WordPress Tutorials

I can't recall how many times I have been asked by numerous people how to remove the "Comments are Closed" text from the bottom of WordPress posts. So, I have decided to write a quick tutorial on the subject. The following tutorial explains how to remove the Comment option and Comments are Closed text from being made available on your posts. One common request is how to remove specific comments from text that might clutter the appearance of your site. By following the steps laid out in this tutorial, you'll not only streamline your post's design but also enhance the user experience. This will allow your content to shine without unnecessary distractions.

I've always enjoyed using WordPress blogging software from the day I first installed it. It's simple to work with, is well structured and contains an easy to navigate admin menu. WordPress includes a default template called Kubrick that contains a great simple base design to work with.

In the following tutorial, I explain how to place Google AdSense ads between your WordPress posts. This is similar to the tutorial on How to add AdSense Ads between posts on category pages, with the exception that this example places ads on your Blog's Main index or Home page. In addition to WordPress, you can also increase your advertising revenue by implementing Adsense into phpBB forum posts. This method allows you to strategically position ads within the discussions, enhancing visibility without disrupting the user experience. By following similar steps, forum owners can effectively monetize their platforms just like blog operators do.

This tutorial explains how to modify the WordPress recent posts sidebar widget entry to display more than 15 recent posts. By default the number of posts to show is (at most 15). Maybe you want to display 20 recent posts? Or more? I'll show you how. One of the key aspects involved is customizing recent post display settings to fit your website’s needs. By adjusting these settings, you can ensure that your audience sees the most relevant content first. Additionally, fine-tuning these options helps improve user engagement and keeps visitors returning for updates.

Changing the default WordPress admin login username: By default, WordPress installations use the admin username. The admin account provides access to the WordPress backend and all characteristics of the installation. Since this is well known, it can become a security vulnerability. A hacker can easily perform a brute force attack on the account to retrieve the WordPress admin login password. To enhance security, it’s crucial to change wordpress username securely and ensure that it is not easily guessable. Implementing strong, unique usernames alongside complex passwords can significantly decrease the risk of unauthorized access. Additionally, utilizing two-factor authentication provides an extra layer of protection for your WordPress site.

WordPress Disable Image Attachment Pages. In the following simple solution, I show you one way to remove or prevent attachment pages from appearing for every image attachment you add to WordPress. Because WordPress stores attached image data in the database as a Post Type, a URL is automatically created for each image.

In the following simple solution, I cover how to Disable WordPress autosave function. WordPress's autosave feature is a lifesaver in many cases, it stores your post edits automatically so you don't lose work if your browser crashes or your internet blips out. But for some site owners, especially when working on long posts, custom post types, or slower servers, autosave can become more of a nuisance than a help. It might trigger too frequently, cause editor lag, or even interfere with certain workflows.

In this guide, I show you how to safely disable or adjust autosave without touching core WordPress files, ensuring your changes survive updates and keep your site secure.

AdSense WordPress Shortcode: In this guide, I will show you how to create a WordPress shortcode that allows you to insert Google AdSense ads directly into posts or pages while writing content in WordPress.

Using a shortcode gives you precise control over ad placement without hardcoding ads into templates. This approach works with modern, responsive AdSense code and is compatible with current versions of WordPress.

Show More than 15 Recent Posts in WordPress 2.8 +. By default the number of recent posts that can be displayed in your WordPress sidebar is (at most 15). Maybe you want to display 30 recent posts or more? It is really a shame that the default limit is 15 posts, so in the following simple solution, I will explain how to modify the WordPress Recent Posts Sidebar Widget entry to Display More Than 15 Recent Posts.

Margin different in Firefox and Chrome or Internet Explorer? If you have spent a good amount time messing with CSS, you may have noticed that the margin spacing set for a Class or ID can often preview different between Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer web browsers.

In the following simple solution, I show you how to remove wlwmanifest and EditURI links from the WordPress head section of your site or blog. You only need these if you plan to use Windows Live Writer to write to your WordPress blog. If you do not plan to use this Live Writer, you can safely remove these links. They are not used for any other purpose.

