WP Minder

gdpr

Links Roundup for August 2021

by 2 Comments

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.

Elementary GDPR for WordPress Site Owners

by Leave a Comment

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) went into effect on May 25, 2018. Even if you are not selling or marketing to EU customers directly, this is still very important for website owners. And it is very much a moving target – you’ll see conflicting information, very little in the way of direction, and this is unlikely to change until the new rules are actually tested in court. It’s frustrating, but I’ll try to share the basics of what I’ve learned here.

Note: I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice; it’s recommended that you contact your attorney to review your privacy policy, terms of service, opt-in forms and other aspects of use that involve personal data.

What’s it all about?

User privacy concerns
Photo by Hannah Wei on Unsplash

It’s about privacy, an overriding concern these days. It’s all about personal data – we have to all be good stewards of our customers’ personal information.

Some sites don’t store personal data, but if they do they have to comply with requests from EU users to remove that data and to share information about why the data is collected, how it’s used, and and how it’s stored.

I’m not in Europe – does this matter to me?

If you’re not selling anything, or focusing on EU users in your marketing, does it still affect you? Most likely. If you have a comment or contact form on your site that asks for name and email address, that’s personal data. If someone from the EU fills out your form, then GDPR applies. From Red Kite’s point of view, compliance is a good target for all website owners.

You may be collecting personal data through:

  • User registrations
  • Payments
  • Comments
  • Contact form requests
  • Chats
  • Plugins
  • Analytics and traffic logs
  • Security tools and plugins

This are serious penalties involved here too – fines can go up to 20 million Euros or 4% of total company annual earnings.

GDPR for WordPress Site Owners – How WordPress is Helping You

You’ll probably be relieved to hear that WordPress is taking this seriously, and as of release 4.9.6 has put some new tools in place right in the admin dashboard to assist you with compliance. These are:

  • Under Tools, new features to make it easy for you to export or erase the data for a user by their username or email address.
  • Under Settings, a new Privacy feature that lets you specify an existing privacy page or have WordPress create a default one (which you must edit) for you.

For more information, check out this helpful post by BlogAid on using the new WordPress GDPR tools.

Keep in mind…

Some key aspects about GDPR to consider (remember: I am not an attorney!).

  • Breach notifications – if you have a security issue with your site, notify users with personal data storage within 72 hours. This means you need to be monitoring security with a plugin and/or a service like Sucuri. Security is going to become even more important!
  • Data collection, processing and storage – a terms of service or privacy page should detail what data is collected, how it’s used, why it’s stored, and how it will be stored. You’ll also need to provide a copy of the data stored if a user requests it, and remove the data if requested (which will mean removing an account in most cases).
  • How plugins on your site store data collected from users – this is a big issue, and a lot of plugin developers are working to make it easy to access/remove user data.

What should you do to make your WordPress site compliant?

Chat with your attorney about this, but these are steps to take that are likely common to most small business sites.

  1. Look at all the different ways you’re collecting user data on your site.
  2. Put mechanisms in place so users can control their data (make sure you’re asking for consent for forms, for example).
  3. Avoid collecting user data when it’s not completely necessary.
  4. Make sure your site’s plugins are also compliant. Site owners are ultimately responsible for the data collection and storage of plugins, so review your plugins carefully.
  5. Make sure all newsletters, downloads, etc. are asking for consent/are opt-in instead of opt-out. Already-checked consent boxes are a breach of GDPR.
  6. Consider a Cyber Liability insurance policy that protects against data breaches and other losses of personal data.

There is an excellent checklist in this post on these other considerations for compliance.

Is it likely that your small business site will ever be involved in a GDPR dispute? Hard to say, but it seems much more likely that the targets of such disputes will most likely be very large companies, at least in the beginning.

There will be more to come on this topic… GDPR is still in its early stages and evolving.

Some other references on GDPR:

GDPR: How it Affects WordPress Site Owners and Developers
GDPR Compliance Tools in WordPress
5 Actionable Steps to GDPR Compliance with Google Analytics
The Complete WordPress GDPR Guide
Worried About WordPress and the GDPR? Start Here
Ask Yoast: Preparing for the GDPR

Did you find this useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues!

