WP Minder

Debbie Campbell

Six Things I Like Best About MailerLite

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I’d been a long-time Mailchimp user, but I switched to MailerLite earlier this year and am very happy with that decision.

As I was trying to get more knowledgeable about automation and drip campaigns, I found Mailchimp to be more and more difficult to use. The interface was not as intuitive. There was confusing terminology (“Customer Journey Builder”) that threw me off. Support was less… well… supportive than it used to be, taking a lot longer to respond. And I was going to have to increase my monthly plan fee to access some of the features I now needed.

I was told about MailerLite in a group and signed up for their free trial. I was impressed right away with the simple, efficient user interface. And after the trial I signed up with no regrets.

Here are the six things I like best about MailerLite.

Great support. They have chat support that often answers right away, often even on weekends. Otherwise, they get back to you in email, and I’ve never had to wait more than a couple of hours.

Reasonable pricing. For 1,000 customers or less, their Premium plan is only $10 per month and includes all features.

Clean User Interface. MailerLite has a simple, straightforward user interface without a huge number of options or clutter. It’s a perfect fit for what WP Minder needs from an email newsletter provider, and is just all-around easy to use. Terminology is also as expected (such as “Automation” – it’s obvious what that menu link is for).

MailerLite's dashboard
MailerLite’s dashboard

Easy automation tools. As someone new to drip campaigns, I found MailerLite’s Automation section to be very intuitive.

You build your automation step by step in a flowchart-style interface. It made so much sense the first time I used it. You can include email content, delays, ecommerce purchases (if connected to your website’s ecommerce platform), and actions (like adding someone to a group) in the flow. Very cool.

MailerLite's easy automation workflow
MailerLite’s easy automation workflow

Simple WooCommerce integration. Connecting MailerLite and WooCommerce was very easy, and it opens up new default subscriber segments like “Repeat Customers,” “High-spending Customers” and “Subscribers with Zero Purchases.” These segments and custom fields can be used in automation tools and emails campaigns, too.

The drag and drop email builder is really good. The one in MailerLite works intuitively and includes many different types of content sections. I was never able to get the RSS feeds in Mailchimp’s builder to work correctly or look right, but in MailerLite they come in with no adjustment needed.

Drag-and-drop builder
Drag-and-drop builder

 

What provider do you use for email newsletters and/or drip campaigns? Share in the comments below if you have something you like.

The links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and make a purchase, I will receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own. I only share affiliate links to high-quality, useful products or services that I’ve used for myself or for my clients.

Links Roundup for August 2021

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Questions about GDPR. GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation, their privacy guidelines for the acquisition, usage, storage and deletion of personal data for EU users) can be a confusing beast. I get questions about it from clients mostly concerned about privacy policies. Here is a post from MailerLite about 99 common GDPR questions for email marketers that you may find helpful.

AI-powered copywriting. Does the idea of writing a blog post make you feel _____ (insert your favorite anxious feeling here)? It can be hard coming up with interesting things to write about week after week, there’s no way around it. But have you considered one of the many AI-powered copywriting tools that are now available? There are a good many to choose from; some focus more on short content like headlines and ads, while others work with longer content like blog posts or product descriptions. Here’s a review of some of the top AI-powered writing tools.

Roundup of content generators. Here’s another post on content generators, but this one covers a lot more ground. In addition to AI copywriting tools, it includes others for generating headlines, names, ad copy, audio and video content, blog ideas and more.

Redirects. Removing (or sometimes moving or renaming) old website content can cause big problems for search engines. Redirection is the process of sending search bots and human visitors to the correct new content when they try to go to deleted or moved content. It’s easy to do with WordPress plugins like Redirection and 301 Redirects, but the reasoning behind it may seem confusing. Learn 6 redirection best practices for your WordPress site.

Why Updates Matter

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A WordPress site is software, and just like the software for your phone, computer, etc. it has to be updated, usually for security reasons and less often for new features or bug fixes. And just like your car needs regular maintenance to run right, so does your website.

WordPress and its plugins and themes do get updated a lot – that’s for sure. Especially if your site is large or complex, there’s a lot to keep up with when it comes to updates.

What can happen if I don’t update my site?

The longer you go between updates, the more risk you’re taking. Here are some of the things that might happen if you don’t update regularly.

