WP Minder

Maintaining WordPress

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 – 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.

How our WordPress Care Plans Save You Time

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In my experience, I haven’t ever come across a client whose goal is to become a master of WordPress.

I don’t mean a power user who blogs brilliantly and can do just about anything you can think of with WordPress. I mean a tech star who knows exactly what to do when they see that dreaded ‘White Screen of Death.’ The one who doesn’t panic when they see a defaced home page, but gets to work on a fix.

This is where WP Minder comes in.

I’d been helping clients with WordPress minor problems and major emergencies for years when I decided to make WP Minder my second business in 2014. Clients were on board from the very start – and one reason is because of all the time our WordPress Care Plans save them.

Here are some examples…

  • WP Minder clients don’t have to spend time hunting in Google for error info when they see a big PHP warning in their WordPress dashboard. And for crashes and blank screens, again, it’s not their problem and they don’t need to deal with it.
  • Setting up offsite backups can be a pain. Making sure they’re really running even if they’re set on automatic is another thing our clients don’t have to do. And occasional testing to make sure the backups really work? They don’t do that, either.
  • SSL certificates expire. Our clients don’t have to worry about that, as our SSL certificates are free and they renew automatically.
  • Is your site too slow? If you’re on shared hosting, the answer is yes. Our clients’ sites are on super-fast Nginx servers with PHP 7+.
  • Our clients typically don’t wait long for support. Once they get in touch with us, it’s generally a quick fix for them.
  • Our annual security audits usually identify site problems early, enabling us to be proactive in getting them fixed.
  • Well-maintained websites rarely get hacked, but if they do, we get our clients back up and running fast. They don’t need to spend time worrying about lost sales or lost opportunities.

Learn more about the benefits of working with WP Minder. Maybe we can save you some time too?

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 – 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 – WordPress Headaches, Remarketing, Restaurant Sites, Font Awesome

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

The top three most-mentioned WordPress pain points are performance, security, and updates that break sites. I hear you. These are all things I deal with for myself and for clients on a daily basis. Here’s an infographic on the biggest WordPress headaches for 2018. If you need help with them, please let me know. We do performance analysis and optimization, security audits, and manage site updates for our clients – minding your site so you can manage your business.

A few of my clients do remarketing (displaying ads to people who have already visited and/or interacted with your site or social media account or mailing list). Others are not familiar with the concept. Here’s a good primer on both Google and Facebook remarketing.

Though this particular article is targeting developers, it may be helpful to you if you’re thinking of starting a website for your restaurant. As always, if you need help with project discovery, consulting, design or development, please contact me.

Font Awesome icons are great – they look good, there are thousands to pick from, and because they’re not images you can resize them freely with no quality loss. Adding Font Awesome icons to WordPress is pretty easy – here are three methods.

And finally – May was the 15th anniversary of the release of WordPress. Here’s the original announcement. Happy Birthday, WP.

 

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