Tips and tricks for web developers, bloggers, and WordPress users by Brian Shim
Brian Shim 
After reading some case studies about the benefits of getting rid of a website’s sidebar, I decided to give it a try on two of my blogs. In the end, getting rid of the sidebars on two of my blogs improved my sites’ bounce rates, pages per session, session durations, % exit, and even ad … Read more
If you are getting a “502 Bad Gateway” blue screen of death on Siteground, and your site is a WordPress site, and it is not going away by itself, here’s how to fix it. The error message claims it’s a temporary error, but when it happened to me, I waited an hour and a half … Read more
Out of the box, the Divi Slider Module has many gross accessibility violations. The keyboard control is poor because you can’t see what you’re selecting as you’re tabbing through the navigation controls. And, the dot and arrow navigation symbol contrast can be bad. For an example of an accessible slider, check out W3C’s demo. In … Read more
I was working on a web app that allowed users to submit comments anywhere in a long feed of events. After submitting a comment, the page would refresh, bringing you back to the top. I found that to be annoying because I had to scroll back down to my comment to make sure it had … Read more
Siteground is my “go-to” hosting provider for my clients. Their servers are reliable and fast, by shared hosting standards. But, I had one site on Siteground that gave s a “500 Internal Server Error” every few months when I tried to log into the admin of a client’s WordPress site. Or, sometimes I could log … Read more
I was happy to find out that Google Analytics 4 can track file downloads. However, I didn’t find any native report in the interface to display the downloaded file names, other than for the last thirty minutes. It actually requires jumping through a lot of hoops to set up a report to do this. After … Read more
There may be some instances where you want to restart PHP on your GoDaddy shared server. For example, you might want to do this if your server is misbehaving, i.e., serving HTML files but not PHP. I had a case where the site was showing the error “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the … Read more
Being a freelancer can mean periods of feast or famine with extreme business at times, followed by crickets… But your business’ downtime is actually a golden opportunity to catch up on important things you might have neglected while you were working those twelve-hour days. Here are some important things to do when you have downtime … Read more
For the life of me, I wasn’t able to find a pre-made Gutenberg block for making checklists. I’ve had more than a few occasions for clients and for my own sites, where I’ve wanted to embed a checklist into WordPress. Usually, I ended up doing it in raw HTML. Not ideal for clients. So, I … Read more
While everyone hates sites bristling with ads and popups, ad blockers are causing legitimate web content creators to suffer more and more lost income each day. Many of the traditional tactics to defeat adblockers, including putting up a paywall, hiding the site content until blockers are turned off, or just begging people to turn off … Read more
A PHP web app that I created using the Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports) API suddenly stopped working one day. Digging into the Zoho documentation, I discovered that they ended support for their “authtoken” authentication method (basically a password) and switched to OAuth 2.0. Hmmm… After looking into it, upgrading my app to be compatible … Read more
I was working on a web application that required a sliding toggle switch like this one, but was also compliant with accessibility standards: Sliding Switch I had known of this HTML/CSS solution with no JavaScript at W3 Schools. But, it’s not accessible. When you tab to it using the keyboard, you can turn it on … Read more
It’s not commonly known, but it’s super easy to move a website hosted on SiteGround to another SiteGround account. You do not need to do a traditional migration of files and the database! If your DNS is at SiteGround, it takes only a few clicks in fact! If your DNS isn’t at SiteGround, you should … Read more
I recently had to figure out how to generate PDFs using PHP. There are tons of solutions out there, free and paid, with pros and cons. This is a summary of what I found out during my research, however, it’s by no means comprehensive. I basically stopped when I found solutions that satisfied my requirements. … Read more
2025 UPDATE I no longer recommend using a Google or Microsoft email account for sending transactional email from a website. The main reason is that I’ve seen these accounts get disconnected for various reasons (i.e., the client changed the password) or sometimes for no apparent reason at all, resulting in no email from the site … Read more
Website accessibility is getting more and more important these days. One of the key factors in web accessibility is the ability to access all of the features of the website with the keyboard. If any element is clickable with a mouse, it needs to be reachable by keyboard using the tab key and return/enter to … Read more
Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find a native solution online to globally disable commenting on a WordPress website. WordPress doesn’t have a checkbox called “Globally Disable All Comments”. But, a quick and easy solution does exist which does not require a plugin! To be clear, I’m talking about still showing the existing comments, but not … Read more
After years of being a satisfied customer of Siteground, I finally had to find a new host because my sites were outgrowing their GoGeek shared hosting plan. I guess that’s a good problem to have. Although I love and still recommend Siteground for their shared hosting, and I knew they offered VPS hosting, I wanted … Read more
Popup Maker is a popular and useful WordPress plugin for creating website popups. The popups can open automatically after a preset time or through a click event on the page or in your menu. But one feature I haven’t found natively in Popup Maker is the ability to tell the page to automatically open the … Read more
Here’s the situation: You’ve created some custom Taxonomies and custom Post Types using the Custom Post Type UI Plugin (or using PHP code). You’re using Advanced Custom Fields (or another plugin) to manage your Taxonomy settings, so you do NOT want those meta boxes to appear in the sidebar of the WordPress editor. I found … Read more
