Go to WP admin panel and turn off “allow people to register” …

See the WordPress documentation for more info on how to setup your WP site:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_General_Screen

You should also install:

a) Limit Login Attempts

and change your main admin password ASAP

if using any plugins with registration capablity, turn them off.

Make sure you have latest secure version of WP installed!

Delete old theme folders you’re not using, and any old plugins no longer used, ASAP.

• This reply was modified 9 years by simchris.

We don’t use TD Speed Booster anymore.

You had asked about a form plugin to use; that was what I was responding to.

You would have to try adding that to the exception list if you need the booster plugin.

We use this one a lot, going on many years now:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/si-contact-form/

Well
a) if your hosting panel does show you have 256M allocated to php
b) if your wp-config has the line to spec 256M
c) your site works
d) get on with your life 😉

Make sure your wp-config.php file is utf-8 — should not have any curly quotes in there, same with php.ini and similar.

also make sure the single quotes are foot marks, and not curly apostrophes.

' vs ‘

I find I have to put my limit at top of the wp-config file after initial comments. Might not impact you, but had that issue on our old server.

Hey! Sorry, I don;t have a simple answer to that; it requires a bit of work on your part. Try doing google search for stuff like “Jquery RSS ticker” (e.g., http://www.jqueryrain.com/demo/jquery-news-ticker/ ). We still use a JS/CSS/RSS ticker on one of our sites to pull news onto our service pages, where the service pages are .shtml static and news is on WP site. So, you can just load one of your topics via the built-in RSS from any of your tags, categories, authors. This was just one example where hacking the theme will drive you nuts.

Ha! Yeah, the icon was something I did as I was tired of my 20 year old “headshot” — and was playing with the South Park Studios Avatar Maker — not sure that still works.

Yes, we do that with mod_pagespeed automatically, so we don’t need to add that here manually and for the current projects I’m doing for our news portals we don’t use either GA or Google Fonts for better page speed; but yes, if you are using anything like that, it does help. (HINT: use a web host that supports mod_pagespeed — it helps WordPress in so many ways; DNS pre-fetch, convert some images to webp for mobile, remove whitespaces (double spaces and pesky indents), remove comments!, DNS prefetch, etc.).

You need to ALSO add a line to your wp-config.php file to tell WP to use more than 40M … see the helpful WordPress Codex (Docs) on how to edit your wp-config.php file here:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Increasing_memory_allocated_to_PHP

define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M' );

This over-rides WordPress’ built-in 40M limit which is there for folks also using multi-site and other cases.

Admin – likely need to add this to the theme docs!

( aw, shucks … ) 😉

I’m actually not using the speed booster plugin anymore myself; I’m now doing this

Switch from VC to TD Composer beta, and:

a) Scripts to Footer plugin
b) generate and insert critical CSS in header.php
c) de-enqueue main style.css in functions.php
d) manually add link to minified style.css in footer.php

In my case this works very well; especially with fast server, all other optimizations, and with mod_pagspeed running very quick (it’s off right now as bug in last release for our server, waiting for next stable version any day now …)

I will do a tutorial on this at some point …

• This reply was modified 9 years by simchris.

I actually used the Yoast Premium to do a 410 error recently for just this use case. Worked pretty well, as there was nothing to redirect to, and better in this sense than 404.

You need to do more than use t he Speed Booster to fully eliminate the render blocking issue due to use of certain plugins, etc.

The speed booster can help, but it’s not 100% able to eliminate the render blocking issue.

Just as FYI: Theme has nothing to do with the favicon rendering. Best bet is to simply make sure you have your favicon.ico, and optional Apple precomposed icons, sitting in the root of your site, where all browsers will “look” for them by default.

Also, note you can create your own loop query and use common javascript to build a completely different ticker, and insert that in a row in your layout, and just not use the one included with theme. This would be much simpler than “hacking” the theme.

Lots of options for doing this online from past decade; very common design element on news sites. Sites like JavascriptSource and others have JS you can use. Or, since jquery being loaded, a simple Ajax RSS ticker script using Jquery could easily be implemented.

Hey!
I’ll post updated version once I finish the tweak of doom! Have been messing with the new TD Composer beta, so got sidetracked, as I wanted to leave VC behind entirely from “now” onward.