Update Copyright Date in WordPress: In this quick guide, I will show you how to automatically update your WordPress copyright year using a small PHP code snippet. Once added, your site will always display the current year without you ever needing to update it manually again.

This is especially useful if you want your footer to show a range like "2006–2026" and keep it accurate as time goes on.

Getting Highslide Working with Nextgen Gallery for WordPress is not complicated. Highslide is even supported by NextGen Gallery. However, the support in NextGen Gallery will only get the basic functions of Highslide to work. By default, the Highslide control bar navigation and captions do not work when used in conjunction with NextGen Gallery.

How to Increase the Maximum Width of Uploaded Images in WordPress. By default, WordPress limits the maximum width of uploaded images (especially when inserted using the "Full Size" option in the editor). Historically, this default width was set to around 500px in earlier versions like WordPress 2.5, which made sense for narrow post layouts.

However, many modern themes use wider content areas (e.g. 700–1200px wide), and you may want your full-size images to take full advantage of that space. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to increase the maximum display width of uploaded images in WordPress by setting the global $content_width value.

How to Fix WordPress Permalinks in XAMPP: If your WordPress URLs look like http://localhost/?p=2 instead of clean links like http://localhost/my-post, it's usually because mod_rewrite is not enabled or Apache is ignoring your .htaccess file. The following steps will help you enable permalinks and .htaccess support in XAMPP.

In the following simple tutorial, I'll cover the process of removing the Comments Off text from all of your WordPress Category or Archive lists. A WordPress Blogger might want to do this if they have disabled comments globally and no longer need to display information related to Comments. If you need to Globally disable WordPress comments, see the article to Globally Disable WordPress Comments.

Like most WordPress bloggers, you probably like to keep your WordPress up to date. However, when there are major changes done to the WordPress core, some plugins may fail to work as they used to. Such is the case with WordPress 2.3-2.5 series upgrade and Ultimate Tag Warrior. Those that were using Ultimate Tag Warrior, prior to WordPress 2.3 are likely to face some problems when performing a WordPress upgrade. This is mainly due to the fact that WordPress 2.3 and beyond includes it's own tagging structure.

If you've ever worked with older WordPress setups or followed early SEO advice, you've probably seen guides recommending that you rewrite URLs to replace underscores with dashes. That advice used to matter a lot, but the search landscape has shifted. Today, Google handles underscores differently, WordPress handles slugs better, and modern redirect tools have replaced most old .htaccess tricks. This guide breaks down whether you still need underscore to dash redirects, what Google actually recommends today, and the best ways to handle URL cleanup on a modern site.

Convert WordPress Tags from Underscores to Dashes for Better SEO: Are your WordPress tag URLs using underscores, like /tag/keyword_tag? If so, it could be harming your search engine optimization (SEO). Google and most search engines do not treat underscores as word separators. As a result, keyword_tag is interpreted as a single word, keywordtag, not two distinct keywords.

Replacing underscores with dashes improves keyword visibility and creates cleaner, more SEO-friendly URLs. This guide shows you how to update your tags directly in the database using phpMyAdmin, plus how to set up redirects to preserve your traffic and rankings.

Google AdSense Smart Pricing is an automated system that adjusts the value of ad clicks based on how likely those clicks are to lead to real business results for advertisers. While designed to improve advertiser ROI, it can have a direct impact on AdSense publisher earnings and reduce Cost Per Click (CPC) rates. Understanding how Smart Pricing works and how to avoid its negative effects is essential for publishers who want to maintain healthy ad revenue.

How to add a second sidebar widget for use on separate pages or posts: The following tutorial covers the process of building a second widget compatible sidebar that can be used on specific pages or posts. Using a different WordPress sidebar for pages and posts allows the user to display different sidebar content on a given post or page. In addition, the user could add the duplicate sidebar widgets plugin to add the same widget content to both sidebars.

With the recent introduction of Kontera in text link advertising, many WordPress bloggers have been switching to or adding the new service. Kontera is a publishers advertising system based solely on contextually relevant in text keywords that are discovered in real time on a web site. These keywords are then automatically turned into links to the most relevant ads found within the Kontera network of advertisers.

