As of version 5.5, WordPress automatically generates an XML sitemap for your site’s content. The sitemap benefits your site by providing a simple “map” of all posts, pages, categories, tags, and more. This is useful for bots and humans, and is considered beneficial for SEO and even GEO. Even better, WordPress makes it easy to customize your sitemap as desired. For example, if you want to include or exclude certain pages, or even disable the WP sitemap completely, there are programmatic techniques (i.e., code snippets) for making it happen.

Anyone familiar with WordPress probably has heard of plugins. They can add new functionality to any WordPress-powered site. But probably not everyone is familiar with two other types of plugins, referred to as Must-Use plugins and Drop-In plugins. Yes there are three types of plugins for WordPress: regular plugins, must-use plugins, and drop-in plugins. Each of these enables you to extend and modify WordPress features with a few clicks. This DigWP post explains the difference between all three. And as a bonus, explains a fourth way to extend WordPress, via the theme functions file. Let’s dig in..

This is a common question I get from folks in the WordPress community. How can I “lock things down” and prevent any changes to plugins, themes, and WordPress core files. For example, how to prevent any themes and/or plugins from being updated or deleted, and how to prevent any new plugins from being installed. This is useful for certain projects where it’s necessary to lock a website to a static version. Fortunately, WordPress makes this super easy with a couple of PHP constants. Let’s take a quick look..

I’ve written numerous tutorials explaining how to troubleshoot WordPress, plugins, email, and more. When investigating issues, diagnosing problems, and hunting bugs, troubleshooting is a critical core skill for any web developer. To help readers level up their tool belt, here’s a quick round-up of free plugins to help troubleshoot any of your WordPress projects.

A common question for new WordPress users is, “what’s the difference between categories and tags?” Like everyone knows what a “category” is, but the idea of “tags” can seem very similar. And then you throw in related WordPress concepts like “taxonomy”, and things can get confusing very quickly. But no worries, it’s really not that complicated. Let’s break it down..

I work from home so can afford to leave tabs open for each of my WordPress sites. That way I can jump on anytime and update or add new content very quickly. The problem I kept running into is that WordPress automatically logs out users after 48 hours. Which means I have to log back in every day even when it’s not necessary. So I needed a way to stay logged in to WordPress indefinitely. Fortunately WordPress is very flexible and easy to customize, and the login duration can be changed via several different methods.

Quick tip: how to disable embeds for any URL(s). The other day I was adding URLs to a draft post in WordPress. Some of the URLs were for Twitter tweets. Checking a preview of the post on the front end, I was surprised that WordPress had automatically embedded the actual tweet in place of the URL. After a few minutes searching for a way to disable the automatic embedded tweet, I remembered about WordPress oEmbed (now referred to as Embeds), which I’ve actually written about in several tutorials. Turns out the solution is dead simple.

There are many books and tutorials that share useful code snippets for WordPress. For example, you can find hundreds of custom functions right here at DigWP.com. You can also find them in my WordPress books, tutorials, and code snippets. For many code snippets and custom functions, the usage instructions will say something like: