WP Minder

Maximizing Your Business Website

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 – Google Maps, FAQ Pages, Stripe vs Paypal, MemberPress

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

If you have a Google map in your site, or have tried to add one recently, and found that following the instructions for getting a Maps API Key (cryptic for many users at the best of times) are no longer working? This is because this summer Google made changes in its Maps API offerings. Now, an API key is definitely required (before it was not, not always anyway) and a credit card has to be on file in the Google account in order for the API key to validate.

This is not to say that you’ll be billed – everyone is given $200 in credit each month. Many sites will never come close to this limit (I calculated it as about 29,000 views on one client site, much more traffic than they currently receive) and you can also cap the visits so that it never goes over the usage limit. But still, requiring a credit card is an extra hassle for my clients who will have to set up their own billing in order to keep using Google Maps.

More information on this from WP Google Maps, my WordPress map plugin of choice.

Considering an FAQ (frequently asked questions) page for your business site? FAQ pages are a great way to address the common questions you get about your products or services, and serve as a way to both educate users and help move them deeper into your site. Here’s a guide to 25 FAQ pages and the reasons why they’re so effective at what they do.

If you run an ecommerce site or are planning to, here’s a nice post comparing Stripe and Paypal, two of the most popular payment processors. I love Stripe – one of the reasons is it’s a lot easier for me to deal with Stripe reporting for my accounting than Paypal. But both have their pros and cons – read the post to learn more and make your own decision.

Finally… I’ve mentioned MemberPress before; it’s one of the easiest membership plugins I’ve used. Here’s a new post about MemberPress and why it might be all you need in a membership plugin. The article discusses the plugin’s features and why it stands out from other popular membership plugins.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – RSS, Finding Your Blogging Niche, WordPress Glossary, MemberPress

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

You probably know a little bit about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds – your blog generates them and users can subscribe to them to get content updates. They were really popular in the early 2000’s, not so much now, but still very useful if you like to follow lots of news sources and read them all in one place. Did you know you can optimize your RSS feed to make it more attractive and get more subscribers? This post mentions Feedly, but there are still some other alternatives for aggregating RSS feeds. I personally use Feedly and like it pretty well, no complaints…

If you’re a blogger, especially a new one, you may feel like you’re struggling to find your niche – that sweet spot where you start to get some traction with your writing and readers and growth is finally happening. Maybe you feel like you just don’t have a niche, or even an idea where to focus? Don’t worry – check out the post. It may give you some ideas you haven’t thought of yet.

You know how when you run a WordPress site you run into words that are just outside any normal conversation all the time? Like when your developer talks to you and you need a dictionary to understand him/her? Here’s something just for you! A new WordPress glossary that explains all those weird terms – things like ‘Akismet’ and ‘shortcode’ and ‘custom post type.’

And finally… One of my favorite membership plugins is MemberPress. I’ve used it on a number of client sites and on my own. It’s easy to set up and has great support. Here’s a post from the folks at MemberPress for the new MemberPress user to help you get going in the right direction with your membership site.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Membership Sites, Not Secure, Emailed Blog Posts, .com to .org

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Ever thought about starting a membership website? It can be a daunting proposition. Here’s a short but informative list of FAQs for starting a membership site from MemberPress that may help you gel your ideas before you decide to take the leap. Also: MemberPress is an awesome tool for running your new site. They have good support and the plugin itself is pretty intuitive to set up and use.

One more step in eradicating the insecure website – as of last week Google Chrome is now flagging all plain HTTP sites with a more prominent “Not Secure” warning in the address bar. If you’re still using HTTP you’ll see this warning before your site’s URL. Please, get an SSL certificate for your site and switch to HTTPS. If you don’t know how, contact me. You are hurting your business and your customers by not doing this.

A great way to reach more readers is to offer your blog by email. Basically, a blog produces an RSS (really simple syndication) feed that users can subscribe too with tools like Feedly. But you can make it even easier for your readers by having them instead subscribe to a blog mailing list and delivering excerpts of new posts to their email inbox automatically. The awesome email marketing tool Mailchimp offers a step by step tutorial in how to get your blog posts automatically into newsletter format. You can choose to send out notifications about new posts as they’re published or on a regular schedule. The Mailchimp RSS tools will provide prominent links to your post and blog to drive more vetted traffic to your website – which is what we all want, right?

Finally…. You may know that wordpress.com and wordpress.org are two completely different animals. If you started off with a wordpress.com site and quickly realized that it has too many limitations to function as a business platform, here’s a guide on moving from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. Please note that the quality of your host really matters. A $3-per-month host may sound like a great deal, but it will not be – you will pay primarily with poor performance. Do some research and find a solid host – it’s worth the effort.

Please let me know if this information is useful to you by commenting below. And let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like to know more about.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Privacy Settings, GDPR Plugins, Affiliate Programs, Admin Columns

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Have you noticed the new Privacy settings page under Settings? This is a new WordPress feature that’s just come out in advance of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) going into effect in the EU on May 25. The GDPR requires site owners to be transparent about how they collect, use and share personal data, and to provide ways for users to review, correct and remove personal data from websites. Add your privacy page in the settings – and if you don’t have one there are some guidelines for creating them.

There are a number of GDPR plugins for WordPress already. Of the ones I’ve checked out, this is the most useful so far: GDPR Personal Data Reports. This plugin makes it super-easy for your users to request a copy of the data on your site, and to request deletion. It’s all automated and requires confirmation from the user before any actions are taken, plus it logs each request in the dashboard for you for record-keeping.

If you’ve thought about monetizing your WordPress site for more income, here’s a post about setting up either an affiliate or referral program in WordPress. These programs use a special link to your site that you share with your affiliates and referrers; they promote your site on their own websites and when someone clicks through, they get a small commission. Several plugins that can help you set up your own program are reviewed.

Finally… a review of the Admin Columns plugin for WordPress. This is a handy tool that lets you fully customize the columns for your Pages and Posts pages in the dashboard – reorganizing, adding or deleting columns, sorting, filtering and even editing content items in columns! There’s a drag-and-drop interface and over 390 different column types to pick from.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Membership Plugins, Not Allowed Error, 301 Redirects, Localization

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

If you run a membership site like I do, you’re always looking for ways to improve. Here’s a nice post from one of my favorite membership plugins MemberPress – it’s a review of 9 plugins for enhancing your membership site. These are all behind-the-scenes plugins but some are essential (security!) or desirable for most membership sites (SEO, lead gen).

Ever see that ‘you’re not allowed to access this page’ error in WordPress? Baffling, isn’t it? Unfortunately there are a number of possible reasons to get this error – but here’s a guide to troubleshooting the problem, if you’re not afraid to get your hands a little dirty in the backend of your site.

If you ever need to change the URL of a post, change your permalinks, or do something else that affects an existing link (like changing your domain), you’re going to need to use 301 redirects. A 301 redirect lets you redirect traffic without causing problems for either human visitors or search engines. Here’s a guide to using 301 redirects in WordPress, either with a plugin or in the .htaccess file.

Finally… if your business is international, you’ll want to internationalize (or localize) your website. This is a big task, and here’s a big post that goes into detail on how to do it.