Plugins
Choosing a WordPress Gallery Plugin
Core already groups images and opens them in a lightbox. A gallery plugin earns its place through layout, albums and performance, and the last one is where most of them fail.
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Tag
Performance
Making WordPress sites load faster.
WordPress Tutorials
WordPress Post Revisions Explained
A revision is an ordinary row in the posts table with a different post type. That explains what it saves, what it silently omits, and why the database bloat panic is usually overstated.
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WordPress Cron: How WP-Cron Works and Why It Misses
WP-Cron is not a scheduler. It is a queue checked when somebody visits your site, which explains every scheduled post that never published and every backup that silently stopped running.
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AMP for WordPress: Is It Still Worth Doing?
AMP was a bargain: accept a restricted subset of the web and get a speed guarantee plus preferential placement. The placement went away, the restrictions did not, and that changes the answer.
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The WordPress Server Stack: Nginx, Apache, PHP and MySQL
Four pieces sit under every WordPress site, and most hosting problems are really a question about which one is responsible. Knowing the division makes support tickets shorter and diagnoses correct.
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Bricks and Breakdance: The Newer WordPress Builders Assessed
The newer builders were designed by people who had watched the older ones age badly. They output cleaner markup and demand more of you — and they make exactly the same bargain about who owns your pages.
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Neve: A Light WordPress Theme and What It Asks in Return
Neve is one of the genuinely light multipurpose themes, and its free tier is unusually complete. The catch is that the starter sites arrive as builder content, and that is what you end up maintaining.
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How to Add Google Maps to WordPress Without Slowing the Page
A map is the heaviest thing most contact pages load, and on many sites it is also an untracked third-party connection. Both are fixable, and the cheapest fix is often not to embed a live map at all.
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WordPress Search: Why the Default Is Weak and What to Do About It
Core search matches words in post titles and content, in date order, with no ranking worth the name. On a small blog that is fine. On anything larger it quietly sends people away.
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WP Rocket: What You Are Paying For, and What You Are Not
WP Rocket is a caching plugin whose real product is defaults that work. There is no free version, the licence renews annually, and on good hosting some of what it does is already done.
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wpDataTables: When a Table Needs to Be a Database Query
wpDataTables handles the tables a simple table plugin cannot — thousands of rows, live SQL sources, filtering and charts. That capability is why it is heavy, and why most sites do not need it.
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Google Site Kit: Dashboards in WordPress, and What They Are Worth
Site Kit connects Search Console, Analytics, AdSense and PageSpeed to your admin and shows you the numbers there. It is the least risky way to add tracking, and the dashboard is the least useful part of it.
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