Divi is one of the most popular drag-and-drop WordPress builder themes out there today. As a long time Divi user myself, I was super excited (and envious) when I learned about some of the killer features of Oxygen, a newer WordPress builder that claims to create fast bloat-free code. After building a couple of sites … Read more
Annoyingly, the Oxygen builder doesn’t really provide a built-in search form that pops out when you click a button (like you see in other themes like Kadence or Divi). You have to build it yourself. In my Oxygen version, the magnifying glass search icon is to the right of the menu. When you click it, … Read more
I have a client who was having chronic server downtime on GoDaddy. A customer support rep pointed me to the Resource Usage page on cPanel which showed the CPU was maxed out. When I investigated the Apache logs, I discovered that several of the sites on the server were under DDoS (distributed denial of service) … Read more
I’ve used MAMP to create local WordPress sites for years. But, I had a hell of a time trying to get it to work with a WordPress Multisite. After a whole day of research, I finally got it to work though! If you want a quick summary of the key points, here are the keys … Read more
Note, since writing this article, I have switched to LocalWP, which is superior to MAMP in practically every way and has clean URLs from the get-go. I’ve kept the article below for those still using MAMP, but rather than messing with these settings, I’d recommend that you check out LocalWP. It’s totally free! If you … Read more
Web development clients seem to love popups. They’re always asking me to add popups to websites. My “go to” solution for WordPress popups is the popular Popup Maker plugin. But, as explained in this article, WordPress Popup Maker has had its “popup” custom post type set to “private” since version 1.7. While there are cases … Read more
WordPress Multisite lets you create multiple WordPress websites that all use the same set of themes and plugins. It might appear to be a great way to make maintaining multiple sites more efficient, as you can update the WordPress core, themes, and plugins once, and they are updated for all sites. But in practice, the … Read more
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is an indispensable time-saving tool for many WordPress developers. But, when data sets become large, ACF queries can take a long time if not done efficiently. Here are some effective ways to massively speed up your ACF queries! 1. Use Local JSON (or Export to PHP) Local JSON is a new … Read more
As a frequent blogger, I depend on spelling and grammar checking, especially because I’m not a very good proofreader of my own content. So, I was surprised and dumbfounded when I found out that Automattic’s own Jetpack spell checker did NOT work with their new Gutenberg block editor! After looking online, I saw that one … Read more
Moving a domain name from one registrar to another can be tricky, especially if it’s something you don’t do often. If the domain is attached to a live site, doing it wrong could result in downtime. I wrote this guide for myself, to remind me of some of the gotchas associated with migrating a domain … Read more
When you post a web page in a Facebook feed, Facebook will attempt to find the thumbnail image from your site’s metadata. If found, Facebook will cache that image so that it doesn’t have to re-load the image from your site every time it shows up on a Facebook feed. This works great until you … Read more
The Ultimate Member plugin is a formidable package for managing membership on a WordPress site. Surprisingly, however, it does not have a built-in way to import members through CSV file or other method. But, you can still do it using the method I describe here. Install the “Import Users from CSV” Plugin The first step … Read more
Elegant Themes already has a blog post entitled “How to Add More Columns to Your Divi Builder Posts or Pages” which shows how to add more columns to your Divi theme. Currently, the builder maxes out at 6 columns. The blog article’s method works fine if your modules are all equal height as shown in … Read more
Stock photography can be expensive. And randomly grabbing licensed images from the Internet can cost you thousands of dollars if you’re found violating copyright and threatened with legal action (this happened to someone I talked to at a Meetup). Filtered Google Search You can find free legal images through a filtered Google search, but I … Read more
On one of my sites, my Divi contact form worked great on desktop but someone told me it didn’t work on mobile. Sure enough, they were right! On my iPhone, I got this message after submitting the form: “Please refresh the page and try again.” In French, the error is “Veuillez actualiser la page et … Read more
WordPress is a great website platform that I use and develop on every day, but, it has its weaknesses. It requires a database that is accessed dozens (or hundreds?) of times every time a page is loaded, which can slow down page load times. It’s kind of a wasteful use of server resources if your … Read more
In mid 2016, Microsoft announced that they were no longer going to support Windows Live Mail. This was bad news for me, because I had been a long-time user of Windows Live Mail, dating back to when it was called Outlook Express. I used it not only for email, but for my calendar and contacts. … Read more
Many people who use the WordPress Divi Accordion Module want it to start out closed by default. Every WordPress client I have who uses the Divi Accordion has asked for it, and there are many people online asking about it. The way it works now is that the first element of the accordion defaults to open, … Read more
Querying a WordPress database is pretty straightforward using WP_Query or get_posts(). However, I ran into a problem when I was trying to search for all Posts with a certain custom field value that was stored as an array. The Problem I was using the popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin. The field type I was using … Read more
If you look up how to increase your PHP max file size, most sources will tell you to change the upload_max_filesize setting in your php.ini file. Well, I did that and it still wasn’t working for me on my client’s shared GoDaddy Linux hosting. So, I called them up and found the un-publicized “secret” way to … Read more