Tips and tricks for web developers, bloggers, and WordPress users by Brian Shim
Brian Shim 
If you have customized WooCommerce files in your theme (or child theme), then you probably know that updating them is one of the most painful parts of maintaining a WooCommerce site. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, your Woo template files are probably not customized, OR, you’ve just been neglecting it and they … Read more
One of the most annoying things about the Divi theme is that often, elements of a page shift around upon load and take a few seconds or more to stabilize. This is technically known as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and when this is high, it is red-flagged in Google Search Console, Google Pagespeed Insights, and … Read more
If you have a Divi background video on your site, accessibility guidelines say that all auto-playing videos need start/stop controls. Unfortunately, Divi doesn’t provide this out of the box. It’s not terribly hard to add this but Elegant Themes has made it more difficult because their play and pause icons are not the same size … Read more
Recently when I tried to migrate a Divi 4 WordPress site to the Divi 5 theme by using the Divi 5 Migrator, the process never finished and the “Migrate” button never showed up. Investigating the Problem Looking in the inspector, I noticed that the admin-ajax.php file was getting 503 errors. Additionally, the migrator worked fine … Read more
If you’re a global admin of a Microsoft 365 account with multiple users, you may get in a situation where a user has lost their two-factor device or accidentally deleted their Microsoft Authenticator App, rendering them unable to log into their Microsoft account. There are two ways to reset a user’s two-factor auth and let … Read more
I think most web developers dread email migrations (or flat out refuse to do them) because we don’t do them often enough to get good at doing them, and the end result doesn’t seem like something super exciting that you can charge a premium for. I had a situation where I was asked to migrate … Read more
After completely blocking AI bot access to all sites on their shared hosting in August 2025, SiteGround relented and announced that they would allow AI bots “that are used in chat sessions”, while still blocking AI training bots. Read about it here. What that means is that now, if you explicitly ask Chat GPT to … Read more
One of my clients discovered that any email he sent that contained a Vimeo link was flagged as spam by Gmail recipients. All other email passed through fine. In the recipient’s junk box, the email had this ominous warning attached to it: Researching this further, I found he wasn’t the only one: Many others have … Read more
Packed with exciting new features, a much faster editing experience, and Elegant Theme’s endorsement to use it on new sites, it might be tempting to use Divi 5 on production sites. But on the other hand, it is still technically an alpha release (not even beta!) and it’s not feature complete. I’ve been playing around … Read more
I had a client site that was experiencing a bot attack, so naturally, I turned to Cloudflare to mitigate it. Fortunately, it was already on Cloudflare, so all I had to do was enable the Cloudflare proxy in the DNS so it could start intercepting traffic. But, as soon as I did this, I got … Read more
After changing the URL of on of my client’s sites on Siteground, I wanted to make a backup. When I went to Security -> Backups -> Create New Backup in the Siteground control panel, I got this error message: The help docs didn’t really help, so I got on chat with Siteground and got the … Read more
Enabling DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) for an email account is one of the ways to combat email spoofing, and has other security benefits such as improving deliverability of your email and preventing it from getting blocked as spam. Spoofing is when someone sends an email that looks like it came from you, but it didn’t. … Read more
I needed to increase my microphone input gain after folks complained that I was hard to hear on a Google Meet meeting. That setting isn’t easy to find in Windows 10 because there are so many other possible places where this setting could be. So, I’ve included the directions here, mainly so I don’t have … Read more
I had a situation where I wanted to be able to set the background color of a custom post type when displayed as a feed or archive page in Divi. Each post could be a different color as chosen by a custom field of that post. I was using the Divi Machine plugin from Divi … Read more
I run a community Facebook Page that I want to allow other folks to post on. You may have a company or organizational Facebook Page with several admins who need to be able to post on that page or help you administer it. Here’s how to grant them access to the page. How to Grant … Read more
Recently, a client of mine reported the dreaded “white screen of death” critical error on one of my sites. On the front end, the error message was simply “There has been a critical error on this website.” In the error log, I saw this: Unfortunately, this line was in WP core, not in my custom … Read more
After migrating a Divi site to production using the All-in-One Migration plugin, I discovered that I was unable to edit any sections, rows, or modules in the Divi editor on the migrated site. In the console, I got the error: The front end of the site was fine. I tried all of the usual tricks, … Read more
Like most modern WordPress builders, Kadence Blocks has the ability to display backgrounds with the parallax effect; that is, when scrolling, the background will scroll at a different rate than the rest of the page. Usually, the background scrolls in the same direction as the foreground, but slower, to mimic real life where things that … Read more
Out of the box, the Divi theme mobile menus are not navigable using the tab key, and therefore do not meet accessibility requirements. A quick solution to this is to install the Divi Accessibility plugin, available on GitHub: This works on the default built-in Divi menu. The problem, though is that it doesn’t seem to … Read more
I use the discontinued Gridpane Pro plan for web hosting. It’s no longer offered to new users, but I’m grandfathered in. The features of the plan are no longer listed on the Gridpane website or their forum (as far as I could find), so I used the Wayback Machine to go back to 2020 to … Read more
