Tag: link

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SmartCrawl’s Newest Release Adds A Handful of New Features, Plus Greater Flexibility in Options

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SmartCrawl version 3.4 adds multiple keyword analysis, additional SEO recommendations, the ability to disable SEO & Readability Analysis in the post list, and more. For free.

SmartCrawl has been SEO optimized from the start, but each new version further improves site performance while boosting your PageRank on Google.

With automated SEO scanning, automatic XML sitemaps, real-time keyword and content analysis, and detailed audits/reports – not to mention one-click recommendations – SmartCrawl lets you create targeted content that ranks at the top of your favorite search engine.

In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at the latest features added to version 3.4, and why they make SmartCrawl even better.

Continue reading, or jump ahead with these links:

Let’s get cracking.

Multiple Keywords Analysis

SmartCrawl has had keyword analysis for a while now. It also previously allowed multiple key phrases to be added, but analysis was only done on the first one.

Now, you can analyze your post content for up to three different focus keywords (or phrases). The first keyword entered will be considered primary, while the second and third keywords will be analyzed as secondary.

Doing this is easy. First of all, let’s make sure analysis is turned on. Navigate to SmartCrawl > Settings > General Settings > In-Post Analysis > Visibility, and make sure Page Analysis is toggled on (it will turn blue), then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

keyword analysis in settings
Simple, flexible settings to start your SEO analysis journey in SmartCrawl.

Now, open any Page or Post, and scroll to the SmartCrawl section at the bottom. In the Add Keywords field, enter up to three keywords or phrases, separating each by a comma, then click on the Add Keyword button. (You can enter them individually or all at once.)

analyze multiple keywords
Multiple keyword (or phrase) analysis has come to SmartCrawl!

SmartCrawl will instantly analyze all of your keywords, showing results directly below them.

keyword analysis results
SmartCrawl provides a wealth of detail on a multitude of SEO checks.

Clicking on any of the keywords will put you on its own tab, with details listed beneath.

For each focus keyword, SmartCrawl will give you a list of recommendations to improve the SEO of your post. Suggestions will be made in yellow and gray, while passed audits will be green.

Click on the dropdown arrow to the right of any recommendation to see details specific to it.

If for any reason you decide a certain recommendation isn’t needed, simply click the Ignore button beneath it, and it will stop appearing every time you run the analysis.

recommendation drop down
Don’t want to see a certain recommendation post analysis? Just click Ignore.

As you go through making content adjustments based on SmartCrawl’s recommendations, follow them up with a click of the Refresh button (at the top of SEO section), so you can reanalyze and see what improvements your changes made.

Taxonomy List Status Column

You’ll also find a handy SEO Status column on Category & Taxonomy pages, providing the SEO status for all of your taxonomies.

It’s just a quick way to indicate whether an SEO description has been set, and remind users to craft good SEO descriptions so they do well in search results.

taxonomy seo status column
An SEO Status column has been added to category & taxonomy pages.

Green check marks mean the SEO description is set and contains the recommended 120-160 characters. Red means a description is missing. Yellow means the description provided is too long/short in length.

You can also hover over any icon in the SEO Status column for a popup with more detailed information.

A Quad of Additional SEO Recommendations

SmartCrawl suggests In-Post SEO Recommendations for every focus keyword that your post content has been analyzed for.

Each of these will click to expand, providing additional information about how to better improve your post SEO.

The list of important recommendations in SmartCrawl was already significant, but we added four more in this version release.

1. Check if the URL contains underscores

Google recommends the use of hyphens over underscores in URLs, stating that hyphens make crawling and interpreting URLs easier for search engines.

2. Check for recommending a hand-crafted meta description

Using best practices for meta descriptions increases the likelihood of your content ranking higher in SERPS. That includes handcrafting your meta description using relevant information about the page content, instead of using the auto-generated one.

3. Primary focus keyword is already used on another post/page

Optimizing more than one post for the same focus keyword confuses search engines and can affect your SEO ranking. SmartCrawl will check to see if your Primary Focus Keyword is used in other Posts/Pages, and then list the 10 most recent ones.

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SmartCrawl checks for repeated primary keywords on more than one post/page.

4. Check if all external links are nofollow links

Relevant outbound site links help search engines determine the relevance and quality of your content, improving credibility, authority, and value to users. While having some nofollow links is okay, best practice is to have at least one external dofollow link in your site, so SmartCrawl will check for this.

Disable SEO & Readability Analysis Status

Posts and Pages in SmartCrawl are analyzed one at a time by default, in order to prevent excessive loads on the server.

In the newest version, you now have the ability to completely disable these checks if you prefer. To do so, navigate to SmartCrawl > Settings > General Settings > In-Post Analysis, and toggle the Disable Page Analysis Check on Pages/Posts Screen on (it will turn blue).

If you change this setting, be sure to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

disable page analysis check in settings
SmartCrawl has one-click disabling for page/post analysis.

The SEO Do-all, Be-all, End-all, SmartCrawl

SmartCrawl is built with ease-of-use in mind. Set up is a cinch, with one-click recommendations that improve your PageRank in minutes, each full of details so you can better understand and improve on them.

Now with the newest features, like analyzing multiple keywords at once, even more recommendations that benefit your post SEO, and improved readability analysis, using SmartCrawl on your WordPress site is a win-win-win.

