WP Deployment 2.8.15

We’re excited to announce our latest update to the UA WordPress environment, focusing on specific improvements that directly impact your experience as a front-end user.

Here are the key changes in this release that affect your user experience:

Blank Pages

We’ve been working to prevent usability and search engine optimization (SEO) issues related to blank pages that do not contain any content. You may recall that we recently added a Blank Pages Report to the WordPress dashboard that lists all blank pages within your site. While this will help you identify and remediate any blank pages on your site, we added two new features that will improve usability and SEO in cases where a blank page is required for some reason.

1. Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumb listings for pages that are blank are no longer clickable. This will prevent users from having the option of visiting a blank page.
2. Google Indexing: We now add a noindex tag to pages that are identified as blank pages, which instructs Google and other search engines to exclude those pages from search results.

While we do continue to work to reduce the negative impact of blank pages on your website, please do keep in mind that blank pages should be avoided. If the blank pages report is appearing on your site dashboard, it is a sign that content on your site needs attention. If you need help determining how you might eliminate blank pages in your site, reach out to us with the Web Request Form.

Media Gallery Updates

Media Gallery Items

We have received reports of images and other media items like PDFs still being accessible after being deleted or replaced. As surprising as it might sound, this is a feature, not a bug. We use a caching system that replicates media items at multiple server locations all over the world to provide a faster loading time for our website visitors. We determined that we needed to modify the website so that it would clear a media item’s cache when an item is deleted or replaced. This should eliminate the possibility that a URL for a media item could still show old or deleted content.

Our commitment to improving your experience on wfu.edu remains steadfast. We appreciate your support and feedback. If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for further enhancements, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us via the Web Request Form.

Thank you for being a part of our community, and we look forward to sharing even more exciting updates with you in the future. Stay tuned, and enjoy exploring our website with the latest enhancements that directly benefit you.