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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 – WP Minder, Installing Plugins, Knowledge Bases, Gutenberg

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

My website is down! What do I do? Here’s a post that answers that question. Or, if you were a WP Minder client, you’d just let us know (most likely we’d know before you do with our uptime monitoring) and we’d get you up and running quickly with no fuss on your part. But for you DIYers, learn 8 things to check when your WordPress site is down.

(Check out our WordPress Care Plans if you’d like to learn more about WP Minder and use coupon code WPMNP10 to get 10% off your monthly subscription.)

Let’s get really, really basic for a minute… Here’s a post on how to do one of the most important WordPress tasks: installing a plugin. Learn three ways to install a plugin! Bet you didn’t know there were three ways…

A knowledge base on your website can be a great way to provide a lot of information on your products or services in a highly-organized and easy-to-use tool. Here’s a review of four top knowledge base plugins for WordPress and information on how to get started creating your own.

You’ve probably used or at least encountered the Gutenburg editor in WordPress by now. Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay. And if you do use it, you’ve probably notice problems in either its capability limits or just the experience of using it. Here’s something that may help: a guide to 10 of the best plugins to extend Gutenburg. These plugins offer more blocks to give you more layout functionality. I’ve used CoBlocks for clients who like using Gutenberg.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Calendar Plugins, Tour Booking, Maintenance Mode, SMTP

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Calendar plugins are a big and sometimes confusing topic – there are a lot of them. Some are free and some paid. How do you choose the best one for your particular job? This review of top calendar plugins for 2019 might help. It’s a little different because it includes plugins for appointment and rental bookings – not just the typical event calendar.

And speaking of bookings… my client is a tour guide in Peru and was looking for a plugin to handle tour bookings. That was harder to find than I thought, but I came up with two options that look promising, and that we’re going to try.  Check out WP Travel or WP Travel Engine. You can also use WooCommerce for this purpose.

Sometimes you may need to ‘close’ your site to do some maintenance or handle an emergency. Here’s a post on how to put your site into ‘maintenance mode,’ with or without using a plugin.

Finally… Not getting the expected notification emails from your WordPress site? That’s so irritating, isn’t it? The reason is most likely that the host server is not set up for PHP mail(), or it’s set up incorrectly, or it’s being flagged as spam by the receiving server because PHP mail() is not industry-standard and can lack proper authentication. The fix is to use SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to send those notifications instead. This post will show you how.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress 5.0, Audio and Video Players, Powerpoint, Internal Links

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Today (Thursday Dec. 6) is supposed to be the (rescheduled) day for the WordPress 5.0/Gutenberg drop. Nothing yet and it’s afternoon… but when it happens, here are some handy links about Gutenberg, the new WordPress editing tool.

  • Should you update to WordPress 5.0 right away? I say no. Personally I would wait until January to give WP and plugin/theme developers time to deal with Gutenberg issues – it is not ready for prime time. I will not be updating client sites until then – I’ll be using Classic Editor instead. Here’s what Yoast says about updating.
  • Do I have to use Gutenberg? No – if you prefer the old editor, install and use the Classic Editor plugin – learn how to do this. You can try Gutenberg when you’re ready, on your terms.
  • What exactly does Gutenberg do? Here’s a guide to everything Gutenberg.

Switching gears, here’s a big review of the 15 best WordPress audio and video players. This is brand new and not super-thorough or in-depth on each plugin, but is a good place to start if you’re looking to add audio or video to your WordPress site and need a quick overview of current options.

If you’re a Powerpoint fan (are there any, still?) then you might have a need for this… I was asked a few weeks ago to embed a client’s Powerpoint in WordPress and I’d never done that before. Here’s a guide to embedding Powerpoint in WordPress; the Embed Any Document plugin they mention worked perfectly. It also embeds Word, Excel, PDF and Illustrator files.

And finally, some SEO stuff. You may not know that internal links (links between pages and posts in your own website) are very important! They help drive users deeper into your site to the places you want them to go. They show search engines what pages are most important (the ones with the most internal links!). And they help ensure that search engine crawlers can reach every page on your site. Learn more about internal links and why you really need to audit them from time to time.

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 – Backup Plugins, HTTP Errors, Hackers, Managing Ads

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Having a recent backup stored safely offsite (think Dropbox, Drive, Amazon S3…) is one of the best insurance policies you can get for your business site. Get hacked? No worries. Just restore that fresh backup!

Here’s a review of 7 of the top WordPress backup plugins. My go-to plugin is BackupBuddy (not free), and for a less expensive alternative I’d pick the free version of UpdraftPlus.

Ever seen that enigmatic “HTTP Error” pop up when trying to upload images to WordPress? The reason may be a mystery… Here’s a post on 10 ways to fix the HTTP error – and a warning, this gets just a little bit technical, but the instructions are clear.

Do you know why hackers target WordPress sites? They do, it’s a well-known fact – WordPress is a huge target and there are almost 100,000 attacks on WordPress sites around the world every minute! If you’re interested in reducing your site’s risk by patching its biggest weaknesses, this post is worth a look.

Finally… if you’re running ads on your WordPress site, are you doing it right? You may be making mistakes and not even realizing it. Learn about some common mistakes with ad management that can impact advertising ROI and traffic growth.