One of the biggest roadblocks to starting a new business in Toronto is the upfront costs involved with opening a store or even securing office space. With today’s online economy, though, those expenses can be eliminated by opening an E-Commerce Site. These online sites provide you with a great virtual storefront that doesn’t come with a price-per-square-foot. It also allows you to market your products to people across Canada, North America, or even the world. You may actually be able to bring in many more customers and make a larger profit by going with an E-Commerce site instead of a traditional storefront. The biggest question most people have is simply “how to I get started with an E-Commerce site?” It may look like a large project at first, but selling online is actually pretty straightforward. Become an Official Business It can be tempting to try to skip over registering […]
Hello! If you are operating a local business in Toronto, one of the most important things you need to do is maintain a web presence. Whether your business is a startup, business services or restaurant : your web presence is key to the fundamental survival and operation of your business. What does it mean to have a web presence? Well the most important aspect that reaches across any niche market or industry, especially in a local market like Toronto, is having your address and phone number indexes properly as a local Google business. We have put together a checklist of steps to ensure that your business is positioned as best as possible and as visible as possible. In a dense city like Toronto, it is more common than not to have very high competition for even basic visibility. 1. Create a Google My Business Account You need to create […]
Install our Free WordPress CDN plugin by Register on our CDN dashboard and then install our wordpress pluginHello! Site speed has, for quite a while now, been a significant factor towards expectation of user experience as well as for things like organic Google ranking. When a website is slow to load, the end user is more likely to abandon the effort and Google is more likely to rank that site lower in the organic rankings. There is an entire industry (arguably overlapping niche market industries) dedicated to alleviating this problem among websites. For websites that are hopeful of being accessible across a more globalized marketplace, their website must be fast to any end user around the world. What is a content delivery network Like the name suggests, a content delivery network delivers the content from your site from a server that is geographically closer to the user who is […]
Try out our Free CDN service by installing the Shift8 CDN WordPress pluginHello! We thought it would be an interesting challenge both from a DevOPS perspective as well as a web development and integration perspective to create our own fully managed content delivery network. Utilization of the network is geared specifically for WordPress users. The idea being to give users a dead simple way to leverage geographic CDN endpoints across the globe by simply installing a WordPress plugin and activating with the click of a button. You never have to leave your site to register on a 3rd party website, you never have to set up API keys by hand or troubleshoot problems. We wanted it to be simple. And to work! There are many components that need to be integrated and ultimately tied together in order for a system of this magnitude to work. I’ll try to break it […]
Hello! First and foremost, why would you want to block WPScan from probing your site? Well we all know that security through obscurity is a bad practice. That said the risks of malicious activity on your site is undoubtedly heightened through many points of information disclosure that is freely available to parse and organize to make an accurate security risk assessment of your WordPress site. This type of information is easily attainable through automated scanners like WPScan. Tools like this scan for version tags in readme files, file size fingerprints and meta tags to determine not only the version of WordPress you are running but the version of each of the plugins you have installed. Why is information disclosure bad? Some would argue its not bad. Others would also point out that a 0-day WordPress core or plugin vulnerability could mean that minutes and hours of circumvention or lowered risk […]
Hello! Yes of course WPBakery / Visual Composer is bloated. Absolutely correct its more ideal to simply create your own page template with a custom WordPress query and design your own post grid from scratch. For smaller budget WordPress projects where time is money, it is sometimes ideal to go the post grid route. Why not? The customer wants the designed and customized end result but they have a restricted budget. WPBakery (aka “Visual Composer”) does save time in these scenarios, and there’s something to be said about applying customized CSS and jQuery to customize and tailor the vanilla packaged look and feel that these types of WordPress bundled solutions usually bring to the table. All that said, the point of this post is to describe how to properly inject custom ACF fields (advanced custom fields fields) into your post grids. Why would you want to do that? Well if […]
Hello! Working with wordpress for a while now, we noticed that many actions, whether administrative in nature or building a WordPress query on the front end, are dependent on the built-in admin-ajax.php or WordPress AJAX API. Since many 3rd party plugins depend on this Ajax API to dynamically push and pull data, it is unfortunately a common occurrence to have the performance of a site impacted when many AJAX API calls are happening. One of the tell tale signs of admin-ajax.php performance issues can be seen when inspecting the network connections of rendering a particular page on your WordPress site. If you filter “admin-ajax.php” in your network tab of the developer console in your browser, you should see clearly the admin-ajax.php POST that may be taking too long. In our experience, some post grid plugins that make it easy to render a grid of posts on your page heavily rely […]
Hello! In the past we have written about how to protect your WordPress media files. In the past exercises we utilized a strategy to set a session cookie with encrypted details that can be read and validated at the http service (i.e. nginx) as well as application (php/wordpress) level. Since then we have refined this process to be much more secure, flexible and efficient. We have abandoned the cookie validation process for verifying the request before serving it and replaced it with a slightly more complicated but much more secure method. First before getting into the details, why would we want to protect WordPress media files? Well the answer depends on what sort of site you have and what you are trying to do, obviously. In our scenario, which isn’t necessarily unique, we have end-users that register for an account in order to check out of a Woocommerce store. We […]
Need this implemented on your site? Click here and fill out our quote form! Hello! There are many reasons why your Woocommerce store may need a system to accommodate verifying the identity of your customers. Depending on what your selling and the local or federal laws that are in place, having the identity of your consumer verified may be needed for liability or compliance reasons. Additionally under certain conditions within your Woocommerce store (such as orders over a certain amount of money), validating the identity can dramatically reduce the risk of fraud and fraudulent transactions on your site. I’m going to go into details with how to implement a system into your Woocommerce store that will accommodate the following : Provide a section within the Woocommerce “my account” area for end-users to upload a digital image of their ID Add a new field for the user details to […]
Hello! Sometimes its necessary to make site-wide changes to WordPress posts in order to save time and programmatically propagate changes without having to edit each post one at a time. For bulk manipulation of WordPress data, it is sometimes effective to write a command line PHP script to hook into your WordPress environment and execute changes. One of the main advantages with executing these types of functions on the command line as opposed to a web based interaction is you are not subject to the same execution and other timeout restrictions for web based requests. This means that a command line PHP solution can run longer, which is sometimes needed for complicated efforts. In our example, we will break down the PHP Command line script, how to safely and securely hook into WordPress to take advantage of all the built in functions, and update all the products in our WordPress […]
