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Weekly Links Roundup – 2FA, Leaving Squarespace, PHP, WordPress Performance

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

It’s a scary world out there. You know how when you login to your bank’s website, they’ll typically send you a code on your phone to make sure it’s you? That’s called 2-factor authentication (2FA) and did you know, you can have the same level of login security on your own WordPress site? It’s a great way to improve overall security of your site. Here’s a guide to adding 2FA to WordPress with a free plugin called FIDO.

Squarespace is a popular hosted website platform suited to beginning website owners, but when you understand its limitations, you’re likely ready to upgrade to a more flexible platform that’s totally under your control. WordPress fits that description perfectly. But how do you move? Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on switching from Squarespace to WordPress.

If your host is using a very old version of PHP on its servers, you likely noticed a nagging popup in the WordPress dashboard around August 20 that encouraged you to update to a modern version of PHP. Users of servers with PHP 5.6 or older got this nag (about 43% of all users). WordPress recommends PHP 7.1+ now. Anything older than that is not being updated for security and is leaving your site at risk. The older the version of PHP, the more likely your plugins and themes will begin to fail due to compatibility issues. And, modern versions of PHP are much, much faster! Learn more about PHP and WordPress and why upgrading is so critical.

And why is website speed so important? Glad you asked – check this out. And get in touch if you’d like a Performance Audit to speed up your own WordPress site.

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

Why Do I Need to Upgrade to PHP 7.1+?

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Depending on your host, you may have gotten a rude surprise recently when you tried to update WordPress and got this message:

You cannot update because WordPress 5.2 requires PHP version 5.6.20 or higher. You are running version 5.6.3.

That’s right. Unless you’re running the (extremely old and unsupported) PHP 5.6.20 or greater, you won’t be able to update WordPress again. Ever.

Ideally, your host should be using PHP 7.1+ which is much, much faster than the old 5.x versions, as well as being actively maintained (7.1 and higher get security and other updates regularly).

WordPress is trying to nudge users to move to new versions of PHP for these two main reasons. In addition to not being able to update WordPress, if you’re on old PHP you will also not be able to install themes and plugins that don’t support your version of PHP. Plugins or themes may simple stop working correctly on the older, unsupported PHP versions.

So what can you do?

If you’re on a good host, you won’t have this problem as they will be keeping up with PHP updates or, like SiteGround, will offer you options on which version of PHP to use for your site.

If you’re on a bad host, you’ll find out quickly enough if you ask them to update PHP and they won’t. That means it’s time to move to a good WordPress host. There really is no other option – ask us if you need help choosing a good, high-quality WordPress host.

If you have the option to switch yourself, not so fast… there is a considerable amount of prep you need to do on your site before flipping the switch. Read this guide on how to upgrade WordPress to PHP 7 to understand what’s involved in doing this without breaking your site.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Hacked Sites, Easy WP Guide, Event Calender Plugins, PHP Versions

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

If your WordPress site had been hacked, how would you know? Check out this infographic from iThemes showing 7 key signs that your site has been the target of a hack. Prevention is much easier than recovery – if you need help keeping your site secure, check out our WordPress maintenance plans. We include an upfront (and then annual) security audit of your site in all our plans.

Easy WP Guide has just released their new guide for WordPress 5.1 – get a PDF here. But don’t bother to print it, it gets updated frequently and is quite large!

Looking for an event calendar for your site? Here’s a roundup of 5 event calendar plugins for WordPress. This list is unusual in that it doesn’t include some of the big players in the category – these are all commercial plugins available at Code Canyon. Check out this post for some top free event calendar plugins – lots of high-quality choices listed here.

A common problem I see with new WP Minder clients is old PHP versions. Why is this so important? WordPress now recommends a minimum of PHP 7.3. But over 77% of WordPress users are on unsupported (read: no security updates ever) versions of PHP – that’s PHP 7.0 and older! Most users don’t know or care about this, but here’s why you should.

You can check the PHP version with this plugin.

WP Minder’s maintenance plans include fast Managed WordPress Hosting on modern, up-to-date servers. Besides the security benefits our clients also get the performance boost that PHP 7.1+ provides.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Cookies, PHP, Store Locators, Mixed Content Warnings

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Seems like every website now has a cookies popup notification, right? In light of the GDPR and some new state-based privacy laws, like we have here in Colorado, it’s not surprising. But how do you get a cookie notice on your site? Here’s a great little tutorial on using the Cookie Consent plugin to do just that. In fact, I followed it earlier this week when I added a cookie popup to this very site you’re reading. It’s easy and quick to do.

I saw this post earlier this week and it made me sit up in alarm: 57% of WordPress sites will become less secure in December 2018. Yikes! What does this mean? It seems that 57% of all WordPress sites are running on host servers using PHP 7, PHP 5.6, or something even older than that. PHP is one of the software platforms that powers WordPress. And as of December 2018, those older versions of PHP will no longer receive any security patches or updates.

That means that if your site is sitting on one of those affected servers, it will become much more vulnerable to hacks and security issues. As new security problems are uncovered, they will not be fixed. Ever. The linked article shows how to find out which version your host uses. If you’re hosting with us, don’t worry – you’re covered and this will not affect you.

Now for something less scary. If you have multiple locations, or better yet if you have a lot of distributors or other providers related to your business, did you know you can easily add an interactive map of all those locations? This can be really helpful for your users. Here’s a review of the best WordPress store locator plugins. I’m a fan of WP Store Locator and have used in on a few client sites. Here is an example of WP Store Locator in action.

Finally… if you decided to make the switch from HTTP to HTTPS and secure your site (yay, you!), you may have been met with a surprise: a Mixed Content warning from the browser. This means your page has links that are https://, as it should, but it also has some leftover links to http:// too. Those need to be fixed, and depending on the size and complexity of your site, this can be a big hairy deal. Learn about Mixed Content warnings and how to fix them.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, PHP

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Want to squeeze more out of your WooCommerce site without resorting to paid commercial plugins? Here’s a roundup of 20 free WordPress plugins to extend WooCommerce, including:

  • WooCommerce-friendly search
  • Product carousel
  • Edit checkout fields
  • Add a ‘New’ badge to new products
  • Customize the tabs on the single product page

Some useful things here – this one I’m using in a project right now…

Next: if you use Yoast SEO, in the near future you might get a warning from them that your host is using an older version of PHP that’s no longer supported. This post explains what that means, why you should care, and why you should consider moving to a new host if yours won’t get on board with recommended PHP upgrades.

And finally… One of the benefits of the newest PHP versions is a faster website loading time. Learn why a fast website is so important for your business. And to follow up, here are 10 easy ways to speed up your slow-loading site.