Most WordPress media libraries are full of JPEGs and PNGs uploaded long before WebP or AVIF were an option. New uploads are the easy part. The back catalog is the hard part, and I had no interest in shipping it to a third-party service for re-encoding. I built WebberZone Image Optimizer to do that conversion…
Back in 2015, I moved my WordPress plugins under this domain. I also needed proper documentation, and every tool I tried worked the way its author wanted, not the way I did. Documentation software treated multiple products as a premium feature, which is a fair business model. But, as a completely free plugin offering, I…
A popular posts list can get stuck showing the same old articles. I’ve been building Top 10 for nearly 20 years, and choosing which views count matters as much as where you display the results. Top 10 tracks posts, pages and custom post types, with the data stored in your WordPress database. You can display…
Complex WordPress searches can spend more time joining related tables than finding matching posts. I saw this in Better Search when a query searched post meta, taxonomies, comments, and multiple terms at once. The changes I made in Better Search 4.4.3 reduce unnecessary database work while keeping the existing relevance model intact. Replacing row-multiplying joins…
Related posts plugins need to know what’s in your content to recommend anything useful. Some do that analysis on your server. Others send your content to an external service and get recommendations back. That difference matters more than it looks. Once content (and potentially visitor data) leave your server, you’re relying on someone else’s infrastructure,…
WordPress ships with a search feature that sorts results by date. Not by how well they match what the visitor typed. I’ve watched visitors on my own sites search for a topic, scroll past the first page of results, and give up because the most relevant post was buried beneath newer but unrelated entries. When…
Related posts have a reputation for slowing sites down. Of everything people raise with me about them, speed comes up first and foremost. The worry has a basis. A naive implementation runs a heavy query on every page load, scans the entire posts table, and adds weight to your time to first byte. Whether it…
Every time I published a tutorial that included code, the default WordPress code block looked flat and unreadable. Plain monospace text on a gray background. No colors, no line numbers, nothing to help a reader scan a snippet and find the line that matters. Nothing beautiful. I wanted syntax highlighting that didn’t require swapping out…
I wanted visitors on WebberZone.com and ajaydsouza.com to have a clear visual signal when a link was about to take them off-site. The difference between an internal link and an outbound one isn’t always obvious, especially with descriptive anchor text. I also like building plugins, so I built WebberZone Link Warnings to handle it. This…
Readers who finish an article don’t always leave immediately. They’re often looking for what to read next. The problem is that WordPress doesn’t surface that content for them by default. It leaves them to go looking, and most won’t bother. That’s a missed opportunity. A reader who has just finished an article is the most…
If you’re developing WordPress sites locally with Laravel Herd, testing email functionality can be awkward. Emails sent from a local environment do not actually reach real inboxes, which makes it harder to test features such as password resets, contact forms, or notification emails. This is where MailHog fits in neatly. MailHog is a developer tool…
One of the easiest methods to increase user engagement and retain visitors on your WordPress site is by highlighting your most popular posts. Showcasing these posts serves as social proof, directing new visitors to valuable content that others have found helpful. By strategically displaying these popular posts, you can boost page views, reduce bounce rates,…
