of the process isn’t likely to go smoothly.
How long does it take to get an initial response?
Live Chats should get a response within seconds (if first in line), and within minutes (if there’s a queue). For tickets, you should hear within 24 hours of submission. Further delays fall outside the bounds of acceptability.
Support Staff
Who is the most direct line of communication to a company’s customer base? You guessed it―their support team. Therefore it’s vital that they present themselves in the most positive light.
Did you know you can convey a more pleasant tone when you smile?
The following should be inherent to a great support staff:
Welcoming
Support should be ready and pleased to engage with you. There’s a lot to be said for a friendly tone and pleasant demeanor.
Knowledgeable
Agents can’t simply hold the knowledge, they must be able to convey it to you.
They are there to assist, yes, but these are also great opportunities to come away with some tech & dev knowledge for handy use later. You’re speaking to an expert, after all. :)
Patient
You should feel no sense of annoyance coming from an agent, nor a sense of being rushed to finish. Being hurried through communications or made to feel insignificant are both indicators of inferior support.
Expertly Trained
Support messages should be conveyed in easy to understand language, so that a non-native speaking individual wouldn’t struggle to comprehend them.
It’s also important for the agent to get to the crux of the matter, so they can provide the most fitting responses and solutions without wasting time (yours, especially) getting sidetracked.
Advanced Troubleshooting Skills
Support should be adept at issue escalation, and able to coordinate between different support tiers if the situation warrants.
For example, if you need to go from Level 1 tech support to Level 2, or another department altogether, it should be with minimal transfers, and without putting you on terminal hold.
Resolution
As we all know, submitting a problem is only the beginning. Having it seen through to completion is another pivotal test of quality customer support.
Here are some important questions to note in this area:
Is the issue resolution time reasonable?
Not all problems are instantly solvable. However, the interim between presentation and resolution should match the complexity of each issue, and the order in which they were received.
Lost time can mean lost revenue and increased bounce rates for your site, so exorbitant wait times, especially over minor items, are deal breakers.
What’s the ticket lifecycle? Are open items closed prematurely?
A customer should always be the one to mark an open item as resolved, not the support team. (With few exceptions, i.e., duplicate threads.)
In this manner, the customer decides and indicates when their issue is resolved, based on their level of satisfaction. Support teams who close tickets at their own whim are a red flag.
How are unresolvable issues handled?
In the rare instances where problems aren’t fixable, the customer should be compensated in a different way.
Much like those “delivered in 30 minutes-or-less, or your pizza is free” deals, but something of value in the hosting realm.
Finding a reliable, robust hosting service at a fair price is absolutely do-able in today’s market.
Getting the Best Web Hosting Support
So we know why good hosting is important to have. Aside from what we already talked about, how can you be sure you are getting it?
Well, here’s a list of some items to be observant of:
Things are running efficiently.
If you never encounter any issues, and your website’s just humming along seamlessly in the background, that’s partly attributable to great hosting support.
That’s not to say hiccups are never to be expected, even in a well-supported hosting environment; just that a lack thereof points to pro-level care behind the scenes.
Support interactions are quick, easy, and produce desired results.
If you can’t recall feeling flustered or helpless after reaching out for assistance, you’ve got a winner.
If you would go so far as to grant a glowing testimonial for help you received―written or verbal―that’s enviable support.
Tools and services are updated, tweaked, or added.
If fresh versions of your plugins or service features are rolled-out on the reg, (or new ones are added to the existing library), that’s a host that works to stay relevant, and provide you with the most value.
Communication flows freely, independent of reaching out for any issues, and is non-invasive and helpful.
If your host sends occasional emails or messages with tips or pertinent news (not hourly or daily nonsense spam), that’s a forward-thinking, knowledge-sharing provider.
Rounding Out Web Hosting Considerations
To make sure you’re getting the best hosting support possible, there are a few other things you can do.
Try an experiment with different hosting companies by doing a Live Chat. Then judge accordingly on the following:
How fast did they respond? Were they polite? Did they ask intuitive questions? Did they answer your queries succinctly & intelligently? Was the chat peppered with unsolicited sales pitches or ‘act fast’ deals?
There’s nothing like testing the waters yourself to decide if you’d rather hang around or get away quickly.
A live chat test that lives up to expectations.
Also, scope out the ratings for potential hosting providers. What others have to say about them can definitely shed some light.
Keep in mind there are likely to be false positives and negatives floating in any sea of reviews, so consider the overall direction of the tide, and go with your inner ear (i.e., reviews that resound with you).
Trustpilot and Reviews.io are two of many reliable, trusted sites for consumer ratings on hosting providers.
While not definitive, customer ratings are a good indicator of web hosting support reliability.
Additionally, check to see if providers offer a free trial, or a money-back guarantee (and that they stand behind them).
Finally, don’t forget to inspect the fine print. Sometimes what seems like a smashing good deal washes away to almost nothing in those asterisked addendums. Read. Them. Carefully.
Make sure offers aren’t just a marketing ploy.
Host-Test With The Mostest
A slick salesperson can sell just about anything once. But it is the ongoing interactions that determine whether you’ll gain a customer for life. A quality company will work to build a rapport―a beneficial one that people will want to retain.
Give due consideration to all the different elements of website hosting. Research and review, digest and debate―from the many offers available.
Then actually go for a trial run, with any host of your choosing, (hey, our support is awesome!), and see how their features, services, and assistance actually stack up.
Whatever hosting provider you go with, know that you don’t have to stick with one who’s not meeting your expectations. Don’t settle for subpar when the best web hosting support for you is out there, ripe for the picking!
What the H double T P? If site loading slowdowns have you shaking your fist, it’s probably time to cache out.
When it comes to fast loading WordPress sites, caching is crucial. A well-optimized page cache can dramatically improve page load speed for visitors, and reduce the load on your server.
You have a slew of options when it comes to caching. You could go with a caching plugin from WordPress.org (there are many, so we compiled a “best of the bunch” short list), or a caching module installed on top of a web server.
Of course the caching method you choose will produce greatly varying results in terms of the quality and impact on your site performance. So what’s the best option?
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:
In this article, we’re going to look more closely at what static server cache is, explain why we recommend FastCGI (with a peek into Static Server Cache FastCGI), and how implementing it can optimize your site speed and user experience.
Let’s get started.
All About That Cache
Rendering or fetching a page or post in WordPress requires queries to be sent back and forth from the database. A lot of these posts and pages won’t be updated everyday.
Rather than the server interpreting the site code itself, querying the database, and returning an HTML document back to the customer and finally loading the page, static caching saves a single result from the first two steps and provides that document to anyone else making the request.
Static assets like CSS, JavaScript, and images are stored in browser caching, so the browser can retrieve them from its local cache. This is faster than downloading the resources again from the page’s server.
Caching in WordPress has multiple benefits, the top amongst them being: speed and performance boosts, hosting server load reductions, and more favorable rankings with search engines. As stated in prior optimization articles, this will be affected by other metrics as well, as there are many components that factor into speed and performance.
There are different caching modules, such as Varnish and FastCGI, along with different types of web servers, such as Nginx, Apache, and LiteSpeed. These modules and servers work in tandem to provide superior caching.
Some modules and servers in the caching arena.
Varnish is a web application accelerator, also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. One of its key features is its configuration language, VCL. Offering great flexibility, VCL enables you to write policies on the handling of incoming requests, such as what content you want to serve, where you want to get the content from, and how the request or response should be altered.
Nginx (pronounced Engine-X) started as a simple web server designed for maximum stability and performance, and has evolved into a multi-performance powerhouse, with capabilities to handle reverse proxy with caching, load balancing, WebSockets, index files & auto-indexing, FastCGI support with caching, and more. As the fastest‑growing open source web server, with more than 450 million sites dependent on their technology, Nginx is incredibly stable.
We believe FastCGI, served by Nginx, is the cream of the crop. Read on for why.
Why FastCGI Rules
FastCGI―an enhanced version of its predecessor, CGI (Common Gateway Interface)―is a binary protocol for interfacing interactive programs with a web server. It’s primary function is to reduce the overhead related to interfacing web server and CGI programs, allowing a server to handle more web page requests per unit of time.
Instead of creating a new process for each request, FastCGI uses persistent processes to handle a series of requests. Using Nginx FastCGI, when a user visits the same WordPress page as they did prior, your website will not perform the same PHP and database requests again because the page is already cached and served by FastCGI. Thus, users will have a much faster server response time after the initial visit.
You’ll also have reduced PHP-FPM and MariaDB (MySQL) load, as well as lower CPU usage. And finally, your server will be able to handle more traffic with the same specs, enabling you to better meet more demanding needs.
For a visual on how these elements work together for superior caching, see the infographic below. (We’ll talk about object caching in a bit.)
Serving a browser request, using FastCGI and Memcached Object Cache.
All WordPress pages can gain huge benefits when using FastCGI.
Caching Policies
There are two content types to consider when setting your cache: static and dynamic.
Static content is any file that is stored in a server and is the same every time it’s delivered to users. Dynamic content changes based on factors specific to the user such as time of visit, location, and device.
Social media pages are a good example of dynamic content. Twitter feeds look totally different for any given user, and users can interact with the content in order to change it (e.g., by liking, re-tweeting, or commenting).
E-commerce sites are commonly heavy on dynamic content as well. With WooCommerce, for example, certain pages like Home, Shop, and single product pages can be fully cached. However, Cart, Checkout, and My Account pages should be excluded. You do not want to page cache these dynamic pages fully as the latest changes would not be seen.
Dynamic web pages are not stored as static HTML files. Generated server-side, these typically come via origin servers, not from a cache. Since dynamic content can’t be served to multiple users (as it’s unique to each one), it’s difficult to cache. However with advancements in technology, caching dynamic content is possible.