Sign up for a WPMU DEV free membership to take a test run with us. In addition to SmartCrawl, you’ll get Smush and Hummingbird – our two most highly rated (and awarded) plugins for image and performance optimizations – as well as the rest of our popular free plugins.

If you want to up the ante even more, we recommend going with one of our Premium Memberships, which include SmartCrawl Pro (plus the rest of our Pro plugins), along with our exclusive, feature-packed Hub client portal, blazing-fast CDN, and our 24/7/365 five-star support. SmartCrawl Pro adds features like scanning, reports, automatic linking for specific keywords, 404s and multiple redirects.

You can also Host with us, and join the tens of thousands of satisfied WordPressers who see the difference our fully dedicated, fully optimized, and lightning-fast resources make.

However you go, SmartCrawl your way to the top of the search game.

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Help choose the syntax for CSS Nesting

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CSS Nesting is making the rounds yet again. Remember earlier this year when Adam and Mia put three syntax options up for a vote? Those results were tallied and it wasn’t even even close.

Now there’s another chance to speak into the future of nesting, this time over at the WebKit blog. The results from the Adam and Mia’s survey sparked further discussion and two more ideas were added to the mix. This new survey lets you choose from all five options.

Jen Simmons has put together a thorough outline of those options, including a refresher on nesting, details on how we arrived at the five options, and tons of examples that show the options in various use cases. Let’s return the favor of all the hard work that’s being done here by taking this quick one-question survey.

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How to Enable Maintenance Mode for WooCommerce

Set Up Woocommerce

Do you want to enable maintenance mode for WooCommerce without affecting other parts of your WordPress website?

Maintenance mode allows you to show a user-friendly notice to shoppers instead of a broken eCommerce site. You can even enable maintenance mode for specific product pages or areas of your WooCommerce store.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to enable maintenance mode for WooCommerce.

How to enable maintenance mode for WooCommerce

Why and When You Need to Enable Maintenance Mode for WooCommerce

Sometimes you may need to put your WordPress website in maintenance mode. For example, you may be making major changes such as installing a new theme or completely redesigning your WordPress blog.

At other times you may need to put your WooCommerce store into maintenance mode, while leaving the rest of your site open.

This could be because there’s a problem that’s only affecting your online store, and not the rest of your website. For example, you may be unable to process customer payments. In this case, maintenance mode can stop customers from encountering the error and having a bad shopping experience.

You may also be adding an online store to an existing website and want to keep those pages private while you work on them.

An engaging ‘coming soon’ page can also create a sense of excitement and anticipation while you build your store behind the scenes. You might even encourage shoppers to get ready for the launch by following you on social media, joining your email list, or even entering a WooCommerce contest.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily enable WooCommerce maintenance mode without affecting the rest of your website.

Enabling Maintenance Mode for WooCommerce

The easiest way to enable maintenance mode for WooCommerce is by using SeedProd.

SeedProd is the best landing page builder for WordPress, used on more than a million websites. It allows you to create beautiful coming soon pages in WordPress, improve your 404 page, and even design unique landing pages using drag and drop.

There’s a free version of SeedProd that lets you create a maintenance mode page. However, we’ll be using the premium version as it lets you put your WooCommerce store into maintenance mode while keeping the rest of your site available.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the SeedProd plugin. For more details, see our guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.

After activating the plugin, SeedProd will ask for your license key.

Adding the SeedProd license key

You can find this information under your account on the SeedProd website. After entering the license, click on the ‘Verify Key’ button.

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to put your WooCommerce store in maintenance mode.

Creating Your Maintenance Mode or Coming Soon Page

After activating SeedProd, go to SeedProd » Pages. Here, you can choose whether to create a maintenance mode page or a coming soon page.

Although some people use these terms interchangeably, there are some important differences you should know.

If you create a ‘Coming Soon’ page, then search engines will still be able to see and crawl your store pages. This gives your WooCommerce site a chance to get indexed by search engines.

If you’re building a new store, then you’ll typically want to create a coming soon page.

If your store is down for maintenance, then you should create a ‘Maintenance Mode’ page instead. This mode tells search engines that your site is temporarily down, using the special header code 503.

After getting this code, the search bots will recheck your WordPress website later to see whether it’s back online. In this way, you can hide your store from shoppers without affecting your search engine rankings.

Note: We’ll create a maintenance mode page in this guide, but the steps will be the same no matter whether you click on ‘Set up a Maintenance Mode Page’ or ‘Set up a Coming Soon Page.’

Creating a maintenance page for your online store

The next step is building the page that shoppers will see when you enable maintenance mode for WooCommerce.

You can either choose a ready-made template or start with a blank design. We’re using ‘Celebrate Coming Soon’ in all our images but you can use any template you like.

To select a template, simply hover your mouse over that design’s thumbnail and then click the ‘checkmark’ icon.

Choosing the WooCommerce coming soon page

After selecting a template, you’ll be taken to the drag-and-drop builder, where you can start customizing the maintenance mode design.

On the left side of the screen, you’ll find blocks and sections that you can add to your design. The right side of the page is the live preview.

How to create a maintenance mode for WooCommerce

Most templates already have some blocks, which are a core part of all SeedProd designs. To start, you’ll typically want to customize these blocks by adding your own text, images, links, and other content.

To change the text in any Headline or Text block, simply click to select that block in your layout. This brings up all the settings for that particular block.

You can now type your text into the small text editor.

