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Weekly Links Roundup – Clean Up Your Media Library, Remote Working Toolkit, WooCommerce Catalogs, Spamdexing

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

Do you have dozens (or hundreds? Or thousands?) of images in your Media Library that you know or suspect are no longer being used? All those extra images can slow down your site, first by taking up lots of extra space on your web server, and second by making backup files huge. Fortunately, there are some fairly easy ways to identify and remove them without having to go through every image one by one. Learn about how to clean up your Media Library without too many headaches.

A timely article called Make It Remote shares work-at-home knowledge gained over a decade of managing remote teams. This is a pay-what-you-want toolkit.

If you want to use WooCommerce as a product catalog instead of a sales machine, there’s an extension for that. I used this in a client’s site last week and it’s super-easy to hide the add-to-cart functionality and replace it with custom messages or links of your own.

Finally – all about spamdexing, where websites get hacked with injected nasty keywords and links to manipulate search engine rankings for another web property designed to rip people off. You can avoid being the target of one of these hacks by keeping your site up to date, using strong passwords, and using a good security plugin properly set up to scan your site regularly.

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.

Weekly Links Roundup – Hacked Sites, Easy WP Guide, Event Calender Plugins, PHP Versions

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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.

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.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Lazy Loading, GDPR, CDN Comparison, Trackbacks

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

I know it’s been a few weeks, but June is busy – a weekend trip, Comic Con, a new kitten… But today I’m getting caught up.

If you’re worried about long load times for your website (and you should be) one of the optimizations you can try is ‘lazy loading.’ Lazy loading is when you delay loading of below-the-fold content until the user actually scrolls down to where they are on the page. This way, things that aren’t needed immediately, like images and video, don’t slow down the initial page load. Here’s a nice review post about lazy loading that highlights some of the main WordPress lazy loading plugins. Personally I like a3 Lazy Load and just used it in a site this morning…

You probably haven’t been hearing as much about GDPR since it went into effect May 25th – but that doesn’t mean it’s gone away. Here’s a post-launch article about GDPR and why it’s still such a confusing mess.

If you’re thinking about adding a CDN (content delivery network) to your site, for the benefits of serving static content from servers physically closer to your visitors and making your site faster, here’s a comparison of CloudFlare and MaxCDN. CloudFlare has a free option and MaxCDN does not, but they are both good choices. This post will explain why.

Finally… all about WordPress trackbacks and pingbacks – what they are, why you may or may not want them, and what to do about them.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – CDNs, Event Calendar Plugins, Privacy Policies, Photography Blogs

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

WP Minder’s VPS hosting plan includes a free CDN – but what exactly is a Content Delivery Network? It’s about distance for sure (having your content delivered by a server near your site visitor’s physical location can decrease loading times) but it can also be about security and bandwidth. Learn more about CDNs from Yoast.

If you’re wanting to add an events calendar to your site, here’s a review of 9 event calendar plugins, including both free and commercial options. I used My Calendar recently on the Colorado Sound site to help them manage an extensive concert calender – take a look.

So GDPR (the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation) went into effect on May 25 and the world didn’t explode. Not yet, anyway. If you haven’t yet taken the time to craft a privacy policy page for your website, here’s a basic guide to privacy policies (note that this article doesn’t constitute legal advice).

Finally… a subject near and dear to my heart. If you’re a photographer, even an amateur one, you should seriously consider starting a photography blog. Here’s why.