Need An Easy Way to Update Your Website?

Need an easy way to update your website? Most people do! The back-end of a website is an intimidating place. Even if you think know what you’re doing, there’s always some hesitation that what you’re doing might “break” the site. If something doesn’t look right after you’ve changed it, will you know how to change it back?

Of course, the website development agency that you hire should take proactive measures and train you on how to do basic things on the site. We do!

But we also make it easy to manage your website yourself, without having to pay a developer to do basic things like update text or add or remove images.

Limelight Department developed a plugin for WordPress sites called the Content Blocks plugin. The plugin utilizes templates that create features that can be added anywhere on your website. These features could be flip cards, video backgrounds, image sliders, or text. If you add a text block that over times becomes irrelevant–for a holiday sale, for instance–you can remove or update that through an easy interface. Check out the website for Wellsource for an example of the cool flip cards feature.

Visual Composer is a popular WordPress plugin that has similar capabilities, however, by design, Content Blocks is different. Visual Composer is a drag-and-drop interface that is easy to use–it’s also easy to “break” something on your site. It’s more free-form in the sense that the user can control many different things, but that means that there are many more opportunities to inadvertently change something or change something in a way that you don’t like and then not be able to figure out how to change it back.

The Content Blocks plugin comes with 12 different interfaces. That gives the client plenty of room for customization and content creation. Content Blocks enriches the WordPress environment but the user can’t “break” the design or the layout of their site by putting things in the wrong place.

The plugin is customized so that the output (what site visitors see on your site) matches your site’s color scheme and style. You, the site owner, need to just fill out a form that supplies the plugin with some information to tell it what to do, and that’s it. Check out these two Limelight Department client sites that are using the plugin, and see if you can tell where the plugin is working.

Bowtech Archery
Diamond Archery

You can’t! That’s how well it works. It’s also a great demonstration of why working with a developer who knows how to do custom installations is so important. Your site can, and should, be seamless from “head to toe,” so to speak.

The Content Blocks plugin gives you the ability to update your website info in the form of images, text or video without having to pay extra development fees. Want to see how it might work for your WordPress site? Give us a call!

Backup your website content! That’s advice that many website owners hear but many also fail to heed. Backing up a site gives you peace of mind that you will not lose all of your hard work. Unexpected things can happen that can put even the most secure website or server at risk. Backing up can be automated, so it can be a task that does not take up extra time in your busy schedule once you have it set up.

You do have to know what you’re getting with a backup plugin for WordPress. With basic backup services, there is a risk that they only back up the website content, not the server settings. Typically no custom content that is stored outside of the WordPress folder is backed up.

Many WordPress hosting providers do offer backup services but they can be limited. Limelight Department’s server has server-level backups that offload backups to Amazon S3, so it does not take up disk space on the web server. And it’s very inexpensive, pennies per gigabyte per month.

If your web server crashes and your server settings are not backed up, you risk losing server configurations from your server. This could be important data such as sales orders, or DNS settings required for your email server.

Why you need server-level backups for your website
Backup plugins store their data in a folder on the WordPress site, so if your site is corrupted then those files will be too.

Server-level backups are backups that are taken on a server level, instead of through the website itself. This means the backup process is not dependant on your website being functional or even online. When using a WordPress plugin (plugin-level backup) the slightest issue could cause your backup to fail. If you receive a spike of traffic that your server can’t handle, or you face a permission issue writing the file, your backup will fail. You might not even know it failed until you really need that backup!

How often should you backup your site?
That depends on how often your site gets updated. If you blog daily, you might want to backup daily, or at least weekly. If your site only changes seasonally then perhaps a monthly or bimonthly backup would be sufficient.

If you are running a store where you take orders from customers on a daily basis, or receive any form of visitor information regularly, you definitely want at least nightly backups.

How many backups do you need?
It may seem paranoid, but you should keep several backups. Keep a copy on an external hard drive and, perhaps on a second hard drive that you keep in a different place.

How should you store your website backups?
Keep them safe. Backups contain highly sensitive information. You should password protect your backups if at all possible. Avoid storing backups on the website, as it poses a security risk in case your website faces intrusion, or a bot is able to snoop out and find your backup directory.

Recommended WordPress Plugins for Backups
UpDraft backups for WordPress – In our experience, this is the easiest to set up and use of all free backup plugins.UpDraft allows you to backup to the cloud, Dropbox, Google Drive or other places.
BackWPup WordPress backup plugin – Saves your complete WordPress site installation and pushes them to an external backup service that you can select.

If you have questions about how your backup works or want to switch to a host like Limelight Department with ongoing, server-level backups, give us a call! We’re looking forward to working with you. Our developers can evaluate your current site setup and make sure your needs are being met. Plugin configurations can be confusing. Let us know if you have questions about how these backups work.

You’ve heard the old saying, use the right tool for the job? Well, the saying holds for your business and website. Having the right set of tools can help you take your business to the next level. Plugins to customize the appearance or content of your WordPress site are the tools we’re talking about. There are plugins out there for a lot of these topics, but there are limitations to using plugins in some cases.

Our team can build your own templates for most of these instead of using plugins. This means you’ll get exactly what you want, and it will be placed just where you want it on the site. And, you’ll have reliable and available technical support.

Contact Forms
Most WordPress themes do not come with built-in contact forms. Building one means it can match your website’s colors and theme.

Maps
If you have a brick-and-mortar store, using a WordPress maps plugin adds Google Maps to your site. You can even highlight points of interest or mark multiple points on a map. No customer will get lost with this in place.

Hours
Using Business Hours Indicator plugin you can display your business’s opening times in a widget that updates each day. This might be a good option if you have irregular hours, holiday hours or seasonal hours.