Adding text to a WooCommerce coming soon page

You can also use these settings to style the text, including adding bold and italic formatting, changing the text alignment, changing the font size, and more.

You can add more blocks to your maintenance page by dragging them from the left-hand menu and then dropping them onto your design.

For example, if you wanted to add a custom logo then you could simply drag an ‘Image’ block onto your layout.

Adding a logo to to your online store's maintenance page

Then, just click to select that block in your layout and the left-hand menu will show all the settings for that block.

To add a logo, go ahead and click on ‘Use Your Own Image.’

Building a custom coming soon page with WooCommerce

You can then either choose an image from the WordPress media library or upload a new file from your computer.

After adding an image, you can change the size, add image alt text, embed a link, and more using the settings in the left-hand menu.

The SeedProd page builder plugin

If you’re using the WPForms plugin then you can quickly and easily add a contact form to the maintenance page. This gives shoppers a way to talk to you even when your WooCommerce site is down for maintenance.

After creating a contact form in WordPress, you can drag the ‘Contact Form’ block onto your SeedProd layout.

Adding a contact form to your maintenance page

Then, simply click to select the Contact Form block.

In the left-hand menu, open the dropdown menu and choose the form you created earlier.

Adding a contact form to the WooCommerce maintenance screen

To remove a block from your design, simply go ahead and click on it.

You can then select the trash can icon.

Deleting blocks in the SeedPage page builder

You can also move blocks around the page using drag and drop.

When you’re happy with how the maintenance page looks, make sure you click ‘Save.’

Saving the maintenance mode template

Turn on Maintenance or Coming Soon Mode for Your WooCommerce Store

Now that you’ve created a custom coming soon or maintenance mode page, let’s go ahead and enable it.

Here, we want to put the store into maintenance mode, and not the entire site. To do this, click on the ‘Page Settings’ tab inside the SeedProd editor.

Then, select the ‘Access Control’ tab.

SeedProd's access control settings

You can use these settings to specify where the coming soon or maintenance page appears on your site, and who sees it. For example, you might show this page to people who have a particular user role or IP address.

Since we want to put our WooCommerce site into maintenance mode, scroll to the ‘Include/Exclude URLs’ section.

Then, just click on the ‘Include URLs’ button.

Enabling maintenance mode for a WooCommerce store

Now, you need to enter the URLs for your WooCommerce store. This may vary depending on how your store is set up, and whether you’ve created any custom pages such as a custom WooCommerce cart page or a custom checkout page.

However, it’s smart to start with all the pages that WooCommerce creates automatically:

https://example.com/shop
https://example.com/cart
https://example.com/checkout
https://example.com/my-account

If your store has products, then you’ll also need to add these URLs. Be sure to include the asterisk!

https://example.com/product/*
https://example.com/product-category/*
https://example.com/product-tag/*

The asterisk is a wildcard character, which tells SeedProd to include all URLs that match the pattern before it.

This means that shoppers will see the maintenance page when they try to access any product, product category, or product tag.

After adding all these URLs, click on the ‘Save’ button to store your changes.

Putting Your Store In Maintenance Mode

You’re now ready to put your WooCommerce store in maintenance or coming soon mode at any point. In the WordPress dashboard, simply go to SeedProd » Landing Pages.

Then, click on the ‘Inactive’ slider under ‘Coming Soon Mode’ or ‘Maintenance Mode,’ so that it changes to ‘Active.’

Activating maintenance mode for a WooCommerce store

Now, simply visit your WooCommerce store in an incognito browser tab and you’ll see your custom design, rather than your online store.

When you’re ready to make your store public, simply go back to SeedProd » Landing Pages.

Then click on the ‘Active’ slider so that it shows ‘Inactive.’ Now, anyone who visits your site will see your WooCommerce store, and can buy products and services as normal.

We hope this article helped you learn how to enable maintenance mode for WooCommerce. You may also want to take a look at our expert pick of the best WooCommerce plugins, and our complete step-by-step guide on how to create an email newsletter.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Holiday Snowtacular 2022

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We’ve got ourselves a real holiday treat! Join host Alex Trost from the Frontend Horse community for the Holiday Snowtacular 2022 this Friday, December 16.

There’s a lineup of 12 awesome speakers — including Chris Coyier, Cassidy Williams, Kevin Powell, and Angie Jones — each discussing various front-end and web dev topics. It’s like the 12 days of Christmas, but wrapped up in a four-hour session for web nerds like us.

It’s a real good cause, too. The event is free, but includes fundraising Doctors Without Borders with a goal of reaching $20,000. You can donate here any time and anything you give will be matched by the event’s sponors. So, come for the front-end fun and help a great cause in the process.

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CSS is OK, I guess.

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Nothing but ear-to-ear smiles as I was watching this video from @quayjn on YouTube. (No actual name in the byline, though I think it’s Brian Katz if my paper trail is correct).

The best is this Pen you can use to sing along…

The little song Una did for memorizing for JavaScript’s map(), filter(), and reduce()methods at the end of this article comes to mind for sure.

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State of CSS 2022 Survey Now Open

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The State of CSS survey recently opened up. Last year, the survey confirmed everyone’s assumptions that TailwindCSS is super popular and CSS variables are mainstream. It also codified what many of us want from CSS, from Container Queries to a parent selector. (Spoiler alert, we now have both of ’em.)