One way to speed up dynamic web pages is to use dynamic compression. In this manner, the content still comes from the origin server instead of a cache, but the HTML files generated are made significantly smaller so that they can reach the client device more quickly.
Just as page caching works on HTML page output, object caching works on your database queries. Object caching is a fantastic solution for caching dynamic content.
Like the other caching components we discussed, there are several persistent object cache contenders in the field, the most well-known being Memcached, Redis, and APCu.
As far as setting your caching policies goes, there isn’t a one size fits all. However, what determines a more or less desirable static cache policy is basing it on the type of content your site is comprised of.
For sites where user comments are steadily being added & approved (often by the minute), or frequent new content is the norm, you should structure your cache policy to clear more often, such as daily or even hourly.
For content that is regularly updated, just not that often, a 30-day cache policy is more than enough.
For static elements like logos, images, page fonts, JS, and core CSS stylesheets, you can extend the max age to one year.
Even Google says there’s no one best cache policy, but they do offer some tips to assist in devising your caching strategy, beyond the scope of your static assets. These are:
Use consistent URLs
Ensure that the server provides a validation token (ETag)
Identify which resources can be cached by intermediaries (like a CDN)
Determine the optimal lifetime for each resource
Determine the best cache hierarchy for your site
Minimize churn (for a particular part of a resource that is often updated [e.g., JS function or set of CSS styles], deliver that code as a separate file)
Popular site speed performance testers, GTmetrix, consider resources cacheable if the following conditions are met:
It’s a font, image, media file, script, or stylesheet
It has a 200, 203, or 206 HTTP status code
It doesn’t have an explicit no-cache policy
If you use a CDN like Cloudflare, you can set your cache policies through your account. Additionally, if you use our Hummingbird plugin, you can access these settings via the built in integrations for Cloudflare.
As a WPMU DEV hosted member, you can access the primary Static Cache settings through The Hub to enable the extremely efficient static cache policy.
Turn on Static Server Cache from The Hub.
Ultimately, how you design your cache policy should be based on the type of content you serve, your web traffic, and any application-specific needs that exist for that new new data.
There are a number of tools you can use directly within WordPress that make implementing a static cache policy quick and easy. We’ll look at those next.
Plugin Possibilities
A quick search for caching plugins on WordPress.org will return in excess of a thousand results. That’s a lot of options to wade through. We handpicked a few that we believe to be solid options.
Hummingbird is a one of a kind, world-class caching suite, active on more than +1 million websites.
With Hummingbird’s WordPress speed optimization, your pages will load faster, your search rankings and PageSpeed scores will be higher, and your visitors will be happier. In fact, speeding up your site has never been easier.
Here is just a selection of HB’s standout features: full Page, Browser, RSS, & Gravatar caching; performance reports; minify and combine Javascript, CSS, and Google Font files; GZIP compression for blazing-fast HTML, JS, and stylesheet transfer; configs (set & save your preferred performance settings, and instantly upload to any other site)―and more.
Hummingbird scans your site and provides one-click fixes to speed up WordPress in a flash. And it’s completely free. (Consider Smush as well; while not a static caching solution, it will compress and lazy load your images for marked speed improvements, and is also free.)
With more than 1.5 million users, WP Rocket is a favored caching plugin for WordPress. It’s a premium service, which you can only install directly from their website.
It’s easy for non-techie users to understand, while more knowledgeable developers can customize it to their liking. It’s compatible with many hosting providers, e-commerce platforms, themes, and other plugins.
WP Rocket automatically starts caching your pages, without any need to tweak the code or mess with settings. Pricing starts at $49, for 1 website/1 year.
WP Super Cache is from the team behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce… Automattic. This plugin is free, and has an astounding 2 million+ active installations.
WP Super Cache serves cached files in 3 ways, which are ranked by speed. Expert (the fastest), bypasses PHP by using Apache mod-rewrite to serve static html files. Simple (mid-level speed, and the recommended way of using the plugin), uses PHP & does not require configuration of the .htaccess file, allowing you to keep portions of your page dynamic. WP-Caching mode (the slowest), mainly caches pages for known users, and is the most flexible method.
WP Super Cache comes with recommended settings, one of which is: If you’re not comfortable with editing PHP files, use Simple mode.
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) has over a million users, with an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars. It is a free plugin.
W3TC improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, and reducing load times, leveraging features like CDN integration and the latest best practices.
W3 Total Cache remedies numerous performance-reducing aspects of any website. It requires no theme modifications, modifications to your .htaccess (mod_rewrite rules) or programming compromises to get started. The options are many and setup is easy.
Some of W3TC features include: transparent CDN management with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself; mobile support; SSL support; AMP support; minification & compression of pages/posts in memory; and minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML with granular control.
WP Fastest Cache is another million+ user caching plugin.
Setup is easy; no need to modify the .htaccess file (it’s done automatically). It’s got a more minimal set of features, including SSL support, CDN support, Cloudflare support, preload cache, cache timeout for specific pages, and the ability to enable/disable cache option for mobile devices. WP Fastest Cache is also compatible with WooCommerce.
WP Fastest Cache is free, but offers a premium-for-pay version, which adds additional features, such as: Widget Cache, Minify HTML Plus, Minify CSS Plus, Minify JS, Defer Javascript, Optimize Images, Convert WebP, Google Fonts Async, and Lazy Load.
LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) is an all-in-one site acceleration plugin, with more than 2 million active installations.
It features an exclusive server-level cache and a collection of optimization features, such as: free QUIC.cloud CDN cache; lossless/lossy image optimization; minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML; asynchronous loading of CSS; deferred/delayed JS loading; and WebP image format support.
LSCWP does require use with a web server (LiteSpeed, Apache, NGINX, etc.). It supports WordPress Multisite, and is compatible with most popular plugins, including WooCommerce, bbPress, and Yoast SEO.
LiteSpeed Cache is free, but some of the premium online services provided through QUIC.cloud (CDN Service, Image Optimization, Critical CSS, Low-Quality Image Placeholder, etc.) require payment at certain usage levels.
Ok, now that we’ve covered some viable plugin options for caching, let’s look at what you can do with the cache settings in WPMU DEV’s hosting platform.
(Con)figuring it All Out
The best WordPress hosting providers―leading in sales and racking up rave reviews―have caching built in. Without it, they wouldn’t be competitive enough in today’s market of tech-savvy web developers.
If you’re looking for tools that are integrated on managed WordPress hosting environments, WPMU DEV Hosting, WPEngine, Flywheel, and Kinsta all have caching built in. Quite frankly, the systems used by hosting companies are quicker and more effective than WordPress plugins.
With WPMU DEV hosting, we use our own mega caching tool, Static Server Cache. This is page caching at the server level using FastCGI. Much faster than any PHP plugin, Static Server Cache greatly speeds up your site and allows for an average of 10 times more concurrent visitors.
Understanding and managing the settings for caching in WPMU DEV hosting is an easy, hassle-free experience. C’mon along and you’ll see what I mean.
From your WordPress admin page, go to WPMU DEV, Plugins, then click on The Hub icon.
One-click access to the Hub from the WPMU DEV dashboard.
Next, from The Hub landing page, click on the site of your choice, under My Sites.
The Hub lists all of your hosted sites.
From here, click on either of the Hosting headers.
Two options to get to the hosting tools page.
Next you’ll click on Tools, and scroll down to Static Server Cache. Click the Off button, then click Continue from the “Turn on Static Server Cache” popup window. (Note: Static Server Cache will be enabled by default for all new server/hosting accounts created with us.)
Turning Static Server Cache on is a breeze through The Hub.
You can also do a quick manual clear of the Static Server Cache from here. Simply click the Clear button, then click Continue from the “Are you sure?” popup window.
You’ll get a confirmation message indicating the cache clearing action is complete.
Static Server Cache is fully integrated with our Hummingbird performance plugin, so any action or process in Hummingbird that triggers clearing of the page cache will clear the Static Server Cache as well.
For example, if you click the Clear Cache button in the Hummingbird plugin and have Page Caching enabled in settings, the Static Server Cache will be cleared as well. Likewise, if you have options like Clear cache on interval or Clear full cache when post/page is updated enabled in Hummingbird, Static Server Cache will follow suit with those settings.
Static Server Cache respects cache settings enabled in Hummingbird.
WooCommerce is also supported by default, hence any dynamic process in Woo is not cached. So if a user on your site adds items to their cart, that would not be cached by the Static Server Cache.
Below is an itemized list of what does or does not get cached when Static Server Cache is enabled. (Note: The max size of any item is 1 GB.)
Cached:
GET/HEAD requests (that’s your content; e.g., posts, pages, etc.)
NOT cached:
POST requests (e.g., forms or any other frontend submission)
If these cookies are found:
comment_author, wordpress_, wp-postpass, wordpress_no_cache, wordpress_logged_in, woocommerce_items_in_cart
If these WooCommerce URIs are found:
/store, /cart, /my-account, /checkout, /addons
If you want to check if any page is being cached by our Static Server Cache, pull up our detailed documentation for a walkthrough.
Please note that Static Server Cache is not enabled on staging sites.
Your Cache Cow
Caching is a reliable and worthy solution to improve your pages’ load speed, and thus your users’ experience. It’s powerful enough to allow refined subtleties for specific content types, but yielding enough to allow easy updates when your site content changes.
While many forms of caching are available, static caching is a method for converting the page generated by a user’s request into an HTML document to serve any subsequent requests to that same page.
Caching images and other static objects will certainly speed up page load time, but caching items such as full HTML documents is what can really amplify a website.
Apart from just basic page caching, make sure your caching solution combines and minifies JavaScript and CSS. Then add Object Caching to take advantage of serving dynamic content, without sacrificing load time or CPU usage.
