Category: WordPress

WordPress shows a 404 page when visitor navigate to a non existent page. To redirect visitor to a specific page, say home page when visiting non existent page, edit functions.php file in your themes folder, then add following code to it.

function redirect_404_to_page() {
    if( is_404() ) {
        header( "Location: https://your-domain.tld/page/" , true, 404);
        exit;
    }
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'redirect_404_to_page' );

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If you lost your WordPress user password, you can use forget password link on the WordPress login screen to reset the password. For any reason, if you were unable to receive the password reset email, you have to reset your password by editing the wp_users table in MySQL Database or by using the WordPress command line tool (wpcli).

If you don’t have wp-cli installed, you can install it with

For root users

cd && wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar
mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/wp

If you are logged in as a normal user, run the following command

mkdir ~/bin
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar -O ~/bin/wp-cli.phar
alias wp="php -d memory_limit=-1 ~/bin/wp-cli.phar"

To make wp command available when using as normal user, you need to run

alias wp="php -d memory_limit=-1 ~/bin/wp-cli.phar"

To make it permanent, you can edit the file ~/.bashrc and add the above line to the end of the file, so it gets executed whenever you log in to the server.

To list all users, you can run

wp user list

To list all users with administrator role, run

wp user list --role=administrator

To reset the password for a user, run

wp user update USERNAME --user_pass='NEW_PW_HERE'

Reset the WordPress user password by editing the wp_users table using phpMyAdmin

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Getting your site to load faster is very important. Bounce rate (visitors leaving your website) on your website increases as load time increases. Many WordPress themes, and plugins add extra javascript/css resources to your page, so each page has to load these resources, making the site slow. It is better to use minimum plugins required. More plugins make the site slower.

To check the speed of your website, you can use speed testing sites like

https://gtmetrix.com

Once you scan your website with gtmetrix, you will get some useful report, that shows how much time it takes to load your website and what you can do to improve your site speed.

Here are some things you can do to improve your site speed.

1) Opimize Images

Make sure all images used in your web site is of proper size. If you want to show a 500 px width image on your web page, don’t use a bigger picture. Just use an image with proper size. This can avoid browser based scaling.

2) Disable loading of unwanted JavaScript/Fonts

WP Asset Clean Up plugin can help disable loading of unwanted resoucres.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-asset-clean-up/

3) Datbase Cleanup

Every time you save a page, WordPress keeps a copy of the page, over time, your database can grow bigger. Using a plugin to clean up the database can speed up your website.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wps-cleaner/

4) Analyze Database Query

Use Query Monitor Plugin to find out which SQL query is slowing up your website. This plugin shows how much time it takes to load a page.

5) Disable Unused Plugins

Using plugins can slow down your website as it adds more code to execute every time someone visits your website. Remove any unused, not essential plugins. Many features can be implemented without using a plugin by editing theme files or PHP code. Plugins are usually created by third-party developers, they may not be secure or bug free like core WordPress files.

6) Cache Pages

You can use a caching Plugin like W3 Total Cache to speed to WordPress load time.

To find the version of WordPress, you can check the file

wp-includes/version.php

Inside the file look for variable $wp_version

You can do this with the grep command

grep wp_version wp-includes/version.php

Using WP CLI

You can use WordPress CLI to find the version of WordPress with the command

wp core version

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If your WordPress sites shows 404 page when accessing URLs, this is because .htaccess file is missing. WordPress uses .htaccess file to generate SEO-friendly URLs when using Apache or LiteSpeed webserver.

To fix the 404 error on WordPress, create a file with the name .htaccess and copy the following content.

If WordPress is installed on the root of your website, use the following .htaccess file

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

For WordPress installed on a subfolder, use

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
RewriteBase /FOLDER/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /FOLDER/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

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