5 Ways to Make Your Website Load Faster

If your website is slow to load, you probably want to look at some ways to improve your website loading time. Website load time is used as a ranking factor by search engines, and studies have shown that people will leave a website if it doesn’t load in 2-3 seconds. While the specific plugin solutions …

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3 Methods to Optimize Images for the Web

Having a website that loads fast is important. And having images on your site to break up the text is important. So what do you do when the images that are supposed to enhance the visitor’s experience on your site are actually causing a less-than-ideal experience by making the site take longer to load. Well, …

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How to Install WordPress on SiteGround

I hang out in a bunch of Facebook groups full of entrepreneurs, and I see a lot of people asking which platform to use for their budding business. I may be a little biased, but I think WordPress is the best platform to start a website on. Aside from other reasons, WordPress is more flexible …

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Are you ready for Gutenberg?

Are you Ready for Gutenberg?

If you have a WordPress site, and you’ve logged into the Dashboard anytime recently, you’ve probably seen the big banner talking about Gutenberg. But, if you’re like a lot of people I know, you probably didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. Do you know what it is? Is your website ready for it? …

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Understanding your PageSpeed Insights report

Understanding your PageSpeed Insights report

If you have a website, you may have heard that optimizing the performance of your website is important both for a positive user experience and for search engine optimization. There’s several tools that will give you information about the optimization of your site, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights. But, what they don’t tell you is what …

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Website Development Process

Sometimes it can seem like building a website is some sort of mystical, magical process. And while I do sometimes joke about “working my magic” on websites, it’s not really magic at all. It’s a process, and it’s one that I’ve developed and adjusted over the years (and continue to tweak as needed) to something …

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Weekend Project: Basic security with iThemes Security plugin

Secure your WordPress website

Last time I checked, WordPress websites power over 30% of the top 1-million websites in the world. That’s a LOT. The downside of this is that the popularity of WordPress makes it a big target for hackers, because they know that there’s a lot of potential targets. Some basic website security will help you strengthen …

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Considerations when building a WordPress Website

Why WordPress? With all of the choices available that you could use to build your organization’s website, why should you use WordPress? WordPress is a CMS (content management system) that now powers over 27% of websites worldwide. Some of the world’s biggest and most powerful brands use WordPress for their web presence, include many nonprofits, …

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Where to find images for your website

Where to find images for your website

Having images on your site makes it a lot easier to read. We are visual people, and images should be used to help the reader understand your content or relate to it in some way. Pictures and other graphics also make your content seem less daunting. When your visitors come to your site and there …

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Connect your website to Google Search Console

Connect your website to Google Search Console

A few weeks ago, I wrote about getting your site set up on Google Analytics because of the wealth of free information available from that source. This week, I’m going to show you how to get your site connected with Google Search Console. This post is part of the WordPress Weekend Projects series. In this …

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Remove unnecessary themes from your WordPress site

WordPress theme audit title graphic

This post is part of the WordPress Weekend Projects series. In this series, you will find bite-size tips to enhance, secure, or optimize your website. Each tip should take an hour or less, and can be done without interrupting your precious weekend time too much. See all of the WordPress Weekend Projects posts at http://beyondtheoffice.com/blog/wordpress-weekend-projects. Today’s Weekend …

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Perform a plugin audit on your WordPress website

WordPress plugin audit graphic cover

This post is part of the WordPress Weekend Projects series. In this series, you will find bite-size tips to enhance, secure, or optimize your website. Each tip should take an hour or less, and can be done without interrupting your precious weekend time too much. See all of the WordPress Weekend Projects posts at http://beyondtheoffice.com/blog/wordpress-weekend-projects. Today’s Weekend …

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Google analytics setup

Add Google Analytics Tracking Code to Your WordPres site

Google Analytics is a great free service that allows you to track information about your website visitors and learn more about their behavior while they’re on your website, and how they got there. There’s a treasure trove of information available, and the only thing that’s required to get it is a YouTube account. I’ve split …

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WordPress Weekend Projects

WordPress weekend projects title graphic

I’ve had this idea rattling around in my brain for a while, and decided that 2018 is the year to make it happen. What’s the big idea, you ask? WordPress Weekend Projects! The idea behind WordPress Weekend Projects is to provide a series of bite-size tips to enhance, secure, or optimize your website. I know that …

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How safe is your website?

Your Website Is Only As Safe as Your Last Good Backup - WordCamp Lehigh Valley 2017

Your website is only as safe as your last good backup… Thanks for checking out my talk at WordCamp Lehigh Valley. I am passionate/slightly neurotic about backups, mostly because I’ve seen lots of cases where bad things happen to good websites because they don’t have a good recent backup of their site. Enjoy the slides, and …

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