A blog about WordPress tips, troubleshooting, reviews and more!

Tips, Tricks & Reviews

A blog dedicated to the WordPress community for designers and administrators

Popular WordPress plugin patches recently discovered vulnerability

As popular as Duplicator is, I’ve never used yet on the dozens of websites I’ve migrated from or to my server over my career. I’ve had great success with both All-in-One WP Migration and Backup Guard for moving websites. They each offer a premium version, however, I’ve had no problems using the free options for either. At some point, I plan to purchase one of them with a developer license, since there is a little extra legwork required for importing databases into the new server.

September 19, 2018 News, Security

Get 30% Off Any of Our Website Design Packages

In celebration of Halloween season, we’re slashing 30% off any website package. This offer will be valid until 10/31/18. Wondering what’s included? Check out our plans by clicking on the read more button.

September 18, 2018 News

Slight Drop in Rankings? Make Sure Your Rich Snippets Are Still Working

I recently discovered that several of my blog posts reviewing certain services had lost their rich snippet feature in Google’s index. Rich snippets give an important edge to help your indexed pages stand out from other results. They feature a little visual flair to catch the attention of searchers. In the case of review rich snippets, a star rating with the author’s name is displayed below title tag and URL, and above the meta description.

September 17, 2018 Tips

Can Fiverr Really Provide Your Business with Quality Results? Yes it Can!

Searching Google for Fiverr Reviews will immediately leave a bad impression for those wondering about the quality of that service. The highly respected aggregate review websites Trustpilot and Sitejabber each have around 1000 total user reviews that average below 3 stars. The #1 result in Google, thefreelanceeffect.com, has a damning meta description that states you should never use them! Only fools would hire someone for their business needs off Fiverr, right? Not so fast.

September 14, 2018 Reviews

Symantec SSL certificates will be distrusted by major browsers in October

Having a distrusted SSL certificate is much worse than having none at all. While Chrome displays a not secure message for websites still using HTTP, it will all but prevent visitors from viewing websites with broken SSL certificates. A red triangle with an exclamation is shown in the URL address bar and on a blank page with a stern warning. If your website is facing the issue it should be fixed immediately.

September 13, 2018 News, Security

European Union approves GDPR-like copyright directive

Wow.. This is insanity. Many online businesses are still adjusting to being compliant with GDPR. Now the EU drops this on everyone. According to article 11, this very post could be liable for damages as it contains a snippet. So any website that sources information from another (in the EU) could potentially have legal consequences. This goes against the very basics of journalism. I remember in grammar school we were taught to cite our sources, give credit to the author, and place direct information in quotes. Where is the harm in that?

September 12, 2018 News

cPanel is preparing to drop support for EasyApache3

cPanel’s Web Hosting Manager is one of the most robust server administrator applications for (the lack of a better term) managing websites. It’s become so popular that you’d be hard-pressed to find it in a non-acronym form (WHM) on the company’s website. EasyApache is perhaps the most recognizable module of WHM for its ability to make compiling Apache and PHP modules a breeze. In previous versions of EA, watching it build profiles through hundreds of lines of code gave me a sense of deep relief. I’m no expert in server administration and trying to learn all the proper Linux commands for compiling would take me ages!

September 11, 2018 News

Google reveals that their algorithm evolves to replace manual actions

I’ve been fortunate to never have received a manual action penalty for any of my websites. Because of this, it makes me believe that you have to be extremely negligent or deceptive to get one. Although, it’s nice to have Google Search Console report such actions to make them easier to diagnose and resolve just in case.

September 10, 2018 News, SEO

WordPress administrators targeted with phishing emails

You should always exercise caution when receiving emails requiring you to submit information or perform an action. Usually, phishing emails are targeting bank accounts or other financial institutions. Even if an email looks legitimate, if there is doubt, always make a phone call to the institution that the email appears to be from.

September 7, 2018 News, Security

Old SEO tactics and strategies that should be left in the past

From the 5 Dino Tactics that Moz listed in their article, the first one I feel is the biggest no-no. The statistics given for the results returned in Google’s Keyword Planner don’t necessarily translate over to organic search. You’re also not given important data associated with those results such as difficulty and the number of results listed for any given search term.

September 6, 2018 News, SEO