Staff Directories
Different sites can benefit from a staff directory. For instance, attorney websites could show off a directory of the attorneys. This same website could use this same functionality in a different way. For instance, to create lists of various practice areas organized by category.

A Little League organization can easily show a list of team coaches. Churches can display a list of members and what their roles are. This can also help organize a site with a lot of inventory. The uses and opportunities for a company or organization with a lot of staff members is endless!

Author Directory
If you have a site where multiple authors are contributing, you can easily add an attractive, customizeable author box to each blog post or page. This “text box” can also be used to include a call to action at the end of every post.

Customizeable Order Form
A customizeable order form for your WordPress site allows you to sell a single product, purchase subscriptions, or even accept online donations. How you set it up is very flexible. A good plugin can blend in with your page, yet be there when you need it.

Some good out-of-the-box plugins:

Use UpdraftPlus to take automatic backups
Use Relevanssi if you have a lot of content and want better search results. Relevanssi provides users with search results sorted by relevance, not by date. It also highlights the search term, to make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.
Here are some more plugins we recommend: “3 Plugins Every WordPress Site Should Have”

Remember, if you’re trying to use a plugin and aren’t sure what to do, or it isn’t working for you like you think it should, ask us! We can help you when you get stumped, and provide technical support to get it working. Or, if you desire a more custom solution, we can build just what you want.

WordPress is a great platform. That’s why we use it exclusively! But sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes plugins aren’t compatible with other tools you may have in place, or you’re just not sure why something doesn’t look right. Not knowing how to debug your WordPress site can be a helpless feeling! You can call your tech support team, but here’s a quick run-down on how to debug your WordPress site that you will likely be able to do yourself.

For WordPress site errors
WordPress comes with a debug system designed to simplify the debugging process and provide a standardized output to help you figure out what is going on.

WP_DEBUG is a setting inside your wp-config file. By setting this to true, errors and warnings will be reported in your browser when viewing your website. If you aren’t sure where this file is, you should refer to the WordPress documentation on editing wp-config.php.

If you don’t want your errors to show on your website (other users could see them too!), then you can also create a new setting called WP_DEBUG_LOG and set that to true. When using this setting, you should be sure WP_DEBUG is set to false. That will hide errors on the website, and instead it will write errors to a debug.log file in your wp-content folder.

For errors in your browser
You might run into an error when viewing your website which doesn’t give any information even with debug mode enabled. It could be that the error is occurring in your browser, rather than on the website. Errors that occur in your browser might not be captured by your website.

To identify client-side errors, locate your browser’s “Javascript Console.” In Chrome or Firefox for Windows, you can press F12 and then click on the “Console” tab. Look for red lines which indicate errors, or yellow lines that indicate warnings. If you have another browser, check the documentation to find out how to access your console. Note that debugging this way on a phone can be difficult.

For performance/slowness
It might seem strange to suggest a plugin to monitor the performance of other plugins, but that’s what the “Plugin Performance Profiler” does. This plugin can identify what plugins are impacting the site the most. Then, you can update them, remove them, find alternatives, or whatever else might be the right fix.

For other performance issues
The plugin “Query Monitor” can be very helpful, although it is difficult to understand the features if you do not have technical skills. This plugin has advanced features not available in other plugins, such as debugging AJAX calls, REST API requests and redirects. You can usually spot a slow query by checking the admin bar. If Query Monitor detects a slow query, the monitor section of the admin bar will turn red, like so:

Hover over the red menu to see a list of errors, which should be highlighted.

Of course, the team at Limelight Department is always here if you need us!

WordPress is a robust platform for online publishing. We believe in WordPress so much that it’s the only platform we use for our clients. However, it is not perfect.

Numerous plugins have been developed to address important features that WordPress does not come with out of the box. There are some critical plugins every WordPress site should have.

If you’re not sure you have these or you’re not sure they are working properly, let us know. Our developers are experienced in WordPress plugins and customization that can make sure you’re getting the right performance for your site. Here are the top 3 plugins every WordPress site should have.

1. SEO plugin. We use Yoast. The Yoast plugin is considered the premiere SEO plugin for WordPress. We have used SEO Ultimate in the past but it was buggy, especially for social media.

2. Performance/caching plugins. Caching drastically reduces the processing requirements of your website by serving the same page from a cached file instead of doing dozens of queries to rebuild it for every user, when it doesn’t change anyway. In other words, this helps keeps your page loading times low.

Performance plugins work especially well to combine and minify (programming language for minimize, or remove unnecessary characters from code) the various scripts and stylesheets of your plugins/theme into fewer files. We use and recommend two plugins for this.

WP Rocket is a paid option but is easy, powerful and simple. W3 Total Cache is free but has a plethora of options (which may be overwhelming for people who are unfamiliar with the subject).

3. A plugin related to your business model.
While there are some plugins that every site should have, like the ones above, a smart choice is to add one that is specific to your business.

Gravity Forms is recommended if you need to take information from users, for example, through a contact form.

Relevanssi is an excellent choice if your site would benefit from more accurate search results.

We recommend WooCommerce if you are running a store. WooCommerce offers the most customizeable ecommerce platform for WordPress.

If you are running a store the plugin AffiliateWP is a great way to introduce an affiliate program to your website. It has everything that you need, and tools to aid your affiliates in promoting your products.

There are approximately 40,000 WordPress plugin options to choose from, so it’s understandable that you might have questions about which ones really work and which ones your site needs. Unnecessary plugins or ones that don’t work well can make your site slow and introduce errors that you might not be aware of. Get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to explain the basics to you.