If you’re looking for a full-featured caching solution, then WPMU DEV’s Hosting plan might be your answer. Pair our FastCGI, accessible via the streamlined Hub interface, with our caching queen, Hummingbird, for the speed round’s 1-2 knock-out punch. With our 30-day money-back guarantee, you’ve got nothing to lose!
If you’re a WPMU DEV paid plan user, you already enjoy the full functionality of this feature. Not a member yet? Try it for yourself, free for 7 days, and see why we have so many five-star reviews.
Whatever method you opt for, you’re well advised to put caching tools and policies in place, so response and loading time is never a hindrance to your visitors’ experience, or your conversion success rates. As someone once said… Cache is King!
Google Lighthouse is the industry standard for testing website performance, and is now built into our SEO plugin, SmartCrawl.
Lighthouse has historically been able to run in several ways: as a Chrome DevTools, as a separate Chrome add-on (with a few restrictions), and as a Node package (incorporating it into your build process).
Now, you can do it from right within SmartCrawl’s dashboard (or if you’re a WPMU DEV member, from our streamlined Hub interface), without touching a line of code.
Continue reading for the full article, or use the links below to jump to any section:
Alright, let’s delve into this illuminating new feature.
Why Lighthouse?
Google’s Lighthouse beckons you to test the surfing waters.
Lighthouse is an open-source auditing tool that provides standardized scores across five areas:
Performance
Progressive Web App
Best Practices
Accessibility
SEO
Lighthouse runs performance tests using emulated data, also known as lab data. This is performance data collected within a controlled environment (with predefined device and network settings), and is helpful for assessing and debugging performance issues.
As mentioned in many of our optimization articles in the past, many variables go into your testing results. What Lighthouse tests via your local machine in a controlled environment does not equate 1:1 to real-world usage. Still, it is a useful indicator on the whole, and a valuable addition to your toolkit.
A Guided Lighthouse Tour
The Start of Something Big
In May of 2020, the Google-backed Chromium project announced a set of three metrics with which the browser would measure performance.
Known as Web Vitals, these metrics ― Loading, Interactivity, & Visual Stability ― became part of a Google initiative to provide guidance for quality signals.
With Web Core Vitals comprising more than half of Lighthouse’s performance score, the focus changed to new, more refined goals.
Looming Large: Page Experience
Google also announced in May of 2020 that Page Experience signals would be included in Google Search ranking.
The new Page Experience signals combine Core Web Vitals with Google’s existing search signals: Mobile-friendliness, Safe Browsing, HTTPS Security, and Intrusive Interstitial Guidelines.
Google’s Page Experience is slated to be complete by the end of August 2021, at which time it will join the hundreds of signals that Google considers when generating Search results.
Google’s Page Experience combines Core Web Vitals + Web Search signals.
What to Look for in Lighthouse Results
We know Google Lighthouse analyzes your site based on the five factors mentioned above; performance is simply the heaviest contributor to the score.
When you double click into performance, Google measures: First Contentful Paint (FCP); Speed Index (SI); Largest Contentful Paint (LCP); Time to Interactive (TTI); Total Blocking Time (TBT); Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
TBT has surpassed LCP in the latest version of Lighthouse, and is now weighted the heaviest in the score. TBT measures the total amount of time that a page is blocked from responding to user input, such as mouse clicks, screen taps, or keyboard presses. The sum is calculated by adding the blocking portion of all long tasks between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive.
Lighthouse scoring calculator allows you to select device type and scoring version.
The Lighthouse report also features some opportunities to improve the site speed of your mobile site, including how much loading time they will save. These include reducing render-blocking stylesheets, render-blocking scripts, properly sizing images, and fixing offscreen images.
Lighthouse gives you a tremendous amount of insight into the performance of your page. You can and should parlay these findings to your advantage.
Setting Up Lighthouse in SmartCrawl
Armed with the knowledge of how important search metrics are, let’s implement our supreme surveyor of SEO-ness, SmartCrawl. (Say that five times fast!!)
You will have the option to continue using SEO check ups, but we highly recommend switching to the new SEO Audits. With it, you’ll get the best of the web on your own site, ensuring it’s always optimized for search engine results ranking. (Also, please note that our SEO Checkup tool will become fully depreciated after the next few version releases.)
WordPress Dashboard Settings
After you install and activate SmartCrawl from your WP site, navigate to her dashboard and the Quick Setup Wizard will pop up.
SmartCrawl pre-selects the above options during quick setup.
Let’s leave all the pre-selected elements on, and click the Get Started button.
She’ll take a few seconds to do her thing, then the full dashboard with the various menus and markers will load. As you can see from the list of found issues, SmartCrawl ran her first test during the setup process.
SmartCrawl’s Checkup provides a comprehensive report of our site’s SEO optimization.
Before we try to fix anything, let’s switch from the SEO Checkup default to the new, recommended Google Lighthouse SEO. To do so, click on the Switch to Lighthouse SEO audits text.
Switching to Google Lighthouse through SEO Checkup settings.
From the SmartCrawl informational strip that loads at page top, click on the blue Try Lighthouse Audits button, which will take you to the settings panel.
Confirmation message after integrating the Google Lighthouse feature in settings.
Click on the Lighthouse Audits tab, select whether you want to scan Desktop or Mobile, then click Save Settings.
You can switch between Desktop & Mobile anytime in the Lighthouse Audits settings.
With Lighthouse Audits selected, you’ll now be viewing the SEO Audit screen and Dashboard widget.
Now let’s run a test using Lighthouse. From the dashboard, SEO Audits tab, click Run Test.
In this case, we’ve selected Desktop, so those are the results we’ll be capturing.
After running the test, SmartCrawl lays out her findings. SEO audits are divided into four categories: Content audits, Crawling and indexing audits, Responsive audits, and Manual audits. You can read about these in depth in SmartCrawl’s documentation.
One health test you’ll be glad to test positive for is SmartCrawls’s SEO.
Each Audit includes an overview, a status, and a description on best practices or how to fix. Click the dropdown arrow next to any listed audit to see suggestions on how to improve your SEO.
Single-click simplicity to all the fixes or recommendations SmartCrawl makes.
We recommend addressing as many of the identified issues as possible to ensure your site is the most SEO friendly.
(Re)Ports of Call
Reports are a great way to keep track of your all-important SEO indicators, and nip any issues in the bud. SmartCrawl brings this to the table with the ability to send SEO Audits Reports. There are two different kinds: Scheduled (automated), and Conditional.
For Scheduled Reports, you can choose the frequency ― daily, weekly, monthly― as well as which day of the week & what time of the day. You can also select which device types to include in said reports ― Desktop, Mobile, or both.
With Conditional Reports, you can select to send an SEO Audits Report based on degrees of variance from baseline values. Settings allow for triggering a report send when your SEO score drops below a specified threshold (any incremental percentage of ten, between 10 and 100).
To set up reports, go to Dashboard, Reporting, Emails & Report, and click on the plus sign for SEO Audits or Sitemap Crawler to get reports on each. (Note: Sitemap Crawler can do scheduled reports only.)
With SmartCrawl, SEO reports and email notifications come based on your selections.
From here you can cater to your preferences, having reports come at your will on selected days & times, or based on specific conditions.
Report sends can be automatic or conditionally based.
We’ve seen how easy and helpful controlling SmartCrawl’s settings through the WordPress dashboard can be. Now let’s look at what we can do with them through the Hub.
The Hub Settings
From WPMU Dev’s Hub 2.0, click on the SmartCrawl icon in line with any of your hosted sites, and it will install the plugin.
The green icons in these Hub settings indicate the plugin or feature is already installed & active.
The SmartCrawl splash screen comes into view, with a blue Install button. Let’s click that.
SmartCrawl shines a light in the darkness with her superior SEO skills.
A nearly identical screen loads, this time with a blue Run Test button, which we are going to click now.
A quick overview of your latest Lighthouse Audit results is provided below the SEO score.
Click any audit category to view additional details in SmartCrawl’s SEO Health screen.
Beneath Other SEO tools, you can select any listed items that you’d like displaying in your Hub. Clicking Activate on any of these will take you back to the WP plugin dashboard, where you will need to enter other pertinent information in order to include them as active panels in the Hub.
Some of the SEO tools require other information in order to activate them in the Hub.
For example, to see MozRank data, you will need to connect to your Moz account by providing your API credentials (Access ID and Secret Key).
Checking SEO tools via the Hub interface is visually pleasing, useful, and convenient, as users can view all their sites’ scores in the same place. And, this can be done in tandem with accessing the information through the WP plugin dashboard, or instead of it. It’s really nice having the option for both.
Advantages of Using Lighthouse SEO in SmartCrawl
Single Source Testing
With SmartCrawl’s Lighthouse SEO integration, users can check Desktop and Mobile audits, at the same time, from the same place. (On console, you would need to do this separately for each device.)
Fixes at Your Fingertips
SmartCrawl provides users with fixes for any issues directly in its UI. (Disclaimer: there are some audits that do not.)
Advice and Assistance At-the-Ready
SmartCrawl shows best practices & contextual help for each audit. (On console, you would be redirected to a separate Docs page.)
Send Scheduled Reports
SmartCrawl allows you to send regularly scheduled SEO Audits Reports.
Send Conditional Reports
SmartCrawl allows you to send SEO Audits Reports based on conditional changes.
Location, Location, Location
ALL of your sites’ scores are viewable in the SmartCrawl Dashboard. Or alternately… The Hub.
Hubba Hubba.
The Hub. This deserves a second shoutout, because it is just that cool and that useful. SmartCrawl’s powerful suite of SEO features are fully integrated with the Hub, so you can manage all your connected sites from a single, streamlined point of access.
A Beacon of Light(house)
Most users won’t be clocking speed scores when they visit your site; but they will remember whether the experience felt fast or slow (with the line between the two separated by milliseconds). We’re living in the tech-forward 2020’s, and most folks won’t settle for delayed gratification.
