Blogging Tips Archives - Page 2 of 27

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

Posted on January 14, 2019

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…]

7 essential plugins that every WordPress blog should be using

Posted on January 11, 2019

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…]

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

Posted on December 30, 2018

If 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…]

Have a WordPress blog? If so, you need to update your server to PHP 7 before January 1!

Posted on December 27, 2018

If you’re a blogger there’s a good chance that your blog is powered by WordPress.

If it is, I recommend that you check the version of PHP that’s currently active on your web server. If it’s running a version that’s lower than 7 you really need to update it to at least PHP 7.0 before the end of December.

If you’re unfamiliar with PHP, that’s the web programming language that the WordPress core files are written in. In other words, PHP is the engine that powers your WordPress blog.

As with virtually everything else that’s related to WordPress, older versions of PHP will eventually be retired and stop receiving security updates. And that’s about to happen with PHP on December 31, 2018.

[Read more…]

Q&A: Which web hosting company hosts RicksDailyTips.com?

Posted on December 17, 2018

Question from Kate L.: I really love your blog Rick. I’ve learned so much since I started reading your tips a while back!

I have a question that I hope you won’t mind answering for me but I’ll understand if you’d rather not.

I’ve been blogging for about 2 years and my blog has really slowed down a lot over the last few months.

I did some research and read that WordPress gets slower as a blog’s traffic levels increase.

That has me thinking the slowdown is probably due to my blog’s traffic more than doubling to a little over 4,000 visitors a day about the same time things slowed to a crawl.

I’m pretty sure I need to move my blog to a new web host with faster servers. I noticed that your pages load really fast even though your site obviously gets a lot more visitors than mine.

Would you mind telling me which hosting company is hosting RicksDailyTips?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]