Mandar Apte

UI/UX Designer from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

Category: WordPress

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system.

  • Stop OpenAI’s ChatGPT User agent from scanning and using your website’s content.

    Background:

    Wikipedia Describes ChatGPT as an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 families of large language models (LLMs) and has been fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

    ChatGPT can access real-time info from the web using plug-ins.

    If you don’t want the ChatGPT User-agent to use your website’s data, you can block it using your robots.txt file.

    A ‘robots.txt’ file is generally located at the root of the web server and can be accessed using SFTP or can be viewed using this URL:

    https://yourwebsite.com/robots.txt

    (replace ‘yourwebsite.com’ with your domain name)

    You need to add this rule to your website’s ‘robot.txt’ file

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  • Resolve Cloudflare’s ‘Invalid Domain’ error while adding a new site.

    Background:

    Cloudflare is a good web service that provides CDN, Caching, HTML – JavaScript – CSS Minifying and security from DDOS attacks free of cost.

    However, you must add your domain to Cloudflare to use this service.

    Interaction is simple. At the top of your dashboard’s navigation bar, there is a prominent button called ‘Add Site’. Clicking it transfers you to the next page, where you can copy-paste your website’s URL.

    If you are getting an error like ‘Invalid Domain’ while adding your website to Cloudflare, use this trick to bypass this error.

    If you are copy-pasting the URL with the http suffix, then you will get an error:

    // You will get error
http://yourdomain.com

    Then you have to enter your domain without http or www, and It should look like this:

    // Success
yourdomain.com

    The ‘Invalid Domain’ error should be resolved by now.

    I hope it helps.

    Thanks & Regards
    Mandar Apte

  • Stop email notifications for WordPress Theme and Plugin Updates.

    With the WordPress 5.5 release, you may have experienced new random daily emails you may have received for every WordPress self-hosted theme and plugin update.

    Here is how to stop email notifications for theme and plugin updates:

    Copy the code below in your domain theme’s functions.php file… It will look something like this…

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  • Cloudflare Flexible SSL Certificate Implementation Guide for WordPress Website.

    Prerequisite:
    Please ensure you have an active CloudFlare account and have added your WordPress Website to CloudFlare. Also, make sure you are using CloudFlare nameservers for your domain.

    Step 01:
    Sign in to your CloudFlare account

    Step 02:
    Make sure a flexible SSL certificate is enabled under the “Crypto” tab for your selected website

    Step 03:
    While signing in to your CloudFlare account, go to > My Profile, Scroll down to API Keys, locate the Global API Key, and copy the key for further use inside your website.

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  • The complete guide for maintaining and optimising WordPress websites for optimum performance.

    Introduction

    I have been using WordPress for almost more than five years now.

    In the post below, I will explain the step-by-step procedure for hardening, securing, and optimising WordPress for best performance and security.

    So, First things first,

    Introduction to WordPress

    What is WordPress? WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Its features include a plugin architecture and a template system. As of January 2015, over 23.3% of the top 10 million websites used WordPress. WordPress is also the most popular blogging system on the Web, with more than 60 million websites using it.

    As we know today, WordPress is offered in two different formats: one is managed and hosted by the team at WordPress.com, and the other is self-hosted by the user using a downloadable installable package available at WordPress.org.

    Difference between WordPress.com & WordPress.org

    The following things differentiate WordPress.com and WordPress.org from each other

    1st Difference
    WordPress.com: The user provides the content & website is managed by the team at WordPress.com.
    WordPress.org: Content provided by the User & Managed by the user itself.

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  • Leverage browser caching for improved webpage load time performance & speed.

    Introduction:

    To enable browser caching, you need to set expiry dates on certain files. Find your .htaccess file in the root of your domain. You can edit the .htaccess file with Notepad or any text editor. In this file, we will set our caching parameters to tell the browser what types of files to cache over a period of time so that page loading time improves by avoiding or keeping certain files and using browser cache from history.

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  • Fix the WordPress.com Jetpack error: ‘Website needs to be publicly accessible to use Jetpack.’

    As we know, the WordPress community exist on wordpress.com & wordpress.org

    WordPress.org is a downloadable CMS (Content Management System) distribution for self-hosting used by web designers and developers.

    Being a CMS lead developer, Automattic wants its wordpress.com experience to be available to its wordpress.org users. So, they developed plugins like JetPack for WordPress self-hosted websites.

    JetPack Error:
    Your website needs to be publicly accessible to use Jetpack: site_inaccessible
    Error Details: The Jetpack server could not communicate with your site [HTTP 404]. Ask your web host if they allow connections from WordPress.com. If you need further assistance, contact Jetpack Support: http://jetpack.me/support/

    Your website needs to be publicly accessible to use Jetpack- site_inaccessible Error Details- The Jetpack server was unable to communicate with your site HTTP 404
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  • Using the Sticky Navigation Bar to increase the page views per visit (session) ratio for any website.

    It is a well-known, tried-and-tested method to have a sticky navigation bar at the top of a responsive website design and layout.

    A fixed navigation bar at the top helps mobile or desktop website users have a fixed area where they can find navigation icons and links through which they can browse and navigate the current website. Having a fixed navigation bar at the top helps webmasters increase page views, i.e., it helps webmasters increase the page views per visit ratio.

    Yes, it occupies space at the top, but it helps the user have navigation links handy whenever he wants to browse the website. Space constraints only refer to mobile devices with small screen sizes.

    The following is the code that helps you have a fixed navigation bar. Copy and paste the following CSS code in your style.css

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  • How to fix WordPress Automatic Update Error.

    Background:

    When WordPress.Org releases a new update to its WordPress standalone CMS (Content Management System), you may have set your website to get your installation updated automatically, or you may like to do it yourself at your preferred time.

    But because of server load on the part of your web host, you may get an error something like this with a screwed-up blank website with the following error printed on the screen:

    Warning: require(/nfs/domains/your-domain-name.com/html/wp-includes/session.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /nfs/domains/your-domain-name.com/html/wp-settings.php on line 122

Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/nfs/domains/your-domain-name.com/html/wp-includes/session.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/php-5.3.27/share/pear') in /nfs/domains/your-domain-name.com/html/wp-settings.php on line 122

    The actual cause of the above errors:

    As mentioned, errors are generated because of interrupted WordPress updates, primarily because of heavy load on your web host’s online server. As the update fails, all files mismatch with consistent version numbers, so some old source files remain as it is & only the remaining few get updated with the new version. So, it is a problem of source code version consistency.

    How to fix this:

    Error 01: [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in

    Error 02: Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required & (include_path=’.:/usr/local/php-5.3.27/share/pear’)

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  • What do CTR (click-through rate), CPC (cost per click), and RPM (page revenue per thousand impressions) mean in online advertising?

    In today’s online advertising age, as an online publisher or advertiser, you will always come across jargon or terms like CTR, CPC, and page RPM.

    All the terms mentioned above help you understand the metrics you want to know before you can finalise & execute ‘Online Advertising’ campaigns. It also allows advertisers to make sound decisions on choosing the right publisher & on the other hand, it helps the publisher to know where his blog is heading or if his design decisions are right or wrong. Ad positions & placements are right or wrong, or should he tweak his website to increase CTR, CPC & Page RPM, respectively?

    So here is detailed information about:

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