Your author’s are the heart of most WordPress sites. They write your content, engage with your audience, and generally make the site work as it should. As such, you’ll often want to get WP author meta from the site so that you can show it off in your template. The way to get meta author tag information from WordPress is a handy function called get_the_author_meta (or, if you don’t need to do any processing, the_author_meta). Using this function is a great way to get the author meta fields from your WordPress users, and show those author fields in your WordPress theme templates.

In the Quick Guide we’ll use WP Security Audit Log to keep an activity log of what’s happening on our WordPress site. Activity logs are a chronological list of records of what logged in users did on your WordPress sites and multisite networks. A WordPress activity log a vital part of site security and management because in them, you can find a user log full of information about user logins—from where they logged in and when, what content they have created, published, modified and deleted, what user profile and WordPress settings changes other administrators have done, and much more.

One thing every WordPress site should have is a site icon, also called a favicon—the little tiny image that shows up in your browser tabs to let you tell one site from another. A site icon looks like this:

Categories are a type of taxonomy that WordPress uses to help users organize posts. If you’re a blogger, or create a lot of new content, you’re probably already using them. If you are, you might have noticed that it’ll automatically categorize your new posts as “Uncategorized” in WordPress,  forcing you to manually select your desired category before you publish anything new. It’s a small extra step that can easily lead to a majorly disorganized site if you frequently forget it. In this quick guide, we’ll show you how to change your WordPress default category from uncategorized to something custom! It’s pretty simple, so let’s get started:

In this Quick Guide, we’ll walk you through how to reset a WordPress user’s password using cPanel and phpMyAdmin. To change WordPress passwords from cPanel is simple (it takes less than a minute front-to-back) and it’s a very useful trick to know—one we use at least a couple times every single month in our work with our clients.

Backing up any data you care about is a super-important procedure. You just never know when your hard drive (or SSD) will suddenly stop working, either from normal failure or from a freak accident. And while you should trust that your web host has your back on data backups for your website, a second line of defense is always a good idea. That’s where UpdraftPlus comes it—it provides a relatively easy and totally free WordPress backup.

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.