While I wouldn’t say the results have been super surprising each year, this time I’m excited to start seeing more historical trends reveal themselves. The survey has been running since 2019, so that’s going to be four years (ancient in front-end years!) of data to see if certain frameworks came and went, specific features are gaining momentum, what general learning practices are out there, and just plain more context. It takes time for stuff to build up like this, so kudos to Sacha Greif for keeping this thing going.

And speaking of the team behind the survey, Lea Verou is new to the bunch and lead this year’s edition. Lea made some nice additions, including more open-ended comments, questions about browser inconsistencies, and a question that compares the amount of time you write CSS versus JavaScript.

Browsers actually use this stuff to help prioritize what features to work on — so definitely add your voice to the mix! The polls close on October 20.

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How to Add Title and NoFollow to Insert Link Popup in WordPress

Wp Plugins

Do you want to add a title or nofollow tag to your WordPress links?

By default, WordPress doesn’t provide a way of adding title and nofollow attributes when creating links with the WordPress block editor.

In this article, we’ll show you how to add options for title and nofollow attributes to the Insert Link popup in WordPress.

How to Add Title and NoFollow to Insert Link Popup in WordPress

Why Add Title and NoFollow Attributes to Links in WordPress?

When writing content, you can add links to interconnect your posts and pages and refer to articles on other sites. These links will tell visitors to your WordPress website where they can find more information on a topic.

It’s helpful to give your links a title. This will appear when someone points their mouse cursor over a link.

A Link With a Title

This can be reassuring to your readers because it makes it clear where the link leads. It also improves your site’s SEO.

SEO experts also recommend that you use a nofollow attribute when linking to external websites. This attribute tells search engines that they can crawl these links, but not pass on any link authority to these websites.

However, when you click the Insert Link icon in WordPress, there are no options to add a link title or to make the link nofollow. The popup only lets you add the Link URL and gives an option to open the link in a new window.

By Default, WordPress Does Not Allow You to Add Title and NoFollow Attributes

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add title and nofollow options to the Insert Link popup on your WordPress blog.

How to Add Title and NoFollow to Insert Link Popup in WordPress

The first thing you need to do is install the free All in One SEO Lite plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin and helps you improve your website SEO. You just need the free version to add extra attributes to the Add Link popup, but AIOSEO Pro offers even more features to help you rank better in search engine results pages.

Upon activation, you need to configure the plugin using the AIOSEO setup wizard. For detailed instructions, see our ultimate guide on how to set up All in One SEO for WordPress.

Once you’ve done that, the plugin will automatically add extra attributes to the Insert Link popup.

These include a title field and options to add nofollow, sponsored, and UGC (user-generated content) tags.

AIOSEO Adds NoFollow and Title Attributes to the Insert Link Popup

To add the link title, just type it into the ‘Add title attribute to link’ field. When when you save the link, AIOSEO will apply the title and any attributes you toggle on.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to add title and nofollow options to the Insert Link popup in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to speed up your WordPress performance or check out our list of must-have plugins to grow your site.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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CSS Rules vs. CSS Rulesets

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The latest spec:

A style rule is a qualified rule that associates a selector list with a list of property declarations and possibly a list of nested rules. They are also called rule sets in CSS2.

Louis Lazaris:

As the above quote from W3C indicates, it seems like the W3C considers “rule set” to be a bit of an outdated term, preferring the term “style rule” (or possibly “rule” for short).

I never noticed that! “Rule set” is so gosh darned branded on my brain that it’s gonan take losing a lot of muscle memory to start using “style rule” instead. I didn’t see a specific note in the spec’s Changes section, but you can see the change in the table of contents between versions:

Side-by-side screenshot comparing the table of contents for both the CSS 2 and CSS 3 specifications.

Louis nicely sums up the parts of a style rule as well:

/* Everything below is a style rule (or rule set, or just rule) */
section { /* Everything between the braces is a declaration block */
  margin: 0 20px; /* This line is an individual declaration */
  color: #888; /* Another declaration */
}

I know nothing of the context and, at first, I was gonna poo-poo the change, but “style rule” really makes sense the more I sit with it. If the property:value pairs are declarations that sit in a declaration block, then we’ve got something less like a set of rules and more like one rule that defines the styles for a selector with a block of style declarations. 👌

Once again, naming things is hard.

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WebKit Features in Safari 16.0

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Whew boy, Safari 16 is officially out in the wild and it packs in a bunch of features, some new and exciting (Subgrid! Container Queries! Font Palettes!) and others we’ve been waiting on for better cross-browser support (Motion Path! Overscroll Behavior! AVIF!). I imagine Jen Simmons typing cheerfully writing out all of the new goodies in the roundup announcement.

A list of new WebKit features.
Source: WebKit.org

Just gonna drop in the new CSS features from the release notes:

  • Added size queries support for Container Queries. Chrome started supporting it in Version 105, so all we need is Firefox to join the party to get The Big Three™ covered.
  • Added support for Container Query Units. These units go hand-in-hand with Container Queries. Once again, we need Firefox.
  • Added support for Subgrid. Now it’s Safari and Firefox with support coverage. The good news is that Chrome is currently developing it as well.
  • Added support for animatable Grids. Very cool! Chrome has always had some implementation of this and Firefox started supporting it back in 2019.
  • Added support for Offset Path. This is also known as Motion Path, and we’ve had broad browser support since 2020. It’s nice to see Safari on board.
  • Added support for Overscroll Behavior. Now we can modify “scroll chaining” and overflow affordances with the overscroll-behavior property.
  • Added support for text-align-last. Now we’re all set with cross-browser support for this property!
  • Added support for the resolution media query. All set here as well!

