Did You Know?
Whitehouse.gov is built with WordPress
Not quite bragging but I am pretty happy to learn that WordPress has grown to a point that it can handle the complexities of a very large government website. I hadn’t realized the official White House website had switched to WordPress back in 2017. The White House website gets an extraordinary amount of traffic and…
Read MoreHow to get to the WordPress Dashboard from the Block Editor
Just a head’s up for people who are used to WordPress aren’t used to the Block Editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg) interface. Turns out there’s a simple but non-obvious way to navigate back to the Dashboard. If you’re used to older Classic Editor interface the Admin bar is always at the top of the page and the…
Read MoreAre ThemeForest and other paid themes really that bad?
In a private Facebook group about WordPress speed someone asked an excellent question: I have a question about paid templates for WordPress, e.g. Themeforest.Is it true that cool looking templates, with e.g. animated buttons or an interesting mouse cursor, are definitely slower and less optimized than the simpler, more standard-looking ones? It’s true that there…
Read MoreHow cheap is “cheap” hosting vs a “cheap” VPN?
In a private Facebook group for WordPress hosting someone who’s trying to save as much money as possible asked a specific question about two hosting plans. They’d initially bought a plan from commodity provider HostGator but had been advised to switch a more premium SiteGround account. It was time for them to renew on SiteGround…
Read MoreGood reasons not to rely (completely) on backup from (even really great) hosting plans
So another participant in a private Facebook group for WordPress users echoed something I’d said about the importance of making your own backups. Similar to David Innes I use [a commercial backup plugin] for Scheduled backups ([cloud-based storage firm] is my choice, but there are many others)…And a lot of people when backups have been discussed…
Read MoreSpring, 1998, building my first website with my son…
It’s funny how much things have changed since I built my first website back in 1997 or so. It might have been for a hand-coded “blog” I tried to manage all in HTML (not a good idea, but WordPress and precursors like MovableType weren’t really a thing yet.) Or it might have been for an…
Read MoreAbout WordPress and image compression
A contributor to a WordPress Facebook had a question about image compression: I have [an image-optimization] plugin installed to compress my images and I noticed while doing a bulk compression that there are multiples of the same image (in different sizes) that it compressed. I did not do this manually. It seems that something created…
Read MoreCase Study: Converting an old page-builder website
On a Facebook group for the Beaver Builder page builder, someone asked “Maybe a crazy question… Would it be possible to take HTML from another page builder and import into BB?” Here’s how I answered the question. I did this just the other day (Thursday!) It was a horribly slow site built with an expired…
Read MoreDo we ever use “store bought” themes for websites?
Here at RealBasics we build all new and rebuilt websites using the popular Beaver Builder page builder [non-affiliate link] products. On a Facebook group we follow someone asked: How do people explain using BB plugin and theme to clients? When comparing to other agencies who buy [heavily-advertised commercial theme company] themes and use demo content……
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