Benoit Luisier

Self taught web developer and a travel addict , I share on Novo-Media my tips about the more "techy" part of topics like web development, Wordpress, Web optimisation or SEO. I'm also the creator of the google maps Wordpress plugin Novo-Map

Why and how to backup your WordPress site (the automatic way)

If there is one important thing on a WordPress site that is too often left aside, it is backups. I know that at the beginning, many people are already struggling with themes and plugins, trying to have a functional WP site… However, once your WordPress site/blog is doing more or less what you expect ...

Understanding and improving Google’s Core Web Vitals on your WordPress site

If you're interested in SEO or use Google Search Console to check your pages rankings, you've probably already seen or heard about Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are new metrics introduced and used by Google to measure the quality of the user experience on your site. But the main reason why you ...

Gutenberg WP plugin development: wp.data module and the WordPress REST API

When I created my Novo-Map WordPress plugin, I always found the information I needed fairly easily on the web. WordPress is such a popular tool that when I got stuck on something, I would usually just google it a little to easily find an answer to my question. But the arrival of Gutenberg is ...

The best WordPress plugins that we install on most of our WP sites

As you may have noticed, there are a lot of WordPress plugins available (more than 58'000 at the end of 2020 to be exact). This abundance of plugins is of course the strength but also the weakness of the WordPress CMS. On the one hand, if you are looking for a feature for your WP site, there is ...

Create custom Gutenberg blocks for WordPress with the Lazy blocks plugin

As I told you in my previous blog post, I have finally switched to the new WP text editor also known as Gutenberg. This editor is clearly the future of WordPress (whether you like it or not) and will soon be more than just a text editor. For example, what you still know as Widgets will soon be ...

Moving from the WP Classic Editor to Gutenberg: my experience

Gutenberg is the new text editor for WordPress, and its release (with WordPress 5.0) has been the talk of the town, to say the least! I had already written (in summer 2018) a blog post about Gutenberg to explain in detail how it works and if it would break your website ;) (by the way, if you don't ...

WP image compressor plugins: Ewwww VS shortpixel VS smushit VS others

One of the key points to improve the loading speed and the Core Web Vitals of a WP site is the image optimization. Indeed, most of the data downloaded by the browsers of Internet users are actually images. It is therefore very important to optimize this type of file as much as possible. I have ...

Cloudflare: a free CDN to speed up your WordPress site

When we started writing our articles in French and English on our websites, we soon found ourselves confronted with a problem: Our websites are VERY slow from countries far away from Europe (Australia, USA, Asia...) That's pretty easy to understand. As the servers of our sites are located in France, ...

Introduction to email marketing and newsletter tools for WordPress

Newsletters or more generally emailing sometimes have this image a little "old-fashioned" and outdated... And yet I promise you that good old emails are far from being dead! They might even come back very strongly in the next few years (it's not me who says so, it's Pat Flynn ;) ). On the other ...

All you need to know about big images handling in WordPress 5.3

Images account for more than 50% of the volume of data that passes between the browsers of people surfing the web and the servers that host websites. If images are not optimized or poorly implemented on a website, they can slow down page load time enormously! This is why it is very important to ...