Ross Hori

writer | designer | photographer

#WordPress

I’ve been building and managing websites on WordPress for almost a decade. These features and posts dive into how to design and manage your site.

Common problems with WordPress (and how to fix them)

Work: writing, research and design
Thursday, January 19th, 2023

Now that I'm backing away from client work on the technical side of WordPress, I thought I'd share a few of the problems I'm often asked about. This is by no means an exhaustive list of everything that could go wrong or how to fix it. Instead think of it as a good place to start, with pointers on where to go next.

Any number of things could be causing this, from the server your site is hosted on, to the design of [keep reading...]

Why I hard code urls in my WordPress theme

Work: writing, research and design
Thursday, November 24th, 2022

When I redesigned this site to load faster, one area that caught my attention was the "server response time". This is how long it takes to put together a webpage's elements before it gets passed to the visitor's web browser. Faster is better as the longer takes, the more likely the visitor is to give up and go somewhere else. As a rule of thumb, 3 seconds is the absolute longest time it can take for the page to first appear.

Most of us host our sites on shared services with little control over how the server is set up. Therefore our efforts focus on how themes are designed and WordPress is configured. In this post I'll outline why I decided to hard code parts of the site to reduce the work the server has [keep reading...]

Yoast: why I removed it from WordPress

Work: writing, research and design
Thursday, September 29th, 2022

Yoast is a popular plugin for WordPress that promises to improve your Search Engine Optimization. It offers tools and advice to tweak your posts and (hopefully) raise your ranking on Google and Bing, or make it more visible when shared on social media.

I've used it for several years on various sites, and with clients. When it was time to rebuild this site, I took a long, hard look at what it [keep reading...]

Block graphic showing red and black triangles stacked on top of one another, with a black and red shape symbolising a search icon on the right.

How to customize the default WordPress sitemap

Work: writing, research and design
Thursday, September 22nd, 2022

After years of relying on plugins for that most basic of SEO tools, WordPress finally has a sitemap. I've been testing it for a month or so, and the results are OK.

The default WordPress sitemap is a crude instrument. It lists every post, page, category and tag on your site without filter. For the most basic of SEO this might be OK, but you may also want to tweak it a little. Maybe remove things that could harm your security, or [keep reading...]

Image of multiple WordPress icons with a you are here sticker over the top

iPad vs Gutenberg: the WordPress editor that won’t format

Work: writing, research and design
Friday, June 10th, 2022

I had planned on taking my iPad Pro on an upcoming trip so I could do a bit of blogging. Sadly, it's suffered a bit of a setback thanks to WordPress.

A couple of nights ago I was using my iPad to update this site when I realized I couldn't add any headers to my text. Nor could I add lists, or change bits of styling. It didn't matter which browser I tried it in (I have 4 on the iPad), or if I typed it into the editor, pasted it from Word [keep reading...]

How to speed up WordPress by tweaking your page header

Work: writing, research and design
Monday, May 16th, 2022

When WordPress generates a webpage, it adds a lot of information unseen by the user. Much of this appears between the <head> tags in the code, and asks the browser to interpret information in a certain way, or load additional files and resources. While some of these are useful (such as style.css, which turns raw words into a stylish website), others are not. Some could even compromise the security of your site.

Each resource that's requested slows your website a little. If you're on fast broadband or 5G, you might not notice. Those condemned to slow mobile connections, data limits, poor service or other [keep reading...]

WordPress admin: how to show featured images

Work: writing, research and design
Wednesday, April 27th, 2022

Most posts on this site have a "featured image". When I'm working on site admin it's useful to know which post has what image, particularly if I'm lining up a collection of photos. Out of the box, WordPress doesn't add thumbnails to the admin pages. Fortunately, with a bit of simple coding it can be added.

What follows is the code I use on this site to make my life a little easier. There are two parts to this code. The first adds the thumbnail [keep reading...]

Screenshot of WordPress admin screen with posts listed with their featured images

Why WordPress 5.9 broke your galleries (and how to fix it)

Work: writing, research and design
Monday, April 4th, 2022

WordPress 5.9 has introduced a whole load of pain for those of us using Gallery Blocks. The HTML code generated by WordPress changed. Without updates to your designs, your site could break.

Before 5.9 was released, galleries were presented in code as an [keep reading...]

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