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Using Backup Plugin UpdraftPlus? Upgrade It Now

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UpdraftPlus logoIf your WordPress website uses the popular UpdraftPlus backup plugin, you’ll want to read this…

UpdraftPlus is installed on over 3 million WordPress websites and is relied upon for securely backing up WordPress site files and databases, which contain sensitive user data.

UpdraftPlus was found by a security researcher at WordPress parent company Automattic to have a ‘severe vulnerability’ that allowed hackers to download usernames and passwords.

Here is the announcement from UpdraftPlus from Feb. 17. They were on top of things, working to release the fixed version about a day after the problem was found and being transparent about reporting it.

WordPress took the unusual step of forcing auto-updates on installations that were still using the older versions of this plugin, but you do need to check your site anyway to make sure. Upgrade immediately if you find one of the older versions.

If you’re still using the following you’ll need to upgrade right away:

Links Roundup for August 2021

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Questions about GDPR. GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation, their privacy guidelines for the acquisition, usage, storage and deletion of personal data for EU users) can be a confusing beast. I get questions about it from clients mostly concerned about privacy policies. Here is a post from MailerLite about 99 common GDPR questions for email marketers that you may find helpful.

AI-powered copywriting. Does the idea of writing a blog post make you feel _____ (insert your favorite anxious feeling here)? It can be hard coming up with interesting things to write about week after week, there’s no way around it. But have you considered one of the many AI-powered copywriting tools that are now available? There are a good many to choose from; some focus more on short content like headlines and ads, while others work with longer content like blog posts or product descriptions. Here’s a review of some of the top AI-powered writing tools.

Roundup of content generators. Here’s another post on content generators, but this one covers a lot more ground. In addition to AI copywriting tools, it includes others for generating headlines, names, ad copy, audio and video content, blog ideas and more.

Redirects. Removing (or sometimes moving or renaming) old website content can cause big problems for search engines. Redirection is the process of sending search bots and human visitors to the correct new content when they try to go to deleted or moved content. It’s easy to do with WordPress plugins like Redirection and 301 Redirects, but the reasoning behind it may seem confusing. Learn 6 redirection best practices for your WordPress site.

Weekly Links Roundup – Online Sermons, Help Desk Plugins, Before You Hit Publish, Download Managers

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

Are you the manager of a WordPress site for your church? If so, have you considered putting sermons online? Here’s a guide to doing that, including audio and video recording, getting sermon content into your site, turning your sermons into a podcast and more.

Here is a review of 13 of the best WordPress help desk plugins. Offer product support right within WordPress!  Help desks can make it much easier to manage client support – assign ticket numbers, organize all support requests and followups in a single dashboard (much simpler than using email!) and be less frustrating for both you and your customers.

Here’s a treat from ProBlogger – this video teaches you 23 questions to ask yourself before you publish your next blog posts.

Download manager plugins extend WordPress’ native ability to handle downloads by adding in download tracking, organization of downloadable materials, and user restrictions on downloading content. Here’s a roundup of 15 of the top WordPress download managers.

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

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 – Easy WP Guide, Podcasting, Post Excerpts, Yoast SEO

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

The latest edition of Easy WP Guide, an evolving manual on all things WordPress, is available now. You can read it online (recommended) or download a PDF in English or Spanish. Keep in mind it’s  PDF that gets updated frequently….

Looking to start your own podcast? Here’s a roundup of 7 of the best WordPress podcasting plugins right now. One of my colleagues recommended Blubrry PowerPress for a new project this week.

If you ever wanted to change the length of the blog post excerpt, which is by default 55 words, this post is for you. The excerpt is the first bit of each blog post that’s displayed on the blog archive page. Learn how to change the excerpt length with or without a plugin.

If you’ve installed Yoast SEO and used it a little bit to try to get your pages or posts ranking higher, it may still not be clear exactly how Yoast works. Learn what Yoast SEO actually does for you. You don’t have to be a tech wizard to get the benefits Yoast provides.

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

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.