WP Minder
WP Minder is happy to announce our brand new WordPress training videos for all Maintenance Plan levels.
Our new training resources include video tutorials for:
In addition, there’s a new WordPress User Manual you can view online or download as a PDF.
If you’re a WP Minder client you’ll find the new Training Videos right under the Dashboard in the WordPress admin menu.
This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.
If your WordPress site had been hacked, how would you know? Check out this infographic from iThemes showing 7 key signs that your site has been the target of a hack. Prevention is much easier than recovery – if you need help keeping your site secure, check out our WordPress maintenance plans. We include an upfront (and then annual) security audit of your site in all our plans.
Easy WP Guide has just released their new guide for WordPress 5.1 – get a PDF here. But don’t bother to print it, it gets updated frequently and is quite large!
Looking for an event calendar for your site? Here’s a roundup of 5 event calendar plugins for WordPress. This list is unusual in that it doesn’t include some of the big players in the category – these are all commercial plugins available at Code Canyon. Check out this post for some top free event calendar plugins – lots of high-quality choices listed here.
A common problem I see with new WP Minder clients is old PHP versions. Why is this so important? WordPress now recommends a minimum of PHP 7.3. But over 77% of WordPress users are on unsupported (read: no security updates ever) versions of PHP – that’s PHP 7.0 and older! Most users don’t know or care about this, but here’s why you should.
You can check the PHP version with this plugin.
WP Minder’s maintenance plans include fast Managed WordPress Hosting on modern, up-to-date servers. Besides the security benefits our clients also get the performance boost that PHP 7.1+ provides.
Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.
This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.
“Ooh, that photo would be perfect for this post I’m writing. Can I use that picture?” Good question! And the answer may surprise you. Learn about the ethics and laws surrounding copyrighted images in this infographic.
So… have you tried Gutenberg yet? I broke down in January and gave it a try myself, and honestly it was not as disturbing as I’d read it was (of course by then a number of bugs had been ironed out). I’m not using it all the time, but I am using it now for some layout tasks that I would previously have added a plugin for like accordions. (Hint: if you use the Classic Editor plugin I’ve mentioned here before, you can switch back and forth between the old and new editors with one click).
If you need a guide to learn Gutenberg (I’d recommend it, it saves time over just diving in and trying to figure it out) and a resource for understanding all that it does, try Go Gutenberg. And if you start using it you’ll likely find it doesn’t have a block you need. There are a number of free plugins now with more blocks; I like CoBlocks because it was the first one I tried with a nice clean accordion block.
Shifting gears… if you’re planning a new site with a lot of pages, you may have considered using a mega menu (you know – one of those huge dropdown menus like this one on the Moleskine site). But do you really need a mega menu? Maybe not. Learn more about when to use mega menus and when it’s not really necessary.
And finally… a winter 2019 roundup of the best WordPress gallery plugins. FooGallery is still at the top of my list.
Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.
This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.
This morning I was putting together a mega menu (think: a really huge menu) for a new site. You know when you have a lot of links in a menu, how hard it gets to move things around in that menu in the WordPress dashboard? I have a fix for that – check out Nav Menu Collapse. It will let you collapse and expand individual menu sections or the entire menu. This functionality should be part of WordPress core, it’s so essential for large sites.
That same new site also needs to be multilingual. The client isn’t interested in manually translating the entire site at this time, but we are going to take advantage of Google Translate and have quick language switching functionality. Learn about different ways to make your site multilingual. And, here’s a review of the 11 best WordPress translation plugins if you want more choices.
Another new client was looking to set up an affiliate program that would let friends and customers sign up to promote the site. A user signs up as an affiliate and then gets a special link to share with others. When someone uses the link, that affiliate gets rewarded. Here’s a review of 10 WordPress affiliate plugins. I’ve heard many good things about AffiliateWP, which integrates with WooCommerce.
Security is an important part of WP Minder’s services. Here’s a quick post about the top 5 security myths surrounding WordPress – and how they have all been debunked. Keep in mind that the biggest security issue with WordPress is user-related; not updating plugins, themes or WordPress core is the number one reason WordPress sites get hacked. If you don’t want to do this yourself, give WP Minder a try and let us handle site security and updates for you.
Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.
This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.
I’m a big fan of the FooGallery image gallery for WordPress, when I need something pretty simple. It supports albums and a lightbox and has a decent variety of free gallery styles, plus their support for the free version is speedy. But sometimes you need more… or maybe just ‘different.’ Here’s a fresh (2019) review of 9 great WordPress image gallery plugins. Envira Gallery is another I can recommend.
Getting into blogging – or doing it already and not seeing the results you expected? Take a look at this… and make sure you’re not doing any of these 13 steps to failing miserably with blogging. Learn what not to do, and be more effective and efficient with your blogging efforts.
Did you know that there are a lot of different ways to get your Google Analytics tracking code into your WordPress site? You can use a plugin, add the code to your theme manually, use Google Tag Manager… Learn about the different ways of adding Analytics code and why you might want to choose one over another.
Finally… Moving content from one WordPress site to another can be a truly painful experience. This post on how to do that is from 2017 but still valid. And yes, it’s still a pain.
Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.
This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.
If you’re a regular blogger and have been doing it for some time, you’ve likely built up a large collection of old blog posts. Some may be useful “evergreen” content, but many may not longer be accurate or that useful. Should you do something about that? The answer is yes – check out this article on what to do with old blog posts. Start with an objective inventory. This process may be rather painful, but in the end you’ll be left with a blog that’s much more useful to your customers. Think of it this way: if you chose to commit to blogging in the first place, also commit to keeping that content at its best. As an added benefit, this cleanup will likely improve organic traffic to your site.
If you offer PDF documents on your site, did you know that you’re not stuck using the browser (which you have no control over) to display them? There are a few PDF viewers for WordPress that give you lots more control over display and keep your viewers on your site when they click to open the document. Both of the plugins reviewed in this article are commercial, but I’ve used the free PDF Embedder plugin on a few sites to good effect.
Well-thought-out landing pages can make the difference in getting a conversion (like a sale or a signup) or not. They simplify things down to one key idea – what it is you’re selling or asking people to sign up for. Here are 10 examples of successful landing pages to inspire you. And… here are some WordPress landing page plugins to help you construct your ideal landing page for any given purpose.
Finally… do you use Paypal in your ecommerce site? It has over 60% market share, so it’s a good bet. Love it, or hate it? If you’re in the latter category, this post is for you! Learn about the top 18 Paypal alternatives for ecommerce sites. I’m not sure if all of these are WooCommerce-compatible, since it’s quite likely you’re using WooCommerce if on WordPress. Stripe is my go-to payment plugin for WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, and Harvest. Compared to Paypal, their support is fantastic, and I find Stripe’s great dashboard makes it much easier for me to do my accounting tasks.
Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.