SmartCrawl is free, and packed with benefits. But if you really want to go full throttle, opt for the ultimate bundle of SEO tools & services, with all of our highly rated plugins, plus our 5-star 24/7 support. There’s no commitment! You can do a free trial of our full membership, or our fully dedicated individual site hosting service. If you’re not completely happy, we’ll refund your hard-earned moolah.
Whoever you use as a hosting service, and whatever plugins or tools you avail yourself of, keep Google Lighthouse and Page Experience signals in mind, and make sure your tools & providers are trusted and reliable.
Using an outdated version of WordPress core, plugins, or themes puts your site at risk. PHP is no different.
While WordPress technically works with some older versions of PHP, you’re sacrificing performance and compatibility, while opening yourself up to security vulnerabilities by using these.
For safety and stability, always aim to use the WordPress recommended versions of PHP.
In this post, we’ll talk about how to check what version of PHP you are running, how to update your PHP to the recommended version for WordPress, and how a capable hosting provider can take care of these elements for you.
If you look in your WordPress site folders, you’ll see a lot of PHP files.
Since PHP powers a bulk of the core WordPress software, it’s a highly essential language for the WordPress community.
PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.), and is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.).
Not only is it a major part of WordPress, but a major part of the whole web, powering 70% of all websites.
WordPress supports many versions of PHP, some even obsolete, but as a general rule you should use only those with security or stable support.
WordPress core officially supports PHP 5.6.20 to PHP 8.0; however, not all themes or plugins are supported.
WordPress currently works best with the following versions:
PHP 8.0
PHP 7.4
PHP 7.3
WordPress Recommendations
PHP has to be updated on a regular basis, just like WordPress core, themes, and plugins.
With PHP, each version receives support for two years after its initial release, then there is a period of another year where only critical security updates are released, as needed.
After this three year period, that version of PHP is no longer supported.
Quality hosting providers will generally require you to use the WP recommended version of PHP in order to use their servers, and will help you modify your site to ensure that the latest version of PHP will not break it.
For example, we’ll refer to ourselves (hey, we’re proud of our hosting!). WPMU DEV Hosting provides your site(s) with the latest sanctioned PHP versions.
Upgrading (or downgrading) to various versions is a simple process, done through our Hub 2.0.
Occasionally, some third party plugins may be out of date and cause issues with the latest version of PHP.
In that case you can look for updates, alternatives, or if necessary, downgrade your PHP version to an older one (as long as it’s still actively supported with security patch releases).
Puny Helping (of) Pie — A miniscule 0.7% of sites use the most recent version of PHP, while a minimal 36.6% use the recommended version of PHP.
Less reputable, cheap hosts will not take the initiative to encourage you to upgrade your PHP because of the additional cost of support time and resources to help you transition.
Since they don’t want to break your site by updating to newer, recommended versions of PHP, they’ll often leave your site to use outdated versions of PHP and hope it goes unnoticed.
PHP 7.2 made its debut in November 2017. Considering the three year rule, we know it reached its End of Life cycle in November 2020 (as well as the even older PHP versions prior).
This means more than one-third (37.2%) of WordPress sites are currently running versions of PHP that are no longer actively supported.
That’s not the worst of it. Historically, there have been extended periods of time where that number has hovered at and even exceeded two-thirds (66%)! This is problematic for several reasons.
Why You Need to Update PHP
Speed
For one, there are tremendous performance benefits that come with using the latest version.
You can see from the above table that with each newer version of PHP, the requests per second get incrementally faster.
Since using the recommended version of PHP takes less time to serve the same number of requests, you can give your visitors a much better user experience.
Kinsta also tested on PHP version 8, and I did want to note the scores for it, as the improvements in speed really continue to trend upwards.
With a benchmark result of 233.40 requests per second, PHP 8.0 takes a giant leap over PHP 7.4, proving to be 18.5% faster.
Step back a few more versions to 7.0, and it actually handles 50% more requests per second, comparatively.
I didn’t include PHP version 8.0 in my chart, because its support in the general WordPress purlieu is very difficult to assess. (WordPress 5.6 is presently considered beta compatible with PHP 8.0.)
Knowing this, please proceed with caution and do thorough testing before upgrading any crucial or client sites to PHP 8.0.
Expense
Maintaining code takes effort, and that effort is multiplied when you need to ensure backward compatibility for additional versions.
There is a collective sigh of relief among overworked theme and plugin developers whenever WordPress bumps up the minimum recommended PHP version, effectively knocking another obsolete version (and all of its associated coding efforts) off the table.
Rather than spending time parsing through the code to ensure that any changes to PHP do not affect it, developers can spend their time adding new features or improving security instead.
Vulnerabilities
Just like plugins, themes, and WordPress core get updates to fix security vulnerabilities, so does PHP.
This is also why using a PHP version that still gets updates is so important; it protects you from vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS and DoS attacks.
According to security vulnerability datasource CVE Details, there were only 2 known vulnerabilities found in PHP in 2021 YTD.
Compare this to the 14 vulnerabilities discovered in 2020, the 23 noted in 2018, and the 105 found in 2016, and you can see why updating can help protect you from many known security exploits.
Number of vulnerabilities per PHP in a given year.
It’s a matter of fact that some hackers look to see what version of PHP you’re running to determine what kind of attack would be effective.
An Aversion to Versions?
The first step in compatibility is knowing what version of PHP your site is using.
You can easily see this information right within the WordPress dashboard.
Go to: Tools > Site Health > Status.
If your site should be using a newer version of PHP, it will be shown under recommended improvement.
If it is, then open the passed tests section to verify. You’ll see that it says Your site is running the current version of PHP, followed by the version number in parentheses.
The WordPress dashboard Site Health screen reveals your PHP version.
Alternately, you can go to Tools > Site Health > Info > Server from your site Dashboard, to see what version of PHP you’re using.
WP dashboard settings to view PHP version info.
How to Update PHP in WordPress
Once you check to see what version of PHP your hosting server is running, you’ll know if you need to upgrade to the latest version of PHP.
If you do, checking your site’s compatibility with the new version of PHP is imperative. You never want to test major changes like updating your PHP on your live site, because if there are major incompatibilities, you could seriously impede or cripple your site.
For this reason, it’s ideal to create an alternate site where you can test your changes first.
Step 1: Create a Copy of Your Site
Start by getting a copy of your current site. You’ll need all of the files and a copy of the database.
In some instances, you may be able to use your last backup, if your backups include both the files and the database.
You could lessen the load by using a plugin made specifically for this task. Duplicator is a free plugin offered on WP.org that has positive reviews.
If you want the most streamlined, painless process for duplicating your site, and you’re already using WPMU DEV as your hosting provider, it’s your lucky day!! Cloning is already a part of your membership!
With a few simple points and clicks through our Hub 2.0, you’ll have fully configured, deployment ready WP Sites in mere minutes.
Not already hosting with us but want to get on the bandwagon?! No problem, just click here.
Once you have a copy of your site, you’ll need to set up a testing environment. You can either use a local environment or set up a staging environment if your host allows it*.
We have a great post on how to set up XAMPP on your local computer if you need help setting up your local environment.
Once your testing environment is set up, you can add the files and database from the previous step to your testing environment, so you have an exact replica of your live site.
After you have a copy of your site in your testing environment set up, you’re ready to upgrade the PHP version of your testing site.
*Hosting through WPMU DEV includes the ability to create a staging environment, and it is a breeze to do. Click here for details.
PHP QC
Now comes the fun part, and by fun, I mean the tedious task of QC-ing.
You’ll need to go through your test site to make sure that nothing is broken.
Pay careful attention to the critical functionality of your site. Check out processes, newsletter signups, comments, web forms, navigation, and all of the other elements that contribute to expected usability and visitor engagement.
You want to catch any issues before they have a chance to wreak havoc on your live site and cause a bad user experience for your visitors or clients.
Handy Tools
There are some tools that can assist with the QC process, for devs and non-devs alike. Any issues discovered that are outside your scope of knowledge can be intelligently relayed to support.
Error Log Monitor – This plugin will display a list of PHP issues as an error log in your WordPress dashboard.
WP_DEBUG – Not a plugin, rather a PHP constant (aka, a permanent global variable), this can be used to trigger debug mode throughout WordPress.
Turning on WP_DEBUG will allow you to see the PHP failure types so that you can fix them in your code. It also allows you to see any deprecated functions that are running on your site (ie, those that exist in WP but are no longer the standard way to perform a particular task).
To turn on debugging, head to your WordPress install files, open the wp-config.php file (located in the root directory), and add the following line of code near the bottom:
If that line of code already exists but says false, change it to true.
Make sure this code line in PHP matches the one in your file.
Check out this article from our blog, for a more indepth look at using WP_DEBUG.
Fixing Issues
If a plugin or theme is causing issues, work out the issue first on your test site, and find a suitable alternative that is compatible with the latest version of PHP.
Once you’ve found a solution, head over to your live site and make the changes there.
PeeHP the supported version when considering plugins for your site.
When you’re looking for a suitable plugin in the WordPress repository, remember to check what versions of PHP are supported.
Resources
Once you’ve worked through all of the bugs and kinks with compatibility, you can either push staging to live, or make any necessary changes to the live site, and then change the PHP version on your live site.
This process will vary from host to host, but will most likely involve changing a setting in your hosting cPanel. Some shared hosts will not let you access this setting, in which case you’ll need to reach out to them for assistance.
Hosting with WPMU DEV includes our Hub interface, which greatly streamlines changing your PHP version.
Accessing PHP settings via WPMU DEV’s Hub.
If you prefer a simple solution with a clean UI for checking or updating PHP versions, give WPMU DEV hosting a try, and take one more task off your plate.
