Host ga.js locally with a WordPress plugin

Recently, I’ve done some WordPress load optimization with Thomas Bensmann (read his post « Full score on Google PageSpeed, Pingdom and GTMetrix») and to achieve full effect, you do have to load the Google Analytics tracking script, ga.js, from your own server.

September 27, 2013 · 2 min · Bjørn Johansen

Optimize your JS and CSS loading in WordPress

When you get into page loading optimization, you will quickly find these «must-dos»: Combine your CSS and JavaScript files (respectively), minimize your CSS and JavaScript, load CSS before JS, load JS in body footer and then even some. Without much effort, we can make WordPress do all of this automatically.

September 22, 2013 · 3 min · Bjørn Johansen

Make Gravity Forms' JavaScript load in the footer

Gravity Forms is not only THE way to create and manage forms in WordPress, but is also pretty awesome when it comes to extensibility and flexibility. However, as most software, it has its issues. One of those is how it outputs some of the JavaScript, which in certain cases will break your site. This is how to fix it.

September 19, 2013 · 2 min · Bjørn Johansen

Why use WordPress as your corporate CMS?

There are now several years since WordPress was considered a blog platform only. Today, it’s a full blown CMS and perfectly capable of powering corporate web sites. Here I provide you with 5 non-technical reasons why WordPress is well fit for a corporate CMS.

August 23, 2013 · 2 min · Bjørn Johansen

Enabling SPDY with Nginx

SPDY is this new, cool, fast protocol created by Google that “replaces” HTTP (the first draft of HTTP 2.0 is using SPDY as the working base). It is supported in all the major browsers – yes, even Internet Explorer – with the exception of Apple’s Safari.

August 22, 2013 · 2 min · Bjørn Johansen

Securing Nginx with HTTPS

Adding a certificate and using the HTTPS protocol is a good improvement to the security in the communication between the browser and the server, and should be in place on all sites that have a user login. Contrary to what many (older) guides say, it doesn’t add much load on your server and is fairy easy and cheap to set up right.

August 22, 2013 · 3 min · Bjørn Johansen

Install latest version of Nginx on Ubuntu

I always run the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on all my servers. Unfortunately, the Nginx versions tend to be quite the bit behind the current release. So how do you get an updated, current version of without resorting to having to maintain the packages yourself? Luckily, the Nginx team have their own Ubuntu apt repository so it’s easy to keep current with the latest version of Nginx.

August 16, 2013 · 2 min · Bjørn Johansen

Install latest version of PHP on Ubuntu

I always run the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on all my servers. Currently the latest LTS is 14.04 which comes with PHP version 5.5, but as of November 2014, the latest stable version is 5.6. So how do you get an updated, current version of PHP without resorting to having to maintain the packages yourself? The answer is in PPA.

August 16, 2013 · 1 min · Bjørn Johansen

Publishing WordPress site from development to production server – or moving your WordPress installation from one host to another

You have finished that WordPress site, and want to deploy it – move it from your test server to the production server where it goes live. But how? WordPress have a famous 5-minute-install, but there is no 5-minute-go-live-script*. I’ll show you how in these 5 easy-to-follow steps.

August 12, 2013 · 3 min · Bjørn Johansen

Restricting access to WordPress login by IP address

If you have a static IP address, like from your own VPN, it is very easy to increase your security tremendously. Simply restrict all logins to that IP address.

April 20, 2013 · 2 min · Bjørn Johansen