Enable gzip compression with GoDaddy Linux Hosting (Apache)

GoDaddy’s documentation claims to have mod_Deflate installed by default on all but its Classic Hosting accounts but any basic HTTP sniffer (YSlow or Fiddler) suggests text-based resources like Javascript, CSS, XML, etc aren’t being compressed. Google’s Web Master Tools will likely flag this to you as well and you can use an online tool like redbot.org to inspect your headers.

If you’re not seeing a header like this one, your content is likely not being encoded:

Content-Encoding: gzip

To enable compression on one of the site’s I’m working on, I added this line to the bottom of the .htaccess file at the root of my site:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html 
text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript 
application/javascript

Bear in mind compression is only one aspect of a performant site. Among other things, you’ll also want to ensure your content is cacheable for a suitable length of time. Consider combining and minifying your CSS and Javascript and use a free content delivery network (CDN) like CloudFlare to accelerate the local delivery of your image assets.

If you’re really keen (or suffering performance problems) consider using image sprites to reduce the number of resources a page needs to download and move away from server-side code where you can. The vast majority of your page content is likely static (even if it’s being generated dynamically—but isn’t personalised) and should be cacheable at the browser level.

How to increase the size of the shopping cart icon in WooCommerce

I found the default size of the WooCommerce shopping cart icon (in the Storefront theme) was a bit on the small size.

The icon is textual and comes from Font Awesome. Normally, this would be an easy change by adding fa-2x or something similar to the style declaration. Inspecting the CSS in Chrome didn’t offer me such an option (I’m new to Font Awesome) so I added this CSS to the custom CSS in my Storefront child theme:

/* Increase size of shopping cart icon */
    .site-header-cart .cart-contents:after
    {
        font-size: 1.25em !important;
    }

The 1.25em increased the size of the cart icon to better reflect the size of the menu text and stand out better.

WooCommerce tax not displaying ($0)

Had an annoying little problem with taxes not showing in WooCommerce recently. Despite my best efforts to configure the Tax pages correctly, all I was getting was $0 for taxes. I had specified an address in the checkout but the tax amount would consistently come back as $0. This was on two separate, new installs of Wordpress v4.2.4 + WooCommerce v2.3.10 and I had no other tax plugins installed.

Thankfully, a response to my post to the Wordpress support forums got me back on track. It was suggested I may be missing the wp_woocommerce_tax_rate_locations table in the database, and sure enough, upon inspection I had no such table.

I created the table using the following SQL from another post describing an identical problem:

CREATE TABLE wp_woocommerce_tax_rate_locations (
location_id bigint(20) NOT NULL,
location_code varchar(255) NOT NULL,
tax_rate_id bigint(20) NOT NULL,
location_type varchar(40) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Next, I clicked Save on the WooCommerce/Settings/Tax/Tax Options screen before taxes would show.

Thanks lorro! Read the full thread here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/tax-displays-as-0

How to set a product as a featured product in WooCommerce

If you want to mark a product as “featured” in WooCommerce (so it will display in the Featured Products widget, for example), you’ll soon find it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to do so.

There are two ways to set a product as a featured product in your WordPress admin screen:

1. From the products list
2. From the edit product page

Products List

Most forum posts, etc will suggest you can toggle a product as featured or not featured in the Products list by clicking the empty or filled star icon for each product. This is easy enough—especially for setting multiple products quickly—but requires you to drop out of the product edit page.

Edit Product Page

If you’re setting up a new product you may want to set it as a featured product from within the edit product page. To do so, expand (edit)  the Catalog visibility: section in the Publish widget. The last option is a checkbox to flag the product as a featured product.

You may also want to read the Adding and managing products documentation from WooThemes for more information.

Can’t access Wordpress wp-admin after changing the site URL

I’m in the process of pointing a domain root to a Wordpress install that resides in a /wordpress folder below the root. I’m following these instructions—or rather trying to!

I first modified the Site address (URL) from https://store.mydomain.com to https://store/mydomain.com/wordpress, moved (instead of copying) the /wordpress/.htaccess and index.php files to the root, cleaned up those files how they should have been in the first place (!), and then promptly lost access to wp-admin.

I backed up the site content before starting all of this but, naturally, elected not to back up the Wordpress database. Which was a bit silly.

Fortunately, I was able to roll back to the start—without access to wp-admin, by modifying the value of the siteurl row in the wp_options table (in the MySQL database via phpMyAdmin).

This article also has some great options to get you up and running again without modifying the database: http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL