This video and text tutorial will teach you how to customize WordPress widgets, including how to edit your WordPress sidebar.

Themes are one of the first things people learn about in WordPress, and for good reason: they control how your site looks. It’s possible to make themes look a little different from other WordPress sites using the same one, but it’s not easy and takes an almost comic amount of work. So instead you should just install a theme that gives your site exactly (or as nearly as you can) the look that you want it to have.

Strong passwords are good for WordPress security, but they aren’t always enough. Especially if your password is one you reuse across many sites (but even if not), you’ll sometimes want to consider a two-step authentication in WordPress. That means that you’ll first fill in your WordPress password, and after that is filled in, you’ll be prompted for another code. Most often, this is a 6-digit number which changes every thirty seconds. Most people have probably experienced a 2-Factor Authentication flow (via a phone SMS message) of this kind from their bank or Facebook account.

Most web hosts limit the amount of storage they’ll allow an individual hosting account. When you begin to run into these hosting disk space limits, your best bet is to find and remove large files from your hosting account that you’re no longer using. This week’s video tutorial explains how to find and remove large files from a cPanel hosting account. We focus specifically on the cPanel software suite because it’s an extremely common choice of hosting interface, especially for shared hosts.

It’s important to think about password security in WordPress. Enforce strong passwords so that your users are never able to have one like “chicago”, and you’re well on your way. But how? How can you make sure that WordPress passwords are as strong as they should be, when you aren’t the only one with an account on the site? That’s where the iThemes Security plugin in WordPress comes it, it has a simple setting that’ll prevent people from setting low-security passwords, and you’ll have a whole load off your mind. Better yet, iThemes Security is a free plugin.

This video and text Quick Guide explains how to prevent browser caching of CSS files, with a special focus on doing this for WordPress sites.

Webpage speed optimization is a complex and multi-facet topic, but many of the problems it poses have well-tested solutions. The methods and algorithms of compressing images for maximum performance are relatively well-known and agreed on, but out-of-the-box WordPress doesn’t make that a priority. So, when you want to optimize images for WordPress, you’ll often need to turn to an image optimization plugin. One of the most popular is “WP Smush It”, which is now called “Smush Image Compression and Optimization” on the WordPress plugin repository. The plugin allows you to “smush images” to help increase your site performance, load time, etc.

From time to time, you’ll need to change the post type of one or more of your WordPress posts. One common need is to change a Post to a Page, when you realize a piece of previously published content is more “evergreen” than “blog.” You could create a new Page, cut-paste the Post’s content and title, and delete the Post—but doesn’t it make more sense to just change the one thing that’s the actual problem, which is the Post’s post type?

An out-of-date copyright year in a site’s footer is a common sight, especially early in a new year. It happens because people don’t take advantage of WordPress’s server-side language, PHP, to auto-update the copyright year in WordPress. Instead they’re manually changing it. But it’s a complex and menial task, so it’s easy to put off.

Contact forms are one of the most common needs on a WordPress site. Whether you want them because giving people an email address scares you of spam or just because you like to get a more structured amount of data from your correspondents, there are a whole host of possible solutions for dealing with contact forms. One of the greatest of those is the Ninja Forms WordPress plugin—best part, it’s free! Today, we’ll cover how to make a “Ninja contact form.” Hi-ya!