For those of you using the Divi template there are lots of animated gizmo’s in there. Provided they are used sparingly you can go that extra mile when your site is compared to another one.
When I am putting sites together I tend to use animation sparingly on some images, and some featured blocks, to ensure they attract attention when they load. But having loaded and completed the animation they remain static, otherwise they would be very annoying.
One thing I have been wanting to do (and you may wish to do this as well) is publish articles after a fundraising event and tell the world how much you raised. Many of you do not do this, the website is used to announce a fundraising event, but not report on it’s success afterwards.
Sometimes you need to add a table into a webpage. There are several ways of doing this. You can create a table in MS Word and copy it, then paste it into a page. You can do the same with Excel. However neither of these is particularly elegant. In both cases you can end up with a largely responsive table provided you do not have too many elements in there.
There is a plugin for that..
One particularly neat solution which has a huge number of users, and very high approval ratings is TablePress. This is a downloadable plugin.
Go to the Plugins option in your wordpress site, and add a new plugin and enter Tablepress into the search box and it will find it. Add it to your website and activate it.
Post activation you will find it as an option in the dashboard menu. TO add a table simply go into the plugin settings and choose Add Table, define how many columns and rows it needs and then build your content in WordPress.
There are also options on importing tables from other sources. It is a very flexible plugin that is not too difficult to use.
For those of you with Divi based websites as well as the conventional method for editing your website there is another method. You need to log into the website as an administrator, which takes you to the dashboard, then visit the website (top left hand corner). You will see a black line across the top of your browser window to indicate you are logged in. Below this you will see your website.
If you have a Divi site you will also see ENABLE VISUAL BUILDER
Look for Enable Visual Builder
Click on it, and then wait for around 15 seconds. What is happening is an editor is loading in your browser. You may see some things replicated, and some things that you cannot normally see. It really depends what is on your screen. Do not be distracted by anything you were not expecting to see there. Focus instead on what you can see, and in particular the text in your pages.
You will see as you move your cursor over your page layout various dark grey, turquoise or blue lines and or icons appear. Ignore them. what they are for is beyond the scope of this quick guide.
There have been quite a few issues with the GDPR plugin I have used on many sites over the past 2 months. It was originally released in May 2018 and was trouble free for many months, and then someone decided to enhance it and then there was a large volume of complaints from users.
The GDPR plugin in some cases was requesting a non existent image file, so it caused pages to delay loading which affected the performance of the website. Right now everything is ok, but it has been quite a rocky ride over the past month or so.
There are some plugins that are highly recommended, the form handlers, slider managers, and security plugins are the most important. Others are less important, and sometimes a plugin that you have had on your site for years suddenly starts impacting the site performance.
Here is how to check
If your website appears to be slow to respond, you can check to see if it is a plugin that is causing the problem by going to the plugins page and checking them all and then disabling them.
This means that some functionality will be temporarily lost on your website; security, forms, sliders, etc. But it is only a temporary measure.
Using Chrome, go to the home page of your website, hit F12 and then choose a page. You will see a waterfall graph which tells you the response time of the website. See the image below for this website (with plugins enabled.) If I turned the plugins off, the speed would be slightly faster.
Click on the image to see a larger version
The image shows the time for the first byte TTFB which is the delay between requesting the page and start of the transfer. It is shown as 1.7 seconds, then the rest of the chart shows the elements in the web page being requested in order to render the page in the browser. In this case the time is 2.18 seconds between requesting the page and seeing the page in the browser.
However there is something else happening in the chart towards the bottom, some other process is taking a further 1.65 seconds.
Remember to turn the plugins back on!
After you have finished checking the speed, remember to turn them back on.
What should you expect?
Assuming all plugins are working, and the site is functioning normally, based on my experience the times should be under 5 seconds, typically 2.7 seconds. However the results are dependent on many things. If your site is wildly out; consistently longer than 5 seconds, let me know and I will check it for you.
Over the past month there have been some speed issues on some websites, and some of these have been down to plugins changing. So it is worth investigating first to see if it is plugin related. If you need help just ask.
All of the websites either automatically upgrade themselves, or I initiate an upgrade on most of the Divi based sites once per week through an automatic process.
From time to time a plugin developer will do something that creates an incompatibility on your site, or impair the performance.
GDPR Plugin by MOOVE Agency.
Some of you have a GDPR plugin in use from MOOVE Agency. It started off as a very simple and elegant pop up which advised you of the Privacy Statement included in websites following the GDPR regulation coming into force in May.
