I think some people use the force regenerate plugin instead on some servers which have the timeout set to short for php scripts … where it literally times out.

You can also double check you increased the default memory for WP from 40MB to something like 128MB in your wp-config.php file —

I’ve never used the “force regenerate” plugin myself — but I’m rockin quad xeons and 32GB RAM on our server so we’ve got power to spare for stuff like that.

Pix working here (Calif./USA) — using IE11/Win7-64.

It’s in the file download.

I think the only change is Visual Composer updated to security issue with VC.

Most themes which auto update in WP use either a theme foundry plugin; or can be updated due to being in the WordPress theme repository (e.g., free themes).

Most commercial themes on ThemeForest and commercial plugins don’t have an “auto update” feature, and generally this is a BAD idea — for example, if people had done auto update from NP4 to NP6, and woken up to find their site broken, that would not have been good.

Similarly some plugins may change settings and require workarounds and/or a perfect example is Yoast who “updated” their old wp meta plugin, by disabling it without telling people it would disable it, even though it still worked. Then printed message on screen – “we’ve discontinued this plugin, please upgrade to Yoast SEO” — well, on one site we didn’t want to do that and had to revert to the original meta plugin. Ouch!

Envato tried to build a theme updater for their themes and you can certainly try that. But often it’s best to review the changelog and see what changed so that you don’t wipe your child theme changes if there is major child theme update, or reset your home page if VC changes, etc.

For example an auto updater today might update the entire theme by deleting old folder and any customizations, and upload new one; when only thing changed was Visual Composer update for security issue. So, today only update it the VC plugin which can be done manually via FTP.

So, while it sounds like a good idea — in practice, it’s really not that advisable.

Hope that made sense — not trying to be contrary, just some feedback from using WP for 10 years and having a lot of cock ups from “auto updates” — we turn them ALL off for our sites due to too many site crashes in middle of the night without warning, or CPU spikes crashing entire box due to a bad plugin (e.g., YOAST, often has major bugs every damn dot upgrade then rushes out 3 rounds of “oops” fixes…. seriously… never install that on “new dot upgrade” — it’s a bad bad idea!). 🙂

Google does that automatically — it’s good for SEO and for folks trying to navigate your website, which is why they do that.

Only way to 100% stop that is
remove breadcrumbs from your pages. Period. Full stop.

Note – even if you remove the meta data for breadcrumbs, Google can still use them in SERPS.

Google may have a method to mark that up as “ignore” if you look in their docs on how presentation of your site is done – perhaps in your webmaster tools (console) account, but I don’t recall seeing that.

We’ve had breadcrumbs on our main site for 15 years — and only added the meta data to the crumbs in 2014.

Plenty of ad management systems for wordpress. Google it. ?

Seriously, though… We use ad rotate plugin here. You can of course use the built in ad system to place your own text or image ads by placing the html into the ad boxes per the docs.

Complex ad managers that track clicks, payments, expirations are not free and you would gave to evaluate based on goals and budget.

But check the ad rotate plugin, as many of us here use it.

• This reply was modified 10 years by simchris.

I put images for ads into my root directory via FTP, and then call the ad banners from my plugin or widgets as mysite.vvv/pix/mybanner-460×60.png

avoid using the words “ad” from now on due to adblockers …

so /pix/ would be good directory to add manually via FTP — downside you have to upload your image via FTP.

I do that for most stuff anyway, so no big deal for me.

WordPress does not support multiple upload directories itself.

There used to be a image limit size setting in the wp admin panel; but now I think you have to set that in either wp-config.php … hmmm…. nope.

I think it’s now set on the server in your hosting panel in the php settings:
upload_max_filesize = 2M

in theory, if your server is running apache and is running scripts as fastcgi, then you can try this:

create a php.ini file and upload it into your /wp-admin folder. Then add the following:
memory_limit = 120M
upload_max_filesize = 1M
post_max_size = 32M
file_uploads = On

You might start with the docs — see link right side of this page … which has a tutorial on how the home page is setup, how the modules work, etc.

Good overview of how Visual Composer works:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/how-to-use-visual-composer/

• This reply was modified 10 years by simchris.

VC might have discontinued support for IE9 or changed that and some caching or other element is still pinging that.

You could likely
a) check the plugin folder to see if that file is there or got renamed
b) do a 301 redirect via htaccess to the renamed file, or to a different CSS file.

Also possible it’s an old file which had a vulnerability and a bot is looking to hack you or check to see if vulnerable.

That could be totally wrong — so tagdiv may have better answer; just food for thought. Looking at the changelog for VC might also provide a clue if the file was retired.

Go to the WP panel settings, for reading and you can set the RSS to show excerpts.

You might want to peruse the basic docs (codex) for WordPress to learn what all the main admin pages do —
https://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Reading_Screen

on the reading page:
For each article in a feed, show Determines whether or not the feed will include the full article or just a summary.
◾Full text – Click this radio button to include the full content of each post.
◾Summary – Click this radio button to include a summary of the post. This could save bandwidth.

Hope that helped! 🙂

(we’ve all been there!!)

• This reply was modified 10 years by simchris.

Like many page-builder related setups, you actually edit the “page” which has been set as the static home page; then the page builder options on that “page” let you change stuff like which category is loaded into a block, move things around in a column (move a block up or down, etc.).

So, find the “page” being set as static home page – a normal WP setup.

Then on that page launch the Visual Composer, and go to the block element you want to edit, and then change the settings from that block in side the visual editor.

