Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why shouldn’t I upload small images to the Media library?

Why shouldn’t I upload small images to the Media library?

Q: How do I fix Google Structured Data > hatom errors?

If you’re seeing errors in the Google Search Console for Structured Data > hatom (markup: microformats.org) for missing “author / entry-title / updated” values – these errors are not from meta tags or Schema markup. There have been several markup formats supported by Google over the years, and your theme templates may include older (and incomplete) hatom / microformats markup. You should contact your theme author to have them fix or remove the incomplete hatom / microformats markup, or try and Remove / Fix ‘hentry’ Errors in your Theme Templates yourself, using a WordPress filter (provided your theme templates use standard WordPress filters).

Q: How do I remove duplicate meta tags?

WPSSO is packed full of essential and unique features — the duplicate meta tag check being just one of many examples. When the “Check for Duplicate Meta Tags” option on the Advanced settings page is enabled, WPSSO will crawl the front-end page after saving a Post / Page and parse its meta tags. If it finds duplicates, WPSSO will issue a notice for each one. It’s important to fix these since some social crawlers — like the Facebook crawler, for example — will reject all meta tags in the webpage if it finds any error. Duplicate meta tags can come from two possible sources: Plugins. Some SEO plugins — like Yoast SEO for example — can also add a few social meta tags, which creates a conflict with those from WPSSO. WPSSO checks the settings of a few popular SEO plugins, and can display instructions on how to disable those conflicting meta tags. Social sharing and/or Facebook related plugins can also add duplicate meta tags to your webpages. Although these meta tags are not essential to their sharing features, these plugins may have to be disabled unless they have options to disable their meta tags. Themes. Themes can, on occasion, have options in their settings to add social meta tags. Some themes also include code in their header.php templates to include a few social meta tags. In this case, you’ll have to edit the header.php file(s) and remove the meta tags yourself. If this is the case, you should also contact the author of your theme and inform them of the problem — social and SEO meta tags are plugin features, which should not be hard-coded in theme templates. At a minimum, theme authors should offer options to enable/disable those meta tags from their theme settings page.

Q: How can I fix an “HTTP error” when uploading images?

There are a number of reasons why you might get a generic “HTTP error” when uploading images in the WordPress Media Library. The first place to look might be the resource limits in your /etc/php.ini file (memory and execution time, for example): Some servers might also be running a deprecated version of ImageMagick. You can change the default image editor from ImageMagick to GD by adding the following filter to your theme (or child-theme) functions.php file (props mklusak).

Q: How can I fix a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error?

This is a known web browser issue — and more importantly — affects the Facebook crawler as well. Some web browsers (and the Facebook crawler) will follow the “official” URL listed in the webpage meta tags if it does not match the current URL. If you’ve used a mix of upper and lower case characters in your WordPress General setting URLs, and your permalinks create lowercase URLs, this can lead to an infinite redirect condition. To fix this condition, you must use lowercase URLs in your WordPress General setting URLs.

Question 1

How can I add Schema Aggregate Rating values?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

There are several ways to add aggregate rating markup to your content, but first, let&rsquo;s talk about what an &ldquo;aggregate rating&rdquo; actually is. ;-) The Schema.org website defines the Schema aggregateRating property value as: The overall rating, based on a collection of reviews or ratings, of the item. Two things to keep in mind about this: An aggregate rating value is calculated from several customer ratings / reviews for the current webpage content (e-commerce product reviews, for example). Google prefers &mdash; and often double-checks &mdash; that Schema markup reflects the current content of the webpage. So, if you want to manually set aggregate rating and/or review values in your Schema markup, make sure these customer ratings and/or reviews also appear in your webpage content (ie. the ratings and reviews are visible). So what&rsquo;s the best and easiest way? The very best (and easiest) way is to use a supported plugin that offers rating and review features, like the WPSSO Ratings and Reviews add-on. The WPSSO RAR add-on extends the WordPress comment system with optional rating and review features, and does not conflict with WooCommerce&rsquo;s own product rating features. ;-) Note that if you&rsquo;re using the WPSSO Core Pro plugin, ratings and reviews from WooCommerce, Yotpo Social Reviews for WooCommerce, and WP-PostRatings are also supported. Alternatively, if you&rsquo;re using a non-supported plugin &mdash; that saves aggregate rating values in post meta &mdash; you can use a WPSSO Core custom filter to add the Schema aggregateRating markup. Note that if you&rsquo;re using the WPSSO JSON Pro add-on, you can also hook the Schema aggregateRating property directly. Either filter will work fine &mdash; it just depends on your personal preference. ;-) If none of the above solutions work for you, the WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup add-on also offers a [schema] shortcode that you can use to customize the current webpage Schema properties. The schema shortcode documentation includes a practical example on how to add custom aggregate rating values to your content.

