Announcing our WordPress Maintenance brand: WP Site Doctor
This is for all active Press Wizards customers about our fairly new WordPress maintenance service and brand website, “WP Site Doctor” – we’re offering a 20% holiday discount for new maintenance signups between Nov 20th and Dec 25th 2017, use code: LOYALPW20PCENT Sign up here: https://wpsitedr.com/ You get daily care with free hack repair. We already have some customers enjoying the maintenance service, and the peace of mind it brings by keeping the website updated, with daily malware and plugin vulnerability scans, daily off-server backups,…
Get your websites on HTTPS before October to avoid “Not Secure” warnings and boost performance with HTTP/2
Chrome now marks HTTP pages as “Not secure” if they have password or credit card fields. Beginning in October 2017, Chrome will show the “Not secure” warning in two additional situations: when users enter data on an HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode. Soon after this update, the Chrome team plans to show the “Not secure” warning for all HTTP pages, even outside Incognito mode. They will publish updates as they approach future releases, but don’t wait to get started moving to HTTPS….
Celebrating 20 Years In Business 1997-2017
We’re happy to announce that we’re celebrating 20 years in business this year! We still have a few customers that have been with us since the beginning, too. We started out building websites when the Internet was barely born under the name Web Wizards, and grew from hosting a handful of sites to hosting hundreds of sites across a cluster of servers. We’re building and redesigning more websites than ever before, now specializing in WordPress, and renamed ourselves a few years ago to Press Wizards®….
Cloudflare data leak Cloudbleed and what it means to you
Your website is most likely not affected We learned of the Cloudflare data leak (dubbed “Cloudbleed”) late last night, and have dug into the issue – long story short, I think it’s a non-issue for almost all sites at this point. Only every 1 in 3 million requests were affected, across a few thousand sites that run through Cloudflare, with network data being output on a few dozen sites that were indexed and cached by search engines. “With the help of Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others, we…
W3 Total Cache v0.9.5 Requires PHP v5.3+ and White-Screen Fix Options
We manage a ton of client sites at Press Wizards, and we’re seeing some serious issues W3 Total Cache’s latest update, v 0.9.5, recently released mainly because of a Cross-Site-Scripting exploit. They clearly didn’t do a ton of testing first, as it’s breaking thousands of websites, and I wanted to summarize the issues and how to fix them. Requires PHPv5.3+ Be aware that v0.9.5 currently now REQUIRES PHP v5.3 or greater. It will cause a white screen if your site is still using PHP v5.2 (or…
WordPress 4.5 New Features and Capabilities
WordPress 4.5 is being released very soon, and there are some interesting end-user and developer enhancements included. Get familiar with the changes and new features so you’re prepared and aware of what to look for in this latest released of WordPress. The information below comes from the WordPress.org field guide, edited for end-user summary review, meaning references to developer-focused specifics have been removed. JavaScript! and CSS! Multiple external libraries have been updated (with the two that could require attention being Backbone and Underscore). Term Edit Page!…
Boost website performance, eliminate server load, using Cloudflare’s Page Rules
Many website owners use the amazing and free Cloudflare CDN (content delivery network), which caches static files (images, javascript, CSS) in all 28 data centers around the world, while also providing a layer of security and traffic scanning/blocking. The result is faster load times for your web site, and lessened possibility of a hacked or attacked website. Most website owners also enable server-side caching, with WordPress sites usually using W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Hyper Cache, or other popular plugins. These plugins lessen the server load…
Benefits and warnings with using the new Universal Analytics in Google Analytics by Yoast v5.0
Google Analytics by Yoast v5 was a major rewrite, and had some issues that affected all sites, but was quickly patched throughout the day, ending with v5.0.5 being automatically pushed out to all sites that haven’t turned off automatic minor updates. Let’s review the updates in Google Analytics now that we’ve had a few days to play with it on a number of live sites that we manage for customers. Google Analytics by Yoast v5 Enhancements For Google Analytics by Yoast, the v5 update includes these new…
Welcome to Press Wizards
It’s been over 10 years since our last rebrand, and so it’s about time, and WordPress is what we’ve been developing with over the last few years, so it makes sense to promote a WordPress focus in our brand. We’ve been Web Wizards since 1997, we briefly added a WP to become WP Web Wizards, but that was a mouthful and we want a simple, powerful brand. So now, we’re Press Wizards, with a new matching .com domain (check out http://presswizards.com), to emphasize our WordPress focus. Nothing will change regarding…
Subtle enhancements to WordPress v4.0 they didn’t talk about
While WordPress v4.0 is just another update number after 3.9 and before 4.1, it has some new things that make it more polished than ever, with quite a few subtle enhancements they didn’t mention in their release post. It was named “Benny” in honor of jazz clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman. Let’s review everything below. WordPress 4.0 major improvements Here’s the major changes in WordPress 4.0: The Media Library was updated to display your uploaded files in a nice grid, with a new details preview making viewing…