  • The risk of acquiring malware/being hacked increases. Did you know that when WordPress, plugin and theme developers release new versions, they generally publish a changelog which is basically a roadmap of the vulnerabilities they fixed with the new release? Hackers use these to target sites still using the old versions to exploit those vulnerabilities. The more old plugins/themes you have, or the longer you wait to update WordPress core software, the more vulnerable your site gets.
  • The risk of something breaking increases. I’ve had clients come to me with dozens (sometimes as many as 50) outdated plugins and themes. When you wait that long, something is bound to break when you finally do get around to updating. Unless you do it carefully and methodically (and on a safe copy of your site), you may not be able to figure out which update caused the breakage. This can lead to a rabbit hole of attempts to fix the problem and become quite time-consuming.
  • Missing out on new features. New features often accompany security improvements especially in major WordPress core software updates.
  • Functionality can begin to fail. If you update sporadically and have a mix of old and new versions of WordPress core software, plugins and themes, you may find that functionality on your site is not working the way it should due to conflicts between those various elements.

Software vulnerabilities in plugins, themes, and WordPress core are one of the top causes of site hacks1. Attacks are done through automated scripts that search for known vulnerabilities all over the web. It’s not personal, but if your site is chronically out of date it is an attractive target for these kinds of hackers.

Why don’t site owners update their WordPress sites?

I’ve heard a few reasons for this, the most common ones being:

  • They just don’t think about it, or forget to do it. This is mostly from brochure-style site owners who don’t update a lot and rarely login to their sites.
  • They didn’t know they needed to do it. This is usually from first-time WordPress site owners.
  • And the #1 reason: they’re afraid they’ll break something. The larger a site becomes and the more plugins in play, the likelihood of breaking something with an update increases. This is especially true of WooCommerce sites.

Those are the reasons we started WP Minder back in 2014 – so our clients don’t have to think about everyday, required site maintenance and are never at risk for breaking something just by trying to take care of their site. We do the care and if something does break, we fix it. It’s that simple.

If you’re a WordPress site owner ready to leave the maintenance behind so you can spend more time on your business, give us a try. Contact us for more information or take our quick survey to see which Care Plan is right for your site.

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1 Sucuri 2019 Website Threat Research Report.

Weekly Links Roundup – Online Sermons, Help Desk Plugins, Before You Hit Publish, Download Managers

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

Are you the manager of a WordPress site for your church? If so, have you considered putting sermons online? Here’s a guide to doing that, including audio and video recording, getting sermon content into your site, turning your sermons into a podcast and more.

Here is a review of 13 of the best WordPress help desk plugins. Offer product support right within WordPress!  Help desks can make it much easier to manage client support – assign ticket numbers, organize all support requests and followups in a single dashboard (much simpler than using email!) and be less frustrating for both you and your customers.

Here’s a treat from ProBlogger – this video teaches you 23 questions to ask yourself before you publish your next blog posts.

Download manager plugins extend WordPress’ native ability to handle downloads by adding in download tracking, organization of downloadable materials, and user restrictions on downloading content. Here’s a roundup of 15 of the top WordPress download managers.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Payments, Uptime Monitors, Popup Plugins

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

For WooCommerce users, a new payments option was announced this past week: WooCommerce Payments. This new service uses Stripe’s payment processing but with a different user experience. However, there’s one big drawback – it requires Jetpack to function. If you’re already using Jetpack to calculate taxes in WooCommerce, then it may be worth a look. If not, I’d probably stick with Stripe. Learn more about WooCommerce Payments. And, why you may want to avoid Jetpack if you can.

Looking for a service to let you know if your website goes down? Here are 12 of the best uptime monitoring services reviewed. Note: if you’re a WP Minder client, we do this for you and always have an eye on your site. Learn about all the benefits of working with us.

Popups are everywhere – they can be useful and engaging, or just terribly invasive. This post about the 5 best WordPress popup plugins also has info on how to make sure your popups are not irritating.

And a few posts from our sister site Red Kite Creative that you might find helpful:

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Easy WP Guide, Podcasting, Post Excerpts, Yoast SEO

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

The latest edition of Easy WP Guide, an evolving manual on all things WordPress, is available now. You can read it online (recommended) or download a PDF in English or Spanish. Keep in mind it’s  PDF that gets updated frequently….

Looking to start your own podcast? Here’s a roundup of 7 of the best WordPress podcasting plugins right now. One of my colleagues recommended Blubrry PowerPress for a new project this week.

If you ever wanted to change the length of the blog post excerpt, which is by default 55 words, this post is for you. The excerpt is the first bit of each blog post that’s displayed on the blog archive page. Learn how to change the excerpt length with or without a plugin.

If you’ve installed Yoast SEO and used it a little bit to try to get your pages or posts ranking higher, it may still not be clear exactly how Yoast works. Learn what Yoast SEO actually does for you. You don’t have to be a tech wizard to get the benefits Yoast provides.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.