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Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Shipping, WordPress Comments, RSS Feeds

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

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and needed a way to set up shipping by weight ranges. There are commercial plugins that do this, but I found a great free one that works fine for my client’s needs. WooCommerce Weight-Based Shipping lets you add a series of rules for free shipping, subtotals, shipping destinations, all based on order weight.

Do you allow comments on your WordPress blog? Comments can be great – they can help build and tie a community of site fans together. But they can also have a dark side. If your blog comments are overrun with spam or trolls and you just want it to stop, learn how to disable comments completely, or conditionally as you see fit. This post also covers how to delete existing comments, shorten the available commenting period, and more.

If you have a blog, are you sharing that blog so people can read it elsewhere? Like an RSS reader. Here’s an interesting post about RSS feeds and whether they are ‘giving away content for free.’ I agree with the author… you want people to read your blog, right? Encouraging people to subscribe to your RSS feed is a way to help more people see your writing. And that’s a good thing.

As a followup, here’s a review of the best RSS readers and news aggregator services. If you’ve never used one, try signing up and subscribing to some feeds.

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 – Collapsing Nav Menus, Translation Plugins, Affiliate Plugins, WordPress Security Myths

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

This morning I was putting together a mega menu (think: a really huge menu) for a new site. You know when you have a lot of links in a menu, how hard it gets to move things around in that menu in the WordPress dashboard? I have a fix for that – check out Nav Menu Collapse. It will let you collapse and expand individual menu sections or the entire menu. This functionality should be part of WordPress core, it’s so essential for large sites.

That same new site also needs to be multilingual. The client isn’t interested in manually translating the entire site at this time, but we are going to take advantage of Google Translate and have quick language switching functionality. Learn about different ways to make your site multilingual. And, here’s a review of the 11 best WordPress translation plugins if you want more choices.

Another new client was looking to set up an affiliate program that would let friends and customers sign up to promote the site. A user signs up as an affiliate and then gets a special link to share with others. When someone uses the link, that affiliate gets rewarded. Here’s a review of 10 WordPress affiliate plugins. I’ve heard many good things about AffiliateWP, which integrates with WooCommerce.

Security is an important part of WP Minder’s services. Here’s a quick post about the top 5 security myths surrounding WordPress – and how they have all been debunked. Keep in mind that the biggest security issue with WordPress is user-related; not updating plugins, themes or WordPress core is the number one reason WordPress sites get hacked. If you don’t want to do this yourself, give WP Minder a try and let us handle site security and updates for you.

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

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 – 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 – 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.