John Hughes | Torque

How To Future-Proof Your WordPress Website In 4 Easy Steps

Author

John Hughes

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Community

Published

November 21, 2016

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Making sure you’re one step ahead of the WordPress update merry-go-round is vital. Not only do you get to take advantage of any new functionality immediately, you’ll be doing your utmost to make sure your website is set for any future advancements in the platform. With some big enhancements on the horizon, such as the REST API, making sure your site can handle any unknown developments is key to ensuring a smooth and trouble-free future. The reality is that by thinking about and actioning some basic-level aspects, you’ll ensure your site will be future-proofed as much as possible – saving both time and […]

4 Reasons Nobody’s Buying On Your New WooCommerce Site

Author

John Hughes

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Community

Published

November 14, 2016

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No matter how much time you’ve spent creating your new WooCommerce site, once the first sales roll in, it may feel like it’s not quite the success you thought it would be. Simply put, once you begin seeing your conversion rates slide it’s time to take action – or your new venture will be dead on arrival. Rather than simple chance, there’s likely some definite reasons why your products aren’t selling – perhaps it’s because your initial marketing strategies are off, or your website’s design lacks accessibility. Whatever the reason may be, the fact of the matter is that nobody’s buying from your […]

A Beginner’s Guide to eCommerce A/B Testing in WordPress

Author

John Hughes

Filed Under

Beginners, Development

Published

October 31, 2016

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Making changes to your eCommerce website design that aren’t backed up with real-world data isn’t an effective way of improving your conversion rates. You could hire a developer and have them make changes based on your guesses, but what if it doesn’t work and you end up losing customers? A/B testing your website can help you arrive at a design that your visitors respond to in the best possible way. The best eCommerce sites understand that there’s always room for improvement, and regular testing plays a key role in paving your path to success. In this post, we’ll show you […]

The Non-Techie’s Guide to Common Security Threats

Author

John Hughes

Filed Under

Beginners, Development, Featured

Published

October 24, 2016

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Security is ongoing discussion for WordPress site owners of all levels of technical expertise, but it can be an especially hard area for newbies to get to grips with. While security insiders are fluent in the differences between common attack vectors, it can often appear as little more than a bewildering sea of hard to grasp threats for the average Joe. In this piece, we’ll be looking to fill in some of those knowledge blanks by briefly breaking down what some of the more common threats out there are actually all about. Rather than blind you with acronyms and white papers, we’ll concentrate on […]

Why Let’s Encrypt Has Completely Changed The SSL Landscape

Author

John Hughes

Filed Under

Featured

Published

October 14, 2016

9 Comments

Though WordPress is increasingly bulletproof out of the box, security is a topic that never really goes away for users. It’s not just the platform itself that you have to worry about, there’s also a much wider world out there full of potentially bad actors with a vested interest in breaking down your digital door. SSL certificates solve one part of that puzzle and have been a rock-solid way of keeping the connection between your website and the average user secure since 1996. Cost and implementation concerns, however, have long stood in the way of their widespread deployment. In this piece, […]

7 Essential JavaScript Libraries To Take Your Skillset To The Next Level

Author

John Hughes

Filed Under

Development, Featured

Published

October 10, 2016

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It’s been a less than a year since Matt Mullenweg confirmed what many in the WordPress world had long been suspecting – JavaScript is at the heart of the platform’s future. The subsequent launch of Calypso on WordPress.com also served to drive the point further home. Naturally, all of this sparked something of a stampede among developers to finally fully engage with the language’s potential, rather than treating it as something they occasionally have to deal with on the front end. Learning to love the widely used libraries is a major part of the process. In this piece, we’ll help you jumpstart […]

A Beginner’s Guide to Load Testing WordPress Sites

Author

John Hughes

Filed Under

Featured

Published

October 3, 2016

2 Comments

Though WordPress is an increasingly bulletproof solution out of the box, there’s a huge difference between merrily clicking around in a local development environment, and how your site actually performs when people start hammering your servers for real. The time to start worrying about how your site will perform is well before it goes live, rather than when it suddenly and unexpectedly goes viral, or simply falls apart under even moderate load. For non-technical site owners or inexperienced developers, working out how to address this can present something of a conundrum, but luckily it’s relatively easily solved these days. In this […]

Building a WordPress Plugin Part 6: Further Options And Final Thoughts

Author

John Hughes

Filed Under

Featured

Published

September 26, 2016

3 Comments

Welcome to the final part of our series on building a WordPress plugin! Starting as a complete beginner, we’ve come a long way over the series and picked up the beginnings of what could be some truly useful skills – as well as a new-found appreciation of the hard work that goes into actually putting a plugin together. To wrap things up, we’ll highlight some important plugin topics that we didn’t quite get to, and suggest a whole slew of useful resources for taking things further on your own. We’ll also provide a handy list of classic WordPress plugins that are well […]

Building a WordPress Plugin Part 5: Finishing Off Our Settings

Author

John Hughes

Filed Under

Featured

Published

September 19, 2016

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Welcome to part five of our series on developing a plugin from scratch. Progress has been nice and steady to date, and by this stage we’ve successfully created a significant portion of our theoretical functionality. In the last installment, we finally got to see the fruits of our labor on-screen in the form of a functioning shortcode. This time around, we’re dipping in and out of both the front and back end. We previously left ourselves a little work to do in terms of organizing the display, and we’ve also yet to look at the settings page that was mentioned […]

Building A WordPress Plugin Part 4: Looking At Displaying Content Via Shortcodes

Author

John Hughes

Filed Under

Featured

Published

September 12, 2016

2 Comments

Welcome to the fourth part of our plugin building series! So far on our journey, we’ve set ourselves up with structure in mind by using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, and created a separate place for our content to live in the back end by registering our own custom post type. This time around, we’ll be giving our plugin users options for actually displaying quotes that are entered into the system. We’ll kick things off by building in some functionality to handle the random selection of quotes, and then move on to looking at creating our own shortcode options. By the […]

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