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Improving email deliverability from WordPress is best handled with a 3rd party service like Mailgun. That said, setting up Mailgun requires technical knowledge. You need to add new DNS verification records, verify the DNS records and then configure Mailgun’s WordPress plugin. That’s alot of work and for really basic WordPress websites. Is there an…

Getting notified when critical plugins are updated is something I sometimes get asked about after a bad plugin update takes place. While there are many ways this can be accomplished, today I’m going to show how to trigger an email notification by hooking into the Simple History plugin. Simple History is a popular plugin…

If you’re a web developer and using Windows, then WSL2 is an exciting upgrade. It’s Microsoft’s completely new Windows subsystem for Linux and comes with some pretty fantastic performance improvements. This week I upgraded from WSL v1 to v2 and hit a few roadblocks with Local Lightning. WSL v2 switched to a virtualized environment…

Spend enough time on the command line and your bound to memorize a few common commands like zip -r backup.zip wp-content/ and unzip backup.zip. Compressing files and extracting them is a very common task. If it was just the zip format you needed to deal with then the two commands mentioned above will get…

I host over 1000 WordPress sites with Kinsta and am a huge fan of their hosting services. Performance related issues with Kinsta are almost always plugin and theme related. Kinsta support can enable New Relic’s tracking which is a great way to track down bottleneck coding issues. Dealing with coding related performance issues can…

Keeping WordPress running smoothly requires some routine maintenance. Most of the time that’s easily handled by regularly installing routine updates. However in rare cases routine maintenance can be a battle. Here are top 5 common WordPress maintenance woes and how to overcome them. #1 Infrequently applying updates. You should not rely on manually installing…

Many web hosts disable a handful of built-in PHP functions like exec for security sake. And for good reason. If your website would ever run harmful PHP code, having access to exec would be quite dangerous. As a developer, being able to use exec would open up many possibilities. I mean literally any command…

Most themes utilize the WordPress Customizer in order to config and setup the website. Unfortunately, many of these settings are specific to whichever theme you are using. That means if you activate a new theme, you have to start over with fresh settings. There is no good import/export functionality. There is one exception where…

Video conferencing usage is increasing exponentially. Google Hangouts has been my preferred tool however Google’s plans to phase it out in favor of their paid product Google Meet. Meanwhile Zoom is quickly becoming a household name. I don’t mind paying for a good solution, but neither Google or Zoom have a great reputation for…