It worked very well for several months, and for some reason they started to change things in the plugin, and introduce some bugs. There is one at the moment that is slowing websites down. It depends on the state of the plugin on your website.
I am adding a link behind this image at the bottom of new sites. Admin’s can click on it to go to a special admin page.
This is especially for Divi based websites. I have revised my training for new websites, and am now running the training for Divi based sites within the template environment. My tutorial is based on an ordinary post or page layout.
If you think it will be helpful, I can add a special private page and post to your website. These can only be seen by an administrator who is logged into the site, the general visitor cannot see them.
The Admin page has a general description on the relevance of Sections, Rows and Columns; these are elements within the Divi Template. It also talks about the differences between pages and posts. There is a section with links back to my training videos and other education resources.
I also include a Template Post which has guidance built into it to help you to remember what to do. It is explained at a very detailed level, and I would anticipate it would help to ensure you cover every step. I also include a guide built into the website as well. The guide includes screenshots. You can see a copy here.
Access to this area is through a small bear in the footer of your website. Or for those of you with more adult rather than family content I can use a different icon. The point being you click on it when you are logged in and it takes you to the Admin page with all of the tips on.
Latest news on this: 1/10/18 Moove Agency have reported a new update to this plugin as of 8am this morning. So this problem may resolve itself without any intervention.
I have added a GDPR cookie plugin to some sites which provides a warning message at the bottom of the website. This has worked fine for five months up until a couple of days ago when the plugin author introduced a bug which affects how it is presented.
It is not a critical bug, it affects presentation more than anything else, but is annoying.
If the bottom of your website has a large white area and the text left justified on your screen tightly in the bottom left corner, then you are affected.
If your site looks like this or you can see a cog in the bottom corner of your screen then you are unaffected. The cookie warning usually looks like this for first time visitors.
Around April/ May 2018 Facebook made changes to the way data could be streamed based on content on Facebook Group pages. This stopped most Facebook feeds on websites where I used the plugin Facebook Feed by WebDorado.
Apparently it is possible to get the feed working but there are some things that an admin will need to do to get it to work. That is a “Facebook Account Admin”.
WebDorado have released a tutorial on it. If you can set it up, you should be able to get your facebook feeds working again on your website. I have not done this yet by the way, just letting you know. They appear to have updated their plugin with a link to the guidance.
I cannot really help you here, you need to work with whomever is responsible for the Facebook page for your organisation as they will have the authority to access the system. If you manage to get the information required, let me know and I will help you to get it working again.
Some time ago I mentioned that my preferred form manager of choice had been withdrawn from the WordPress plugin library. This plugin was called FS Contact Form. At the time I had not found a suitable replacement that did everything that the FS Contact Form manager did. I have resolved that now. If you have it in your installation you can check in the plugins page, or check under Settings. If you can see FS Contact Form you have it on your website. If you can see Contact Manager in your plugins list that is even older. Also should be replaced.
There has been one instance where the FS Contact Manager plugin had stopped working. I am not sure why, it could have been related to another plugin conflicting with it. I want to encourage all of you to test your forms once per month by sending a message to yourself. That way you can be sure it is working. Continue reading Check your contact forms
In June of this year Google changed the map service (and many other services as well) which we use on our websites. For most of you it does not make too much difference, in some cases however you may see grey screens where a map should be present, or comments over a map. If you see this let me know please.
It depends on whether the plugins in use on your site are using a Google API (Application Programming Interface), these now require keys to be generated. That is not such a problem, but now you cannot create them without the key being assigned to an account with a credit or debit card assigned to it.
The following is from a Google Developers website, note the text in the orange section below:
The mapping information used to be free and very useful. It is still free provided the number of calls (aka visitors) to the map does not exceed a credit limit which is being provided by Google. I am understandably not happy about having my credit card associated with your site in this way because I have no control over it. At the moment each call to create a map is 0.7cents (USD) which equates currently to 28,000 views per month.
It looks as though Google is offering a £100 credit, or $200 depending on where you look on the API type on each account. I need to figure out how to manage that so that the number of calls never exceeds £100 in any billing period otherwise I start to get charged.
I guess Google have placed a lot of time and money in the development of the APIs and now they have us all hooked they are choosing to monetise them, which is not so surprising.
In some cases I have embedded maps into your websites, and in others they are generated through plugins such as Modern Tribe Calendar. Check them and if there is a problem let me know.
There is a risk that the credit being offered by Google is just a transition to full billing in the future. Time will tell.
Right now, I am looking at this problem in detail on new developments. So more to follow later when I have figured it out.