Question 2

Why shouldn&rsquo;t I upload small images to the Media library?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

Once in a while a customer will ask me this question &mdash; believing they should upload the image size they require for their content to the WordPress Media Library. For example, if they require a 300x200px image for their content, then they upload a 300x200px image to the Media library. What they don&rsquo;t realize is that WordPress isn&rsquo;t meant to be used this way, and they&rsquo;re actually breaking an essential WordPress feature by doing this &mdash; 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 &ldquo;upscale&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s what WordPress image sizes are for. ;-) In the WordPress Settings > Media page, you can define sizes for a variety of different image sizes, like thumbnail, medium, medium-large, large, etc. Your theme and other plugins may also define additional image sizes, and some plugins allow you to define custom sizes as well. When you need to add an image to your content, you select an image from the Media library and choose the image size you require. You should never use the full size image in your content. If you need a 300x200px image, for example, you should have defined a 300x200px image size in the WordPress settings (cropped or uncropped, depending on your requirements) and then select that image size. So, what image size should you upload to the Media library? That&rsquo;s easy &mdash; the largest size you can. ;-) Currently, Facebook uses 600x315px images for shared links, which means providing Facebook with 1200x630px images for high resolution devices. So at a minimum, you should be uploading 1200px wide images, but hopefully even larger to future proof your images for evolving requirements &mdash; both Facebook and Google may require larger images in the near future. Because so many websites have used small images in the past, WPSSO provides 600x315px images to Facebook by default. If your images are large enough, you should change this to 1200x630px in the WordPress Settings > Social and Search Image Dimensions page. See the WPSSO Setup Guide for more information on image sizes. ;-)

Question 3

How do I fix Google Structured Data > hatom errors?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

If you&rsquo;re seeing errors in the Google Search Console for Structured Data > hatom (markup: microformats.org) for missing &ldquo;author / entry-title / updated&rdquo; values &ndash; these errors are not from meta tags or Schema markup. There have been several markup formats supported by Google over the years, and your theme templates may include older (and incomplete) hatom / microformats markup. You should contact your theme author to have them fix or remove the incomplete hatom / microformats markup, or try and Remove / Fix &lsquo;hentry&rsquo; Errors in your Theme Templates yourself, using a WordPress filter (provided your theme templates use standard WordPress filters).

Question 4

How does WPSSO Core find / detect / select videos?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

Provided you are using the WPSSO Core Pro version (video detection modules are not included in the WPSSO Core Free version), videos from SlideShare, Vimeo, Wistia, and YouTube will be detected automatically from the following locations: A video entered in a theme or plugin custom field defined under the SSO > Advanced > Custom Meta > &ldquo;Video Embed HTML Custom Field&rdquo; or &ldquo;Video URL Custom Field&rdquo; options. A video entered in the custom Social and Search Optimization metabox &ldquo;Video Embed HTML&rdquo; or &ldquo;Video URL&rdquo; options. Embedded video HTML in your post / page content text or from a shortcode in your content text. WPSSO Core does not consider simple URL links to videos to be an important / integral part of your content (like an embedded video). If you&rsquo;d like WPSSO Core to consider video links as equal to embedded videos, you must use a custom WPSSO Core content filter like this one.

