Site Not Available on GoDaddy Hosting

GoDaddy Hosted Website – Unable to connect

Can’t establish a connection to the server at www.***online.com.

• The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
• If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
• If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

Slow TTFB, Timeouts, No Connection, Database Errors on GoDaddy Hosting

Time to first byte served (TTFB) often 15 seconds and longer, another 15 t0 60 seconds before the full page is loaded, Google bot page load over 4 seconds, “unable to connect to WordPress database”, unable to connect to website. Some of the ‘normal’ performance issues experienced by a client’s site hosted with GoDaddy.

Does GoDaddy Restore Website Database

 GoDaddy Restores Website Database Without Asking?

I wonder how many others have noticed something odd happening with their WordPress sites hosted on GoDaddy. By odd, I mean you make changes e.g. delete fix or captured 404 errors, activate a new plugin or update a plugin and so on, then the next day you go back to the site, and all the changes are gone – the same things fixed yesterday still exist?

There are only two things I can think of to cause this to happen;

• Sites using distributed servers are not updating (unlikely with basic shared hosting)
• the hosting company (GoDaddy) is restoring the site and/or database from a backup (most likely)

WordPress 3.6 Due

WordPress 3.6 Delayed but Still Due in April 2013

The release of WordPress 3.6 has been delayed for 2 weeks, but is still expected for public release by April 29th! The release was pushed back to allow beta testers more time to find and report bugs in WP 3.6 core. As far as new features go,  no more new features or functions will get added after March 27. At this point the beta will be released for developer testing.

What to Expect in WP 3.6

These are some of the possible new features we may see in WP 3.6

Post formats UI: Post formats UI in WordPress 3.6 will change. The UI (User Interface) itself will be revised to help users better understand a particular post format.

Several sources of inspiration will be worked in, in particular CF Post Formats by Alex King, wordpress.com UI and the famous Tumblr interface. What we can expect from WordPress 3.6 (webdesignerdepot.com)

How will this affect us? If the changes to the media manager are anything to go by, the change will not be good for those of us using WordPress for a website CMS. We can probably expect another dumbed-down interface (which hopefully WYSIWYG editor developers will be on top of before this version is released).

Another WP3.5 Site Backdated

One More WordPress 3.5 Series Site Goes Back

I’ve just had to backdate another WordPress 3.5 series (WP3.5.1) site to WP 3.4.2. This time it was for the media manager which the client decided he really couldn’t live with.

“I’ve got peculiar links all over my blog to posts that don’t exist, e.g. mydomain/anotherdomain/post-title/!” “Has my site been hacked?”

After a quick front-end survey of the site, my answer; “No sir, your site hasn’t been hacked. WordPress is adding your domain to incompletely formatted outgoing links in your posts.”

“When you add outgoing links, do you always include the full http: //www etc string?” “It’s easy to fix, just go back to every post with outgoing links and make sure the full http:// is included. “

“But I’ve got hundreds of posts, isn’t there something else we can do? I never had to do that before. I thought WordPress did it for me!”

“Yes sir, you can revert back to the last version of WordPress that didn’t have that feature!”

“I don’t know how to, how much will you charge to do it for me?”

Don’t Update to WordPress 3.5

WordPress 3.5 Causes Problems – Don’t Update

Be very careful before updating to WordPress 3.5, it may break vital systems. A number of plugins and themes are partly or totally incompatible with WordPress 3.5 at this time. If you have advanced features and commercial themes wait until you are certain these are fully WP3.5 compliant before upgrading, or you could lose these functions, and lose business as a result.

If you are starting a new blog or website WordPress 3.5 is fine… If your existing blog uses a default WordPress theme like TwentyEleven, TentyTwelve or TwentyTen, and only default or 3.5 proven plugins, then probably it’s OK to update. If you have extended functions on the front end, be wary, be very wary!

Auto Hyperlinks

Now we Get Auto Hyperlinks – Bad News

Text gets turned into hyperlinks automatically. I just discovered this annoying thing that’s part of the latest version of WordPress used by WordPress.com – WordPress 3.5. Type the text for a URL and the darn thing turns into a hyperlink when published. That’s right, you don’t have to click on the link function in the editor, so no options to add target info and title… No options not to create the hyperlink…  Arrgghhh!

Maybe it’s handy for the terminally lazy, but it’s bad news for SEO. And what about the bloggers who write about malware and bad websites, and want to tell readers about these bad addresses? They don’t want visitors to click a hyperlink, just want to inform people about the bad address. With auto-hyperlinks the information becomes an active link!

For example, this hacker information “Exploit attempt on WordPress GD Star Rating plugin”

WordPress 3.5 Image Manager

New Image Manager for WordPress 3.5

The new WordPress 3.5 image manager makes a change. First seen on WordPress.com (except for those of us who used the beta versions of WP 3.5 on test setups). I wasn’t sure how I felt about this new image manager at first.  It looks good, and the thumbnails are a decent size – and they resize somewhat when re-sizing the browser window. It’s easy to use too. But initially there seemed something was missing – the image URL, or link to the image. (I should have looked closer – or worn my specs!)

Having got used to the image URL in the link field, from the earlier image manager, I was looking for “http” etc, right clicking the thumbnails and everything else possible, and not finding the link… Then finally, staring me in the face – well almost – tucked away in the bottom right hand corner is the link manager.

Stop Timthumb Attacks at Server

Stop Timthumb Attacks Before WordPress

All owners of busy, and not so busy, self-hosted WordPress sites and blogs will know all about timthumb scripting attacks on their site. If the site has the latest up to date version of the vulnerable files, that’s as far as the attack will go.

But constant timthumb attacks are still annoying and use up resources with 404 page not found responses.

Stop Timthumb Attacks at Front Door

Here’s a way to stop these annoying attacks at the front door, before they even get to WordPress. The following script shown below added to your website or blog .htaccess file will prevent nearly all timthumb RFI attacks from wasting server resources.

Host on WordPress.com Network

Host Your Site on the WordPress.com Server Network

Would YOU like to host your site on the WordPress.com server network. Sorry, that’s a rhetorical question. There can be only one answer – YES. Well, if I’m reading the adverts correctly, it’s possible.

WordPress.com VIP Services

It seems there’s a whole bunch of things available for Self-hosted WordPress, from several different levels of hosting to a range of expert WordPress support services

Cache Pre-load Impact on Performance

Cache Pre-load Improves Google Page Load

Using a cache pre-load system can improve Google crawl page load speed substantially as clearly shown in the infographic below. Google considers page load in it’s SERP algorithm as an indicator of site quality: Where two similar ranked sites exist, the site with faster load speed will usually get better SERP than a slower site. With this in mind surely it’s a good idea to make the effort to improve page load speed as much as possible.

Page load speed can be improved in a number of ways;  moving the site to a better hosting service, optimising the site technically, including getting rid of unnecessary plugins, keeping image size as small as possible, and using an effective caching system are some of the things we can do.

No matter how well all the other technical aspects are improved, caching the site, and especially pre-loading the cache, will make a big difference to page load speed.