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Weekly Links Roundup – Food Blogging, Breadcrumbs, SMTP

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Okay, sorry – I know I haven’t been blogging weekly in a few months. It was an intensely crazy summer and fall with a lot of unplanned travel related to family, a broken arm and hand, a vacation, a sinus infection and bronchitis. And no paddle boarding. But things are now beginning to settle into a new routine, and I hope to be blogging more regularly. Onward.

My husband recently started a food blog. Well, not exactly… it was more of a way to get about 150 printed recipes we use a lot out of a ragged folder and into digital format so we can find them easier. He used WP Recipe Maker as the recipe plugin – here’s a review of the best 15 WordPress recipe plugins in case you’re interested in trying a food blog yourself. These recipe plugins make it easy to add SEO-friendly recipes with options and features like printing and Pinterest rich pins built in.

And speaking of food blogs – if you include a recipe that’s been published elsewhere, how does that work? Is that a copyright violation, and if it is, how do you avoid that? This post discusses recipe attribution: “when in doubt, always give attribution.”

Let’s talk about breadcrumbs. No, not the ones from your favorite bread recipe… the helpful little string of text and links at the top of a page that tells you where in the website you are at any given moment. Did you know that those breadcrumbs are important for SEO? Not only are they good for human users; they also help Google and other search engines understand the structure of your site.

Finally… ever had problems getting notifications from your WordPress site, like submitted form entries or completed payment notifications? It’s one of the most common issues my clients report, but thankfully it’s also easy to fix. WordPress by default uses your host server’s PHP mail() function to send notifications, but quite commonly the server either isn’t using it or has problems with its setup. So what do you do? You don’t worry about the server at all. Instead, you use the SMTP (outgoing mail) settings from one of your existing email providers, like Gmail or a domain associated with your site. You could also use a 3rd-party service like SendGrid or Mailgun which will likely improve deliverability of site emails, important as your site and audience get larger. Here are instructions for setting up SMTP; my favorite free plugin for this is currently Post SMTP.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Calendar Plugins, Tour Booking, Maintenance Mode, SMTP

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Calendar plugins are a big and sometimes confusing topic – there are a lot of them. Some are free and some paid. How do you choose the best one for your particular job? This review of top calendar plugins for 2019 might help. It’s a little different because it includes plugins for appointment and rental bookings – not just the typical event calendar.

And speaking of bookings… my client is a tour guide in Peru and was looking for a plugin to handle tour bookings. That was harder to find than I thought, but I came up with two options that look promising, and that we’re going to try.  Check out WP Travel or WP Travel Engine. You can also use WooCommerce for this purpose.

Sometimes you may need to ‘close’ your site to do some maintenance or handle an emergency. Here’s a post on how to put your site into ‘maintenance mode,’ with or without using a plugin.

Finally… Not getting the expected notification emails from your WordPress site? That’s so irritating, isn’t it? The reason is most likely that the host server is not set up for PHP mail(), or it’s set up incorrectly, or it’s being flagged as spam by the receiving server because PHP mail() is not industry-standard and can lack proper authentication. The fix is to use SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send those notifications instead. This post will show you how.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – 2FA, Leaving Squarespace, PHP, WordPress Performance

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

It’s a scary world out there. You know how when you login to your bank’s website, they’ll typically send you a code on your phone to make sure it’s you? That’s called 2-factor authentication (2FA) and did you know, you can have the same level of login security on your own WordPress site? It’s a great way to improve overall security of your site. Here’s a guide to adding 2FA to WordPress with a free plugin called FIDO.

Squarespace is a popular hosted website platform suited to beginning website owners, but when you understand its limitations, you’re likely ready to upgrade to a more flexible platform that’s totally under your control. WordPress fits that description perfectly. But how do you move? Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on switching from Squarespace to WordPress.

If your host is using a very old version of PHP on its servers, you likely noticed a nagging popup in the WordPress dashboard around August 20 that encouraged you to update to a modern version of PHP. Users of servers with PHP 5.6 or older got this nag (about 43% of all users). WordPress recommends PHP 7.1+ now. Anything older than that is not being updated for security and is leaving your site at risk. The older the version of PHP, the more likely your plugins and themes will begin to fail due to compatibility issues. And, modern versions of PHP are much, much faster! Learn more about PHP and WordPress and why upgrading is so critical.

And why is website speed so important? Glad you asked – check this out. And get in touch if you’d like a Performance Audit to speed up your own WordPress site.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – CDNs, Shortcodes, Writing Blog Posts, Before-and-after Photos

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Is your blog slow? Especially if you have a lot of media files like images and video, you may greatly benefit from getting a CDN (content delivery network). A CDN serves your media files from servers around the country (or the world) that are closer to your users, speeding up delivery of those files in their browsers. Here’s a review of the 10 Best CDN Services for WordPress users. My current favorite is CloudFlare, which has a free plan and is pretty painless to set up. It also has security benefits for your site.

As a WordPress user you may have come across this before. You have a shortcode, which inserts something dynamic like a form or button wherever it’s placed. You want to paste it into a widget so your dynamic content will show up in a sidebar or other area – here’s how to do that, two easy ways.

Are you starting a blog, and you want to learn everything? I mean everything… Check out this article on How to Write a Blog Post. This may be more than you bargained for… if so, try this one instead: Write Better Blog Posts.

Finally – a nifty plugin I ran across this week. If you ever need to display before-and-after images, this tutorial on How to Show Before and After Photos is perfect for you! The plugin is very easy to use, and the effect looks great.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Security, Google Maps, FooGallery, Why Blog?

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

I’ve had WordPress clients tell me they don’t worry about security or backups because their site is “too small to hack.” I beg to differ. It’s small sites with owners who have poor security practices that are frequently the target of hacks because they are so easy to crack! When a site owner doesn’t update WordPress/plugins/themes sometimes in years, or when they have simple login passwords, their sites are much easier to attack and use for malicious activity. If your site gets hacked and begins churning out spam or displaying links to porn sites or worse, gets defaced, your business’s trustworthiness and credibility will take a big hit. Don’t let this happen your business – read this quick post on why it’s important to harden your site. And check out our WordPress Care Plans if you want a partner to do this critical work for you. Our plans start at just $2 per day.

Maps are a great addition to your website when you have a brick-and-mortar location. And, you can add them to your WordPress site easily using either some manual code or a plugin. Learn how to add a Google map to your WordPress site.

FooGallery has been my go-to WordPress gallery plugin for several years. Besides being a full-featured responsive and flexible gallery plugin, they also have excellent support if you need it. FooGallery has a pro (commercial) version that includes more features, like a video galley option, but for my clients the free version usually works fine. Here’s a big comprehensive review of FooGallery so you can see whether it’s a good fit for your site too.

Finally, here’s an interesting take on the evolving purpose of blogging. How has blogging changed in the last decade or so? Do you find yourself writing more to teach others what you know, or to get a reaction out of them? Both purposes have value. Some food for thought…

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