PHP Host Partnering
Would you rather be in a Pretty Horrible Position, or a Professionally Happy Place? Rhetorical question… I really just wanted to play with that acronym. :)
Cheap, shared hosting has convinced a lot of people that hosting websites is a simple and straightforward process. The truth is, there is a lot that goes into maintaining your site files and database.
Keeping all of your software up-to-date is one of the tasks that your host can and should help you with.
If they’re unwilling to help you, or hide versions to keep you in the dark, that’s a red flag that you can do much better, and should seriously consider switching hosts.
At WPMU DEV, our hosting (backed by Digital Ocean) leads the industry in value.
Not only do we help you update your PHP version, we also provide a big ole goody bag of features, such as security, caching configuration, uptime monitoring, dedicated IP, nightly backups, free & automated migration, website analytics, and more.
If you ever need help on compatibility issues with your themes or plugins, or have questions about anything WP, our top-rated support team is ready to jump in and assist, 24/7.
Also, every hosting plan is covered by our full 30-day money back guarantee (we’ll happily refund 100% of your money if you decide you don’t like it).
Choose a company you can trust to take care of those automation and update tasks, like keeping your PHP version current with WP recommendations.
Don’t let subpar hosting steal your focus. You should be able to devote your time and energies to the finer details; making your sites shine with the talents that set you apart from the competition.
It’s here. As of Hummingbird’s latest release (3.0) you can now integrate and control Cloudflare’s powerful APO feature straight from your Hummingbird dashboard.
A lot of awesomeness came with Hummingbird 3.0 (check out the full feature list and changelog), including an exciting new integration with Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) feature.
Why is it a big deal and how can it benefit you or your clients? You’ll find out in this article.
You’ll also learn how easy it is to activate and control this feature, right from your Hummingbird dashboard, and how using it alongside our hosting can result in even better performance.
Take your WordPress site’s performance to the next level with APO from Cloudflare.
Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) is an additional cache feature that serves all site content from their network (including 3rd-party scripts), ensuring that your site is blazing fast.
If your business depends on successful, fast loading websites, it’s hard to ignore the benefits of APO.
The best news? It now integrates seamlessly with our Hummingbird performance plugin.
It used to be that in order to handle Browser Caching and APO from Cloudflare through your site, you had to activate their plugin.
However, this new integration changes all that, and installation of the Cloudflare plugin is not needed.
It also means you can avoid a separate login to Cloudflare every time you make a change on your site.
With the new Automatic Platform Optimization integration in Hummingbird, Cloudflare can also cache dynamic content and third-party scripts, so the entire site is served from cache.
Put them all together and it’s lightning in a bottle. The best part is, both Hummingbird and Cloudflare can be used completely free.
Hummingbird’s newest release takes it from rock star to rock legend.
Before we get to activating Cloudflare’s APO, let’s first take a look at how to integrate Cloudflare with Hummingbird.
Cloudflare Integration Setup
In Hummingbird, the Integrations feature enables you to connect third-party providers to gain more control over your caching.
The first step in doing this is routing your DNS to Cloudflare, which you would do through your account on their website. Once propagation completes, your traffic is now routed through Cloudflare.
From Hummingbird’s dashboard, click on the menu item Caching, then Integrations. Click on the blue plus sign to the right of Cloudflare, under Available Integrations.
Cloudflare Integrations settings are in the Caching menu in Hummingbird.
In the popup window, enter your Cloudflare account email address and Global API Key.
Hummingbird provides a quick guide on how to locate your Cloudflare Global API Key.
If you get an error message when trying to connect, it’s likely due to recently adding DNS information through your Cloudflare account, and the settings not having propagated yet.
Give it a few minutes and try again.
Make sure you give your DNS records in Cloudflare the chance to propagate if newly added.
Now that we’ve officially joined the happy couple, let’s see what’s on the menu.
Automatic Browser Caching
Connecting your Cloudflare account through Hummingbird’s Integrations will automatically configure your Browser Caching settings.
You can adjust if needed under the Browser Caching tab by clicking the Configure link.
Get one-click configuration for your Cloudflare browser caching via Hummingbird’s integration settings.Server Type, Expiry Time, and Cache Clearing can all be handled through Cloudflare’s browser caching integrations in Hummingbird.
And now… drum roll please… away we go to APO!
Enable Automatic Platform Optimization (APO)
First things first, APO for WordPress does come with a monthly cost (see latest Cloudflare plan prices) on Cloudflare’s Free plan, and is already included in their Professional, Business, and Enterprise plans.
You can purchase the APO right from Hummingbird’s interface, click on “here” beneath the APO header (see screenshot below).
This will open a link to Cloudflare’s site, offer payment options, and take you through the checkout process. You can go directly through CF’s website for this process, if you prefer.
To enable their APO feature, you need to purchase a plan through Cloudflare.
After you’ve acquired the APO service, you can turn the Enable APO switch ON, under Automatic Platform Optimization, from Hummingbird’s Dashboard > Caching > Integrations.
Once enabled, you can also set an additional option inside to cache content, according to the device types used by your site visitors.
Cache by device type ensures only needed assets are cached and delivered to the user’s browser, depending on the device used (mobile, tablet or desktop).
Click the Re-Check Status button at any time to ensure that data displayed is up to date.
Alternatively, you can disconnect the Cloudflare integration from your site at will by clicking the Deactivate button.
Be aware that Cloudflare will still handle your browser caching, as your traffic is routed through them, but you’ll no longer be able to manage those settings from WP, and will have to do it directly through Cloudflare.
Simple one-click settings for all Cloudflare integrations are available via Hummingbird’s dashboard.
Also keep in mind that WPMU DEV’s 5-star support team is available for assistance, 24/7, should you run into any issues or questions during setup.
DJ Hbird keeps the Cloudflare party going.
(Cloud)Parting Thoughts
No matter your site’s purpose, getting and keeping optimal loading speeds is mission critical.
Hummingbird’s seamless integration with Cloudflare delivers an incomparable experience.
If you want to really blow your page loading speed out of the water, it’s worth considering a paid service from Cloudflare, and taking advantage of all that their APO offers.
Add a trusted, fully dedicated hosting solution (WPMU DEV hosting provides one of the best individual WordPress site experiences, backed by Digital Ocean), and your site can experience warp speeds.
Give it a go yourself with our 7-day free trial. You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
If you engage the above trio, you get performance, speed, protection, and world-class support, all with the ease of a single source of input via Hummingbird’s streamlined dashboard settings.
Dynamic content naturally comes with a performance downside. In this article learn how to optimize Slider Revolution to create both beautiful and efficient animations.
Pro level visuals that look amazing and are fully responsive, can often put a damper on page speeds.
But no fear, you’ll soon see how easy it is to have the best of both worlds (the sizzle, without the slowdown) with the help of built-in Slider Revolution settings, plus our Smush, Hummingbird, and hosting tools.
Skip ahead.
Feel free to skip ahead to any of the topics we’ll be covering:
Plugins on deck are Slider Revolution (SR), Smush, and Hummingbird*.
(If you’re using our hosting, you will also have the WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin, as it’s automatically installed on sites hosted by us.)
Turn on CDN in Hummingbird
(cost associated, Hummingbird Pro)
Turn on FastCGI in the Hub
(cost associated, WPMU DEV Hosting)
Run speed tests after each of the above steps (free sites)
Particulars
The Pro versions of Smush & Hummingbird will be installed on sites hosted by WPMU DEV.
To mirror non-pro versions of the plugins, my initial tests were conducted with the Pro features disabled*.
Hummingbird optimization uses different types of caching and compression features on sites. Page, Gravatar, and RSS caching were disabled.
WPMU DEV turns on browser caching and GZip compression by default; this is standard for most hosts. These will remain on during our tests, since we can’t turn them off without impacting other settings.
As we’ve mentioned in other articles of our optimization series, please note that because of the variances inherent to each element, no one will have identical results.
Geographical locale, media library size, hosting provider – all paint part of the picture using very different brushstrokes.
No matter your particular site environment, you are bound to see marked improvement with this process.
We are going for beauty and brawn, so Slider Revolution will not only be visually stunning, but a highly functional and fast flying site.
How To Sizzle, Without The Slowdown
First up, let’s install Slider Revolution on a fresh WP site, with no other pages, posts, etc.
After installing, select a New Module from Template, from the SR dashboard. I chose “Mini Website”, which required the addition of the Particles Effect add-on.
I tweaked some settings, to personalize the content a bit. There’s so much you can play with here, I could’ve gotten lost for hours.
But on to the task at hand! A quick copy & paste with shortcode, and my landing page is revolutionized. :)
How YOU doin?
Time for our initial speed tests.
Nothing to brag about, but that’s only our base line speed.On the mid to low end, but this is pre-optimization; we’ll bring that way up.
There is currently a file size optimizer feature baked into Slider Revolution. We’ll try that and see if it gives us a bump.
Core JS and CSS are already optimized by default.
The file optimization screen lists the module’s images that can be optimized, along with a slider to make adjustments. (See SR File Size Optimizer Documentation.)
SR’s built in file size optimization offers three methods of activation.
After making some adjustments, let’s do a speed test to check for improvements.
No change from our last speed test score.A hair better than our last score.
There was a modicum of improvement with that, which we’ll follow up with some exciting news:
We have it on good authority from ThemePunch that Slider Revolution’s next version release will have built-in optimizations for Smush! (Follow ThemePunch for more on that.)
There are some overall tips and tweaks you can gain strides with, which we’ll cover a little later.
But to really enhance your site speed using Slider Revolution, you’re best served by top quality hosting, and plugins specifically designed for optimizing.
By incorporating Smush and Hummingbird, our world-class (and free!) optimization plugins, you’ll have pagespeeds humming in no time.
