Your WordPress Sites Shouldn't
Keep You Up at Night

New Cinch Branding: For Real this Time

We've been designing logos and brands for years, especially Chris and his team at Studio2. Lots of really good work over the years. Designing for ourselves should be a... wait for it... cinch for us right? Yeah not quite so much. Turns

Change Order of Posts in WordPress Dashboard

We recently had a customer request that the entries in a custom post type get automatically alphabetized. Clicking on the title certainly does the job here, but who's got time for that? There are a few ways to order posts, but if

WordPress Download Manager < 2.8.8 Critical Security Vulnerabilities

The WordPress plugin, WordPress Download Manager, has been discovered to contain multiple security vulnerabilities in versions 2.8.8 and lower. Both the free and pro versions are at risk. If you use this plugin, please update immediately to the latest build: version 2.8.9.

Gutenberg 3.9.0 Changelog

Add support for creating reusable blocks out of multi-selected groups of blocks not just individual blocks. This means the ability to easily save templates out of an existing set of blocks.Add support for importing and exporting reusable blocks (using a JSON file

How to Set Up Google Maps API Credentials and Enable Billing

Google updated its Maps API requirements last year and many of our customers are just now finding their maps no longer working. I'm not sure if the policy is just now going into effect for them, but the issue usually lies in

Gutenberg 4.1 Changelog

Implement a block navigation system that allows selecting child or parent blocks within nested blocks (like folder path traversal) as well as functioning as a general fast navigation system when a root block is selected.Add a Media & Text block that can facilitate the creation of

How to see if your WooCommerce site is TLS compliant

Authorize.net has been notifying it’s merchants of an upcoming TLS requirement. As of February 28, 2018 any merchants running TLS 1.0/1.1 will no longer be able to process sales transactions. All credit card processors are requiring that sites meet these requirements by

Uptime Monitoring of WordPress Sites

You have a business to run and a life to live – one that doesn’t include constantly checking your WordPress site for problems. Websites and servers do go down from time to time, however, and not knowing there is an issue can

How Cinch Handles Premium Plugins for WordPress

What is a Premium Plugin? A premium plugin is a WordPress extension that requires its own license in order for you to use it. There will also be a license fee that gives you access to future updates and developer support for

WooCommerce Subscriptions Renewal Notification Didn’t Send? Here’s What Was Missing

A customer reached out with a question on WooCommerce Subscriptions renewal notifications: We received a complaint from a member who said he was not notified that his membership was about to renew. When I look in the logs, it shows an email

SVG SMIL animations to be deprecated

I was recently got a console warning in Chrome on a client's website stating that: [text] SVG's SMIL animations ('animate', 'set', etc.) are deprecated and will be removed. Please use CSS animations or Web animations instead. [/text] The site contains an SVG

Optimizing a ThemeForest theme

WordPress themes from ThemeForest are perhaps the most popular premium themes available. Themes like Avada, X | The Theme, and Enfold have over 100,000 sales each (Avada has nearly 400k sales). These themes provide their users a ton of control and options,

Why We Don't Do One-Time Fixes

We write quite a bit on our blog about WordPress and WooCommerce, and how we've solved some of the issues we've come across. This brings a lot of site traffic – folks looking for help on the same issues we've come across.

Gutenberg 4.4 Changelog

Improves discoverability of permalinks by adding permalink panel to the document sidebar.Improves margins, column child block, and mobile display of columns.Allow for programmatically removing editor document panels.Replaces the uploading indicator of images and galleries with a spinner and faded out image.Toolbar for

Secure your site or alienate your visitors

Stuck in WordPress Maintenance Mode (Briefly Unavailable…)

When a new version of WordPress is released, it's important to keep your site up to date. On rare occasions, the update process may hang or timeout, leaving your site in maintenance mode. In this article we'll discuss what WordPress Maintenance Mode

How to filter Gmail to ensure delivery of emails from own domain

If you have a form on your website that is set up to send notifications to an email address with the same domain, you may have found you're not getting them when using Gmail as your email host. For what ever reason,

Why We Recommend Extensions from WooCommerce.com

We support a ton of customers running WooCommerce on their sites and have seen an equal ton of WooCommerce extensions and plugins on those sites. Over the years we've noticed a few patterns and can safely say that we highly recommend using

Prevent WordPress from Scaling Large Images

WordPress version 5.3 made a change to the way it handles large images uploaded to the media library. This change was made to help address the issue of very large images being uploaded without first being optimized for the web. Photos taken

Delete LayerSlider WP if you are not using it

LayerSlider WP is a seemingly ubiquitous content slider that comes bundled with over 900 WordPress themes available at themeforest. If you run a premium theme purchased there, chances are you have it installed on your site right now. Like many other bundled