The following tutorial explains how to make the WordPress search button inline after the search box in your sidebar. If your like me, you'd probably rather have the search button next to the search box rather than under the search box. However, by default, the sidebar widget employs a break between the search form and search button. This is relatively easy to fix as I explain below.

How to Add Related Posts to WordPress (Modern Method) – Displaying related posts on your blog is a great way to keep readers engaged and increase page views. When visitors see additional content related to the article they are reading, they are far more likely to continue browsing your site.

Years ago, many WordPress users relied on the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) plugin to display keyword related posts. However, modern versions of WordPress now include built in tagging, and there are much easier ways to display related posts without using outdated plugins.

This guide explains both the original UTW method (for historical reference) and a modern way to display related posts using WordPress tags.

After upgrading, restoring a database or moving a WordPress site, you may encounter strange characters in your WordPress posts text. It appears to be a character set or charset encoding problem where apostrophes, hyphens, quotation marks and dashes appear in posts and pages as strange characters like ’‚?. The symptoms are obvious. WordPress posts and pages suddenly contain garbled, weird, or strange characters.

The following tutorial explains how to quickly manually upgrade WordPress to a newer version. The process is fairly straightforward and simple and shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. However, I have frequently caught people including myself become lazy, skipping important steps of the process.

Removing the WordPress post per page limit: By default, WordPress posts are limited based on the posts_per_page setting. Making many of your older posts incredibly hard to find for both search engines and readers. Like many readers, I hate (pagination) having to read through pages of posts in a category one page at a time. So I decided to find a way to make every post within any given category show up on a single category page eliminating the need to flip through pages. In the following tutorial, I'll explain how this is accomplished.

Looking to remove the WordPress sidebar Bullets? The following tutorial is for those who use the default WordPress theme or a derivative of it and want to remove the sidebar bullets to make for a cleaner looking blog. The bullets normally don't appear if your using the Internet Explorer browser and although some people prefer the bulleted sidebar look, I tend to remove it on all sites I have helped develop.

When creating or editing the content of a WordPress Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), many people neglect to take the time to check their work using multiple browsers, IE. Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Navigator etc. Unlike Internet Explorer and many of the other popular browsers, Firefox is one of the only browsers that properly use some commonly implemented CSS property values. This can propose a problem when viewing your work with multiple browsers.

At some point in time, nearly every WordPress Blogger will experience a broken WordPress blog due to the recent activation of a non compatible plugin. A broken plugin can wreak all sorts of havoc on a WordPress blog including the inability to access the WordPress administration panel. In most cases, when a blog breaks, the fix is fairly simple.

The following tutorial outlines a few WordPress quick fixes for a blogger to try when encountering the almost inevitable incompatible WordPress plugin problem that is causing site errors or limited blog access.

The Ultimate Tag Warrior is an awesome plugin for WordPress that allows a Blog author to add keyword tags to your WordPress posts and pages. UTW is relatively simple to install and use, but contains many advanced features that the user can customize as well. For example, tag clouds (one of the most popular keyword organizing methods) are often used on some of the highest ranking sites. The following tutorial explains how to add a custom tag cloud to WordPress in the footer section.

A TrackBack is a mechanism used for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a "TrackBack Ping"; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow. - Information quoted from the WIKI

As a WordPress user, you may have noticed that you can insert a more tag to your posts so that only the text before this tag appears on the archive or category pages. By using the more tag, more post entries can appear on each page while still utilizing an introductory paragraph for each post. Then, when a visitor clicks on the more tag, they are sent to the full post where they can continue to read the article. However, the default WordPress more tag simply says (more...). In the following article, I explain how to change the more tag text to a text that is more meaningful like "click here to read on!"

The following article explains how to turn off WordPress trackbacks and pingbacks. In most cases, a WordPress Blog author might decide to disable comments if they are getting an overwhelming amount of spam. However, sometimes the spam can still get through in the form of trackbacks or pingbacks, enabling an abusive user to spam links as comments on the affected blog. Luckily this feature can be easily turned off and or totally eliminated entirely from your WordPress blog in just a few steps.