Weekly Links Roundup – Lazy Loading, GDPR, CDN Comparison, Trackbacks

by Leave a Comment

This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

I know it’s been a few weeks, but June is busy – a weekend trip, Comic Con, a new kitten… But today I’m getting caught up.

If you’re worried about long load times for your website (and you should be) one of the optimizations you can try is ‘lazy loading.’ Lazy loading is when you delay loading of below-the-fold content until the user actually scrolls down to where they are on the page. This way, things that aren’t needed immediately, like images and video, don’t slow down the initial page load. Here’s a nice review post about lazy loading that highlights some of the main WordPress lazy loading plugins. Personally I like a3 Lazy Load and just used it in a site this morning…

You probably haven’t been hearing as much about GDPR since it went into effect May 25th – but that doesn’t mean it’s gone away. Here’s a post-launch article about GDPR and why it’s still such a confusing mess.

If you’re thinking about adding a CDN (content delivery network) to your site, for the benefits of serving static content from servers physically closer to your visitors and making your site faster, here’s a comparison of CloudFlare and MaxCDN. CloudFlare has a free option and MaxCDN does not, but they are both good choices. This post will explain why.

Finally… all about WordPress trackbacks and pingbacks – what they are, why you may or may not want them, and what to do about them.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – CDNs, Event Calendar Plugins, Privacy Policies, Photography Blogs

by Leave a Comment

This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

WP Minder’s VPS hosting plan includes a free CDN – but what exactly is a Content Delivery Network? It’s about distance for sure (having your content delivered by a server near your site visitor’s physical location can decrease loading times) but it can also be about security and bandwidth. Learn more about CDNs from Yoast.

If you’re wanting to add an events calendar to your site, here’s a review of 9 event calendar plugins, including both free and commercial options. I used My Calendar recently on the Colorado Sound site to help them manage an extensive concert calender – take a look.

So GDPR (the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation) went into effect on May 25 and the world didn’t explode. Not yet, anyway. If you haven’t yet taken the time to craft a privacy policy page for your website, here’s a basic guide to privacy policies (note that this article doesn’t constitute legal advice).

Finally… a subject near and dear to my heart. If you’re a photographer, even an amateur one, you should seriously consider starting a photography blog. Here’s why.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Privacy Settings, GDPR Plugins, Affiliate Programs, Admin Columns

by Leave a Comment

This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Have you noticed the new Privacy settings page under Settings? This is a new WordPress feature that’s just come out in advance of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) going into effect in the EU on May 25. The GDPR requires site owners to be transparent about how they collect, use and share personal data, and to provide ways for users to review, correct and remove personal data from websites. Add your privacy page in the settings – and if you don’t have one there are some guidelines for creating them.

There are a number of GDPR plugins for WordPress already. Of the ones I’ve checked out, this is the most useful so far: GDPR Personal Data Reports. This plugin makes it super-easy for your users to request a copy of the data on your site, and to request deletion. It’s all automated and requires confirmation from the user before any actions are taken, plus it logs each request in the dashboard for you for record-keeping.

If you’ve thought about monetizing your WordPress site for more income, here’s a post about setting up either an affiliate or referral program in WordPress. These programs use a special link to your site that you share with your affiliates and referrers; they promote your site on their own websites and when someone clicks through, they get a small commission. Several plugins that can help you set up your own program are reviewed.

Finally… a review of the Admin Columns plugin for WordPress. This is a handy tool that lets you fully customize the columns for your Pages and Posts pages in the dashboard – reorganizing, adding or deleting columns, sorting, filtering and even editing content items in columns! There’s a drag-and-drop interface and over 390 different column types to pick from.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Booking Plugins, GDPR Resources, Image Optimization Plugins

by Leave a Comment

This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

If you have any kind of services website where you need to manage appointments, consider using one of these 10 WordPress booking plugins. I haven’t used any of these in client sites, though I’ve had several good experiences using BirchPress Scheduler (both the free and commercial versions).

GDPR is coming up on May 25! To mark this event (which has a number of my clients and colleagues very concerned), here are a few of the resources I’ve found as I’ve been updating my own sites to comply.

Finally… If you have images on your site, they need to be optimized – otherwise they can slow down page loading (if you have a lot of images, this becomes even more important). Here’s a comparison of 6 WordPress image optimization plugins – my current favorite is ShortPixel.