Justyna Dorsz

WordPress

WordPress – Useful Plugins

I’ve had this blog for a few months now, and during that time I installed and uninstalled a lot of plugins. I am sharing here a list of plugins that I found useful.

  1. Jetpack
    I use it to monitor if my website is working. Any time it’s down, I get an email. That’s how I knew that there were some issues with memory.
  2. Site Kit by Google
    For insights on how well my website is performing and what are people searching for when they visit my website.
  3. Simple Social Icons
    The simplest plugin to add social icons: Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.
  4. Taxonomy List Widget
    On the right side of this website, you see a list of my most popular tags. This is displayed by Taxonomy List Widget.
  5. UpdraftPlust – Backup/Restore
    I use it for backups before any major changes on my website.
  6. WordPress Popular Posts
    To show my 10 most popular posts in the side panel.
  7. Akismet Anti-Spam
    Even my website has a problem with spam — mostly people posting links to their online stores. This plugin stops all that.
  8. FooGallery
    For when I need to show a gallery of images. I tested many gallery plugins and this is the only one that worked how I wanted.
  9. Really Simple SSL
    Awesome plugin, saved me hours of work. I was trying to fix SSL by editing files on the server — I really didn’t know what I was doing. This plugin fixed everything automatically.
  10. Jetpack: Related Posts
    I wanted to show related posts under each entry. I thought it was going to be complicated, but with this plugin, it took all of 15 seconds.

Someone tried to reset my password

Yesterday, I received this email:

WordPress Password Reset Attempt
WordPress – an attempt to reset my password.

Which was strange because I didn’t request a password reset. I checked the IP from which the request originated on en.asytech.cn website and received the following info:

Looks like someone from that same IP address was trying to attack other websites too.

However, I use Cloudflare, which means it’s easy to block malicious IP addresses. If you don’t know what Cloudflare is, it’s a company that makes it possible to route all traffic through them. It helps to load your website faster and also protects it from attacks. They have a free tier, which is sufficient for such a small website as mine. If you have a website and don’t use Cloudflare you really should — all you have to do is change nameservers, and it takes just a few minutes.

Anyway, if you use Cloudflare, then you can set rules for IP addresses. So, I added a rule to block all incoming traffic from a range of IP addresses. One attempt is not a problem, but I wasn’t going to wait for more tries.

To block a range of IP addresses, just go to Firewall ⇾ Tools, and add a new rule:

Block a range of IP Addresses in Cloudflare
Block a range of IP Addresses in Cloudflare

Fiverr Failure

I hired a web developer on Fiverr to migrate my website. It was a disaster.

If you read my blog then you know that my brother and I make games. I maintain a website about them and about our little studio: manichyena.com. It’s hosted on Squarespace and I’ve wanted to migrate it to WordPress but I was so busy that I’ve been putting it off. Three weeks ago I finally hired someone on Fiverr to do the migration. From the start, it was a disaster — instead of saving time, I wasted more time.

Here’s the story of how it all went down. I found someone who had a good rating and I read all his reviews, seemed legit. I contacted him, he accepted the job. We agreed on payment — $70, and he said he needed 7 days to do the migration.

After 6 days, meaning a day before the deadline, he marked the migration as done and ready for review. So I checked the migrated website. It’s difficult to even describe what a mess it was. I didn’t know how to start explaining to him everything that was wrong or missing. It took me 2 hours to take 38 screenshots and describe all the issues. Some of those issues were: a strange white bar at the top of the pages, a lot of formatting issues, texts that were copied from the original website were not copied in their entirety, stretched images that looked weird, links and buttons not working or in wrong places, 3 pages were not migrated at all (out of 11).

For example, this is how a newsletter sign up section should have looked:

And this is how it looked when he migrated it:

Not only was the image cut from the top and bottom but most importantly the input box and the button needed to be centered. He kept insisting that it looked right on his computer screen. I told him it needed to look good on all computer screens. I don’t think he understood me because he offered to prove to me that it looked right by letting me connect to his computer and see his screen.

There were many issues like the one above. I wasted so much time writing to him about all those problems. I could have just made the migration myself in that time. After another week of him working on it, the website still looked bad but he kept saying that everything was fixed. I canceled the order.

He told me that I wasted his time and he was going to report me to the Fiverr support team. And that was that.

I think I will migrate manichyena.com by myself instead of trying to find someone else. But I am not completely discouraged. Next time I will hire someone on Fiverr Pro instead of the normal Fiverr. I should have done that from the start but all the developers in the Fiverr Pro section had queues of orders already and the developer that I hired had really good reviews. Now I know I should have hired a professional even if it meant waiting a few weeks.

Squarespace vs WordPress – The Costs

I manage two websites:

I will be moving manichyena.com to WordPress in the upcoming days. The main reason is the financial one. Let’s look at the costs.

This website runs on WordPress, which is free. And is hosted on DigitalOcean, which costs $5 per month. I also pay $1 per month for automatic backups. To sum up, I pay $78.56 per year, including taxes.

On the other hand, manichyena.com runs on Squarespace. There are a few price plans and we needed the Business Plan which costs $216 per year. Including taxes, it’s $265.68. There are no automatic backups.

So, Squarespace costs $187 more per year than WordPress + DigitalOcean. It’s not that much if you consider just one year. But we plan to keep our website for years. It’s possible we will still have it in 10 or more years and the savings add up. In 10 years we will have saved $1870 by moving from Squarespace to WordPress on DigitalOcean.

By the way, here’s a referral link for DigitalOcean. If you use it then we both get some hosting credit.

WordPress on DigitalOcean – Error establishing a database connection

Today this website wasn’t working for a few hours.

My website is built with WordPress and is hosted on DigitalOcean. They were doing server maintenance — usually, that does not cause any issues but this time it did.

When I tried to access my website, I got this error:

Wo
Error establishing a database connection

I found out that the issue might be that the MySQL server was turned of.

To fix that I logged in to my droplet web console and ran:

sudo netstat -plt

It showed me programs listening for connections. However, MySQL was not on the list:

WordPress - MySQL is not working

Since MySQL was not listed, it was not running. I needed to start MySQL:

sudo systemctl start mysql

To check if MySQL started I ran the netstat command again. And this time MySQL was on the list:

WordPress - MySQL is running

That fixed the issue for me.