Fair enough. Some of our sites have been online 20+ years so high value targets 🙂

We just turned that off as nobody really cares how many comments a post has. Especially with some many sites polluted by spam and bot posts. Probably only attracts more trolls to chime in that they hate coffee made in a drip machine and pour over is the only way! 😉

Also remember unless you disable or redirect the built in WordPress REST API stuff, folks can ping that to look for vulnerabilities like user ID, admin user, etc. Addihg redirect in your htaccess or a plugin is ideal. But be careful as some plugins rely on that to “do something’ – so good to look more deeply into overall security (page on the wordpress.org codex page, for instance). Recaptcha good place to start as thwarts bots.

make sure not using PHP 8.3 (8.2x max); also make sure you don’t have zomm mode on in Chrome as they seem to have some bug on Windows when also having text zoom on in the Windows OS settings. Try clearing cache in your web browser. Some third party plugins can also conflict with UX CSS.

Upshot, working for me with both PHP 7.x and 8.2x, using Chrome web browser on Windows 11.
(I don’t work here.)

avoid custom html characters in category names

I’ve always had problems with stuff like this
ZWYCIĘZCY 2024
vs
ZWYCIEZCY 2024

Issue with Firefox, should be patched in their next update.
Kind of like the Chrome bug that would have my slider in Newsmag theme break the width of the two column layout.

How did you ‘install’ ?
Two options
(1) FTP (e.g., Filezilla) — unzip, upload folder only for theme to your wordpress theme folder; make sure you don’t have a folder inside folder
(2) upload via WP built-in install theme, using the zip file from the download

Install a WordPress theme from a . zip file
Sign in to WordPress.
In the left-side menu, select Appearance and then Themes.
Select Add New.
Select Upload Theme.
Select Choose File.
Locate and select the theme . zip file on your local computer and then select Open.
Select Install Now.

Once installed it will be showin in the list of themes you can activate.

(I don’t work here.)

• This reply was modified 1 year by simchris.

You should just move on from AMP and make sure your pages are responsive and work well on mobile without too much overbuilding.

AMP was pretty much abandoned by Google 2 years ago.

I posted a thread on here awhile back on how to setup 301 redirects to retire AMP endpoints entirely on your site.

Ideally you’d want your ‘actual’ pages on your website loading and not some /amp version which was Google’s attempt to track you by loading your pages on their cloud servers.

(I don’t work here.)

Do you have proper open graph tags setup?

FB will still randomly skip image capture, which has nothing to do with any theme or website. As long as you have proper OG tags setup, it’s up to any social site to properly capture the info. But may not from time to time.
(I don’t work here.)

Have you looked through the docs?
https://forum.tagdiv.com/newsmag-newsmag-documentation/

(I don’t work here.)

okay – final resolution for anybody running into this…
the toptal online minifier I’ve used long time, apparently is broken in some way. It tries to group things together in long string, but not in a sensical way.

I used a different minifier and fixed several random CSS problems in test.

SO, I ended up with a 115kb file vs 98kb (still better than 155kb before server size gzip stuff). On the surface, that might presume 18kb of chaos theory.

The ‘bad’ minifier had also broken the CSS for main menu so the items were initial cap vs all caps, which I hadn’t noticed until now.

First time I’ve ever had a minification issue on anything.

Upshot. “Be careful out there.” 🙂

RESOLVED

a)
Get down to the membership section on the general settings page. Uncheck the checkbox that says anyone can register on your website. This will prevent any visitors, man or bot, from being able to register as users on your site.

b) consider a recaptcha to stop bots (we now use hcaptcha several places)
https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-add-captcha-in-wordpress-login-and-registration-form/
not tested: https://wordpress.org/plugins/login-security-recaptcha/

I don;t work here. Just WP user for over 20 years, so been around the block a few times 😉

okayyyy…. I am pretty sure this was due to my normal practice of removing all custom fonts of any kind from the CSS prior to minification… specifically changing everythign to
font-family: "Segoe UI",Frutiger,"Frutiger Linotype","Helvetica Neue",-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Dejavu Sans",Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,Arial,arial,sans-serif;

So, presumably, I must have mis-applied a copy/paste in there while replacing these
font-family: sans-serif;
font-family: 'Open Sans', arial, sans-serif;

I will revisit that and correct. But adding the borked CSS to the wp > customizer solved it for the moment.