Let’s install and activate Smush.
Smush is our user’s choice, award winning, and benchmark tested image optimizer.
Upon navigating to the Smush dashboard, you should be greeted with the quick setup wizard. These settings include: Auto Compression, EXIF Metadata, Full Size Images, Lazy Load, and Usage Data.
Here’s what each feature does:
Auto Compression ― automatically optimizes new image uploads, so you don’t have to do each one manually.
EXIF Metadata ― strips camera settings from your images, helping reduce file size. (Don’t worry; it won’t strip SEO metadata).
Full Size Images ― compresses your original full size images. (Note: it stores copies of your originals by default, in case you ever want to revert back. This feature is Pro only.)
Lazy Load ― stops offscreen images from loading until a visitor scrolls to them.
Usage Data ― lets our designers gain insight into what features need improvement. (Your personal data will never be tracked.)
Go ahead and run through each screen, leaving default settings on. (Allowing Usage Data will help towards the functionality of future versions of the plugin, but if you have any qualms about opting in, leave it off.)
Smush is ready, willing, and able to bulk compress.
Once the wizard completes, the dashboard will reflect how many images could use compressing. Click the Bulk Smush Now button to activate her super power.
What do our image optimization stats look like now, Ms. Smush?
157 images smushed, saving 5.5 mb. Smushing like a champ!
Let’s see how much that lightened the (page) load, and do our speed tests again.
That’s an olympic jump! More than ten points.This is the kind of “B”oost you love to see.
Time to kick things into high gear, and let Hummingbird flit on the scene.
Hummingbird scans your site and provides one-click fixes to speed up WordPress in a flash.
After installing and activating Hummingbird, going to the dashboard will activate another quick setup wizard. She will suggest running a performance test, which is exactly what we want to do.
Once the test is complete, you’ll get a notification letting you know. The dashboard shows us the score from the performance test.
A score of 86 is good, but we’ll easily raise that, and our page load speeds along with it.
Hummingbird displays a list of Score Metrics that were rated during the performance test.
Your overall performance score is calculated on these listed metrics, while the pie chart represents the weight of each metric in the overall score.
For some performance issues, Hummingbird’s own features can be activated or tweaked to address them.
In other cases, Hummingbird will identify the issue, with the fix required in a separate plugin (e.g., Smush Pro).
When a plugin is not the best solution, and a bit of code editing is required, Hummingbird provides specific instructions for how to fix it.
Additional metrics called Audits separate issues into categories of Opportunities, Diagnostics, and Passed Audits.
Opportunities are basically color-coded alerts. Yellow indicates a mild to moderate issue, and Red means the issue is impacting performance to a greater degree as compared to other sites.
In this performance evaluation, Hummingbird has indicated that I have an item in Opportunities. It’s only a single instance, and not of major impact, but I am going to address it anyway.
To resolve Opportunities, click on any alert row, and it will display:
a detailed description of the issue
a list of specific assets involved
step-by-step instructions on how to resolve the issue
Opportunities for speed improvement (with detailed fixes), provided by Hummingbird.
I have nineteen Passed Audits (sweet!). Audits provide a detailed look at every aspect of your site’s performance capacity.
Even Passed Audits have explanations and fixes for each item listed. Again, this info is accessed through the corresponding row’s arrow dropdown.
Hummingbird considers Audits “passed” when the score is 90/100 or higher.
Lastly, I have three Diagnostics. These provide additional information about how your page adheres to best practices of web development.
To resolve any Diagnostics, click on the dropdown arrow to the right, under the header, and follow the instructions provided beneath How to Fix.
No googling required; Hummingbird spells everything out for you on any cited issues.
Once you’ve made all of your fixes, have Hummingbird run another performance test, so we can check score improvement.
A little birdie told me we gained six points. Huzzah!
Now we’ll do some asset optimization. From the left menu bar, choose Asset Optimization. Click Automatic, and make sure the Speedy slider is ON.
This setting not only compresses your file, but also auto-combines smaller files together, which helps decrease the number of requests made when a page is loaded.
Set your Asset Optimization to Speedy & Automatic for a performance boost.
Of note: when you’re in Automatic mode, Hummingbird auto-detects newly added plugin and theme files and optimizes them for you, but won’t remove any old files from a plugin or theme that was removed.
This is to avoid conflicts and issues, and why it’s recommended to re-check files on occasion ― so everything remains in sync.
Ok, time for some speed testing.
From the upper 70’s to the mid 80’s. Definitely making measurable gains.Better and better, on the way to best.
Awesome scores! There’s another tool we can use… let’s turn on the CDN in Hummingbird.
From the same Asset Optimization page, move the WPMU DEV CDN slider to ON (it will turn blue).
Set CDN to ON, and Crank Dat Number.
Let’s run our speed tests again.
We’re on the cusp of the 90th percentile.Don’t stop B’lieving! Performance and structure scores continue to rise.
We could finish here and be perfectly happy campers. However, I’ll throw one more log on the fire, by tweaking a setting through my WPMU DEV hosting.
Turning on FastCGI through WPMU DEV’s hosting Hub.
Bustin that move deserves a new round of test scores!
Woohoo! We’re finally in the endzone.A-maze-ing.
I think we’ve earned a victory lap!! Before I get carried away with the checkered flag, I want to share an earnest thought on continued testing.
If we were to run speed tests randomly going forward, slight variances would be expected, as none of the elements are truly static.
But barring extreme circumstances, you shouldn’t see any significant dips in page loading time, with all of the tweaks we’ve put into play.
Wheee! Slides are fun.
Making Slider Revolution(ary) Speed Gains
Slider Revolution is definite eye candy (of the designer chic variety, not bubble gum dispenser dross). Their pricing is reasonable, and tiered to the number of sites it will be used on.
If you want to make jaws drop and be remembered for powerful visuals, without giving up valuable page load speed, Slider Revolution – optimized with Smush & Hummingbird – can give you the best of both worlds.
Not only will it make an impression, but page load speeds will fly, giving your users a first-rate experience.
As I mentioned earlier, there are some components you should always consider when it comes to getting and maintaining optimal speed on your site.
They are:
Be more minimalistic in your theme design
(You can go fancy, just don’t overstuff content, taxing speeds.)
Delete plugins that are old or no longer being used
That last one can really make a night and day difference.
Make sure your hosting provider has a good reputation, and is shown to be fast and reliable. (WPMU DEV hosting plans provide solid, fully dedicated WordPress site hosting, backed by Digital Ocean.)
Quick note regarding CDN as it applies to our plugins: the settings for the image CDN are located in Smush Pro, while the web object settings are in Hummingbird Pro.
Now you can sit back and relax, while your website flies. Ah… that’s a good feeling.
Avada is already one of the most popular premium WordPress themes available. We’re going to make it even better by enhancing it with our free optimization tools ― Smush and Hummingbird.
It’s not uncommon for WordPress sites built with Avada to experience page loading slowdowns. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including data-heavy images, lack of caching, CDN quality, and a “host” of other tangibles. (Pun intended.)
This is where two of our optimization plugins shine. Smush and Hummingbird can make a serious impact when it comes to getting (and keeping) your site running at optimum speed.
With a fresh Avada install, we’re going to tweak some settings and run a few tests to see just how much of a (loading time) difference Smush and Hummingbird can make on an Avada themed site.
We’ll also present some additional suggestions that can improve Avada’s overall speed on your site.
When we’re done, you’ll have some great knowledge and resources in your arsenal to get your Avada site to operate lightning fast.
Feel free to jump ahead to any of the article sections:
Keep reading to check out our process, and the measurable results.
Avada Theme Testing Setup
”Avada is the Swiss army knife of WordPress themes.” – Collis Ta’eed, CEO of Envato
Avada. Is. Everywhere. With over six million users, it’s the number one selling WordPress theme on ThemeForest.
Have you wanted to use this popular theme builder for your site, but were concerned about the loading latency that often occurs? We’ve been there, and can tell you there is an easy ― and free! ― way to make great strides in improvement.
Let’s look at what we’ll be doing to accomplish this.
Procedure
Note: We’ve indicated below which steps involve no cost vs. some cost.
Install Avada Theme Builder & theme on a clean WP site (requires Avada theme license.)
Repeat entire procedure again, using a different Avada theme (no cost if you’ve already purchased Avada theme license.)
Parameters
We’ll be using a clean foundation, meaning, our site will be built on a brand new WordPress installation.
Theme configurations and options will be kept static after initial installation.
My hosting is the Bronze plan, through WPMU DEV Managed WordPress hosting.
My region is USA/East.
Plugins are Smush and Hummingbird only.
(If you’re using our hosting, you will see the WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin, as it’s automatically installed on sites hosted by us.)
GTmetrix speed testing done using their default server location (Vancouver, Canada), and default browser (Chrome Desktop).
Particulars
Sites hosted by WPMU DEV will install the Pro versions of Smush & Hummingbird. To mirror non-pro versions of the plugins, I conducted all of my initial tests with the Pro features disabled.
Hummingbird optimization uses different types of caching and compression features on sites. Page, Gravatar, and RSS caching were disabled. Most hosts, including WPMU DEV, typically turn on browser caching and GZip compression by default. Since we can’t turn these off without impacting other settings, they’ll remain on during our tests.
Finally, as we’ve mentioned in other optimization articles, please note that no one will have the exact same results, because of the variables inherent to each element. Your geographical region, the size of your media library, your hosting provider, all paint part of the picture using very different brushstrokes. But no matter your particular site environment, you are bound to see marked improvement with this process.
Alright, let’s hit the track.
Hitting Peak Speeds Using Smush & Hummingbird with Avada
In preparation for this process, let’s make our tool kits match, like sisters on picture day. (Was it only my mom who did that with us?) If you haven’t already, download the Avada Website Builder. You’ll also need the Smush & Hummingbird plugins (both of which are free), but we’ll add those a little later.