There are quite a few nice updates to Safari’s developer tools, too. We’ve got a Flexbox inspector, a Timelines tab (with an experimental screenshots timeline), and Container Queries info, to name a few. There’s a full 32-minute video that walks through everything, too.

I thought Safari 15 was a pretty killer release, but 16 is pretty epic in comparison. I know there’s a “Safari is the new Internet Explorer” vibe in some circles, but I’m happy to see big jumps like this and appreciate all the forward momentum. Go Safari Team!

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iShadeed’s Container Queries Lab

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Ahmad Shadeed got an early jump on container queries and has a growing collection of examples based on everyday patterns.

And, if you missed it, his latest post on container queries does a wonderful job covering how they work since landing in Chrome 105 this month (we’ll see them in Safari 16 soon). Some choice highlights and takeaways:

  • Containers are defined with the container-type property. Previous demos and proposals had been using contain instead.
  • Container queries are very much like the media queries we’ve been writing all along to target the viewport size. So, rather than something like @media (min-width: 600px) {}, we have @container (min-width: 600px) {}. That should make converting many of those media queries to container queries fairly straightfoward, minus the work of figuring out the new breakpoint values.
  • We can name containers to help distinguish them in our code (e.g. container-name: blockquote).

Great job, Ahmad! And thanks for sharing!

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Committing CSS Crimes

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The time for CSS-Tricks is over. Now is the time for CSS Crimes!

In this current landscape of content service providers, users are often limited to expressing themselves in text, links, and images. Sanitization rules tend to strip out HTML, JavaScript, and various attributes.

Social media service Cohost allows users to have greater freedom with markup and inline styles than we may be typically used to. Some users have taken advantage of this freedom to commit CSS Crimes! It has resulted in creative recreations of familiar interfaces and interactive games by using properties in unconventional ways.

Blackle Mori created a contraption where pulling a handle slowly turns a series of gears, pulleys, and chains. Eventually an aperture opens to reveal the site’s mascot (“eggbug”) and the proclamation “Good Job!”. I have stared at this in Developer Tools and it is an amazing combination of grid, resize, transform, and calc(). I ended up adding a border to all <div>s to try and get a better understanding of how each individual element moved.

There have been situations in the past where I have been restricted from using the full toolkit of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. There have been many instances of using decorative CSS shapes to get around images. I have used :hover as a workaround for mouseenter and mouseleave. I have used input:checked as a sibling selector for toggling.

While CSS Crimes are probably not something you would want to employ on a regular basis, we should embrace experiments within constraints that can foster creative solutions.

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Actually, the San Francisco Typeface Does Ship as a Variable Font

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Apple unveiled an expanded version of its San Francisco system font at WWDC 2022. Then, last month, Jim Nielsen zeroed in on the font’s variations, explaining how the font provides a spectrum of variations based on the width and weight. It’s a remarkable read if you haven’t checked it.

With all of these great new options, you might be tempted to use them in a web design. Chris was ogling over the expanded sets as well over on his personal blog and pondered:

But it’s not year clear how we might tap into the condensed, compressed, and expanded varieties in CSS, or if there is even a plan to allow that. I suppose we can peek around Apple.com eventually and see how they do it if they start using them there.

Doesn’t this make perfect sense to construct as a variable font and ship the whole kit and kaboodle that way?

Turns out, yes. It does make perfect sense. Chris follows up in a new post:

But just yesterday I randomly stumbled across the fact that the built-in San Francisco font (on the Apple devices that have it built-in) is already variable (!!). See, I was derping around with Roboto Flex, and had system-ui as the fallback font, and I was noticing that during the FOUT, the font-variation-settings I was using had an effect on the fallback font, which renders as San Francisco on my Mac. Which… unless I’m daft… means that San Francisco is a variable font.

So, as for using it? Chris has a demo, of course:

There are some gotchas to all this, the most significant being fallbacks for non-Apple devices. After all, that demo is simply calling system-ui for the font family — it’s not telling the browser to download a font file or anything and who knows if Apple is gonna ever ship a variable font file we can serve up as an actual custom web font.

The other interesting thing? Chris did some sleuthing and counted 35 layout featured included in that system font. Go read the rest of the post to see ’em all (and to get a good ol’ dose of Chris-isms — I know I miss them!).

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Actually, the San Francisco Typeface Does Ship as a Variable Font originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

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Save at Last! Forminator’s New Save and Continue Feature

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Allow users to save a partially filled WordPress form as a draft so they can complete it later before submitting it with our Forminator plugin.

Sometimes, form-filling takes time – especially multipage or lengthy forms. With Forminator’s Save and Continue option, users can save a form as a draft and complete a form at a later time via a custom link.

save as draft image.
Saving long forms as a draft is now an option for your users!

This highly requested feature is available and easy as ever to implement. You’ll be able to customize your form’s settings to allow draft retention periods, allow drafts of forms sent to an email address, edit messages, and more!

This brief article takes you through all the features and how to implement them.

We’ll cover:

You can begin using this feature immediately, so let’s…

Get Started

The Save as Draft feature can be applied to a new, draft, or published form. To begin, choose a form from Forminator’s Dashboard or create a new one.

