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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.

Weekly Links Roundup – Clean Up Your Media Library, Remote Working Toolkit, WooCommerce Catalogs, Spamdexing

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

Do you have dozens (or hundreds? Or thousands?) of images in your Media Library that you know or suspect are no longer being used? All those extra images can slow down your site, first by taking up lots of extra space on your web server, and second by making backup files huge. Fortunately, there are some fairly easy ways to identify and remove them without having to go through every image one by one. Learn about how to clean up your Media Library without too many headaches.

A timely article called Make It Remote shares work-at-home knowledge gained over a decade of managing remote teams. This is a pay-what-you-want toolkit.

If you want to use WooCommerce as a product catalog instead of a sales machine, there’s an extension for that. I used this in a client’s site last week and it’s super-easy to hide the add-to-cart functionality and replace it with custom messages or links of your own.

Finally – all about spamdexing, where websites get hacked with injected nasty keywords and links to manipulate search engine rankings for another web property designed to rip people off. You can avoid being the target of one of these hacks by keeping your site up to date, using strong passwords, and using a good security plugin properly set up to scan your site regularly.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Grammar, Anti-spam Plugins, CCPA

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

Not the best speller? Think doesn’t matter? Think again…Nothing hurts the credibility of your business like content full of spelling and grammar errors. It forces the reader to work harder to understand you. And put simply, it makes your business look slack. If your content is flawed, what does that say about the rest of your operations? Learn how to improve your content to build credibility. And if you’re not the best at spelling and grammar there are tools for that, like browser-based Grammarly which works in both Gutenberg and classic editors.

Here’s a roundup of some of the best anti-spam plugins for WordPress. I’m been a fan of Antispam Bee for awhile but lately am using the commercial plugin CleanTalk for our WP Minder Care Plan clients and it is fantastic. CleanTalk provides behind-the-scenes protection (no captcha!) and a dashboard that shows how it’s working – one of my client sites that was previously reporting a bad spam problem had almost 1,800 spam attacks blocked just this week.

By now you have likely heard about the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) which dropped on January 1. Like the GDPR, the CCPA is designed to protect private data of users including knowing what person info is collected; what info is being sold; opting out of data collection and data selling. Here’s post about how CCPA may affect your WordPress business.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Super Admin, Smart Slider 3, Media Cleanup, Hacked Sites Report

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

You may or may not be the super admin of your WordPress website – but what does that really mean? Here’s a good explanation of why you need to be careful when choosing a super admin.

Smart Slider 3 has been my go-to favorite slider for client sites for awhile now due to both its great array of tools and excellent support. Here’s an in-depth review of Smart Slider 3 and a head-to-head comparison with another popular slider, Soliloquy.

If you have tons of files in your Media Library but are not sure if they are all being used, try a Media Library cleanup. Word of warning – if you use a cleaner plugin make absolutely sure you have a fresh backup first!

Finally… Sucuri has release their Hacked Website Threat Report for 2019. Some of the major takeaways:

  • 56% of websites that were hacked had outdated core files – such as an outdated WordPress version.
  • 44% of hacked sites had more than one outdated component including plugins and themes.
  • About 60% of hacked sites were running on servers with outdated, unsupported versions of PHP.

Moral of the story – keep WordPress, plugins and themes up to date. And check with your host if you’re not using an up-to-date PHP version. You can use WP Health to see what PHP version your host uses.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Shipping, WordPress Comments, RSS Feeds

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

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and needed a way to set up shipping by weight ranges. There are commercial plugins that do this, but I found a great free one that works fine for my client’s needs. WooCommerce Weight-Based Shipping lets you add a series of rules for free shipping, subtotals, shipping destinations, all based on order weight.

Do you allow comments on your WordPress blog? Comments can be great – they can help build and tie a community of site fans together. But they can also have a dark side. If your blog comments are overrun with spam or trolls and you just want it to stop, learn how to disable comments completely, or conditionally as you see fit. This post also covers how to delete existing comments, shorten the available commenting period, and more.

If you have a blog, are you sharing that blog so people can read it elsewhere? Like an RSS reader. Here’s an interesting post about RSS feeds and whether they are ‘giving away content for free.’ I agree with the author… you want people to read your blog, right? Encouraging people to subscribe to your RSS feed is a way to help more people see your writing. And that’s a good thing.

As a followup, here’s a review of the best RSS readers and news aggregator services. If you’ve never used one, try signing up and subscribing to some feeds.

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