Webmaster and WordPress Help Archives

WP Rocket Read Our Horror Story Before Purchasing

10/14/2016 FidoSysop

Read this WP Rocket WordPress Cashing Plugin Review Before Purchasing. It’s not as described. Even WP Rocket tech support couldn’t get their product to work as advertised. WP Fastest Cache FREE Plugin outperforms WP Rocket! We have been running WP Fastest Cache on this blog for several months. Our theme uses Google fonts that are not optimized. This lowers it’s Page Speed Insites score. WP Rocket claims it optimizes Google fonts but does not. Always looking for more speed, we decided to give WP Rocket a try since it offered…

Jetpack 4.3 Removes Stats From WordPress Dashboard

09/09/2016 FidoSysop

After upgrading WordPress Jetpack Plugin to version 4.3 we noticed stats were missing from our WordPress dashboard. To get your stats, logging into WordPress.com is now required. Update 09/27/16 Jetpack is now history. See update below this post. WordPress stats are adequate for a quick view into the days visitors, popular posts, etc. It was real handy to have WordPress Stats in WP-Admin sidebar menu, but after version 4.3 that option is gone. When going to > Jetpack > Dashboard > a short graph is available. Currently the view old…

HTTP 410 Gone Code Stops Search Engines Re-Crawling Dead Urls

09/03/2016 FidoSysop

Here is how to use HTTP 410 GONE status code to tell search engines those 404 urls they keep re-crawling over and over again have been permanently removed and will never be back. If your website or blog is quite old, chances are you have removed posts, added and removed categories, tags, and media attachments over the years. Google crawls your whole website. This includes your JavaScript, CSS files, Plugins, on top of your posts, pages, tags, categories, etc, etc, etc. Jokers redirecting a url to your domain also redirects…

Google AMP Mobile Search Preview: AMP’ed Results In Search

08/22/2016 FidoSysop

AMP Mobile Page Specific Search Preview is now available from Google. Previously AMP search results targeted only major news and other top stories sites on the net. But sites / blogs like yours and mine will soon be showing up in Google mobile device searches. Here’s how to opt into AMP Search. From Googles blog post on the subject : It’s 2016 and it’s hard to believe that browsing the web on a mobile phone can still feel so slow with users abandoning sites that just don’t load quickly. To…

WP Fastest Cache For WordPress Using CloudFlare

07/04/2016 FidoSysop

WP Fastest Cache is Doc’s recommended plugin for WordPress when using CloudFlare. Despite the increased speed CloudFlare gives your site, WordPress still has to generate each page dynamically. Above average visitor load can cause database connection timeouts. And even get your site shut down if on shared hosting. You can gain a ton more website speed by caching your posts, pages, tags, and categories. When caching your site a generated html page is delivered to your site visitor. This saves WordPress from doing all the work saving bandwidth and server…

Facebook Embedded Media Blocked By Robots Noindex

06/11/2016 FidoSysop

Facebook Embedded Video Blocked By Robots.txt File

Embedding Facebook Media or Video in your blog posts? We discovered today that those embedded media items come with meta robots.txt block. This meta robots block will greatly effect your overall post seo score. Updated 12/13/16: Facebook embedded Website Comments also comes with an undisclosed robots block. What Facebook is saying: You can use this resource to display on your site, but we block any seo advantage to using it. Just like all external Facebook links are meta nofollow. This means putting a link to your website or blog will…

Optimizing WordPress Using CloudFlare Security and Encryption

05/26/2016 FidoSysop

Optimizing WordPress SimplePress running under CloudFlare

CloudFlare is the best resource on the net to Protect and Enhance WordPress Installations. This also goes for the popular WordPress Forum Plugin SimplePress . In this article i am going to show how to get the most from CloudFlare’s FREE plan and tweaking WordPress and SimplePress for best results. Getting started: CloudFlare offers an incredible package even on their free plan. It’s rather easy to set up your domain. First go to CloudFlare.com and register your account. After registering scan your domain to add it to cf dns. This…

PHP MBstring May Need Enabling In WordPress Installations

04/16/2016 FidoSysop

PHP MBstring May Be Required In Certain WordPress Configurations

PHP Multibyte String often referred to as MBstring may not be enabled in many common php configurations, but may be needed in certain WordPress configurations, dependent on certain plugin use. We ran into this after upgrading to WordPress 4.5. Our self administrated server did not have this php module installed. This article shows how to enable this module in WHM / cPanel servers using easy Apache. From php.net: When you manipulate (trim, split, splice, etc.) strings encoded in a multibyte encoding, you need to use special functions since two or…

