WPSSO – Why You Shouldn’t Upload Small Images

December 9, 2017Updated on April 23, 2024 JS Morisset WordPress, WPSSO Core

Once in a while a WPSSO Core user will ask me how to disable notices from WPSSO for small images — they reason that images uploaded to their Media library are sized correctly beforehand, and they cannot re-upload larger images without significantly altering their content layout (including huge images, instead of smaller ones, in their post content). For example, if a user requires a 300x200px image for their content, they upload a 300x200px image to the Media library. What they don’t realize is that WordPress isn’t meant to be used this way and they’re breaking an essential WordPress feature by doing this — not to mention that WPSSO will probably reject the image for being too small for Facebook Open Graph meta tags and Google Schema markup requirements. :-)

WordPress and several 3rd party plugins provide different image sizes based on the resolution of the viewing device (aka responsive images). For example, a 300x200px image in your content will look blurry on high resolution screens (almost all current mobile phones, tablets, and laptops) because the browser must “upscale” the image to 450x300px or 600x400px in order to fill a 300x200px space on these high resolution screens. WordPress includes additional image markup in the webpage to provide alternative sizes (300x200px, 450x300px, and 600x400px for example), which allows the browser to choose the appropriate image based on the screen resolution. If you upload a 300x200px image to the Media library, WordPress will not be able to offer these additional image sizes, and WPSSO will not be able to use this image for most social sites and search engines (which have minimum image size requirements).

So, what should you do if you want a 300x200px image in your content?

That’s what WordPress image sizes are for. ;-)

New Plugin – JSM Force SSL / HTTPS

January 3, 2017Updated on April 22, 2024 JS Morisset Plugins

When searching for a plugin on WordPress.org, I’m always surprised by the number of results — many plugins appear to be similar, or even identical, but if you look at their PHP code, those similarities quickly evaporate. This was the case recently when I was looking for a simple plugin to redirect HTTP URLs to HTTPS. Some plugins were way too basic / incomplete in their logic, while others looked like a pile of spaghetti code with the kitchen sink thrown in there somewhere. :)

JSM Force SSL / HTTPS is my take on a simple WordPress plugin to redirect HTTP URLs to HTTPS. ;-)

New Plugin – JSM Show Post Meta

August 1, 2016Updated on April 23, 2024 JS Morisset Plugins

Wondering about the post meta your theme and/or plugins might be creating?

Want to find the name of a specific post meta key?

Need some help debugging your post meta?

The JSM Show Post Meta plugin displays all post meta (aka custom fields) keys and their unserialized values in a metabox at the bottom of post editing pages.

There are no plugin settings — simply install and activate the plugin.

WPSSO RRSSB – Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons

July 28, 2015Updated on April 23, 2024 JS Morisset WPSSO RRSSB

WPSSO Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons (WPSSO RRSSB) version 0.2 has just been released this morning.

This new extension plugin for WPSSO adds Ridiculously Responsive Social Sharing Buttons to posts / pages, custom post types, bbPress, BuddyPress, WooCommerce product pages, and many more. The sharing buttons can be included in your content, excerpts, in a floating CSS sidebar, in a widget, from shortcodes, and on admin editing pages. The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) used by WPSSO RRSSB resize automatically to their container size, so they always look great from any device, including high resolution retina displays.