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Weekly Links Roundup – Social Auto Posting, Testimonials Plugins, MemberPress, WordPress in 2019

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Merry Christmas!

This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

In the process of finding a good social media auto poster (that lets you post your new or old blog posts to social media automatically) I came across this review of the best plugins for auto-posting to social sites. These are nice because once configured, you don’t have to do any extra work to get your blog posts out there on multiple sites.

One of the most important things to add to your business website is testimonials – they can really make a difference in developing trust in your users, and getting them to become new customers. Here’s a review of 9 testimonial plugins for WordPress.

One of my favorite, go-to plugins for client sites is mentioned in the post above, Strong Testimonials, and I recommend trying it. You can create multiple Views to display your testimonials in different ways throughout your site, like a rotating sidebar widget vs. a big, sliding home page testimonial.

If you’re using MemberPress to run your WordPress membership site (like WP Minder!) here’s some news for you… MemberPress now includes a downloadable files feature. You can set rules to govern downloads by members and track the number of downloads of each file.

And finally… as we close in on 2019, here are some of the predictions about WordPress in the new year. Lots of changes happening as 5.0 launched along with Gutenberg. Take a look and see what may be in store. This post is more of the developer and WordPress community view, so it might be different than what you’re expecting.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Ecommerce Sites, PDF Links, Gallery Plugins, WordPress 5.0, Email Signups

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Just in time for the holidays – learn 5 ways to take your ecommerce site to the next level. This is a very useful (and short) article. I totally agree with one of their points and can’t emphasize enough to clients that high-quality product photos are critical to ecommerce sites. Investing in great photography for your site will pay off by providing a strong first impression. And don’t forget – your photographer should remind you – that all product shots should be taken under the same conditions with the same background and angle.

Here’s a simple task: linking to a PDF in WordPress. It’s a help request I get fairly frequently from clients, so here’s a tutorial in how to do it yourself.

I’m a big fan of the FooGallery plugin, but always open to new things! Here’s a review of the 8 most beautiful WordPress gallery plugins.

WordPress 5.0 with the new Gutenberg editing experience came out last week. I’m holding off on updating WP Minder clients for reasons I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, but if you’re considering going for it, take a look at 7 things to know before updating to WordPress 5.0. Just in case, remember that Classic Editor is your friend!

Finally… learn how to get more email signups on your WordPress site. It’s not easy, but this article covers what you need to build your list and strategies that will help you grow your list over time.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress 5.0, Audio and Video Players, Powerpoint, Internal Links

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Today (Thursday Dec. 6) is supposed to be the (rescheduled) day for the WordPress 5.0/Gutenberg drop. Nothing yet and it’s afternoon… but when it happens, here are some handy links about Gutenberg, the new WordPress editing tool.

  • Should you update to WordPress 5.0 right away? I say no. Personally I would wait until January to give WP and plugin/theme developers time to deal with Gutenberg issues – it is not ready for prime time. I will not be updating client sites until then – I’ll be using Classic Editor instead. Here’s what Yoast says about updating.
  • Do I have to use Gutenberg? No – if you prefer the old editor, install and use the Classic Editor plugin – learn how to do this. You can try Gutenberg when you’re ready, on your terms.
  • What exactly does Gutenberg do? Here’s a guide to everything Gutenberg.

Switching gears, here’s a big review of the 15 best WordPress audio and video players. This is brand new and not super-thorough or in-depth on each plugin, but is a good place to start if you’re looking to add audio or video to your WordPress site and need a quick overview of current options.

If you’re a Powerpoint fan (are there any, still?) then you might have a need for this… I was asked a few weeks ago to embed a client’s Powerpoint in WordPress and I’d never done that before. Here’s a guide to embedding Powerpoint in WordPress; the Embed Any Document plugin they mention worked perfectly. It also embeds Word, Excel, PDF and Illustrator files.

And finally, some SEO stuff. You may not know that internal links (links between pages and posts in your own website) are very important! They help drive users deeper into your site to the places you want them to go. They show search engines what pages are most important (the ones with the most internal links!). And they help ensure that search engine crawlers can reach every page on your site. Learn more about internal links and why you really need to audit them from time to time.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Cart Abandonment, Gutenberg, Megamenus, Member Directories

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

We’re right in the middle of the 2018 holiday season. Do you run a WooCommerce shop? Did you know that cart abandonment (people who shop on a site, put things in their cart, but never complete their purchase) is estimated at almost 70%? That’s a huge number. If you could track those people down and try to recover those sales, why wouldn’t you? Here are 4 plugins to help with WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery.

Gutenberg was due for release this week, but it’s been pushed back indefinitely. This is a good thing! Gutenberg is not yet ready for prime time for a number of reasons – that’s the feeling shared by many developers, including me – and for the time being I suggest staying with the classic WordPress editor. This is what I’m recommending to my clients and maintenance service subscribers. Here’s how to disable Gutenberg (when it goes live) and keep using Classic Editor.  If you’re a WordPress user and are not yet familiar with Gutenberg take a look at this….

If your site has a menu with a ton of items or products, and is unwieldy (lots of very long dropdowns), consider moving to a megamenu. These are great if you have lots of items, or many categories, or want to include other content such as images in your menu. Here’s a review of 8 popular megamenu plugins. My favorite of these is UberMenu. I’ve used it on a number of sites and though it’s complex, it’s not too hard to get your head around. They have good support and tutorials available.

Finally… if a member directory would be a handy tool for your community, here’s a nice walkthrough of setting up one using the Posts Table Pro plugin. A membership directory can be valuable for a large organization where you need to display contact and other information for many people. Why would you want to use a plugin rather than just typing out this info in a page? Because the directories generated by Posts Table Pro are dynamic; they can be searched, or sorted by a particular field, for example. I haven’t used this plugin, but the step by step walkthrough looks promising.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Cookies, PHP, Store Locators, Mixed Content Warnings

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Seems like every website now has a cookies popup notification, right? In light of the GDPR and some new state-based privacy laws, like we have here in Colorado, it’s not surprising. But how do you get a cookie notice on your site? Here’s a great little tutorial on using the Cookie Consent plugin to do just that. In fact, I followed it earlier this week when I added a cookie popup to this very site you’re reading. It’s easy and quick to do.

I saw this post earlier this week and it made me sit up in alarm: 57% of WordPress sites will become less secure in December 2018. Yikes! What does this mean? It seems that 57% of all WordPress sites are running on host servers using PHP 7, PHP 5.6, or something even older than that. PHP is one of the software platforms that powers WordPress. And as of December 2018, those older versions of PHP will no longer receive any security patches or updates.

That means that if your site is sitting on one of those affected servers, it will become much more vulnerable to hacks and security issues. As new security problems are uncovered, they will not be fixed. Ever. The linked article shows how to find out which version your host uses. If you’re hosting with us, don’t worry – you’re covered and this will not affect you.

Now for something less scary. If you have multiple locations, or better yet if you have a lot of distributors or other providers related to your business, did you know you can easily add an interactive map of all those locations? This can be really helpful for your users. Here’s a review of the best WordPress store locator plugins. I’m a fan of WP Store Locator and have used in on a few client sites. Here is an example of WP Store Locator in action.

Finally… if you decided to make the switch from HTTP to HTTPS and secure your site (yay, you!), you may have been met with a surprise: a Mixed Content warning from the browser. This means your page has links that are https://, as it should, but it also has some leftover links to http:// too. Those need to be fixed, and depending on the size and complexity of your site, this can be a big hairy deal. Learn about Mixed Content warnings and how to fix them.

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