With much fanfare, Automattic released a new version of Jetpack Stats for WordPress in March 2023. And sometimes the page doesn’t load, giving the spinny ring of death. Wait all day if you want, you’ll just get the ring. Hitting F5 to reload the page will almost always cause this to happen, as will your computer going to sleep while the page is open. But sometimes I’ve seen it happen on its own as well.
The fix is easy but non-obvious.
My WordPress has been acting strange for a while, missing scheduled posts and other general weirdness. I eventually traced the problem to a file called wp-cron.php. Here’s how I automated wp-cron.php to improve WordPress speed and reliability.
Read More »Fix wp-cron.php to improve WordPress speed and reliability
It’s a good idea to periodically back up your WordPress site. That way, if something unexpected happens, you can recover. You should also back it up prior to major upgrades. Here’s how to backup a WordPress site, quickly and easily, at little to no cost.
I use an SEO plugin called Yoast. I’m not exactly enamored with it, but I’m also not sure I can switch to something better. One reason I’m not enamored with it is its high CPU usage. I had to fix it from the MariaDB side. Here’s how I figured out how to limit CPU usage in MariaDB.
I built a shiny new server recently. Then I spent three hours trying to migrate my site to it. So it goes. But even after the site mostly worked right, WordPress gave me a critical error on my website every time I tried to save a post. Here’s how I fixed the problem.
The message there has been a critical error on your website, please check your site admin email for instructions can be scary, especially when you check your e-mail and there’s nothing there. I found the WordPress dashboard can help.
I tend to schedule a lot of posts in advance. At least when I get on a roll, that is. But sometimes you schedule a post, then have second thoughts about it being ready to run. I’ve certainly run more than a few posts before I intended to. Here’s how to unschedule a WordPress post.
It doesn’t look like setting the post status to draft actually unschedules it. Looks can be deceiving, so here’s how to be sure.
One of the main reasons I bought the Yoast SEO plugin was for its internal linking suggestions. It automatically flags similar content that you can link while writing or revising posts. But it didn’t work on my site. Here’s what finally fixed it for me, and might work for you if you find Yoast internal linking not working.
Yoast’s knowledge base has a number of suggestions, including looking for errors, disabling plugins, or switching to a stock theme. If none of those suggestions helps, you might have too many tags.
Read More »Yoast internal linking not working? Try this simple trick.
What is a blog used for? Well, take it from a guy who’s been blogging since 1999. It’s used for a lot of things, depending on who is running the blog. It helps to remember that ultimately, a blog is just a web site. So you can use it for anything you would use any other web page for. But let’s explore it. My motivations for blogging certainly have changed over time.
I saw a post on Linkedin last week proclaiming that SEO is dead and encouraging people to just write great content. Are they right? Is SEO dead? Here’s why I don’t think so. Not in 2019. Probably not ever.
Don’t get me wrong. SEO has changed. Old-fashioned SEO, which amounted to keyword stuffing and little else, is dead. But ignoring SEO is a shortcut and it backfires on you. It backfired on me.
I had to add SSL to WordPress recently. I’d tried it before without success, but this time it was surprisingly easy. My downtime was minutes, at most, and I saw a small bump in traffic within days.
My walkthrough assumes you are running WordPress on Linux and you have shell access. It will be different on other setups.