Karol Krol is a writer, content strategist, and WordPress figure-outer with over 20 years of experience rooted in website building and web technologies. With his expertise underpinned by a master's degree in computer science, he authored "WordPress Complete" - the ultimate WordPress handbook for newbies. His work has been published across numerous industry websites. He leads the editorial team at WPShout.
Looking for the best image optimization plugin for WordPress? To help you choose, we went hands-on with five popular options and ran our own tests. See the results of these tests here.
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Your site is slow. People leave. Google shrugs. You tweak your theme, compress your images, scream into the void. Still slow… The problem might be your cache plugin, or rather the cache plugin you're not using yet.
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Images can quietly wreck your site. They generally slow pages down, eat bandwidth, and frustrate users if they take too long to load - especially on mobile. Any solution to this?
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Teaching online shouldn’t feel like wrestling with software, yet that’s what many WordPress LMS plugins make you do. It’s often not entirely their fault, though. After all, transforming WordPress into a full-featured LMS is a significant challenge, and it’s difficult to keep things intuitive while making a lot of functionality possible.
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Most WordPress theme lists bore me. So I made one that's actually useful. This post covers 15+ WordPress themes that real users love, backed by solid ratings, and good numbers of "active installations." I picked only themes people genuinely like, not just ones that look good on demos.
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You might have noticed a new report published on the official website of the WordPress project. I'm emphasizing the word "official" because the publication location is quite strategic, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
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This morning, I came across some interesting news about Google's updated site reputation abuse policies. Apparently, they've revised their main guidelines with some fresh updates.
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Google has made a significant change: you now need to enable JavaScript to use Google Search. According to them, this move is about security and improving the experience for users like you and me. By requiring JavaScript, Google says it can better protect its platform against spam, bots, and other types of abuse. It also claims this change ensures you get “the most relevant and up-to-date information.”
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Happy almost-2025, everyone! While you’re finishing up your year-end to-do’s (or wishing you had started them earlier), I’ve been diving into some fresh data published by Cloudflare. This time, they’ve looked at how people around the globe have been spending their time online during the holiday season – between Christmas and the New Year. As it turns out, when the feasting starts, the web often takes a back seat.
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Cloudflare just released their “2024 Year in Review” report – a detailed document that dives into the key trends and patterns shaping the web over the past year. I’ll be honest with you, it’s my first time paying attention to this report, but I’m really fascinated by the insights that they’ve been able to deliver. It’s an opportunity for all of us (website owners) to explore the forces behind the internet as we use it every day, and perhaps walk into 2025 a little more prepared.
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Something you might not know about - at least I didn't - is that Google, the search behemoth we've all come to know (and sometimes love), is quietly losing its search market share in several European countries.
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Mathieu Viet, the driving force behind BuddyPress, has made a heartfelt announcement: he's stepping away from the WordPress ecosystem…entirely.
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If you’ve been following the WordPress world lately, you might have heard about the small little lawsuit between WP Engine and Automattic. Jokes aside, it’s the kind of case that could have far-reaching effects for developers, other hosting companies, and anyone whose business depends on WordPress for that matter.
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Something truly unexpected happened in the WordPress community just before the weekend - a "product release," sort of. You've probably already guessed what I'm talking about from the headline, so let's skip the suspense.
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Cheap WordPress hosting sounds great until you're hit with hidden fees, slow loading times, and (truly) useless support. I've been burned by this myself…multiple times. So, I decided to find out if it's even possible to get reliable WordPress hosting without emptying your wallet.
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Ever since we started this site, we’ve been deeply involved in the topic of hosting a WordPress website. Personally, it wasn’t something I deliberately set out to learn that much about; rather, the topic found me. If you’re using WordPress, hosting is just essential, and there’s no way to ignore it. You just can’t run a site without it. So naturally, you’d want the best hosting available and steer clear of the sub-par options.
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Over the past few months, I’ve been diving deep into what people really think about WordPress’ block editor – Gutenberg. I thought this was going to be a fun project. I analyzed over 340 opinions from platforms like Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and WordPress.org. I also spoke with developers, colleagues, and other professionals in the WordPress community to get a well-rounded perspective.
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If you haven't checked out Learn WordPress lately, it's probably a good idea to do it today. This free educational hub has just had a serious glow-up, and I'm here to give you the scoop on why it's worth your attention.
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Just like apps enhance your phone, some of the best WordPress plugins can transform a basic WordPress site into something special. From powerful SEO tools to simple contact form plugins, it’s impressive how a quick ten-second installation can make such a big difference.
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Our regular readers know that we’ve been conducting hosting surveys ever since 2016. This initiative has grown to become the biggest WordPress hosting survey on the web. Roughly once every 1-2 years, we look at the lineup of the most popular WordPress hosting companies and ask our readers to assess their actual long-term experience with those companies.
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I don't really believe anything that WordPress hosting companies say about themselves. Neither should you. That's why I've started measuring their real-world performance myself, with the main goal of finding out which WordPress host is actually the fastest.
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Marketing automation has transformed how businesses engage with their existing and potential clients. It's enabled them to streamline repetitive tasks and focus more on needle-mover issues. With an increasing number of organizations adopting these technologies, understanding the key marketing automation statistics has become crucial to stay ahead of the competition and make informed decisions.
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Picture this, your WordPress site starts to load, but then for three agonizing seconds your visitors stare at a blank screen. They're gone before your hero image even appears. That's Largest Contentful Paint killing your conversions.
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As we wave goodbye to 2023, it’s time to reflect on the wealth of knowledge shared in the WordPress community. The year has been a remarkable journey, filled with insights, innovations, and inspiring ideas that have reshaped how we think about website building. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, the articles we’ve gathered here are not to be missed.
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We recently ran an experiment across three of our blogs to better understand readers, what they think of our content, and how we can potentially improve it. In this post, we’re going through the why and how of our experiment, along with the raw data and our initial conclusions.
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Black Friday (2024) is this rare, once-a-year opportunity to take advantage of some sweet discounts and grab yourself something nice for a fraction of the price. Or, in this case, grab your website something nice. After all, it’s WordPress Black Friday deals that we’re all about here!
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Navigating the world of ecommerce can be like trying to find your way in a big city. You need a good map! That’s where this post listing 60+ ecommerce stats comes in! Think of it as your guide to everything ecommerce: from big-picture trends to the nitty-gritty details of sales and revenues.
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Do you want to create a WordPress link that takes readers directly to a specific section of a page? As in, it can be a section anywhere in the middle of the page – not only the start of it. There’s an easy way to do that in WordPress. In this post, I’ll show you how.
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This post clears things up and explains how WordPress decides which file to load for a page, both in classic and block themes. I'll show where the templates go, what WordPress looks for first, and how it moves down the list when files are missing. If you're building or editing a theme, this is what you need to know first.
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Getting a domain name is most people’s roadblock when trying to release a new website to the world. Basically, you cannot even start working on a website until you have a domain name at your disposal. But what if you could actually get your domain without paying anything for it? In this guide, we’re going to show you four very real methods of how to get a domain name for free.
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