CleanTalk The Best Anti-Spam Solution For WordPress

04/05/2016 FidoSysop

CleanTalk is the Best WordPress Anti-Spam Bot Solution. Are Bad Bots eating your blogs resources up, and spamming your comments with junk? Akiasmet does a fair job, but does not have a firewall like CleanTalk to block blacklisted IPs before they hit your blog. Doc’s Place BBS has been using this exceptional script for two years now – and it’s fantastic! Plus CleanTalk is Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) compliant. This is a big plus as many WordPress plugins are not currently amp compatible. CleanTalk also supports many other CMS…

CloudFlare WordPress Plugin Disaster Breaks Admin Functions

03/29/2016 FidoSysop

CloudFlare WordPress Plugin Breaks WP-Admin

CloudFlare WordPress Plugin Disaster Breaks WordPress Admin Functions – And CloudFlare Support Was Clueless! This morning i couldn’t log in to this WordPress blog. It was the start of several hours of hell trying to diagnose the problem. CloudFlare had a major security issue – and what they did to fix it was beyond logic! I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong while having my morning coffee. I suspected a CloudFlare debacle right off the bat since i had updated their plugin last night before going…

Google AMP Validation Errors Under CloudFlare Easy Fix

03/24/2016 FidoSysop

Google AMP Validation Errors And CloudFlare Incompatibility

Recently we enabled Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and since then are dealing with multiple Validation Errors. Automattic (WordPress) has a plugin that generates the required compatible pages, and Yoast has came out with a Glue plugin that adds a few items Automattic’s Plugin leaves out. But Google has outlawed Script commands that seem to be the greatest majority of our amp validation errors. We are running under a CloudFlare pro-account, their main script that loads CloudFlare performance options, (Mirage, Polish, Email Obfuscation, Rocket Loader, etc) is outlawed by Google…

Why Donald Trump’s Campaign Website Is The Best Online!

03/09/2016 FidoSysop

An article published on slate.com explains why Donald Trump’s Political Website is the best. A tribute to Mr. Trumps Webmaster and his political campaign team, that has excellent communication skills! 😉 I have watched Mr. Trumps website grow almost daily as more navigation links and important information has been added. Speed and Security is of utmost importance these days, and donaldjtrump.com is running under https/tls security , and is protected against cyber attacks by cloudflare.com the same service used on this blog. The article talks about political websites: Presidential campaign…

HostGator Web Hosting Sucks

01/16/2016 FidoSysop

HostGator Web Hosting Sucks. It sucked in 2014 when i leased a VPS Server from HostGator and in 2016 it appears nothing has changed. Since we quit offering web services and notified several clients of this, a couple asked who could move their sites and where to get web hosting. Shared hosting can really suck if the wrong host is chosen. Knowing that i decided to have my client purchase a hosting account and i would do the site move for them. Since i have not utilized shared web hosting…

OfferUp The FREE Craigslist Car Dealer Classified Alternative

10/06/2015 FidoSysop

Craigslist is charging auto dealers a flat $5 per car listing fee to advertise their used cars on it’s platform. Considering Craigslist used to be free has many car dealers fuming! But here is something new that might work out better than Craigslist for car dealers. OfferUp is something you car dealers should try out. Everything these days is turning to mobile devices. OfferUp is an app available for both Android and Apple platforms and is definitely worth giving a shot. Update 03/22/17: Fraudsters are offering cars for sale at…

Google Chrome Cleanup / Software Reporter Tool HIGH CPU

09/11/2015 FidoSysop

Google Chrome Cleanup / Software Reporter Tool “software_reporter_tool.exe” Was running multiple processes (12 to be exact) and pegging my CPU usage meter. I found this out by bringing up my task manager and observed the multiple processes running. Killing one or more services just popped up more. The name in my process manager is “Chrome Cleanup Tool.” The system fan was whirling like mad trying to cool my CPU down. Thinking id be cute – i deleted that sucker.. Walla.. 😆 But wouldn’t you know.. chrome cleanup tool came right…