Make sure you are starting on a new WP site, with no new pages or posts created, and no optional plugins or add-ons activated.
Next, install the Avada website builder. There are two additional Avada plugins required ― Core, and Builder ― so we’ll go ahead and install them as well.
Avada’s Core and Builder plugins must be installed to use the theme builder.
Theme 1 ― Avada Spa
Time to make our actual theme selection. For this first test, we’ll use Avada Spa. It doesn’t require any additional plugins, but has a fair number of images, so it seems like a good one to try. It’s tucked into the pre-built library in the Avada dashboard, and installation is a few simple clicks.
Select only the content you want to import during theme installation.
With our theme installed and applied, and before we start tweaking or adding anything, we should get an initial snapshot of our speed.
GPSI gives us a fair to middlin score.GTM is on a par with Google for our initial speed test.
Both scores fall in the “7Os” or “C” range. We can definitely do much better.
I want to look into Avada’s built-in optimization settings, make some adjustments there, and see if we get page speed improvements.
A snippet of Avada’s built-in optimization menu.
From the Options/Performance menu tab, here are the changes I made:
Performance
Image Lazy Loading >> from None to Avada
Font Face Rendering >> from Block to Swap All
Preload Key Fonts >> from Icon Fonts to All
Load Stylesheet in Footer >> from Off to On
Dynamic CSS & JS
Load Media-Queries Files Asynchronously >> from Off to On
With all changes saved, we’ll check our speed.
Double sevens, so we tapped up a smidge.
A bit of a wash per GTM, with performance going up and structure going down.
Let’s try the first of our optimization plugins, and activate Smush.
Smush is our user’s choice, award winning, and benchmark tested image optimizer.
Upon navigating to the Smush dashboard, you should be greeted with the quick setup wizard. These settings include: Auto Compression, EXIF Metadata, Full Size Images, Lazy Load, and Usage Data.
Here’s what each feature does:
Auto Compression ― will automatically optimize new image uploads, so you don’t have to do each one manually.
EXIF Metadata ― will strip camera settings from your images, helping reduce file size. (Don’t worry; it won’t strip SEO metadata).
Full Size Images ― will compress your original full size images. (Note: by default, it stores copies of your originals, in case you ever want to revert back.)
Lazy Load ― will stop offscreen images from loading until a visitor scrolls to them.
Usage Data ― will let our designers gain insight into what features need improvement. (Your personal data will never be tracked.)
Go ahead and run through each screen, leaving default settings on. (Allowing Usage Data will help towards the functionality of future versions of the plugin, but if it makes you uncomfortable in the least, leave it off.)
Smush makes suggestions to maximize image compression.
Once the wizard completes, the dashboard will reflect how many images could use compressing. Hulk smash that Bulk Smush Now button!
What do our image optimization stats look like now, Mdm. Smush?
54 images smushed, saving 3.2 mb. Smushing like a champ!
Let’s see how much that lightened the (page) load, and do our speed tests again.
That’s a pretty good jump! Almost ten points.“B”it by bit, we’re on an upward trajectory.
Time to kick things into high gear, and have Hummingbird alight on the scene.
Hummingbird is everything you need to get your site running fast.
After installing and activating Hummingbird, going to the dashboard will activate another quick setup wizard. This time, she’ll just suggest running a performance test, which is exactly what we want to do.
Once the test is complete, you’ll get a notification letting you know.
The dashboard shows us the score from the performance test.
83 is not too shabby! We’re already flying, but we’ve yet to hit our highest altitude.
Hummingbird provides lists and a chart of assorted metrics and audits that were rated during the performance test.
Hummingbird tracks six metrics in the Performance section of the Lighthouse report.
She also provides additional score metrics called Audits. These separate issues into the categories of: Opportunities, Diagnostics, and Passed Audits ― all recommendations for improving your performance score.
Opportunities are basically color-coded alerts. Yellow indicates a mild to moderate issue, and Red means the issue is significantly impacting performance.
In this performance evaluation, Hummingbird has indicated that I have 3 Opportunities, which as least one of is high priority (red squoval).
To resolve these Opportunities, click on any alert row, and it will display:
a detailed description of the issue
a list of specific assets involved
step-by-step instructions on how to resolve the issue
You don’t have to go digging through pages of instructions or do mad googling; Hummingbird spells everything out for you on any flagged issues.
It’s a good idea to address these, and that’s what I’ll do now. Once you’ve made the fixes, you can move on to the next step… asset optimization.
From the left menu bar, choose Asset Optimization. Click Automatic, and make sure the Speedy slider is ON.
Set your Asset Optimization to Speedy & Automatic for a performance boost.
Of note: when you’re in Automatic mode, Hummingbird auto-detects newly added plugin and theme files and optimizes them for you, but won’t remove any old files from a plugin or theme that was removed. This is to avoid conflicts and issues, and why it’s recommended to re-check files on occasion ― so everything remains in sync.
Ok, time for some speed testing.
Woohoo! That pushed us up into the 90’s.“B”hold our continually rising numbers.
Great scores! One more thing we can still do… let’s turn on the CDN in Hummingbird. From the same Asset Optimization page, move the WPMU DEV CDN slider to ON (it will turn blue).
Let’s run our speed tests again.
The heat is on! We’re cranked up to 94.High school me wishes this had been my grade in AP History.
We could stop here and be perfectly happy campers. However, I’ll throw one more log on the fire, by tweaking a setting through my WPMU DEV hosting.
Turning on FastCGI through WPMU DEV’s hosting Hub.
Time to put the pedal to the metal and get some new test scores.
Nearing perfection with a score of 97 in GPSI.Yes! We finally got our “A”.
Alright, I’m super stoked about that. Let’s move on to our second round of testing by installing a different theme.
Theme 2 ― Avada Classic
For our second test environment, we’re going to use Avada Classic. It requires the additional WooCommerce plugin to be installed, so will add an interesting element which could possibly affect page load speeds.
Before we actually change themes, let’s roll back to our original test environment. If you have WPMU DEV’s hosting, turn off FastCGI from the Hub. In Hummingbird, turn off CDN Asset Optimization. Then deactivate both the Hummingbird & Smush plugins.
We also need to revert the Avada Performance optimizations back to their defaults, via the Options/Performance tab, Reset All.
Once again from the Avada Dashboard, let’s navigate to the pre-built themes. Make sure you select all the components you installed for Avada Spa; then click Remove. Once that process completes, head to the Classic theme (it’s the first one), and install/activate it.
The extremely popular WooCommerce plugin is required for Avada’s Classic theme.
Prior to making any changes or adjustments, let’s get our initial speed test scores.
Not bad for our baseline.I “C” you, and I will raise you 20. (At least!)
Ok, that’s respectable, but we want superb. Let’s adjust some of Avada’s built-in settings again.
I’m making the same optimizations as I did last time, but with one addition: Avada’s PWA plugin (primarily a caching app, under development at Google). Once PWA is installed and activated, I’ve got some choices now under Options for Progressive Web App. I’m switching it ON, leaving the pre chosen settings as is, and saving changes.
To enable PWA settings in Avada, you must first install its plugin.
Let’s see how much of an impact those tweaks made in speed scores…
Ok, not a mind blowing uptick, but an increase nonetheless.This is also a higher score ― we’ll take it!
With the Avada optimizations under our belt, let’s reactivate Smush.
Your Smush settings will remain as we last had them. Because our new theme added new images to the media library, we need to let Smush do her thing.
You’ll already see the savings from bulk compression in her dashboard. We didn’t have to actively smush the images added to the media library with this theme, because we had previously told Smush to automatically compress our images on upload. And that’s exactly what she did.
With Smush on duty, carrying out her pre-specified tasks requires no prompting.
Alright, time for another round of speed tests.
The needle is still climbing.Can still “B” better, but we’re going in the right direction.
Even better scores than with our initial theme at this point. Of course, we can get them higher. Time to let our rapidly-fluttering-winged friend grace us with her presence. Reactivate Hummingbird, and run a performance test.
Hummingbird’s 87 is a great score.
While I’m pleased with her score, it’s not as good as it can get. I see she has listed three Opportunities, and at least one is substantial (code red). I’m going to go in and fix what she’s recommending, and I suggest you do the same if you have issues indicated in Opportunities.
Hummingbird’s at-the-ready fixing instructions are as simple as click, read, do.
Time for our speed tests.
We’re in the upper echelon…Slowed to a crawl, but we’re still moving up.
With our next tweak, we should see those markers go up even more.
In Hummingbird, go to Asset Optimization/Assets, and click the Re-Check Files button. While she’s checking, turn CDN to ON again (from the running pop up). She’ll tell you how many assets are found; click the “Got it” button. After her scoring, click Activate.
Before we do speed tests, I’d like to run another Hummingbird Performance test, and see how it’s improved since we made all those optimizations.
87 to 98! I’d call that a stellar improvement.
Let’s see if that bumped up our speed scores.
96 deserves a happy dance!”B” still my heart. Performance is on the rise.
We could call it a day and have great responsiveness with these scores. But I’m gonna do that one last leap, and turn on the static server cache from my hosting Hub.
One final test… and survey says??
Pretty near perfect. BTW, can anyone see 99 and not hear Toto in their head?Fan-humming-smush-tastic!!
Okay, this is the best score I’ve seen yet. I’m gonna do a victory lap!! Before I get carried away with the checkered flag, I just want to share a serious thought on continued testing.
There will be slight variances if we were to test randomly going forward, as none of the elements are truly static. But you shouldn’t see any significant dips in page loading time, with all of the tweaks we’ve put into play.
Tips for Overall Speed Gains in Avada
This has been an eye-opening experience. Avada can most definitely ramp up the pace when used in tandem with Smush and Hummingbird. Even though we fine tuned numerous settings, there are some things you should always consider when it comes to getting and maintaining optimal speed on your site.
