Tips and tricks by Brian Shim for web developers, bloggers, and WordPress users
A poll is a great way to increase user engagement on your site. You might even see increased sharing on social as people encourage others to vote. These are some plugins that allow you to add a poll or questionnaire to your website: WP-Polls WP-Polls is a good free plugin for generating a single poll … Read more
Clients seem to love popups despite their pitfalls (SEO, accessibility, etc.). If you need to indulge them, here are a few good options. Popup Maker Whether you need a popup that happens automatically after page load or on button press, this is the best modal popup plugin that I’ve found and it’s probably the “industry … Read more
Check out these plugins to manage and improve your WordPress posts. Post Appearance Add Widget After Content Does just what it says. Great for adding email subscription forms right after your article content. Advanced Excerpt Use if you want more control over your post excerpts, like adding HTML. Secondary Title It’s good practice to have … Read more
Compliance with privacy laws is an important consideration for almost any website these days. Here are some plugins that can help you comply. Best Paid Solution Termageddon This is probably the closest thing to the “industry standard”. If you polled web developers for their preferred privacy solution, you’d probably get Termageddon as the winner. Cost … Read more
The most performant way of doing URL redirections is at the server level. But, sometimes, the convenience of using a plugin is more important than speed. These are some WordPress redirection plugins that I recommend. Redirection The Redirection plugin is a quick and easy way to redirect URLs in WordPress. For complex redirections, you can … Read more
Some say RSS is dead, but it still can be useful to display posts from other sites on your site. These plugins help you do that. Featured Image in RSS Feed Adds the featured image to your RSS feed. Or, if you’re comfortable adding a bit of code to your theme, use this solution. FEEDZY … Read more
The default WordPress search is bare-bones and leaves much to be desired. These plugins improve the WordPress search results and appearance. Better Search ★ One reviewer said this plugin should be standard for all WordPress installs. It’s a lightweight plugin that improves the search results appearance by highlighting the search terms, and sorting by relevance, … Read more
These plugins hide your site during development or maintenance. Force Login ★ Force Login can be a great way to hide a site before it’s ready. Unlike other “coming soon” plugins, it doesn’t give you a landing page. It just presents the WordPress login form. I like the simplicity of that. I’ve used other “coming … Read more
Any serious strategy for WordPress security should involve solutions at the server level. Still, these plugins can provide additional security benefits. Security and Scanning Plugins Ninja Firewall / Ninja Scanner I haven’t tried this plugin myself yet, but it comes highly recommended and has rave reviews. It processes incoming HTTP requests before most of the … Read more
I install an SEO plugin on every WordPress site that is meant for public consumption. These are three solutions varying from lightweight to full-featured. Yoast SEO ★ – The Industry Standard This is still probably the industry standard SEO plugin (perhaps along with Rank Math). I use it on most of my sites. It has a … Read more
These are the best WordPress plugins for displaying social sharing buttons and social feeds that I’ve found. Monarch (Paid Plugin) This is one of my “go-to” social media plugins which comes with a Divi subscription. Displays click counts. You can place the sharing buttons on a variety of locations, including floating on the sides. You … Read more
These are some great shortcode-based table and tab plugins for WordPress TablePress – Simple and Lightweight This is my “go-to” plugin when I need a simple shortcode-based table on a site. These tables are not mobile responsive, but you could just set a minimum width on the container using CSS and have the user scroll … Read more
These plugins help deal with WordPress Taxonomies. Bulk Move Moves posts from one taxonomy to another. Radio Buttons for Taxonomies If you would like to limit Categories or custom taxonomies to one per post, this plugin does it by changing the checkboxes to radio buttons. Simple and just works! Taxonomy Switcher Kind of a narrow … Read more
Here are two ways to add a text reader to your WordPress site. Free TTS (monthly fee) TTS is not a WordPress plugin, so you can use this for any site. If you just need some text converted to speech in mp3 form, simply submit your text and get an mp3 back. You can then … Read more
These plugins help you manage WordPress user roles, so you can control what capabilities different users have. Managing User Capabilities LoginWP This allows you to create rules to login redirect users for any role or capability type that you choose. For example, let’s say you want subscribers to see their own custom album page when … Read more
These WordPress plugins help you import and export your WordPress users. WP All Import Folks who work with WooCommerce all of the time swear by WP All Import for migrating data. It’s also great for migrating non-WooCommerce data as well, whether between sites or from a CSV file. Export Users for WordPress Really solid plugin … Read more
I had a client who wanted the local weather displayed in their site footer. This is the best one I found! wp-forecast Unlike a lot of other weather widgets, wp-forecast doesn’t require obtaining an API key to use. It is super configurable with lots of options. And it’s accurate (one other I tried wasn’t). The … Read more
In general, I don’t recommend messing with the default WordPress admin appearance too much. These plugins tidy up your admin area or add helpful notes. Admin Columns ★ I hate it when plugins add columns to the “All Pages” and “All Posts” feeds in the admin, cluttering them up with useless info (I’m looking at you, … Read more
No plugin can magically make your website accessible. But, these WordPress plugins can help. Able Player – An Accessible Media Player If you need an accessible media player on your site, check out the Able Player plugin. It features accessible controls for audio or video playback on your site. Divi Accessibility ★ (GitHub) This plugin … Read more