If you’re new to Forminator and need a detailed look at creating a form from scratch, be sure to check out our article about How to Get the Most Out of Using Forminator.

List of all of the forms created in Forminator.
Pick a previously created form or start a new one from scratch.

If you’d like to add this to a previously created form, simply click the Gear Icon and then Edit.

The gear icon.
The Edit button will get you started!

And for a new form, the process will be the same. Once you get your form started, you’ll click Behavior to begin. When you scroll down a bit, you’ll see Save and Continue.

Ready for launch? Click Enable Save and Continue to activate.

Enable save and continue button.
One click is all it takes to get started.

When enabled, a dropdown menu will appear with customizable options. There is a Configuration and Permissions area.

Configurations and Permission buttons.
Once enabled, you’ll have two options.

We’ll start with all of the options in the Configuration tab.

Draft Retention Period

Choose the days a form’s draft will be stored on your server. Then, once the time expires, they’ll be automatically deleted.

By default, it’s set at 30-days.

Draft retention period.
Set any amount of days you’d like.

Set whatever time frame suits your needs.

Save Form Link Text

You can also customize the text when it comes to saving the form. This is what users will see.

Save form link text area.
Whatever you want to include in your messaging, do so here.

Additionally, when a form is successfully submitted, the user will get a message. Customize the message to anything you’d like.

The form fields for text.
It even shows what form fields will not be saved.

Your message can include links, form data, and more – to make them as clear, personalized, and precise as possible.

Enabling Draft to Email

When a user wants to save and continue at a later date, there’s no better way to remind them than by having an email sent to their account. By activating this feature, a link to the draft will be sent directly to them with the option to resume.

The send draft to email area.
It’s as easy as ever to let users’ send the incomplete form to their email.

As soon as you have your Save and Continue features set up – click Update on the form.

The Permission Area

Decide whether every user can save their format as a draft – or just registered users. That’s all done from the Permission tab.

The Permissions area.
There are two options to choose from.

Just choose your option – and it’s all set.

User Experience

So, now that you know how to set up the Save and Continue feature, what does it look like from the users’ perspective?

Of course, every form is different. Unlimited style options, fields, etc., can be used (which we cover in numerous articles, like this one). For this article, we’ll keep it simple and have a look at what happens when a user saves the form we just created.

First, they’ll see the Save as Draft Option on every page (if you have multiple pages) of the form as they complete it.

The save as a draft button.
Here, it’s on page three.

When clicked, it will bring up the custom (or default) message to let them know their form was saved. Plus, the user will get a link that they can copy and paste so that they can get back to the form at any time.

The text view for the user.
As you can see, the text that we created in the admin is clearly visible.

Since we incorporated the Send Draft Link, this option is available. All the user has to do is enter their email address and hit – in this case – the ‘Send Draft Link’ button (which, as we talked about, can be edited to say something else).

Instantly, an email will go to the user’s email address. It contains the name of the form, website, link, and expiration date of the link.

Text the user sees about reminding them to complete the form.
A short and sweet reminder for the user to complete the form.

All a user has to do is click the link to return to the form and complete it!

Good Save

With Forminator’s new Save and Continue feature, forms will be saved and not forgotten by users who, for whatever reason, can’t complete a form in one session. As you can see, it’s simple to set up in just a few clicks and highly customizable. Plus, this feature is entirely free to use.

This feature is a welcome addition to Forminator, as it was a top request from our users. And so, we’re happy to now include it.

After all, a good form deserves a good save.

 

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How to Add an Author’s Photo in WordPress

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Do you want to add an author’s photo in WordPress?

By default, most WordPress themes show the author’s gravatar as their profile picture. However, authors may want to replace this gravatar with another image.

In this article, we will show you how to add an author’s photo in WordPress.

How to add an author's photo in WordPress

When Do You Need to Add an Author’s Photo in WordPress?

If you run a multi-author WordPress site, then you may decide to add an author info box in WordPress posts. These author bio boxes typically show the author’s profile photo, a brief bio, and link to their website or social profiles.

By default, most WordPress themes use the person’s gravatar as their author photo. However, sometimes you may prefer to use a different image for the author photo.

As a WordPress website owner you may even have rules about the kind of photos you want to show in your author bio boxes. For example, maybe you require your authors to use a professional headshot.

If the author’s gravatar doesn’t meet your rules, then you may want to edit their profile and upload an image that better suits your WordPress blog.

With that in mind, let’s see how you can add an author’s photo in WordPress.

How to Add an Author’s Photo in WordPress

The easiest way to add an author photo in WordPress is by using the PublishPress Authors plugin. This plugin lets authors edit their own profile and author photo by adding a new ‘Author Profile’ area to their WordPress dashboard.

Changing your author photo

It also gives site admins the power to edit the author’s profile including changing their photo.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the PublishPress Authors plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to Authors » Settings. You can then go ahead and click on the ‘Display’ tab.

PublishPress' author settings

Once you’ve done that, open the ‘Layouts’ dropdown and choose a layout that includes an author photo.

Let’s look at your options.

The default layout is ‘Boxed.’ This shows the author’s information in a box, complete with their author photo.

How to add an author's photo in WordPress

The ‘Centered’ layout is similar to the boxed layout, but with all of the author’s information centered inside the author bio box.