They are:
Choose a theme that’s more minimalistic (i.e., “light”)
Delete plugins that are old or no longer being used
That last one can really make a night and day difference. Make sure your hosting provider has a good reputation, and is shown to be fast and reliable. (WPMU DEV hosting plans provide solid, fully dedicated WordPress site hosting, backed by Digital Ocean.)
Quick note regarding CDN as it applies to our plugins: the settings for the image CDN are located in Smush Pro, while the web object settings are in Hummingbird Pro.
Fast & Furiously Optimized
You’ve got all the tools at your disposal now. As your site grows, and you continue to add content and increase your traffic, you should regularly test and reassess your optimization settings.
As you’ve seen, Smush and Hummingbird are both free, feature-packed optimization tools that will increase your speed. But regardless of what you use, continue to make adjustments so your page loads are never a deterrent to visitors or clients.
Make Avada your own, and site speed your silver bullet.
Is your website getting maximum value in user engagement? Hustle’s integrated modules allow for the most robust and customizable pop-up experience around…for free!
If you run a successful site for yourself or clients, no doubt you hustle hard. We do too! Hustle is our very own free marketing and lead generation goldmine.
Pop-ups are only the beginning for this plugin powerhouse. It also presents slide-ins, embeds, and social shares — with panache.
The integrated set of tools is feature rich yet a cinch to use. There are tutorials and documentation aplenty, available directly from the WP dashboard plugins page, or right here on our blog.
Click on the links above to jump to any section of this tutorial.
Alright, let’s get hustlin’…
What Are Behaviors?
Behavior settings in Hustle let you specify when and how your pop-ups, slide-ins, and embeds should appear. They work seamlessly alongside Hustle’s other options — such as Visibility, which lets you specify who your pop-ups should display to.
In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at the Behavior screen, which lets you set up precise triggers for your pop-ups to display when conditions of your choosing are met.
It all begins with creating a module, then we’ll deck it out in eye-catching accessories.
There are three Hustle modules that have associated behavior parameters: Pop-ups, Slide-ins, and Embeds.
Each module has two possible types: email opt-in, and informational.
Email Opt-in is ideal for newsletter signups, or collecting user data.
Informational is perfect for promotional offers with a Call to Action.
Selecting pop-up type in the initial setup screen.
While each type suits a different intention, setting them up is much the same.
Modules and Their Associated Settings
Pop-ups
Slide-ins
Embeds
Schedule
Schedule
Schedule
Pop-up Trigger
Slide-in Trigger
Animation Settings
Slide-in Position
Animation Settings
Additional Closing Methods
Additional Closing Methods
Closing Behavior
Closing Behavior
Additional Settings
Additional Settings
Additional Settings
Handy chart showing which settings each Behavior module allows.
Now we’re ready for a deep dive into the behavior settings.
Making Behavior Modifications
Let’s make sure we’re on the same page… figuratively and literally. :)
From the Hustle Dashboard, navigate to the Pop-ups section, and either Create a new or Edit an already existing module.
Click on Behavior, so we can focus on those settings.
(By default, the module landing page opens to Content.)
We can access all of our options from the Behavior screen.
Now, let’s dig into the elements.
Schedule
Schedule is our initial selector, and strictly uses time for activation. It defaults to start immediately after publishing, and to never end. However, these choices are changeable, down to the minute.
The schedule for start and end dates (and times) is fully customizable.
To adjust dates or times, uncheck either blue box (Start or End), then click in the date field. A full editable calendar drop-down will appear, as well as drop-downs for hour, minute, and AM/PM.
The ability to choose your start and end dates & times is a nice flex.
Do you want your pop-ups to show up every day, or only certain days? All day, or only during certain hours? Whatever your preference, you can make it happen with Active On.
Click Selected Weekdays, and choose whatever day or combination of days that you want.
Active On let’s us choose to make our pop-up active only certain days.
Uncheck the blue box next to All Day and the time drop-downs become active.
Cater to early birds and night owls alike with Active On.
Even timezones have the ability to be tweaked. The default decides this using your visitor’s server, but you can fully customize it by clicking on Custom, then selecting from the drop-down.
Select any timezone you want by specific UTC, or geographical location by continent.
Next, we’ll explore triggers.
Triggers (Pop-up & Slide-in Only)
The point at which a Pop-up or Slide-In module activates is important, and personal preference for these variables can vary widely.
The wonderful thing about triggers, is triggers are wonderful things. :)
Triggers allow you to decide when, where, and how a pop-up appears, goes away, and/or comes back. There is a lot to unpack in these modifications, so let’s get started.
You can enable any combination of available triggers, or keep it simple with just one.
There are five different Triggers, each with its own subset of options.
Time
Scroll
Click
Exit Intent
Ad-Block
Let’s take a look.
Time modules will appear after the chosen period of time passes.
Adding a custom time delay to your pop-ups is fast and easy.
Scroll modules become active when the page is scrolled by a certain percentage, or when a user scrolls past a designated CSS element. Select the trigger you prefer, then input the settings.
Enter the selector class or id (of any on-page element) to use the CSS trigger.
Click modules display when a specified on-page element is clicked. Both of these click triggers can be used at the same time, as well as having active multiple instances of each trigger, on any page.
Both of these click triggers can be used at the same time, as well as having active multiple instances of each trigger, on any page.
Exit Intent ensures users see at least one conversion option before they leave a site.
Select Trigger once per session to ensure that a module only appears once.
Ad-block will display a module every time Hustle detects an active ad-block add-on or extension in a user’s browser.
Inputting delay time for the Ad-block pop-up.
Need some help identifying your element’s selector or rendering a trigger button? Check out the relevant sections in the plugin’s documentation.
Ok, that covers all the nitty gritty on Triggers. With one final, important note: You must enable at least one trigger for your module (pop-up, slide-in, embed) to appear. Without any triggers, there is no user action that will ‘trip’ it into activation.
Animation Settings (Pop-ups & Embeds Only)
Modules can be animated as they appear and exit the screen. Choose the desired entrance and exit animations from the drop-down menus, and use the Preview button to see what they will look like.
I will note that Pop-ups have options for both entrance and exit animations, while Embeds have entrance animation only.
Twenty-eight different entrance & exit animations to choose from — wow!!
And now let’s bounce right into slide-in positions…
Slide-In Position (Slide-Ins Only)
Where would you like your slide-in to appear from? Click any of the available edge areas to set your designated sweet spot.
There are eight available areas to target for slide-in position.
Next, we’ll look at some additional closing methods that fall outside of the ones we already covered.
Most modules require the interaction by a user to trigger their closure. These Additional Closing Methods are intended to resolve instances when users do not interact with the module.
When Close pop-up when clicked outside is set to on, it automatically selects the same option under the Closing Behavior/Closed by settings.Additional closing methods for your pop-up, other than closing it by clicking on “x”.
Let’s move on to shutting things down, or as social butterflies might say — knowing when to make a graceful exit.
Closing Behavior (Pop-ups & Slide-Ins Only)
These settings determine how a module will behave when it has been closed.
Closed by
The options that appear here depend on which options are enabled in the Additional Closing Methods above.
Pop-up closed by the visitor by clicking on “x” icon is the default, and it is recommended to leave this enabled, as it provides your visitors with the most familiar option.
You can also choose to auto close based on a timer, or by clicking outside of the pop-up. Settings allow you to select any one of these options, or any combination of the three.
The Closed by options are based on selections enabled prior in Additional Closing Methods.
Behavior
Your selection here will apply to the Closed By methods you select.
You can choose not to show a message on the post or page, across the entire site, or just keep showing the message.
Selecting either of the Do not show Behavior options will open the drop-down for time selection input in Reset this after.
Moving on to our last set of behavior mods, providing additional settings for other conditions.
Additional Settings
These are a few additional options to give you more control over what happens when users interact with your page and/or module.
Page Scrolling (Pop-ups only)
If enabled, users can scroll a page while the pop-up is displayed.
Disable prevents users from interacting with the page until the module is closed.
Visibility after opt-in (Opt-in modules only)
This setting affects the pop-up visibility once a user has opted-in a form.
Visibility after CTA conversion
This appears only if Call to Action is enabled under the Content tab.
You can choose to keep showing, no longer show across site, or no longer show on a specific page/post.
If you select No longer show this module on this post/page, the module will continue to appear, per its configuration, elsewhere on the site.
External Form Conversion Behavior
This setting applies to forms or other plugins that have been integrated into a module from external sources.
You can opt to close, redirect to form target URL, or do nothing (used for Ajax Forms).
Selecting Close the slide-in or Redirect to form target URL will open additional input fields for adding a time delay.
Annnnd… that concludes our sequence on behavior settings.
Well Behaved
We’ve gone through all the Behavior options in Hustle! You rock.
Continue to tweak the settings to your heart’s content, then publish to activate them, and prepare to behold the power you just unleashed.
As with all WPMU DEV plugins, publishing is never permanent. You can edit, preview, unpublish, or delete any of the modules you created at will.
Also, keep in mind that if your site only requires one or two pop-ups, slide-ins, or embeds, the free version of Hustle should be more than ideal for your needs (you can create up to three modules for each campaign type). For unlimited opt-ins, custom content, and social sharing, we recommend upgrading to Hustle Pro.
For the entire suite of plugins and site management services, including live, 24/7 support for anything WordPress related, give our free 7-day membership trial a go.
(thanks Melbourne!) I don’t think I’ve ever done so much work, and it felt like everybody at WPMU DEV was pretty much doing the same, hitting product goal after product goal.
) If your hosting provider offers Let’s Encrypt support, they can provision a certificate on your behalf, install it, and keep it up-to-date.
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