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Weekly Links Roundup – Membership Sites, Not Secure, Emailed Blog Posts, .com to .org

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Ever thought about starting a membership website? It can be a daunting proposition. Here’s a short but informative list of FAQs for starting a membership site from MemberPress that may help you gel your ideas before you decide to take the leap. Also: MemberPress is an awesome tool for running your new site. They have good support and the plugin itself is pretty intuitive to set up and use.

One more step in eradicating the insecure website – as of last week Google Chrome is now flagging all plain HTTP sites with a more prominent “Not Secure” warning in the address bar. If you’re still using HTTP you’ll see this warning before your site’s URL. Please, get an SSL certificate for your site and switch to HTTPS. If you don’t know how, contact me. You are hurting your business and your customers by not doing this.

A great way to reach more readers is to offer your blog by email. Basically, a blog produces an RSS (really simple syndication) feed that users can subscribe too with tools like Feedly. But you can make it even easier for your readers by having them instead subscribe to a blog mailing list and delivering excerpts of new posts to their email inbox automatically. The awesome email marketing tool Mailchimp offers a step by step tutorial in how to get your blog posts automatically into newsletter format. You can choose to send out notifications about new posts as they’re published or on a regular schedule. The Mailchimp RSS tools will provide prominent links to your post and blog to drive more vetted traffic to your website – which is what we all want, right?

Finally…. You may know that wordpress.com and wordpress.org are two completely different animals. If you started off with a wordpress.com site and quickly realized that it has too many limitations to function as a business platform, here’s a guide on moving from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. Please note that the quality of your host really matters. A $3-per-month host may sound like a great deal, but it will not be – you will pay primarily with poor performance. Do some research and find a solid host – it’s worth the effort.

Please let me know if this information is useful to you by commenting below. And let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like to know more about.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Email Newsletters, Hosting, Maintenance Plugins, Scrolling

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

I believe I’ve gone over this before, but you should never rely on WordPress to send email newsletters. Learn why (emails will often be flagged as spam especially if you’re on shared hosting, or may not be received at all due to server settings) and see the alternatives.

If you’re looking for a managed WordPress host, I work with an awesome one (WP Engine) but some of the others are somewhat less desirable. This is an opinion piece detailing the inner workings of one of those offerings. I’m happy to provide high-quality WordPress hosting recommendations at different price points for clients.

If you ever need to hide your site from public view temporarily (say you’re doing a logo update or some other change to your live site), you need a maintenance plugin. Here’s a review of 5 of the top WordPress maintenance plugins that will do the job.

Finally…

Here’s a big myth that I’ve had trouble convincing clients about in the past: people don’t scroll. It’s not true – they do scroll. Everything doesn’t have to be at the very top of your page. See the research results.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Monetizing Blogs, Payment Gateways, Managing WordPress, Tabs Plugins

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Thinking about monetizing your blog and are not sure how to get started? Here’s a podcast transcript from ProBlogger that describes 6 common ways that beginners start making money from their blogs. He recommends affiliate marketing as one of the best ways to monetize.

And speaking of money…. just yesterday I chatted with a client about how easy it is to take credit card payments from her site. Thanks to companies like Stripe, it’s super-simple to set up and get started. Here’s a roundup of the top 5 ecommerce payment gateways for WordPress sites. I’ve used all of them except Braintree, and Stripe is by far my favorite. It integrates with the most common plugins I use, like Gravity Forms and WooCommerce, and is very easy to deal with when it’s time to do your accounting (one of the reasons I don’t use Paypal very often).

Here’s something that all of us can benefit from: How to Manage a WordPress Site Like a Pro. You’re a pro, right? Pay special attention to #1 – Good Hosting. This is so important, so basic, and bad hosting is behind so many of the client complaints I receive. Slow websites, slow or poor support, outdated server software, obscure server setups that don’t allow WordPress to run at its best. So many problems can be traced back to a low-quality host.

I can’t recommend our host of choice WP Engine enough, they are the best I’ve ever used since my first site in the mid-90’s. Contact me if you’re interested in getting the best hosting at a significant discount.

Finally, here’s a roundup of 12 of the best plugins for tabs and accordions on your WordPress site. Tabs and accordions can be great for presenting a lot of information in a smaller space and also give a nice interactive experience for your visitors.

Weekly Links Roundup – Credibility, Real Estate Plugins, Hosting

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

You’ve got a great-looking business website full of useful, high-quality content. What else can you do to enhance your site’s credibility? Try using these trustmarks to make your customers more confident in using your site. They include things like security seals from payment processors; using HTTPS for added security; and displaying credible reviews and testimonials.

If you’re running or considering starting a real estate site, here are 7 real estate plugins to help you manage your listings. Some also provide various calculators for visitors, like a mortgage calculator. These plugins are designed to work with any theme.

A little nag… Earlier this week I was notified that a client’s site was down. For this client, however, it’s more of a problem than it should be, as he has five active business websites on the same hosting account! I understand the desire to save money, but if you run multiple business sites, don’t put them all on the same account.

For one thing, if something happens to the server, all your sites are down, not just one. If it’s a catastrophic problem like a server meltdown, and you don’t have recent backups of your sites, you could lose everything at once. Also, consider that if a hacker manages to get access to your hosting they then can easily access all the sites on that account. It’s too much of a risk – please keep your business sites on separate accounts. Okay – nag over.

The Right WordPress Host Can Make a Big Difference in Performance

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This week I moved a client’s site from a popular big-box ‘managed WordPress’ host to WP Engine. Here are the results of performance tests before and immediately after the move was complete:

Page performance test

(The ‘C’ is in part because WP Engine was adding files to its CDN at that time, and the site does need performance tweaks in addition to just switching hosts…)

The most important thing to note is First Byte. Time to First Byte (TTFB) is affected by three things1:

  1. The time it takes for your request to move through the network to the web server.
  2. The time it takes for the web server to process the request and generate the response.
  3. The time it takes for the response to move back through the network to your browser.

1Check out the MOZ article on improving search ranking by optimizing TTFB.

You can see TTFB on the old host was 3.53 seconds. WP Engine’s is 0.11 seconds. That’s a huge improvement, 97% less time. MOZ says ideally you should be under 1/2 second for TTFB – WP Engine meets that benchmark easily.

My client said:

“I’m posting dozens of articles to [my site] this a.m. (as fast as I possibly can) and am absolutely delighted with the speed I’ve gotten back after moving to WP Engine hosting. The CMS is operating at lightening speed, similar to the way it once functioned when we were hosted at the defunct MediaLayer.”

So yes – good hosting does make a difference!

Check out our site care plans including WP Engine hosting.