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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 – 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.

Weekly Links Roundup – Security, Google Maps, FooGallery, Why Blog?

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

I’ve had WordPress clients tell me they don’t worry about security or backups because their site is “too small to hack.” I beg to differ. It’s small sites with owners who have poor security practices that are frequently the target of hacks because they are so easy to crack! When a site owner doesn’t update WordPress/plugins/themes sometimes in years, or when they have simple login passwords, their sites are much easier to attack and use for malicious activity. If your site gets hacked and begins churning out spam or displaying links to porn sites or worse, gets defaced, your business’s trustworthiness and credibility will take a big hit. Don’t let this happen your business – read this quick post on why it’s important to harden your site. And check out our WordPress Care Plans if you want a partner to do this critical work for you. Our plans start at just $2 per day.

Maps are a great addition to your website when you have a brick-and-mortar location. And, you can add them to your WordPress site easily using either some manual code or a plugin. Learn how to add a Google map to your WordPress site.

FooGallery has been my go-to WordPress gallery plugin for several years. Besides being a full-featured responsive and flexible gallery plugin, they also have excellent support if you need it. FooGallery has a pro (commercial) version that includes more features, like a video galley option, but for my clients the free version usually works fine. Here’s a big comprehensive review of FooGallery so you can see whether it’s a good fit for your site too.

Finally, here’s an interesting take on the evolving purpose of blogging. How has blogging changed in the last decade or so? Do you find yourself writing more to teach others what you know, or to get a reaction out of them? Both purposes have value. Some food for thought…

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 – Forums, Video Players, Shortcodes, Security Plugins

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

While discussion forums don’t seem to be as popular as they once were, they can still be a great tool on websites where you have a lot of members and want to enable them to ask questions and interact with each other – which can be good for sustaining and growing your membership site. Learn how to add a forum to your site with bbPress.

Looking for a video player plugin to embed videos from YouTube or play locally-hosted videos? There are many out there, both free and commercial. Check out this review of 7 free WordPress video player plugins.

WordPress shortcodes can be great while you’re using them, but one big mess if you have a theme or are using a layout tool like Visual Composer and decide to switch. You’ll end up with a whole lot of useless shortcodes in your pages. Here’s a review of the commercial plugin Shortcode Cleaner that will help clean up all those unused shortcodes. If you use a tool like this, please be sure to backup your site beforehand!

Finally… if you’re considering paying for a security service for your site, here’s a comparison of Wordfence and Sucuri. There’s a lot of noise in the comments about this being a biased review by a Sucuri affiliate, but IMO that may not be true. I’d also strongly recommend Sucuri over Wordfence. If you’re hosting with us or using our Small Business or higher WordPress maintenance plans, you’re already taking advantage of Sucuri’s services.