The Caveena Solutions Blog
In a previous post on WordPress Plugins I use while developing a WordPress website I mentioned WP Maintenance Mode which blocks public access to the website and returns an HTTP status code of 503 for search engines. But did you know you can change the returned HTTP status code?
Google has started notifying webmasters (via their Search Console) that starting in October 2017 Chrome (version 62) will show a “NOT SECURE” warning when users enter text in a form on an HTTP page, and for all HTTP pages in Incognito mode.
This is in line with their efforts to move everyone towards a more secure web.
Is your website using secure communications with HTTPS/SSL?
The Adminimize WordPress Plugin is one of those things I wish I had found sooner. To protect our clients from themselves, we remove and block access to certain WordPress Admin pages that we feel could accidentally allow them to mess up their website. We use to do this through a combination of WordPress Roles and custom code that had to be painstakingly collected and tested. Most, if not all, that code is now redundant thanks to Adminimize.
There are lots of things in the WordPress admin area that your users don’t need to see or use. [The Adminimize WordPress] plugin help [sic] you to hide unnecessary items from WordPress admin area.
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Unless you make a living building websites, you’ve probably never asked yourself Why SEO Matters. CEOs and business owners have more pressing matters to deal with like growing a business and establishing a customer base. Sure, maybe you’ve taken the time to put together a quick website and stay engaged on social media with a myriad of phone apps but who’s got time for Search Engine Optimization and all that malarkey?
I support the separation of presentation from structure.
I think it’s admirable we’re moving towards code reuse and modularity.
I’m all for using HTML tables for data and not for page layouts.
This is the perfect world I strive for in building websites. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a messy world where clients want visible changes immediately and we’re working within parameters of time, money and energy that we have no control over.
Read more »
The SearchAutocomplete WordPress Plugin does one thing and only one thing. That’s right, the plugin adds auto-complete to your WordPress search. And if your WordPress search is powered by Relevanssi you’ll be happy to know that SearchAutocomplete can query your Relevanssi index. Neat!
Use Emails to promote your own unique brand. Email addresses have replaced the telephone number as being the way your vendors and customers contact you. Unlike phone numbers, you can promote your brand through your email address.
Promote your brand with your Email address
Caveena Solutions is proud to present our Branding Email package. With it, you can choose among available domain names to customize the perfect email that reflects your brand.
- Do you have a business? Use email addresses to identify your different business units: [email protected] & [email protected]?
- How about your own personal brand? Choose an email that reflects it: [email protected] & [email protected]
- Have a special event coming up? Why not celebrate it with a unique branding email address: [email protected]
The possibilities are (almost) endless!
Get your Personal Branding Email today!
Elements of a website’s User Interface need to be obvious. Said another way, don’t confuse users with ambiguous design choices.
Take a look at the following checkbox, a common form element:
Now ask yourself if the box is ticked. Well, there is a checkmark in the box so maybe it has already been ticked. But no, this is what the ticked checkbox looks like:
It’s not obvious, is it? There’s room for improvement here. Make your elements obvious.
Website Backups have become a required part of modern website strategies. The sad truth is that websites today are threatened by hackers wanting to deface web pages, servers that unfortunately go down and malware that’s always trying to hijack your website traffic.
When trouble happens, fixing the problem can be very time and resource consuming. Sometimes the simplest solution is to restore your website to a known safe state using a Website Backup.
Introducing our Website Maintenance: Backup Package
Caveena Solutions is introducing our Website Maintenance: Backup Package specifically to address this need. With this package, your website will enjoy the safety of regular automated Website Backups for your peace of mind. On top of that, a copy of your Website Backups are stored off-site to further mitigate the risk of losing your website.
Get your Website Backup solution today!
This article was updated on 26th September 2022.
When you’re still developing your WordPress website you usually want to keep things under wraps. Here is a list of WordPress plugins that will help support your websites while they are still in development.
Prevent development websites from updating WordPress: Advanced Automatic Updates
Advanced Automatic Updates gives you the option of preventing your WordPress core from updating in your development website. This will help minimize the risk of functionality breaking when things update. You have the option of completely disabling all updates, enabling major version updates or enabling security updates.
(Update 26th September 2022) Automatic Updates are a bit more complex than they used to be but not by much. To disable all Automatic Updates (core, plugins & themes) add the following line to your wp-config.php file:
define( 'AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED', true );Check out Configuring Automatic Background Updates to learn how you can customize the automatic update behaviour.
Protect development websites from being seen: WP Maintenance Mode
There are a lot of “Under Construction” plugins available but I keep going back to WP Maintenance Mode. This plugin will display a customizable “Under Maintenance” message to all non-Admin users who have are not logged in. You can also select which WordPress users you want to grant access to.
An additional benefit of the plugin is that it keeps search engine crawl bots at bay too. You can allow them to crawl the development website or block them with a 503 HTTP response.
Fun fact: This is the plugin I use when doing routine website maintenance.
Get (some) Jetpack functionality without connecting to WordPress.com: Unplug Jetpack
Without getting into an argument about Jetpack’s bloat-factor, Unplug Jetpack gives you access to some Jetpack functionality without connecting to WordPress.com. Just install the plugin, activate it and… that’s all really.
(Update 26th September 2022) Unplug Jetpack hasn’t been updated in 3 years. While it still works (as of writing) it uses deprecated code which may one day cease to function. Fortunately Jetpack has an Offline Mode which you can enable by adding the following line to your wp-config.php:
define( 'JETPACK_DEV_DEBUG', true );When enabled there will be a notification on the Jetpack Dashboard.
There’s also a filter hook if you prefer using that. Check out the previous link to Jetpack’s Offline Mode to learn more.
Stop emails from sending: Stop Emails
I’ve only recently discovered Stop Emails and haven’t put it through it’s paces yet but this plugin will (you guessed it) stop emails from sending. Note that the plugin only stops emails sent using WordPress’s wp_mail() function. Any emails sent through PHP’s mail() function will still go through.
True story: I was once testing a custom function which just so happened to send emails to a couple accounts I have with Yahoo! Mail and Mail.com. I must have sent well over 3 dozen emails within the span of an hour to test things out causing Yahoo! to think I was trying to spam the account. To this day all, emails sent from that development website domain is blocked by Yahoo.
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