These are plugins that help you insert ad code into your content manually. There are plugins that auto-insert ads in your content, but I believe that hand-inserting them gives the cleanest results. AdRotate Allows you to place your own ads on a site using a shortcode. Ads can rotate through the same location on your … Read more
While reviewing a new client’s site, I noticed that their chatbot widget was not accessible using the keyboard. By “chatbot widget”, I mean the icon in the lower right corner of the site that you click on to either get canned answers or speak to a live agent. So, I did a bunch of research. … Read more
Web Accessibility compliance has become a “must” in today’s world, not only to serve your visitors but also to avoid expensive litigation by accessibility trolls. The Divi Theme/Builder is one of the most popular WordPress frameworks out there, yet, out of the box, it is not accessible, unfortunately. In this article, I’ll give you some … Read more
There may be cases where you want to show an animated pre-roll splash page that people see for a few seconds when they visit your website’s home page. For example, maybe you want to show a background image with your logo in the foreground and zoom in very gently over a period of five seconds … Read more
Here’s a cheat sheet on how to display referrer URLs (URLs of sites where someone clicked a link to get to your site) in Google Analytics 4. Like so many things in GA4, you need to create an Exploration to do this. 1. Log into Google Analytics and create a new Exploration Click the Explore … Read more
Wherever you host your websites, you should have automatic regular backups made at the server level (in addition to other methods). GoDaddy offers an automatic backup service called “Essential Website Backup” which backs up your site to a separate cloud server; you could even use it to back up a site not hosted on GoDaddy. … Read more
Evernote and OneNote are the two most popular cross-platform note-taking apps. In this article, I’ll compare features and tell why I switched from Evernote to OneNote. If you’re ready to migrate from Evernote to OneNote now, jump to this section on how to migrate. 2023 Evernote Update As of November 29th, 2023, Evernote has limited … Read more
Occasionally, the database of my eM Client Windows email app will get corrupted, usually after the power goes out unexpectedly. It’s easy to panic in this situation because it won’t let you view your email until the problem is fixed. But, it’s often not disastrous since you usually have a copy of your email in … Read more
It’s very common to want to add social icons to a website’s main menu. When using the Divi theme, you can do this by using the Divi Builder to create a custom menu. But, if you’re not already using a custom menu for other reasons, that might be more work than necessary. In this article, … Read more
There are a lot of outdated articles online telling people to use CSS if they want to hide the header or footer of a page using the Kadence WordPress theme. But, there’s actually a much better way to do it that doesn’t use CSS. It actually removes the header or footer from the page for … Read more
I had a request from a client who saw this on a competitor’s site. Basically, they had an auto-playing video that was muted, with a big unmute button in the center, like this: I wasn’t sure how to do it at first, but I figured it out. The code is in this article! How to … Read more
It’s a pretty common situation in WordPress where you’re using a custom post type for, say, a feed on a page, but you don’t want individual posts of that post type visible as separate pages. One example of this is a staff page. For ease of maintenance, you might want to create a custom post … Read more
Google Analytics 4 has the ability to natively track outbound link clicks without the use of JavaScript or Google Tag Manager. Unfortunately, it makes you jump through some hoops to see the data. In the article, I’ll explain how to set up a Google Analytics 4 Exploration to track outbound link clicks on your website. … Read more
After reading some case studies about the benefits of getting rid of a website’s sidebar, I decided to give it a try on two of my blogs. In the end, getting rid of the sidebars on two of my blogs improved my sites’ bounce rates, pages per session, session durations, % exit, and even ad … Read more
If you are getting a “502 Bad Gateway” blue screen of death on Siteground, and your site is a WordPress site, and it is not going away by itself, here’s how to fix it. The error message claims it’s a temporary error, but when it happened to me, I waited an hour and a half … Read more
Out of the box, the Divi Slider Module has many gross accessibility violations. The keyboard control is poor because you can’t see what you’re selecting as you’re tabbing through the navigation controls. And, the dot and arrow navigation symbol contrast can be bad. For an example of an accessible slider, check out W3C’s demo. In … Read more
I was working on a web app that allowed users to submit comments anywhere in a long feed of events. After submitting a comment, the page would refresh, bringing you back to the top. I found that to be annoying because I had to scroll back down to my comment to make sure it had … Read more
Siteground is my “go-to” hosting provider for my clients. Their servers are reliable and fast, by shared hosting standards. But, I had one site on Siteground that gave s a “500 Internal Server Error” every few months when I tried to log into the admin of a client’s WordPress site. Or, sometimes I could log … Read more
I was happy to find out that Google Analytics 4 can track file downloads. However, I didn’t find any native report in the interface to display the downloaded file names, other than for the last thirty minutes. It actually requires jumping through a lot of hoops to set up a report to do this. After … Read more
There may be some instances where you want to restart PHP on your GoDaddy shared server. For example, you might want to do this if your server is misbehaving, i.e., serving HTML files but not PHP. I had a case where the site was showing the error “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the … Read more
Being a freelancer can mean periods of feast or famine with extreme business at times, followed by crickets… But your business’ downtime is actually a golden opportunity to catch up on important things you might have neglected while you were working those twelve-hour days. Here are some important things to do when you have downtime … Read more