I will actually update and add the #comments on what couple of the things actually do. And I’ll include my AMP footer injection code, too!

Actually the trick with the stupid render blocking thing is three step

a) generate ‘critical CSS’ for your post page; insert this into the header.php right before </head>

b) in functions.php – “de-enqueue” the main style.css from being generated and placed in the head.

c) put link to the main style.css file in the footer.php file.

d) if you don’t want to use functions.php to move the other .js stuff; use the “Scripts to Footer” WP plugin.

THAT is the super secret way we do it for my SEO service here (not a sales pitch). What this does is load the important CSS “above the fold” inline, then page loads on mobile (and I have 98 MPS score to prove it; the last gotcha is the CSS for stupid ‘tap targets’ — ugh) without waiting for anything, then main CSS loaded at end.

This simply works. If you have weirdo plugins injecting css and js in the head, you’ll have to de-enqueue them and move to footer.php manually. But the speed rating improvement is insane as there is literally *no* “render blocking” of any kind for Google on mobile or desktop. Period.

I was writing an ebook on all of this but personal life intruded so that didn’t happen.

• This reply was modified 9 years by simchris.

Newsmag very fast on mobile over here 🙂

WP 4.6 works perfectly with Newsmag 3.1 on my sites.
Make sure you update the plugins included with the theme when you update it, as that is common issue.

(I don’t work here.)

You can generally only assign one menu to each space; so I usually create a new menu called “topbar” for the top bar, “underfoot” for footer, and “mainmenu” for the main menu under logo. Then assign each of those locations. I use the normal menu editor under appearance > menus

You create the menus normally per the docs on WordPress.org for WP; but if you’re not doing the above, you might consider it. I have zero issues with menus on four sites I’m updating right now.

Sorry if that doesn’t help your particular problem.
(I don’t work here.)

FYI

benefit of WP super Cache is that its built/managed by same team who build WordPress, so it’s generally the “most compatible” and works best with themes plugins optimized for latest version of WP and normal use-cases of WP installs and WP 4.6x compatible plugins.

Various other caching plugins work, too, but you need to experiment as to which settings (avoid minification settings and similar!) work for your particular server setup, plugins, hosting account, storage space, etc.

So you don’t have to use WP Super Cache — it’s your website — but you should consider using similar settings in your cache plugin as those recommended for WPSC.

You can choose to either
a) use featured images
b) not use featured images
c) use featured images, but make default post template without image

This way posts where you want featured image will have them to give you custom layouts. But imported/syndicated content with an auto generated thumbnail, will not create two copies of the image, as the “no image” template allows you to manually have image inline in the post AND a featured image for social/indexes, without it appearing twice as both inline with syndicated or post, and repeated as featured image.

page names and post names cannot be the same so

a page cannot be “how to contact us” and a post “how to contact us” at same time

pages don’t appear in categories, only posts

Not sure if that helps. Probably TagDiv will need more information to help you.
(I don’t work here…)

Weird. Our issue was totally due to Visual Composer, and not the theme.

Also as a tip for system overloads:

a) disable xmlrpc
b) install the “limit login attempts” plugin.

Contact the hosting server with the offending website and file a complaint if they are ‘scraping’ your content. Make sure your site itself is not copying content from other sites; make sure you have visible copyright notice and legal statement on your site (and privacy policy per U.S. law, Europe and other countries).

I just tried to lookup the IP address to determine host for that .ru site and it gives DNS error.

If the site shows up in Google, you can report it and file a DCMA complaint with Google to have it removed from search results.
https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en

In our case there was some weird issue with Visual Composer where processes would go out of control and server CPU would spike from “1” to “70” and eventually crash the box even with dual XEONs and 32GB RAM. There was no server side “tweak” to solve it.

At the time, Radu made a “shim” where we could create layouts with most of the TD modules for our home page, disable VC, then leave the shim on. That worked great the past 15 months or whatever it’s been.

If your server had the same particular mix we had, and running 1.71, and the older version of Visual Composer, you can “try” to build your home page, then DISABLE the plugin and see if the pages still load once the CSS is there.

But really, v 3.1 is awesome and I keep finding little gems, like the ” – advertisement – ” for ad spots, the IDs for categories shown in module drop downs (!), etc. — loving it!

• This reply was modified 9 years by simchris.