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Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Shipping, WordPress Comments, RSS Feeds

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

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and needed a way to set up shipping by weight ranges. There are commercial plugins that do this, but I found a great free one that works fine for my client’s needs. WooCommerce Weight-Based Shipping lets you add a series of rules for free shipping, subtotals, shipping destinations, all based on order weight.

Do you allow comments on your WordPress blog? Comments can be great – they can help build and tie a community of site fans together. But they can also have a dark side. If your blog comments are overrun with spam or trolls and you just want it to stop, learn how to disable comments completely, or conditionally as you see fit. This post also covers how to delete existing comments, shorten the available commenting period, and more.

If you have a blog, are you sharing that blog so people can read it elsewhere? Like an RSS reader. Here’s an interesting post about RSS feeds and whether they are ‘giving away content for free.’ I agree with the author… you want people to read your blog, right? Encouraging people to subscribe to your RSS feed is a way to help more people see your writing. And that’s a good thing.

As a followup, here’s a review of the best RSS readers and news aggregator services. If you’ve never used one, try signing up and subscribing to some feeds.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – Gutenberg, Crawl Errors, RSS Feeds, Image Compression

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Have you heard about Gutenberg yet? Don’t worry – if you haven’t, you will, very soon. Let’s start now: what is Gutenberg? It’s a massive change to the way you enter content in WordPress, and it’s coming (most likely) with WordPress 5.0, sometime in 2018. Take this opportunity to get your head around it in advance… there are both positive and negative sides to this new editor, but if you’re in the latter camp, don’t worry – the old familiar editor will still be available.

If you’ve added your business website to Google Search Console (and it’s highly recommended, it’s a handy set of tools!) you may have found that your site has crawl errors. What do they mean? And what can you do about them? That’s the subject of this post.

Displaying RSS feeds on your WordPress site is easy to do and can add a lot of benefits, such as the latest news on a topic, aggregating content from multiple sites, showing upcoming events from different websites, showcasing your own social media posts, and more. It’s kind of an old idea, but still a nice way to add more content to your site easily. Learn about 5 WordPress plugins for adding RSS feeds to your site.

Finally… optimizing images by compressing them is often one of the most-recommended ways to speed up image-heavy websites. Here’s a review of 5 WordPress plugins for image compression. I’ve recently switched to ShortPixel Image Optimizer and I like the mix of more precise control, but still easy to use.