‘Inline with avatar’ and ‘Simple List’ are both layouts that includes space for an author photo. Here’s an example of the Simple List layout.

An author photo displayed in the simple list layout

Just be aware that those two layouts don’t have space for a bio. Even if the author has added a bio, it won’t be shown on your website.

After choosing your layout, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button. You can now visit your website to see the author photos on your WordPress posts and pages.

Anyone who has registered on your site with the Author role will now be able to upload a photo using the ‘Author Profile’s settings in their WordPress dashboard.

How To Change an Author’s Photo in WordPress

As admin, you can also use PublishPress Authors to change any of the individual author photos that appear on your website. This is useful if an author chooses a photo that isn’t a good fit for your site.

To change an author’s photo, simply go to Authors » Authors.

Adding an author's photo to WordPress

You will now see a list of all the authors who are registered with your WordPress blog.

From here, you can click on an author’s ‘Edit Author Profile’ link.

Changing the author's photo in WordPress

Then, just click the ‘Image’ tab.

By default, PublishPress will try to find a gravatar that’s linked to the author’s email address. To use a different author photo, click on the ‘Custom image’ radio button.

Changing the author's profile picture

Once you’ve done that, click on ‘Select Image.’ You can now choose any image from your WordPress media library, or upload a new image.

Then, just click on the ‘Update’ button.

Saving a new author photo in WordPress

Your website will now use this new image as the author’s photo.

We hope this article helped you learn how to add an author’s photo in WordPress. You can also go through our comparison of the best WordPress membership plugins, or see our expert guide on how to install Google analytics in WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Customizing Color Fonts on the Web

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Myles C. Maxfield on the WebKit Blog published a nifty how-to for color fonts. It comes on the heels of what Ollie wrote up here on CSS-Tricks the other day, and while they cover a lot of common ground, there’s some nice nuggets in the WebKit post that make them both worth reading.

Case in point: there’s a little progressive enhancement in there using @supports for older browsers lacking support the font-palette property. Then the post gets into a strategy that shows the property’s light and dark values at play to make the font more legible in certain contexts. There’s also a clever idea about how creating multiple @font-palette-values blocks with the same name can be used for fallbacks.

To Shared Link — Permalink on CSS-Tricks

Customizing Color Fonts on the Web originally published on CSS-Tricks. You should get the newsletter.

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Good Design Is All About Good Timing

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Imagine a shiny newsletter pop-up. A pop-up makes its splendid appearance on an eCommerce site just as you are about to make your way to a product page. You didn’t even have a chance to explore a single product yet; nor did you have a chance to learn about prices and materials and delivery options. But here you are, distracted and annoyed, almost instinctively dismissing that pop-up before even fully realizing what it says.

That pop-up is right there, and it’s there for a reason. It’s there because there are established KPIs and expectations that somebody in the company needs to reach. These KPIs expect leads, and the more charming (or intrusive) that pop-up is, the more leads it will generate, boosting revenue projections and bonus pay-outs.

A Short Story About A Large Pop-Up

A while back I was working with a large eCommerce retailer operating just like that. There was a strong desire to generate new leads, so the team has spent weeks tweaking headings and copy and labels and visuals and calls to action and their positions and backgrounds.

By the end, the pop-up was so large and so loud that you could barely see anything else on the page. And it worked! Indeed, just a few weeks in, the list has started to grow considerably, and there was even a dashboard set up to celebrate new leads coming steadily minute after minute.

It was weeks until the management has discovered that the growth of the list wasn’t resulting in the growth of the revenue.

The company was indeed getting plenty of leads, but those leads were poor and noisy. They were a mixed bag of disposable, temporary emails, creative and non-existent aliases and just random text strings, and as such, they weren’t generating any noticeable revenue at all. These very leads actually cost money because the pop-up — showing up on every other page — drove people away from the site.

It didn’t work because what the company wanted wasn’t just leads; they wanted good leads. They wanted emails with low bounce rates and high opening rates; emails that would have high conversion and high engagement; emails that wouldn’t get filtered out or marked as spam. They wanted new, engaged and excited customers who would trust and love the brand. A loud newsletter pop-up wasn’t helping them get there.

What did help the company was removing the pop-up altogether, and subtly integrating a bit of newsletter messaging all across the site, from product pages to confirmation emails.

Strategy To Generate Good Leads

Over the years studies showed over and over how reluctant people are to respond positively to any promotional message that disrupts their current workflow. This goes for a modal, a pop-up, a notification and anything in-between. In fact, any interruption of a task at hand is seen as a major distraction that needs to be dealt with urgently. And urgently rarely works in favor of user experience.

In the end, it’s all about the right timing. If we want a good response, we need to find the time in a user’s journey when we can almost guarantee that users will appreciate the disruption, and will respond positively. And that means being very thoughtful about the right time and the right places to surface our messages in a humble, respectful way.

