Web Developer Resources by Brian Shim — WordPress, Divi, accessibility, hosting, troubleshooting
Tips and tricks for WordPress and WordPress themes like Divi, Kadence, Oxygen, and more!
Recently, after cloning this site to the same server but with a new subdomain, I had a problem where the WordPress admin had no styling. The strange part was that the front-end was perfectly fine! The error was that when an admin tried to load CSS using https://developer.brianshim.com/wp-admin/load-styles.php, the server was returning a 404 error. … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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
There are a lot of outdated articles online telling people to use CSS if they want to hide the header or footer of a page using the Kadence WordPress theme. But, there’s actually a much better way to do it that doesn’t use CSS. It actually removes the header or footer from the page for … Read more
It’s a pretty common situation in WordPress where you’re using a custom post type for, say, a feed on a page, but you don’t want individual posts of that post type visible as separate pages. One example of this is a staff page. For ease of maintenance, you might want to create a custom post … 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Let’s say you have a page or piece of code that needs to be run regularly, say once a day, or once an hour. It might update a database, import something into WordPress, clear out log files, make a backup, or whatever. If you have access to the server, you can set up what Linux … Read more
Ultimate Member is a very widely-used membership WordPress plugin. It works well, but I’ve come across a number of problems with the uploading of member cover photos on multisite WordPress sites. These were so maddening, I decided to write about them and provide solutions to you! So, here are some things to check if cover … Read more
Have you ever gotten this Linux “out of memory” error when working with your WordPress site? If you Google around to solve this problem, almost all of the advice you’ll get is to increase your PHP and WordPress memory limits, or add memory to your server, or to remove plugins. I didn’t want to just … Read more
Here is the scenario: You’ve searched high and low and found the perfect WordPress theme for yourself or your client. But, there’s one big problem: it’s not mobile-friendly. With mobile web traffic soon expected to exceed desktop web traffic, being mobile-friendly is critical. I often have to go through the exercise of converting a non … Read more