Silicon Dales at WordCamp EU 2022

WordCamp Europe 2022 Porto

Silicon Dales attended WordCamp EU 2022 in Porto, Portugal, to catch up with the great people in the WordPress eco-system including hosting providers, plugin makers and, of course, the platforms themselves. It has been 3 years since the last European meetup and it was really refreshing to finally catch up with those we’ve been working …

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How to start with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) on WordPress

It’s nice when thing’s stay still – especially when you’re looking at a webpage. Simply put, CLS is a measure of how still a webpage stays while a user is looking at it. Google rates this as an important user experience factor. Cumulative Layout Shift scoring and how to improve your site’s score is a …

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How Do I Get a Website into Google News?

A number of people have asked us this question over the years, particularly since we have placed a couple of really popular websites into the highly popular news search engine that Google has: Google News. On several websites we have designed and built the backend processes which tell Google News what to index. Specifically, this …

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WooCommerce Developer in Manchester

In case you didn’t know (and why would you unless you were already watching us?), Silicon Dales opened an office in Manchester in August 2017. About Silicon Dales Silicon Dales is a distributed team of WordPress and WooCommerce developers, who work on complex open source projects for small, medium and larger enterprises. Silicon Dales are …

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Google service outages 14th December 2020

Google experienced multiple outages today, including across YouTube, Gmail and Docs. For a fuller breakdown of the services and regions affected, see TechCrunch. All services now appear to be back online and operating normally. To see the Google Workspace status dashboard, click here.

Ensuring Business Security Despite Laptop Ban and Border Password Requests

Many of the electronics restrictions imposed during 2017 have now been lifted. Read more about the 2017 laptop ban here. How to ensure your business information is secure while employees and contractors travel. Whether travelling to conferences, or checking-in on work whilst holidaying, travel restrictions imposed during 2017 in the US, Europe and elsewhere provided …

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How to Set Out-of-Office Replies in Google Workspace

At this time of year, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, many companies are beginning to plan holiday breaks and cover. There are lots of tools available within Google’s Google Workspace which can help businesses to manage holiday breaks without interrupting workflow.  One of these is straight forward: out-of-office replies for the email component of …

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“Safe” Ways to Increase Google PageRank and Search Rankings

UPDATE 2019 – the article below was originally posted in 2013, and a lot of terminology and practices, particularly in SEO (do we even talk about PageRank any more? Remember those PR toolbars? Remember toolbars!?!), have moved on apace since then, but the general principles still hold true today…  A lot of the time, when …

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