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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.

Weekly Links Roundup – Blog Post Length, Online Courses, Gutenberg Addons, Plugins

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

One of my clients is now starting a blog with the goal of getting more traffic from search results. She asked me last week: “How long should my blog posts be?” The answer, like for so many things, is “it depends.” Looks like current trends are pointing to longer blog posts being better for getting more traffic (to the dismay of many!). Really long – like over 1700 words. Here is a post to back that up with research data, along with a number of other opinions and guidelines.

Ever thought about teaching others online? Here’s a thorough and informative post about creating your own online courses using LearnDash, a course plugin one of my clients uses and likes. There is a lot of upfront work involved in creating an online course, but the benefits in passive income can be worth it. Note that the linked post recommends a commercial theme that may or may not suit you or your course idea – you can use any theme with online courseware.

If you’ve made the switch to Gutenberg, you may be wanting more options than what comes in the new editor by default. Here’s a review of 10 of the best Gutenberg add-on plugins. These plugins give you new and different types of blocks to use in your page layouts. One of my current favorites is CoBlocks which includes about 30 layout blocks.

For new WordPress users – confused about the differences between themes and plugins? Here’s a great post explaining what plugins are and why you’d want to use them. One important thing to remember when choosing plugins (free or paid) is to look at the reviews and the compatibility. As a rule it’s better to avoid older plugins that haven’t been updated recently or tested with current or recent WordPress versions.

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 – WP Guide, Collapsing Categories, Tags, Installing Plugins

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Happy Holidays!

This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Easy WP Guide, an online/downloadable handbook for using your WordPress site’s tools, has just come out with a fresh new updated version. Get it here.

Collapsing Categories is a useful plugin if you have a lot of blog categories and subcategories. It will expand and contract as needed and works great as a sidebar widget. You can see it in use here.

If you’re new to blogging in WordPress, you may not realize how handy using categories and tags can be. They can help with site navigation and general browsing.  They’re also useful for helping search engines crawl more of your website. Check out the 10 best practices of using tags and categories.

And if you’re brand new to WordPress, you may not be aware that you can add any of thousands of plugins to add new functionality to your site (that’s if you’re using self-hosted wordpress.org, not wordpress.com!). Learn about plugins and how to install them.

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