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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 – Super Admin, Smart Slider 3, Media Cleanup, Hacked Sites Report

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

You may or may not be the super admin of your WordPress website – but what does that really mean? Here’s a good explanation of why you need to be careful when choosing a super admin.

Smart Slider 3 has been my go-to favorite slider for client sites for awhile now due to both its great array of tools and excellent support. Here’s an in-depth review of Smart Slider 3 and a head-to-head comparison with another popular slider, Soliloquy.

If you have tons of files in your Media Library but are not sure if they are all being used, try a Media Library cleanup. Word of warning – if you use a cleaner plugin make absolutely sure you have a fresh backup first!

Finally… Sucuri has release their Hacked Website Threat Report for 2019. Some of the major takeaways:

  • 56% of websites that were hacked had outdated core files – such as an outdated WordPress version.
  • 44% of hacked sites had more than one outdated component including plugins and themes.
  • About 60% of hacked sites were running on servers with outdated, unsupported versions of PHP.

Moral of the story – keep WordPress, plugins and themes up to date. And check with your host if you’re not using an up-to-date PHP version. You can use WP Health to see what PHP version your host uses.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Broken Links, Missing Images, Stripe

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Looking for an easy way to check for broken links on your WordPress site? There is a plugin for this (of course there is!) called Broken Links Checker, but this plugin is banned by some hosts because it puts a high load on the server. Fortunately there are other ways to check for broken links including using the free Google Search Console formerly Google Webmaster Tools) to check for crawl errors.

I ran into this problem on a client’s site just this week. If you ever open up the Media Library and some or all of your uploaded images are displaying blank thumbnails, this post on fixing Media Library blanks is for you.

Finally… If you are not using an ecommerce, membership or forms plugin that works with the Stripe payment gateway but would still like to use Stripe, you’re in luck! This post is all about using a free plugin to sell with Stripe. Your site will need an SSL certificate and use HTTPS to set this up.

Questions? Opinions? Please leave a comment!

 

Weekly Links Roundup – SEO for 2017, Media Library Plugins, Newsletter Signups

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

First, a giant list of SEO tips for 2017, from 39 SEO experts. A lot of good information here to browse through…

Second – is your media library a mess? You’ve probably noticed that after you add 30 or so images it gets harder to find things in there. The native WordPress library oddly included no support for folders, categories, tags or anything else, but the good news is there are plugins to fill that gap.

Here’s a review of the commercial plugin Real Media Library. My favorite free media library-enhancing plugins right now are Enhanced Media Library or Media Library Assistant. Both will let you classify, organize and sort your media library images.

Finally – if you’d like to get more newsletter signups from your site (and who doesn’t?) here are some tips from Constant Contact on doing just that. This post talks about the Constant Contact WordPress forms plugin, but it has good info even if you’re not a CC user.

Friday Link Wrapup – Messy Media Library, Permalinks, Blogging Tips, Themes for Musicians

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Is your WordPress Media Library one big mess? The older your site gets the more it’s likely to happen, because (surprisingly) core WordPress still doesn’t come with any organizational tools for media files.

So, here is a review of commercial plugin WP Media Folder (which allows you to add folders in the Library). There are a few free plugins I’d check out too if the commercial one looks too complicated: Enhanced Media Library lets you add tags and categories for images, and Media Library Assistant adds even more features including EXIF data for photographs.

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about WordPress Permalinks – what they do, how to make them pretty, and (scarily) how to change them on a live site.

Here are 4 quick blogging tips aimed at getting more clients.

And finally… if you’re looking for a commercial WordPress theme to showcase your band and music, here are five themes that may fit the bill.

Friday Link Wrapup – Essential Plugins, Taxes, and Media File Managers

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

A big list of 37 essential WordPress plugins (I was surprised to find I only use about 6 of these regularly, but I have my own preferred plugins that are alternatives to most of the rest).

If you’re running a WordPress membership site, here’s a scary word: taxes. This post from MemberPress (my current favorite membership plugin) introduces some tools designed to take some of the fear out of tax setup.

Finally, the WordPress media library has a lot to be desired in terms of ease of use. These 15 media file manager plugins can help – I really like Media Library Assistant myself and use it in image-heavy client sites. It provides ways to categorize and tag media files plus many other features.