Do you publish WordPress posts on a regular basis which use the same structure? Maybe you have a signature or picture you would like to add to every post? You can eliminate the time spent going back and forth between posts doing copy and paste functions by simply creating a post template. A post template can automatically add text, images or code to every new post you create. Currently, I don't use a WordPress post template on this site. However, I have set it up for others who use specific images and signatures that need to be added to the content of every post.

Adding addtional buttons or tools to WordPress WYSIWYG TinyMCE visual editor: Like most people, you probably enjoy using the built in TinyMCE visual editor that is included with WordPress. However, by default the included WYSIWYG editor lacks some essential tools like font color, font size, font family and more. The good news is that most of these tools are already included in WordPress but are simply not active. The following tutorial shows you how to add additional buttons to include these tools to your WordPress visual editor.

WordPress is perfect to use as a personal blogging platform. But did you know that it can also be used as a complete Web Site replacement? By using the Static Front Page option built into WordPress version 2.1 and later, one can literally turn a Blog into a Website. In addition, the user can still retain the Blog Post structure.

This tutorial will show you how to place google adsense ads between articles in your phpbb forum. When finished, Your forum will automatically show one ad after the first post within each article and continue on any additional pages stemming from that article.

My Top Picks for Essential WordPress Plugins. Choosing the right plugins for your WordPress site can be overwhelming with so many options available. Since I started using WordPress as my blogging platform, I've experimented with various plugins to enhance functionality and aesthetics. Over time, I've curated a list of the best plugins that are current, reliable, and highly recommended.

This tutorial explains how to add Google AdSense ads to your WordPress category and archive listing result pages. While plugins exist for this purpose, manually adding ads gives you full control over placement and appearance. The process is simple and should only take a few minutes to implement.

How to Enable or Disable WordPress Comments? You might be asking: How do I disable comments on WordPress without a plugin? How can I enable comments for all posts?

WordPress Adding Banners: This tutorial explains how to add a banner to a single page or set of pages in WordPress. This is particularly useful for those that have the desire to display a specific banner on a per page basis. For example, you might want one page to present a banner but do not want the banner to appear on your whole site. This can easily be accomplished in just a few steps, so let's get started.

After installing the WordPress WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin, I needed to make a few modifications so the cart would work exactly the way I wanted. One of those changes involved restricting which countries customers could select for shipping.

If you run a small online business, you may not want to ship products worldwide. Limiting orders to specific countries can simplify logistics, reduce risk, and make shipping costs easier to manage.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to modify the WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin so that only the countries you want to ship to appear in the checkout country list.

Manually adding AdSense to WordPress posts is a relatively simple task that can be accomplished within just a couple of minutes. In this tutorial, we cover the process of adding the code to the singlepost.php. This will allow us to display advertisements on every post only when the post is individually viewed. There are many places within the singlepost.php to add the code, for the sake of simplicity, we are going to cover the hotspot.

Moving the Kubrick sidebar to the left side: The default Kubrick template that comes with WordPress is great straight out of the box. However, some people prefer to have their pages and posts laid out differently. One change I've seen many wish to implement is a left sidebar. By default, the sidebar is located on the right side of the page rather than the left. The following tutorial explains how to easily move the sidebar from right to left.

WordPress 2.1 (codename "Ella") has just been released from WordPress.org, providing many key improvements. This release symbolizes a major landmark in blogging software development. It looks like it might be time for us to do an upgrade. Just a few of the awesome improvements are listed below:

How to Add a Horizontal Navigation Menu in WordPress: A horizontal navigation menu is one of the most common and essential elements of any website. It usually appears at the top of the site and contains links to your most important pages, such as Home, About, Blog, and Contact. A well-structured navigation menu helps visitors explore your content easily and improves the overall user experience. Fortunately, most modern WordPress themes support horizontal menus out of the box using the built-in menu system.

The drama of WordPress word spacing issues: When I first installed WordPress blogging software, I was impressed and thought to myself, this is much better than most of the previous open source blogging software I've used. As I started to become more familiar with WordPress, I began to find some small bugs and quirks. Most of these bugs and quirks were fixed with simple update versions of WordPress and third party plugins.