12/14/2025 UPDATE: This problem seems to be fixed now, at least for true parallax. – Brian I recently discovered that Divi’s Parallax feature doesn’t work on Safari (on November 2024). When you scroll down, the background image just scrolls with the page like a regular background image. It doesn’t work whether you choose “True Parallax” … Read more
The Divi theme comes with the Elegant Themes Icon Font which contains 360 cool icons. You can use these icons in the Divi Blurb module, but what if you want to use them somewhere else, like in a Text module or Code module, or sidebar? This article shows you how to easily do it. Note, … Read more
There may be legitimate cases where an admin might need to access another Microsoft 365 user’s email. For example, when an employee has left the company. In this article, I’ll explain how to do that Step One: Getting Permissions The first part of this requires granting yourself permission to access the user’s email account. As … Read more
Here are my recommended Analytics plugins for WordPress whether based on Google Analytics or other. The Best Non Google Analytics Plugins With the shift from GA3 to GA4, Google frustrated a lot of users who just wanted a simple analytics dashboard and didn’t need the complex features that were added. In addition, since Google is … Read more
I didn’t find a working example of how to create an HTML select input in Alpine.js online, so I’m presenting it here. Select Input in Alpine.js Basically, you create a “for” loop to generate the option values. One of the keys to making this work with stored values is to set the “:selected” property to … Read more
If you’re using custom code to create users in WordPress, you may need to create a password reset link that you can email to new users once their account is created. Here’s how to do it. Creating the Password Reset URL Here’s the code to create the URL: The only thing you need to do … Read more
Through my clients, I have encountered tons of web hosting services. Some are great, while many are awful. Based on my experience as a full-time web developer, these are the web hosting services that I use and recommend: Best Shared Web Hosting (Great for Most Businesses and Organizations) I use SiteGround shared hosting for the … Read more
If you use the Fluent Forms plugin and have it sending notification emails when a form is submitted, you might notice a copyright blurb at the bottom of the email with the copyright symbol and the name of the site: This might seem harmless, but I’ve been asked by multiple clients to get rid of … Read more
Somehow I got in a situation where a page that was supposed to use the WordPress Block Editor got “stuck” and would only allow me to open it with the Divi Builder. When I tried that, it only gave options to start from scratch or a template, which of course I did not do! I … Read more
As I was learning Alpine.js for a new project I came across a problem when using HTML inputs in nested x-for loops. Data binding was working great in a single x-for loop wrapped around an HTML input tag. But, when I nest nested loops, the data entered in the inner loop inputs is not binding … Read more
If you want your WordPress site to be in different languages, there are a lot of plugins to choose from. Here’s my take on three of the most popular ones. TranslatePress – Recommended! TranslatePress is my #1 recommended translation plugin for WordPress. It is a great solution for keeping different language layouts synced to each … Read more
I had a situation where I updated the PHP version in cPanel from 7.3 to 8.0, but on the actual server it was still at 7.3. No matter what I did in cPanel, the PHP version wouldn’t change on my actual server! I called up the host, GoDaddy, and they quickly found the problem. It … Read more
I had a site with a pre-roll fade-in animation on the home page. It worked great, but it soon got really tiresome to have to wait for the animation to complete every time I returned to the site’s home page. I needed a way to detect if the user got to the home page from … Read more
Compliance with web accessibility regulations is super important these days. The accessibility compliance of websites built on Squarespace varies depending on which template you’re using. Here are some tips and tricks to fix the accessibility errors that you might find in various Squarespace templates. As part of my testing, I use the WAVE browser extension … Read more
Keeping backups of any website you maintain is absolutely essential. I make sure backups are done both at the server level and at the WordPress plugin level. My Two “Go To” WordPress Backup Plugins All-In-One WP Migration ★ This is now the backup plugin that I use the most. Very easy to use and reliable … Read more
Database Search and Replace Better Search Replace This is an easy-to-use database search-and-replace tool. I’ve used it to swap out shortcodes in the content, as well as to update URLs in the database before launching sites. There is a pro version that will show you a preview of the changes before executing, however, it doesn’t … Read more
These are some invaluable plugins for debugging, developing, and monitoring WordPress sites. Debugging Database Queries Debug This See exactly what query WordPress is running. Great for debugging WordPress query problems in your code. Query Monitor Similar to Debug This, but this has more emphasis on the WP queries on your site. Very useful. WP phpMyAdmin A lifesaver … Read more
These are some of the most useful plugins for the Divi builder that I’ve seen. They work great with the Divi Theme or Divi Builder Plugin. Divi Accessibility ★ (GitHub) This plugin fixes many of the accessibility problems with Divi, and lets you see where your site is in violation so you can fix others. … Read more
Check out these Gutenberg Block plugins that add new block functionality to WordPress. Accordion Blocks Adds the much-needed accordion block to Gutenberg. You need to style it yourself using your own style sheet, but it’s lightweight and just works. Block Visibility Schedule when any Gutenberg block is displayed and to whom, or hide it altogether. … Read more
Someone described WordPress Multisite as the “bastard child” of WordPress, and I think that is an accurate description. I’ve burned many hours dealing with the quirks of Multisite, and this is one of them. If you look at Local WP’s official docs on how to migrate a Multisite to local, you’ll see the painful instructions … Read more