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Productivity

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.

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 – Selling Books, Caching Plugins, Repurposing Content

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

If you’re a writer and interested in selling your physical and/or digital books from your website, check out this review of the best WordPress plugins and themes for self-publishing.

Caching plugins can help your WordPress site load faster – particularly if you’re on a slow shared host. One of the most popular caching plugins is W3 Total Cache, but it’s a real bear to configure. So here’s a helpful step-by-step guide for setting up W3 Total Cache for newbies.

If W3 is too much to deal with, try one of the other caching plugins in this review. Personally I like WP Fastest Cache (free) and WP Rocket (commercial) for user-friendliness.

Finally – do you repurpose your content? You know – you blog regularly and often and eventually you’ve got 100 posts on topic X, and you decide to assemble them into an ebook you can sell or offer as an incentive for signing up for your mailing list. Learn how to leverage your efforts and save time and money by repurposing content.

Friday Link Wrapup – Calenders, Premium Themes, Local SEO

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Yesterday I was researching calendar plugins for a client project – there are a lot of them out there. This guide to WordPress event and calendar plugins was one of the better resources I found.

What did I use? I wound up going with All-in-one Event Calendar. The reviews are mixed, but don’t let that throw you; this is still a really good plugin with lots of features (I’ve used it many times in the past). The main features we liked are the widgets that you can customize to display specific categories, and the event list feed that can be used on pages and posts.

If you’re looking for a commercial WordPress theme instead of a custom solution for your business, the premium themes directory is a good place to start.

Are you lucky enough to blog for a living? If you are, here are some tips on staying productive when working at home.

Finally – if you have a brick-and-mortar location and are interested in getting started with local SEO, here’s a detailed guide for setting up the commercial Yoast Local SEO plugin.