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Q&A: How can I tell when my blog is loading from the new server after I switch hosting companies?

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Question from Jay:  I have a WordPress blog and it started going down on me at random times a couple of months ago.

I’ve signed up for a better hosting account with a different company and they’ll move the blog to the new server for me at no cost.

I’m planning to put in the request for the move when I get back to the office on Monday, but I’d like to ask you a question in the meantime.

I’ve been told that it could take quite a while for my blog to start loading from the new server after they make the switch. How will I be able to tell when my blog starts loading from the new server instead of the old one?

Rick’s answer:   [Read more…]

Speed up your blog and make it more secure by using a CDN

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cloudflare-logoIf you’ve been blogging for a while, you might have noticed that your blog’s page load times have increased over time as you added posts and started receiving ever more traffic to them.

Every active blog slows down over time as ever-increasing numbers of visitors put an ever-increasing load on your web server’s resources.

As more pages are loaded from your server its CPU must work harder and the RAM and disk I/O eventually get maxed out. This results in sluggish page loads, and during peak times your blog can even grind to a halt.

There are several things you can do to mitigate the problems you’ll almost certainly encounter as your blog grows in size and popularity.  [Read more…]

7 essential plugins that every WordPress blog should be using

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If you have a blog that’s powered by WordPress you probably already know that plugins make it easy to add new features and capabilities to your blog.

But with thousands of WordPress plugins to choose from, how do you know which ones you really need?

Well, I’m going to try to shed some light on which plugins you need to install on your blog, and which ones you should avoid.

First, let me explain which plugins you need to avoid, because that’s the really easy part…  [Read more…]

Review: CSS Hero – Easily customize your WordPress blog even if you’re clueless about working with CSS

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Do you have a blog that’s powered by WordPress?

If so, you probably know that WordPress is the most powerful and most customizable blogging platform there is.

By selecting a quality theme and customizing it to your liking you can give your blog its own distinctive look and feel – in other words, give it its own personality.

The thing is, to really customize all the various aspects of your blog’s theme you’ll need to make changes to its style.css file.

In a nutshell, the style.css file contains the Cascading Style Sheet (aka CSS) code that controls virtually every aspect of how your blog will look and respond to visitors when they arrive at one of the pages on your blog.

The following short snippet from this blog’s style.css file will give you an idea of what I’m talking about:  [Read more…]

How to get Google and Facebook to display a custom snippet for your blog posts in WordPress

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Have you ever noticed how Facebook and Google love to pull in the first few lines of text from your blog posts and use that text as the “snippets” they display to their users?

That’s not always a problem, but it can be a big one if the snippet contains text that doesn’t accurately describe the content of the post.

For example, if you always begin your blog posts with generic content such as an author bio, the first few lines of that bio will be displayed as the snippet in the Google search results and on Facebook for every post you write.

That means every post you publish will have the same snippet, and that snippet won’t do anything to accurately describe the content of the post and entice the reader to click the link and read the post on your blog.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to get both Facebook and Google to display your own custom snippet for every post you write on your WordPress blog.  [Read more…]

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