Author: Rob

Why I use Cloudflare and you should too

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Maybe you’ve heard about this service called Cloudflare and wondered what the heck it is. Or maybe you started to read about Cloudflare and thought, “this doesn’t sound like something my little website needs”. I am here to tell you that no matter how small your website is, it can greatly benefit from Cloudflare’s services. And best of all, Cloudflare is free! Here is how CloudFlare describes itself on its website: Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs,… Read More

The Easiest Way to Install Nginx as a Reverse Proxy

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If you are reading this article, I am assuming that you have already decided to install Nginx (pronounced “engine-x”) as a reverse proxy in front of Apache. There a number of compelling reasons to do so including better performance and increased security. Nginx as a reverse proxy plays well with WordPress and Drupal right out of the box – I highly recommend its implementation on your server. If you aren’t scared of SSH and command lines, setting up Nginx is… Read More

Why is my WordPress website slow? It might be your host.

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One of the most common requests that I receive here at Maneo is troubleshooting a slow WordPress website. Addressing this issue is often troublesome because there can be many reasons for poor WordPress performance. Too many plugins, too many large images, and poorly designed WordPress themes are just a few of the potential causes. Usually, I will recommend: Reducing the size of header, background, and gallery images in your WordPress installation. Compressing CSS, JS, and text using GZIP (I have… Read More

Google Adwords Tips and Tricks

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Once upon a time, I almost paid a nice lady in India $800 to help me with my Google Adwords campaigns. I was frustrated. There were times when my campaigns were on fire and I was getting tons of conversions and other times when click after click was giving me nothing. Fortunately, I thought better of the idea and decided to continue experimenting on my own. After a few months of trial and error, I was finally able to develop… Read More

Why I don’t work with private label rights content

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A few weeks ago, a very nice lady contacted me to ask if I could build a ‘content rich’ website for her legions of followers on Facebook. She told me that she wanted to impart some financial knowledge to her fans through a membership platform. She explained that the content was not her own but had been purchased through a Private Label Rights (PLR) website. The next day, she sent me her PLR credentials so that I could have a look at the… Read More

The Importance of WordPress Backups

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It always surprises me how few of my clients are backing up their websites. WordPress backups are so important, not only because websites are hacked all the time, but also because websites can break during routine updates or theme modifications. It is always good to have a one-touch restore option that will bring your website back from the dead. Before I start working on a client’s website, I almost always install a free plugin called Updraft Plus which allows me to… Read More

Why No Captcha Recaptcha MIGHT be bad for business

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Before I start hearing from all of the haters I want to point out that what I am about to share is in no way scientific. I have not actually proved that a No Captcha Recaptcha problem truly exists or that it kills business. I can only tell you what I have experienced this past weekend while I was advertising through Google Adwords. The No Captcha Recaptcha problem on my website Two of my landing pages on this website are… Read More

WordPress WP Ecommerce vs. WooCommerce

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I have been working on a website this week that makes use of the WP Ecommerce plugin. When I first started on this website, it was extremely slow which was why I was asked to investigate. After deactivating the plugins one-by-one, I discovered that the WP Ecommerce plugin was the culprit. The website contains more than 1400 products,hundreds of variations, and almost 100 categories. I ran some diagnostics  and discovered that the site is producing some very slow MySQL queries, some of… Read More