WordPress category pages are the pages that list all the posts on your blog from a particular category. These pages give your readers a way to view all the posts on a certain topic or category in one place. However, depending on your chosen WordPress theme, these category pages don’t often include any original or useful information about the posts they contain. While it’s possible to edit the theme files in use on your website to create your own custom category pages, the free Enhanced Category Pages plugin gives you an easier way to customize and add your own content to these pages, effectiv ..read more

The benefits of expanding the scope of your blog are pretty self-explanatory: you expand the scope of your content, add new perspectives for your readers, build relationships with key influencers, build backlinks, and bring a wider audience to your blog through the writer’s existing followers. Keep your expectations reasonable One of the key mistakes many make when starting their guest post outreach is only looking at the biggest names in their industry. It is a great idea to follow and interact with them. However, your outreach efforts are better served by maintaining realistic expectations ..read more

I’ve talked a lot about security over the last few weeks. This week, though, I want to talk about another important website attribute: speed. For anyone who experienced 56k dial-up, you could be forgiven for thinking today’s super-fast broadband connections have solved the problem of website speed. After all, most websites load within a few seconds. We’ve become accustomed to lightning-quick websites, though, and this has made us more demanding than ever before. So let’s make this clear: speed matters. Why is it so important? Because Google loves fast websites. On more than a few occasions, t ..read more

If you work with WordPress regularly, the WordPress admin will feel like a second home — I know it does for me, at least. Although the default design, layout, and settings work exceptionally well, it’s possible to make small tweaks to the WordPress admin to help you work more efficiently. Today, I want to share four simple tips for customizing the WordPress admin. Admin Color Scheme Personally, I’m a big fan of the WordPress admin’s appearance. In WordPress 3.8, the admin interface was given a significant overhaul, and much of what we see today still remains — though a slightly different colo ..read more

While explaining how it works is a little more difficult, the essence of what a WordPress Reverse Proxy does is simple. It allows your WordPress site to be viewed through another domain, so that your visitors have no idea they’re on a different site or system. For example, let’s say you have a WordPress blog at MyAwesomeBlog.com. But you want to consolidate your blog with your main site, MegaSite.com. A WordPress Reverse Proxy will allow your blog to show up as something like MegaSite.com/Blog. To put it in more technical terms, a reverse proxy serves as a middleman that forwards requests fro ..read more

Introduction to WordPress IDs When I first started using WordPress several years ago, I remember a plugin asking me for a post ID. I thought I was picking up WordPress quite quickly, but this one had me stumped. I could see the name of my post, I could find the URL – but I had no idea how to find the post ID. If you’ve ever had this problem, you’re in luck: today, I’m going to show you exactly where to find the WordPress post ID. Now, many WordPress users don’t know how to find the post ID, and they get by just fine. So why might you need to know it? Usually, it’s a situation like the one abov ..read more

In this post, we’ll take you step-by-step through the process of creating and using your own custom shortcodes. We’ll go over what shortcodes are, walk you through the entire process of creating a new shortcode, and show you how to modify and control the shortcode attributes and functions. Please note that this is a more advanced post that will go into details on how to create shortcodes. If working with code is beyond your technical expertise, and you just want the easiest way to get started with creating and using shortcodes, you may want to start with a shortcode plugin. A Little History Tr ..read more

Introduction: From generating qualified leads to boosting SERP rankings, a successful enterprise WordPress site must achieve a balance between driving sales and generating brand awareness. For corporations that want to take advantage of all WordPress has to offer, there are a handful of questions that typically come to mind. Will WordPress scale to meet our needs? Is WordPress secure enough for our brand? How do we incorporate marketing efforts into our WordPress site? If your team is asking questions like these, it’s important to understand what capabilities and features WordPress offers spec ..read more

Introduction to WordPress Maintenance Admit it, you do treat your WordPress installation as a set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing, don’t you? Almost everybody does. Literally, the only two things we usually do with a WordPress site once it’s up and running is: (1) publish new content, (2) update the plugins and the WordPress core itself (here at Pagely, Plugins and Core are updated for you). But that’s pretty much it. Unfortunately, this isn’t the best approach out there. Here’s why you should start performing a regular WordPress check-up, and how to keep your site healthy, optimized, and safe ..read more

The Importance of SSL in Today’s Web Environment It’s become commonplace for a majority of internet users to share personal information on the internet. With the disregard for protecting personal data becoming second nature, how do we protect ourselves and our users? That’s where the power of SSL comes in. If your site requires users to submit any valuable or fragile information, then having an SSL certificate is a must-have. Below you’ll learn what SSL actually is and how you can install your SSL certificate on your WordPress site. Understanding SSL: The Basics What is SSL? Having a secure we ..read more