WordPress Archives - Page 12 of 18

Great news: Fixing ‘White Screen of Death’ fatal errors on your WordPress blog just got a lot easier!

Posted on May 7, 2019

If you’ve been blogging with WordPress for a while you’re probably well familiar with the infamous “White Screen of Death”.

If you haven’t encountered it yet, that’s the stark, panic inducing white error screen that WordPress displays when it encounters a fatal error with some component of your blog.

There are several reasons why you might see a white screen of death on your blog, but they’re usually the result of a serious problem affecting your blog’s theme, one of the installed plugins or the database.

Whatever the reason, it’s the last thing you want to see when you try to access your blog!

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Q&A: Why is Firefox still finding insecure content on my SSL encrypted WordPress blog?

Posted on May 2, 2019

Question from Patty J.: I recently found out about the free certificates from Let’s Encrypt. I asked my web host to install it for me so I can make my WordPress blog secure.

I installed the Really Simple SSL plugin and that took care of the redirects from http to https as well as most of the mixed content issues.

But Firefox is still blocking parts of my pages that it claims are still trying to load from insecure sources.

I’ve looked my pages over and I can’t find anything that appears to be loading from an insecure location. Everything on the page appears to be loading from URLs starting with https instead of http.

When I load the pages in Chrome it shows the green padlock with no warnings. It’s only Firefox that’s not cooperating.

I’m pulling my hair out here. How can I find out what Firefox is blocking for being insecure so I can fix it?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: Which VaultPress subscription do you recommend to backup my WordPress blog?

Posted on March 14, 2019

Question from James A.: I read your post about why you use VaultPress to back up your blogs and I’d like to give it a try.

I usually publish from 3 to 5 new posts every day, and my posts tend to be pretty in-depth. That means recreating them if they were to get lost would be both difficult and time-consuming.

As I understand it if I choose the cheapest plan then my blog would only be backed up once each day. What concerns me is losing any posts that were published since the last backup was created.

My question is which of their three subscription options should I choose? I don’t want to over-pay but I definitely want to protect my hard work.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: How can I give my blog’s sidebar widgets a background color in WordPress?

Posted on February 11, 2019

Question from Kevin A.: Hi Rick. First of all, I really love your blog. What a wonderful service you’re providing to those of us who struggle with technology!

I have a WordPress blog of my own and the sidebar widgets sort of run together because they all have a white background.

How can I give my own sidebar widgets a light gray background color like the widgets on your blog?

Rick’s answer: [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.

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