There are a couple of options that we can explore:

  • Integrated messaging.
    The more integrated our messages appear with the rest of the page, and the more connected they are with a task at hand, the better they will be performing. Think of empty states, 404 errors, product pages and blog posts.
  • Success moments.
    Identify moments when a user completes a task or reaches a particular milestone, and integrate your messaging there. E.g. when an invoice is paid, when a request is approved, when a transaction is completed.
  • Nonmodal dialogs.
    To ease distraction, consider using collapsible nonmodal dialogs that don’t block the rest of the UI. Users can dismiss them for a while, and return back if needed.
  • Confirmation pages.
    That’s where users linger for a while until they get a confirmation email. That’s also a great place to ask users for more details, ask to review email or set up a password and get a 15% discount in return.
  • Confirmation email link.
    As users are eagerly expecting that email, we can allow people to subscribe to a newsletter with one single click on a link in the confirmation email.
  • Next to the price.
    We could integrate the newsletter box on the most important pages, right next to the pricing of a product, prompting them to subscribe to get 10–15% off the first purchase.
What About That eCommerce Retailer?

Of course, what has worked for one company might not work for you, so it’s probably a good idea to try out all these options and see what actually works best.

In the case of the eCommerce retailer, integrating the newsletter box next to the price and making the newsletter pop-up a collapsible nonmodal dialog worked best. This change didn’t produce as many leads as the initial pop-up, but the leads were much better in quality and longevity.

We need to give users a chance to develop trust towards the brand. This requires a more humble approach and a more patient team, but the results might be significantly better, with customers coming back and giving a company exactly what it has always wanted.

Meet Smart Interface Design Patterns

If you are interested in similar insights around UX, take a look at Smart Interface Design Patterns, a 6h-video course with 100s of practical examples. 6h of video content on everything from accordions and dropdowns to complex tables and intricate web forms — with 5 new segments added every year. Check a free preview.

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How to Regenerate Your Permalinks in WordPress

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Do you need to regenerate or flush your WordPress permalinks?

If you are not able to view your website content, then neither can your visitors. Broken links and 404 errors can damage the user experience, and your position in SEO rankings. 

In this article, we will show you how to fix these dead URLs by regenerating your permalinks in WordPress. We will also talk about what causes this error, and how to spot broken links, before your visitors do. 

How to Regenerate Your Permalinks in WordPress

Why Do I Need to Regenerate Permalinks in WordPress?

Most of the time, the URLs on your WordPress site are permanent and won’t cause any problems. They just work.

However, sometimes you may click on a link and get a 404 error. You might even get a 404 when trying to access your entire WordPress website.

This sometimes happens after moving your WordPress site to a new host or server. It could also happen after you install a new plugin. This is because some plugins edit your site’s .htaccess file without your knowledge. This can affect your site in lots of different ways, including damaging your URLs. 

Note: For this tutorial, you’ll need to be able to log in to the WordPress dashboard. If you can’t access your WordPress admin page, then see our step by step guide on what to do when you are locked out of WordPress admin.

Often, regenerating your permalinks can be a quick and easy fix for those issues. Let’s take a look at how to do that.

How to Regenerate Your Permalinks in WordPress

When you regenerate your links, you’re rebuilding and repairing the WordPress permalink structure. This may sound complicated, but don’t worry. You simply need to click on a button, and WordPress will handle the rest.

To get started, head over to Settings » Permalinks from your WordPress admin menu.

The WordPress Permalink settings.

This will take you to the WordPress Permalinks Settings page. Here, you’ll see the permalink structure that you’re currently using.

WordPress supports several options for permalinks. You can see our guide on how to create custom permalinks in WordPress for step by step instructions on how to customize them.

To regenerate your permalinks, just scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.

After a few moments, you should see a message confirming that WordPress has updated your permalink structure. 

WordPress' 'Permalink structure updated' notification.

That’s it! WordPress has now regenerated your permalinks.

To make sure it worked, head over to your site and try clicking on a few different links. 

Are You Still Seeing Permalink Errors After Regenerating?

If you’re still getting 404 errors, then you may have to clear your browser cache. For more details, see our guide on how to clear your browser cache in all major browsers.

If this doesn’t fix the problem, then think about what happened right before you started seeing these 404 messages. If you’d just installed or updated a plugin, then this might have affected your links. You can try disabling this plugin, to see whether this removes the 404 error.

The Plugin settings, as seen in the WordPress dashboard.

If this doesn’t work, then you can try deactivating all plugins to see whether this fixes your broken links. 

This is a bit of a drastic step, so it’s smart to put your site into maintenance mode first. This will keep visitors informed while you test your plugins, giving a better impression than seeing a broken website.

If deactivating all of your plugins solves the problem, then you’ll know that at least one plugin is affecting your URLs. In this case, reactivate each plugin individually and then test how this impacts your links.

When the 404 error reappears, you’ve found the plugin that’s causing the issue. You can then delete this plugin from your site or ask the developer for support.

Your site should now be error-free and running smoothly. If not, then check our list of the most common WordPress errors and how to fix them. 

How to Track and Avoid Broken Permalinks in WordPress

Broken links are bad news for visitors, conversions, and your search engine rankings. Over time, dead URLs can impact where you appear in the search engine rankings. This means less traffic to your website.   

With so much at stake, you’ll want to know about any dead links as soon as possible.

The easiest way to track and fix broken links on your WordPress website is by using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin for WordPress. Over 3 million website owners use AIOSEO including us here at WPBeginner.

The All in One SEO (AIOSEO) WordPress plugins.

AIOSEO allows you to easily find broken links and fix them with just a few clicks using their powerful redirection manager. For more details, please see our guide on how to track 404 pages and redirect them in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to regenerate your permalinks in WordPress. You can also go through our guide on how to choose the best website builder, or our expert pick of the best domain registrars.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Regenerate Your Permalinks in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.