Whew!! So, human error on my part apparently. DOh.

Thanks. very weird. I’ve been using the same minifier for decade so not seen stuff go missing before. I even have stuff like Pagespeed ‘off’ during upgrade as you might expect. I will try adding into the customizer out of paranoia. My next step was to put back the unminified CSS but so weird. Nothing else acting funky that I can see.

Also, fyi, I pulled the css from the ‘all files’ repo, not the single theme download in case you want to double check that.

🙂

I removed all my custom CSS and had no effect.

Hi, all good. Resubmitted sitemap to see if they still flag anything.
Luckily with dedicated server we have good DDOS tools in place, but all our sites are on the same server now vs old days where we had two. Luckily the big hack attempts seem to be relegated to major US POTUS elections.

Feeling the pain over here today for our new U.S. overlord babyman.

OKAY … you may laugh, but it turns out the site in queation was still running my hacked up version of Newsmag 3x (!).
Migrating to latest 5x trunk will probably fix the shenanigans with Google.

#DOH

you can download from your themeforest account in the all files zip….and yes, need to update theme and plugin.
make record of your home page layout, widget setups, and put custom css in customizer vs theme panel to be safe as you may need to redo them …

use php 8.2…
limit number of modules per page and in sidebars and footer widgets…
limit random elements, related posts, mega menus…
choose modules with same image sizes to limit number of images…
change default wp image compression to 50…
limit outbound queries like external fonts of social likes…

• This reply was modified 1 year by simchris.

Technically you can have multiple H1 tags which indicates most important things on page. Logo as H1 is totally fine as search engines understand that is branding and links to home page, with the H1 headline text as most important textual element. having logo as H1 does not invalidate main headline title on page. Does not really matter; so don’t stress over it.

FYI: Google News removed the abilty to ‘submit’ a site to their platform; and they are now reindexing news platforms to see if worthwhile (high amount of original vs copied content). Best bet is to setup a Google News sitemap and submit it, and hope they eventually do intake. Also, add the ‘IndexNow’ plugin as this may be the wave of the future.

We had couple of sites drop out after 15-20 years while they do their reindex and ‘AI’ thing.

Also carefully check for errors, as they will now stop indexing pages with stupid things like breadcrumb errors, or low core web vitals, etc.

Hi
we’re still evaulating false positives; as we ended up in horrible timing thing where we got DDOS on our news sites right as Google was starting their reindex thing. Knocked couple sites out of Google News for first time in decade, couple were fine, couple not so much. One site not even getting notes or monthly impressions. The other finally getting oddball errors. Once the dust settles will let you know if non issue or real issue. Ugh. They have way too much power over the interweb.

It’s no prob to change the php file(s), We have to change a number of things each time anyway, like removing the images from the search box, and changing the ‘views’ field, since many of our sites way pre-date tagdiv themes, we have existing views field as ‘views’ so don’t want two different fields for that, so always have to change that on updates. We use a number of tags and categories per story, so I move those to bottom vs above headline as it becomes a mess if something is in, say, entertainment, books, California, Los Angeles, Featured …. too many pill boxes. 🙂

NO worries. Most things CSS does the trick. But a few things, no trouble editing files as long as I keep a “map” of that.

Actually — compared to the ooooooold code base, actually easier now. v5 was refactored a bit better than v3. 🙂

Thanks again!

Chris

Perfect thanks.
I think I can do that in template 2 where I’m moving tags and categories to bottom below share buttons. Testing on the one pesky website where stupid Google says it’s a problem. Sigh.

Thanks. That workes. I’d almost go so far as suggest making this the normal layout.

I’m already editing the file to remove number of articles and comments, since we don’t have comments on the site, that is redundant. Been annoying me for years. So, fixing with the latest NW update. 🙂

Thanks!!