Category: <span>WordPress</span>

Posted on August 23, 2018November 28, 2018 by Halicarnassian — Leave a comment

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Week 3

Further WordPress SEO Setup, Styling

More settings completed on All-In-One SEO Pack plugin.
Left margin changed on blog entry lists.
Added Greek meander divider to Category, Archive & Author pages on Ancient Greek Keyboard.
Hid some widgets on Category, Archive & Author pages.
Changed text on Add To Cart button (to Buy Product).

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Week 2

WordPress SEO Plugin Changed, Fixed Bingbot Blocking Error, Styling For Handheld

Changed file permissions on WP-CONFIG.PHP.
Deleted Yoast SEO plugin & installed All-In-One SEO Pack plugin. The reason for the change was that the creators have crippled the latest version of Yoast SEO — it no longer allows the site owner to NOINDEX specific pages in its XML sitemap. Since the Cancelled Transaction, Checkout, and Thank You pages should not be indexed, Yoast SEO was unsuitable for this site’s needs.
Monitored page indexing on Google. Indexed pages reached 7 on the first evening, then fell to 2 a couple of days later (probably due to delayed propagation across Google’s servers). As of today, the number of indexed pages was 8.
Plugin mistakenly was blocking Bingbot. Contacted plugin support & problem was resolved.
Submenus on handheld devices were not displaying due to theme update. Was unable to use CSS to target the issue. Therefore, created a second menu for use on handheld devices only.
Floated the hamburger menu on handheld to the left.
Media attachment pages on Ancient Greek Keyboard were being indexed by Google, which is apparently bad for SEO. Changed Media Attachment settings in All-In-One SEO plugin, then set up redirects for media attachments with code in Child Theme > FUNCTIONS.PHP.

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 8 (Site brought live)

WordPress Site Brought Live, SEO Plugins Activated & Set Up, Styling

Deactivated the Coming Soon plugin.
Set ROBOTS.TXT to allow search engine indexing (ie: Unchecked “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” in settings.)
Activated Yoast SEO plugin.
Set XML sitemap to not index Cancelled Transaction, Checkout, and Thank You pages. (Really? This setting page could not be found in the plugin’s administration area a few days later!)
Added site to Google Webmaster Tools. Uploaded verification file, verified & submitted Yoast-generated XML sitemaps.
Activated statistics plugin on Ancient Greek Keyboard.
Edited styles to center text on 404 Error pages.
Edited styles to change button color to navy.
Within 3-4 hours of adding the site to Webmaster tools, 5 pages had already appeared on Google’s search engine.
Added meta descriptions to a few indexed pages.

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 7

WordPress Security, Limits On Number Of Post Revisions

Site security work.
WP-CONFIG.PHP edited to limit number of page & post revisions to 5 (in order to keep the database to a reasonable size).
Removed HTACCESS rule preventing others from viewing Ancient Greek Keyboard site. (Although at this point, all they could see was the Coming Soon page.)
Researched sFTP.

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 6

Final WordPress Shopping Cart Adjustments

Set real product prices & shipping costs on all “Add To Cart” buttons.
Tested all “Add to Cart” buttons on Ancient Greek Keyboard site.
Deleted first WP automatic blog post.

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 5

WordPress Styling & Site Security

Minor styling on sidebar widget spacing.
New transparent favicon with Theano Didot font created & uploaded.
Created Ancient Greek Keyboard site image for use on PayPal’s site before & after checkout. PayPal allows this image to be 480 px wide X 90 px high. Some confusion here because PayPal allows the merchant to upload a logo image, but this is only viewable by the merchant when logged into PayPal.

However, for a logo viewable by customers during checkout, the image must be uploaded to the Media Library & its URL must be added to one of the settings in the shopping cart plugin. (NOTE: PayPal will only display a customized site image if it’s served from an HTTPS site)
Additional security with HTACCESS.

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 4

Setup For PayPal, Favicons, Apple Touch Icons

Previous day’s blunder: Forgot to add a # sign in the CSS when targeting a CSS ID for one of the sidebar widgets, and erroneously attributed the failure to change the widget’s style to the host’s caching system.
Changed most business information on PayPal business account to that of ancientgreekkeyboard.com.
Revised product title on all shopping cart buttons.
First test purchase.
Gravatar created on new WordPress.com account.
Created new administrator with new gravatar & site email.
Fixed widget style for Single Blog Posts (ie: product listing and cart should appear under the blog navigation in the sidebar).
Created favicon. Site logo is too detailed to see on a 16 px X 16 px image, so used π (for παλαιός: old, ancient). Experienced a little trouble finding a site that converts PNG favicons to ICO. Must explicitly ask Google to search for this.
Apple touch icons created, uploaded and HTACCESS code added.
Screenshot of site with Child Theme styles enabled & added to the Child Theme folder.

