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Weekly Links Roundup – Security, Google Maps, FooGallery, Why Blog?

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

I’ve had WordPress clients tell me they don’t worry about security or backups because their site is “too small to hack.” I beg to differ. It’s small sites with owners who have poor security practices that are frequently the target of hacks because they are so easy to crack! When a site owner doesn’t update WordPress/plugins/themes sometimes in years, or when they have simple login passwords, their sites are much easier to attack and use for malicious activity. If your site gets hacked and begins churning out spam or displaying links to porn sites or worse, gets defaced, your business’s trustworthiness and credibility will take a big hit. Don’t let this happen your business – read this quick post on why it’s important to harden your site. And check out our WordPress Care Plans if you want a partner to do this critical work for you. Our plans start at just $2 per day.

Maps are a great addition to your website when you have a brick-and-mortar location. And, you can add them to your WordPress site easily using either some manual code or a plugin. Learn how to add a Google map to your WordPress site.

FooGallery has been my go-to WordPress gallery plugin for several years. Besides being a full-featured responsive and flexible gallery plugin, they also have excellent support if you need it. FooGallery has a pro (commercial) version that includes more features, like a video galley option, but for my clients the free version usually works fine. Here’s a big comprehensive review of FooGallery so you can see whether it’s a good fit for your site too.

Finally, here’s an interesting take on the evolving purpose of blogging. How has blogging changed in the last decade or so? Do you find yourself writing more to teach others what you know, or to get a reaction out of them? Both purposes have value. Some food for thought…

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 – Copyrighted Images, Gutenberg, Mega Menus, Gallery Plugins

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

“Ooh, that photo would be perfect for this post I’m writing. Can I use that picture?” Good question! And the answer may surprise you. Learn about the ethics and laws surrounding copyrighted images in this infographic.

So… have you tried Gutenberg yet? I broke down in January and gave it a try myself, and honestly it was not as disturbing as I’d read it was (of course by then a number of bugs had been ironed out). I’m not using it all the time, but I am using it now for some layout tasks that I would previously have added a plugin for like accordions. (Hint: if you use the Classic Editor plugin I’ve mentioned here before, you can switch back and forth between the old and new editors with one click).

If you need a guide to learn Gutenberg (I’d recommend it, it saves time over just diving in and trying to figure it out) and a resource for understanding all that it does, try Go Gutenberg. And if you start using it you’ll likely find it doesn’t have a block you need. There are a number of free plugins now with more blocks; I like CoBlocks because it was the first one I tried with a nice clean accordion block.

Shifting gears… if you’re planning a new site with a lot of pages, you may have considered using a mega menu (you know – one of those huge dropdown menus like this one on the Moleskine site). But do you really need a mega menu? Maybe not. Learn more about when to use mega menus and when it’s not really necessary.

And finally… a winter 2019 roundup of the best WordPress gallery plugins. FooGallery is still at the top of my list.

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.