230 - 'K' is for Killer Tips

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

Hello, This is another A-Z of WordPress where we attempt to cover all the major aspects to building and maintaining sites with WP.  Today is K for… Killer Tips

Preamble

We are cheating with this, but it has been a while since our chats have featured the thoughts of the WP Builds Facebook group.  Interestingly I looked at a few articles on top WP tips and I think our group covers all the major one mentioned elsewhere and more so yay us!

The Tips…

Using WordPress

Tom Carless
When you upload a plugin that is already installed, WordPress lets you compare the versions and choose what to do.

Camo Jones
Uncheck the “discourage search engines” settings.

Didou Schol
Since WordPress 5.2 you can’t see the errors when you’re developing, or make mistakes when editing your functions.php.

To counter that David almost immediately turns on WP_DEBUG, but also WP_DISABLE_FATAL_ERROR_HANDLER by setting the constants in wp-config.php

Colin Needham

• Set the time zone to the country of origin.  Louise Findlay also says the country is better than UTC with some plugins (daylight saving and WordPress did not have proper time zone settings back in the day of php 4)
• Always create backups
• Add a plugin to Monitor security
• Connect the site to Google Search Console and upload site maps
• Test your forms 
• Compress your images 
• For accessibility, make sure buttons, links, and text are not too small on mobiles

David’s notes. One of my tips would be to concentrate on image file sizes. There is a trend at the moment on speed testing themes and page builders. The fast themes may only be loading 50kb less than the slowest. Optimise your images and you may lose 10 times that!

David McCan
Use a Starter Site – time saving.

Jay Ovens-Henig
Self plug for Admin Page Spider! Basically worth having  a look around for WordPress navigation tools (David uses Beaver Builder’s Assistant)

Design

Chantal Edouard-Betsy

• Use typographic scaling. pick a base font size that’s easy to read… depending on the font this can be in the 16-22px range… then scale up your heading sizes from there… look at the perfect fourth scale… David’s personal favourite
• Accent colours should be just that… accents. When used too liberally they don’t stand out at all, so if you want that call to action to stand out use the accent colour sparingly on the page – see https://htmlcolorcodes.com/resources/best-color-palette-generators/
• White space… making sure you have enough white space is one of the things that instantly makes a site look more polished. This isn’t 1995, and we aren’t trying to avoid scrolling anymore, so space things out. On rows David normally sets the padding to 70-100px and 35-50px on tablet and 20-30px on mobile. Whatever number you choose, make it consistent through the whole page
• Basically get a system!

Jay Ovens-Henig

• Try designing for mobile first. It’ll save a lot of hassle coming up with a good design aesthetic and language when getting to desktop
• Don’t overcomplicate things… animations and transitions and fancy things are attractive, but best used conservatively
• Avoid pop ups… they don’t work as effectively anymore and just annoy users
• Jay works in marketing as a day job and although the consensus that designing ‘above the fold’ is no longer necessary, it still actually does have a huge drop off in users not bothering to scroll. Obviously industry dependent, but even though it matters less, it still matters – try to make your above-fold real-estate pretty impactful

David’s notes. Good to get client on the same page. http://www.5minutemarketingmakeover.com/video-1/ (Story Brand Donald Miller) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YtrieuSlhY (Watertight Marketing Bryony Thomas)

Tools and resources

Brenda Malone

https://formstyler.com/
https://www.wpdevtools.io/tools/plugin-explorer/

Peter Ingersoll

The Kinsta blog is one of his top WP resources https://kinsta.com/blog/
Also for blocks https://wordpress.org/plugins/find-my-blocks/

David Waumsley

https://codepen.io/
https://www.w3schools.com/  (to see if I can avoid another plugin)
https://wpscan.com/  security

Business and clients

Colin AT

Have a lean stack, and master what you have.

Gen Herres

Never assume what the client says means what you think it means… Always really dig into the details of “expected behavior”.

Michelle Sullivan

• Profile your client
• Be a mind reader
• Learn to become a good design mimic
• If you get a vague feeling a client won’t like something go with your gut and don’t go there
• Develop client ESP… As soon as you think about a client and how you should contact them about xyz do it immediately, as 9 times out of 10 the client will email you within hours
• Never cut and paste. Always copy and paste
• Lastly, always have a backup

Ulrik Kristiansen

Log everything that everyone is doing on yer bloody site.

David’s notes. There is https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/ and Main WP child reports (a fork of https://wordpress.org/plugins/stream/) 

Peter Ingersol

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-history/  (this one makes sense when we talk about clients)

Sincere thanks to all of you who took part and submitted your thoughts, this was the easiest way to make a podcast, so we’ll be getting you guys to do all the work again at some point in the near future!