Question 5

How can I fix a PHP fatal &ldquo;out of memory&rdquo; error?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

If your PHP configuration is limited to less than 128mb of memory, you may get a PHP fatal &ldquo;out of memory&rdquo; error when WordPress attempts to resize an image, etc. 32mb and 64mb memory limits were common a few years back, and some hosting providers have not revised their PHP configurations since then &mdash; which can cause problems with the latest versions of WordPress and some common plugins. Increasing the WordPress Memory Limit. Edit your wp-config.php file and enter something like: See Increasing memory allocated to PHP in the WordPress codex for more info. If you have access to your PHP.ini file, change the line in PHP.ini: If you don&rsquo;t have access to PHP.ini try adding this to an .htaccess file:

Question 6

How do I remove duplicate meta tags?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

WPSSO is packed full of essential and unique features &mdash; the duplicate meta tag check being just one of many examples. When the &ldquo;Check for Duplicate Meta Tags&rdquo; option on the Advanced settings page is enabled, WPSSO will crawl the front-end page after saving a Post / Page and parse its meta tags. If it finds duplicates, WPSSO will issue a notice for each one. It&rsquo;s important to fix these since some social crawlers &mdash; like the Facebook crawler, for example &mdash; will reject all meta tags in the webpage if it finds any error. Duplicate meta tags can come from two possible sources: Plugins. Some SEO plugins &mdash; like Yoast SEO for example &mdash; can also add a few social meta tags, which creates a conflict with those from WPSSO. WPSSO checks the settings of a few popular SEO plugins, and can display instructions on how to disable those conflicting meta tags. Social sharing and/or Facebook related plugins can also add duplicate meta tags to your webpages. Although these meta tags are not essential to their sharing features, these plugins may have to be disabled unless they have options to disable their meta tags. Themes. Themes can, on occasion, have options in their settings to add social meta tags. Some themes also include code in their header.php templates to include a few social meta tags. In this case, you&rsquo;ll have to edit the header.php file(s) and remove the meta tags yourself. If this is the case, you should also contact the author of your theme and inform them of the problem &mdash; social and SEO meta tags are plugin features, which should not be hard-coded in theme templates. At a minimum, theme authors should offer options to enable/disable those meta tags from their theme settings page.

Question 7

How can I have smaller dimensions for the default image?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

If you use a large Open Graph Image Dimension, as suggested in the plugin help / documentation, Facebook will feature that image more prominently in shares. In cases where a post/page does not have an acceptable image (missing and/or too small), the default image is used. If that default image is a logo, you may want Facebook to include it more discretely in your shares. To do this, you should use the &ldquo;Default Image URL&rdquo; option instead of the &ldquo;Default Image ID&rdquo;. Enter a URL to a smaller version of your logo (300x300px for example).

Question 8

How can I fix an &ldquo;HTTP error&rdquo; when uploading images?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

There are a number of reasons why you might get a generic &ldquo;HTTP error&rdquo; when uploading images in the WordPress Media Library. The first place to look might be the resource limits in your /etc/php.ini file (memory and execution time, for example): Some servers might also be running a deprecated version of ImageMagick. You can change the default image editor from ImageMagick to GD by adding the following filter to your theme (or child-theme) functions.php file (props mklusak).

Question 9

How do I fix my theme&rsquo;s front page pagination?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

Some themes may have badly coded pagination filters, which break when WPSSO Core is activated. If this is the case with your theme, you may try adding the following to your theme&rsquo;s functions.php file:

Question 10

How can I fix a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error?

JS Morisset · Accepted Answer

This is a known web browser issue &mdash; and more importantly &mdash; affects the Facebook crawler as well. Some web browsers (and the Facebook crawler) will follow the &ldquo;official&rdquo; URL listed in the webpage meta tags if it does not match the current URL. If you&rsquo;ve used a mix of upper and lower case characters in your WordPress General setting URLs, and your permalinks create lowercase URLs, this can lead to an infinite redirect condition. To fix this condition, you must use lowercase URLs in your WordPress General setting URLs.