Development
Google’s Core Web Vitals and Organic Search Ranking
Google is rolling out a new set of metrics designed to evaluate the performance of websites across the internet. How your site performs, according to these metrics, will directly impact your website’s organic search engine results page (SERP) ranking – that is, how close to the top of Google you are. Site speed has always…
Read MoreSemantic Versioning for WordPress
One of the biggest struggles facing both the maintainers of WordPress and individuals tasked with maintaining WordPress sites is updates. Running updates often gets ignored by non-technical users afraid of breaking things, and the WordPress core team is doing everything they can to mitigate the security risks involved with not updating. If you don’t install…
Read MoreRemove WordPress Actions with Object-Bound Callbacks
Often, it’s very simple to disable a filter or action in WordPress. Core’s adherence, merit notwithstanding, to working in the global namespace meant many plugins and themes followed suit. So unhooking a function was as simple as: But as PHP has matured, plugin and theme authors have moved toward more frequent use of modern structures…
Read MoreFix WP Bakery Disabling Gutenberg with Classic Editor Enabled
There’s currently a bug in WP Bakery (version 6.0.5) that enables or disables the block editor, Gutenberg, for an entire post type based on a single post on the various “All [Post Type]” admin screens. You’ve probably noticed this if you’ve installed the Classic Editor plugin and have switching editors enabled. You’d expect to be…
Read More
Run a WP-CLI Search-Replace for Revolution Slider
If you’re a WordPress developer moving sites between environments, you might find yourself using the WordPress command line tool WP-CLI to run database search-replaces fairly frequently. This lets you quickly swap out one URL for another in the database (so if I want to replace https://sternerstuff.dev with https://sternerstuffdesign.test, for local testing). I inherit a variety…
Read More
Restore a Fresh Local WordPress Database from Production
Situation: You’ve got your local codebase for a site in place, but the database got wiped, intentionally or otherwise. Maybe you destroyed your Vagrant box. To quickly pull the production database, I’ll often use a tool like WP Migrate DB Pro. Of course, using that tool (or any other plugin-based database migration tool) depends on…
Read More
Customize Beaver Builder’s Social Media Icons
Here at Sterner Stuff, we find that many of our clients benefit from using a flexible and performant theme that can fit a variety of needs. It helps us deliver projects faster, and for many small businesses, it’s a great fit for their needs. We turn to Beaver Builder to fill this role. While most…
Read More
Convert WordPress Tables to utf8mb4
WordPress version 4.2 changed up the default database table collation. Swapping to utf8mb4 provides support for a wider range of characters, including emojis. If the contents of your content editor are deleted when saving with an emoji in it, this is probably your issue. If you upgraded to WordPress 4.2 while running MySQL version 5.5.2…
Read More
2019 PHP Benchmarks – Why You Need PHP 7+
2019 is just around the corner, and with it comes Kinsta’s annual PHP benchmarking. You can check out their full post, or keep reading for a quick look at the stuff most important to WordPress or Laravel users. What is PHP and How Does it Affect SEO? PHP is the server language that powers popular…
Read MoreFunction to Check if Divi is Active
There are times you may want your WordPress page templates to behave differently depending on whether or not a page builder has been enabled on it. For example, I built out a custom page template for a client that had content that was populated via custom fields, but also space for whatever was in the…
Read More