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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.

Why Do I Need to Upgrade to PHP 7.1+?

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Depending on your host, you may have gotten a rude surprise recently when you tried to update WordPress and got this message:

You cannot update because WordPress 5.2 requires PHP version 5.6.20 or higher. You are running version 5.6.3.

That’s right. Unless you’re running the (extremely old and unsupported) PHP 5.6.20 or greater, you won’t be able to update WordPress again. Ever.

Ideally, your host should be using PHP 7.1+ which is much, much faster than the old 5.x versions, as well as being actively maintained (7.1 and higher get security and other updates regularly).

WordPress is trying to nudge users to move to new versions of PHP for these two main reasons. In addition to not being able to update WordPress, if you’re on old PHP you will also not be able to install themes and plugins that don’t support your version of PHP. Plugins or themes may simple stop working correctly on the older, unsupported PHP versions.

So what can you do?

If you’re on a good host, you won’t have this problem as they will be keeping up with PHP updates or, like SiteGround, will offer you options on which version of PHP to use for your site.

If you’re on a bad host, you’ll find out quickly enough if you ask them to update PHP and they won’t. That means it’s time to move to a good WordPress host. There really is no other option – ask us if you need help choosing a good, high-quality WordPress host.

If you have the option to switch yourself, not so fast… there is a considerable amount of prep you need to do on your site before flipping the switch. Read this guide on how to upgrade WordPress to PHP 7 to understand what’s involved in doing this without breaking your site.

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