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 3

Site Security, WordPress Shopping Cart Setup, Styling

Blocked all other IPs with HTACCESS until the Ancient Greek Keyboard site was ready to go live.
Added short product description & product image for side navbar widgets.
Added product name for all “Add To Cart” buttons.
Experienced more difficulty with final styling of side navbar widgets due to caching. Must turn off caching in cPanel with the Supercaching tool for style changes to be applied.
Activated several plugins and matched their settings to that of the development site.

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 2

Live WordPress Site Synchronized To Development Site

Logged into WP.
Matched live site settings (on AncientGreekKeyboard.com) to that of development site.
Additional HTACCESS security.
Installed Storefront theme.
Deleted all other themes.
Uploaded Child Theme with HTTP URLs commented out.
Uploaded background images to Media Library.
Stylesheet updated to use live site’s background images (ie: so that site does not use development site images).
Installed & activated WP Google Fonts plugin & set H1 tags to Caesar Dressing font.
Experienced caching problem while trying to style the top logos. Later discovered this was a host caching issue, and had to be fixed with cPanel.
Copied & pasted all pages from development site to live site.
Set menu & submenus.
Uploaded & inserted media to pages (ie: so that pages load images from HTTPS source).
Deleted unneeded plugins & installed required plugins.
Discovered several countries were trying to access the site within the last 24 hours despite ROBOTS.TXT request not to index the site.
Activated HTML sitemap plugin.
Set up HTML Sitemap page. Did not index 14 (Cancelled Transaction), 16 (Checkout) and 27 (Thank You) pages.
Activated Contact Form 7 plugin & set up Contact form.
Set up widgets.

In retrospect, it would take less time to use the Duplicator plugin or the Migrator tool from cPanel to copy the development site over to the live site.

(Though the advantage of manual migration is that problems can be more easily dealt with one at a time. And for a small site, the process is not too unwieldy.)

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 1

Domain & Host Registration, WordPress Installation, Email & SSL Setup

I. Registrar (Namecheap.com)

Set up account & contact information.
Purchased domain name (AncientGreekKeyboard.com).
Turned off Parking Page.

II. Hosting Company (SiteGround.com)

Set up account & contact information.
Set up cPanel & FTP passwords.
Located DNS records for hosted site.

III. Registrar

Pasted DNS address from the hosting company into the Custom DNS nameservers.
Clicked checkmark to save the new DNS addresses.

IV. Hosting Company

Reviewed online directions for installing WordPress manually.
Accessed cPanel.
Downloaded WordPress installation ZIP file. Unzipped it.
Set up WordPress database & recorded database credentials.
Added these credentials to WP-CONFIG.PHP and saved the file.
Uploaded WordPress files & folders to Host.
Manually installed WordPress.
Logged into WordPress.
Installed & activated the Coming Soon plugin.
Set up email accounts on cPanel.
1. Accessed cPanel.
2. Mail > Email Accounts
3. Set up email address, password, size.
4. Created email account.
5. Beside new account, clicked More > Access Webmail.
6. Chose Default Webmail Application.
7. Sent email configuration information to a different email address.
8. Tested email to make sure it was working correctly.
Set up SSL on WordPress
1. Activated SSL with “Let’s Encrypt” on cPanel.
2. Forced SSL login via code in WP-CONFIG.PHP.
3. Uploaded WP-CONFIG.PHP.
4. Logged into WP and updated WordPress Address (URL) & Site Address (URL) to HTTPS.
5. Installed & activated Velvet Blues Update URLs plugin.
6. Clicked “UPDATE URLS” link & updated links on WP from HTTP to HTTPS.
7. Used HTACCESS to redirect HTTP to HTTPS.
8. Verified Permalinks were set to HTTPS & were using the desired format.
9. Verified that HTTP links on the site were correctly redirecting to HTTPS.
10. Manually updated STYLE.CSS so that background images loaded from HTTPS rather than the development site (Did this on Day 2).

UPDATE: In hindsight, the following actions should have been performed on this day:

HTACCESS should have been set at this point to deny access to the site to everyone but myself until the the site was ready to go live.
The WWW version of the site should have been created instead of the non-WWW version. (The site must be WWW if it is ever configured for Cloudflare.)

Category: WordPress

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Week 3

Further WordPress SEO Setup, Styling

Other posts in this series:

Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Week 2

WordPress SEO Plugin Changed, Fixed Bingbot Blocking Error, Styling For Handheld

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Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 8 (Site brought live)

WordPress Site Brought Live, SEO Plugins Activated & Set Up, Styling

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Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 7

WordPress Security, Limits On Number Of Post Revisions

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Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 6

Final WordPress Shopping Cart Adjustments

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Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 5

WordPress Styling & Site Security

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Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 4

Setup For PayPal, Favicons, Apple Touch Icons

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Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 3

Site Security, WordPress Shopping Cart Setup, Styling

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Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 2

Live WordPress Site Synchronized To Development Site

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Manual eCommerce Site Setup On SiteGround: Day 1

Domain & Host Registration, WordPress Installation, Email & SSL Setup

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