These might be useful on learning to setup custom queries for search:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-limit-search-results-for-specific-post-types-in-wordpress/

http://biostall.com/filter-wordpress-search-results-by-one-or-more-post-types

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_search_form

You would likely need to custom build some kind of new query based on a date range, like only show item/block if query to that featured category has a story newer than xx days. So else if nothing newer than xx days, show nothing.

Not sure you could do that in VC with a module — but you could likely create your own CSS for a custom block or something, and then maybe populate that spot in layout with that block?

This is not a normal thing since that is kind of what a ‘featured’ category has traditionally been used for in WP — meaning, you have a “sticky” category, and then you only have one item in it; then edit that post when you no longer want it featured.

Not sure that helps — but some food for thought anyway.

Hi
this may seem dumb; but add the thumbnail upscale plugin, the regenerate thumbnails plugin; run the regenerate thumbnails plugin; then rebuild your slider with new images so that the larger versions are used/cached vs the original smaller ones.

I had this happen once and drove me up the wall – then went, duh. Rebuilding the slider AFTER I had the larger image versions on server worked.

Might not help or be your issue, but worth a try.

Also, you can check your error log to see if you’re getting a barrage of hack attempts, brute force attempts on your admin account, scanning your directories, testing for known bad old plugins or themes … in your domain error log you should be able to see that kind of thing then block the offending IPs.

Our server went to a crawl last year with a DDOS pummeling all our ports, DNS lookups, admin logins (luckily we use ‘limit login attempts’ plugin which auto blocks the IPs from the site for bad login attempts by bots), etc. — only way to stop that was to block the entire country of Ukraine!

So, keeping an eye on your main error log periodically, even if only first of every month is super useful to have a “sense” of who is messing with you.

My server response time is typically 0.32 seconds …. and Google says that is slow ! So, 3.2 seconds for server response time (not page load time), is a bit slow by today’s standards unless it’s a $10/month account, where you can’t expect much for “on the cheap.”

Right now you have no top menus setup (11:29am PDT 10/5/15); and so that might be the issue?

From the above linked page:

•We provide updates on a regular basis, after we test the plugin for theme compatibility we include it in the latest theme update, inside the ../plugins folder

So, presumably that means that TagDiv will include the updated version of the VC plugin in the next update once the version is fully tested as compatible and without major bugs. Just because something is updated doesn’t always mean that you need to update it to use it.

I don’t work here, just some food for thought.

Likely best way to see what modules are in the theme is to setup a blank “page” and then launch Visual Composer and look at all the modules — you can load content from any category you want like /articles/ — as we do on one of our websites which is a magazine and has no “news” — e.g., book/movie reviews, fiction, health articles, etc.

Pages are not posts — “pages” are typically referential like “about us” or “privacy” — and “Posts” can be anything from news to articles or fiction or whatever — so you can build layouts in VC to load content by topic from any category — build one section with fiction, build one section with lifestyle, build one section with music reviews — that’s all up to you.

Easy to play with, even build multiple different home page versions and test them by turning one on/off and asking staff to evaluate, etc.

See the theme docs for examples of different modules and “blocks” — and how you might use different ones in your layout; look at the example sites from users; look at the theme demos — all of that can be great idea starters for your layouts!

example of different “block” layouts which can be mixed and matched on your home page layout:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/theme-thumbs/

Hope that helped a little 🙂

• This reply was modified 10 years by simchris.

A good place to start with Newsmag is with the theme docs; see right side of page; this covers things like the tested-bundled version of Visual Composer:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/how-to-update-visual-composer-plugin-wpbakery/

I use the ‘thumbnail upscale’ plugin which fixes this; stupidly WordPress disables the built-in GD library feature on server to ‘enlarge and crop’ images — dumb dumb dumb on WP’s part. So, the upscale plugin brings this back by disabling the disabling. 🙂

This probably should be added to the theme docs at some point.

ga-roovy!
I don’t work here — just paying it forward around here for all the help I’ve gotten on other forums over the years when I couldn’t figure stuff out, or had a burning WTF question and got some great help.

You can easily import any font family you wish via your style.css file, and load files on your own site.

You may find this helpful if you’re new to how to use custom fonts on the web:

enabling web fonts
http://zoerooney.com/blog/tutorials/installing-web-fonts-start-to-finish/

overview of font linking in style sheet:
http://www.fontspring.com/support/troubleshooting/style-linking

We use Google fonts and have a 100 UX score with Google and 97 page speed. Of course, we moved the CSS loading to the style.css file.

Having a single large CSS file is preferable to 10 CSS files like many themes use as it’s cached and compressed as one item by server/browser and not reloaded over and over.

One of the top 3 selling themes on ThemeForest has 10 CSS files loaded per page! TagDiv does not. Footprint on complex themes is average 550kb for CS/Java these days.

A theme I used yesterday to setup a nonprofit website has 7 CSS files, 6 JS files, etc. — I’m having to manually combine those to optimize.

TagDiv closed weekends, as noted top of page.

I answered a bunch of threads, but I don’t work here. 🙂

Sorry to editorialize here, just some feedback on that issue.

Considering most of the top SEO companies, YOAST, etc., recommend breadcrumbs — and “how Google displays” the content in SERPS has no direct relation to placement in search (ranking), it’s really up to you on presentation.

Meaning, Google ranks your site on numerous factors like content, inbound organic links (non paid), social media shares, etc., not the breadcrumbs.

Google then shows the ranking IN the SERPS (search engine result pages) in various ways depending on the actual search placement.

How they DISPLAY that result has no direct relationship with the RANKING itself.