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Weekly Links Roundup – Grammar, Anti-spam Plugins, CCPA

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

Not the best speller? Think doesn’t matter? Think again…Nothing hurts the credibility of your business like content full of spelling and grammar errors. It forces the reader to work harder to understand you. And put simply, it makes your business look slack. If your content is flawed, what does that say about the rest of your operations? Learn how to improve your content to build credibility. And if you’re not the best at spelling and grammar there are tools for that, like browser-based Grammarly which works in both Gutenberg and classic editors.

Here’s a roundup of some of the best anti-spam plugins for WordPress. I’m been a fan of Antispam Bee for awhile but lately am using the commercial plugin CleanTalk for our WP Minder Care Plan clients and it is fantastic. CleanTalk provides behind-the-scenes protection (no captcha!) and a dashboard that shows how it’s working – one of my client sites that was previously reporting a bad spam problem had almost 1,800 spam attacks blocked just this week.

By now you have likely heard about the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) which dropped on January 1. Like the GDPR, the CCPA is designed to protect private data of users including knowing what person info is collected; what info is being sold; opting out of data collection and data selling. Here’s post about how CCPA may affect your WordPress business.

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.

Weekly Links Roundup – CDNs, Shortcodes, Writing Blog Posts, Before-and-after Photos

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Is your blog slow? Especially if you have a lot of media files like images and video, you may greatly benefit from getting a CDN (content delivery network). A CDN serves your media files from servers around the country (or the world) that are closer to your users, speeding up delivery of those files in their browsers. Here’s a review of the 10 Best CDN Services for WordPress users. My current favorite is CloudFlare, which has a free plan and is pretty painless to set up. It also has security benefits for your site.

As a WordPress user you may have come across this before. You have a shortcode, which inserts something dynamic like a form or button wherever it’s placed. You want to paste it into a widget so your dynamic content will show up in a sidebar or other area – here’s how to do that, two easy ways.

Are you starting a blog, and you want to learn everything? I mean everything… Check out this article on How to Write a Blog Post. This may be more than you bargained for… if so, try this one instead: Write Better Blog Posts.

Finally – a nifty plugin I ran across this week. If you ever need to display before-and-after images, this tutorial on How to Show Before and After Photos is perfect for you! The plugin is very easy to use, and the effect looks great.

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