Once you have your development environment set up, and a child theme ready to be filled in, there’s one more handy tool you’ll want to understand before you start making changes to your site. Google’s Chrome Inspect Element feature has become a beloved tool by developers because it allows you to see the code behind any given feature of your site from the front end. If you’re using a theme you didn’t hand code yourself, you’ll need to figure out what classes and ids correspond to which parts of your site before you can start making changes. Here’s how to use  Chrome Inspect Element to quickly get the information you need to start designing your site.

Seeing an invalid (old, expired) cached pages is one of the most common and frustrating stumbling blocks for people getting to WordPress development for the first time. Different caching systems have different (or non-existent) options to clear that cache. In this video and guide we explain how the clear the cache if you’re using the WP Super Cache plugin.

As developers, one of the first things we always do on a shared host is install a full-page-caching plugin called WP Super Cache. Some shared hosts now offer caching outside of WordPress; SiteGround does. If they do, use that instead of WP Super Cache. It’ll be faster. But if they don’t have a caching layer from the host, using WP Super Cache made by Automattic (makers of WordPress.com) is the way to go.

One of the most annoying parts of maintaining a WordPress site effectively is dealing with spam submissions. CAPTCHA, a type of challenge-response test that’s used to tell if a user is human, is one of the most common ways of protecting against spam. It’s also one of the most obnoxious for users. We’ve all had experiences on sites where we had to decode unreadable, broken numbers in an image multiple times before we could sign up for a mailing list or submit a question over a contact form. The WPBruiser plugin (formerly  Goodbye CAPTCHA) is one of our favorite plugins for dealing spam and boosting the security of your site (this isn’t a sponsored post, so you know we must really love it!).

If you’re trying to increase traffic to your website and improve your SEO, Yoast SEO for WordPress has quickly become the go-to SEO solution for most WordPress developers. It’s a multifaceted SEO plugin that’s full of features that make optimization easier to keep up with! One of our favorite features is the snippet editor, which gives you the ability to edit your meta title and meta description in WordPress which we’ll cover in this post.

While WordPress itself is already one of the best tools you could be using to improve your site’s SEO, optimization is a large, ongoing task that should be fully integrated into your marketing and PR strategy. Without thoughtful consideration, your site could easily become invisible to the people who need your content the most. Luckily, Yoast makes a great plugin to help you stay on top of SEO.

Now that you have a working design for your site and have created a few new pages of content, you’ll want to make sure your visitors can find the right information easily by adding your new pages to your menu. It’s a very easy task, so let’s get started!

Adding a custom logo to your site’s header is one of the very first things you’ll probably want to do after you’ve set up your site on your new host and installed a theme you like. Luckily, it’s also one of the simplest things you can do in WordPress. Here’s how to make it happen: