Tag: WordPress Plugins

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Need For Speed: AMP Your Website Up

Need For Speed: AMP Your Website Up

Is your website AMP’ed? If it is you most certainly know that I am talking about Accelerated Mobile Pages, and Google loves them.

If you are not, it is relatively easy to create an AMP page template for your HTML website. Just follow some of these links to learn more and to see examples.

https://moz.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages-whiteboard-friday

https://www.ampproject.org/

If you have a WordPress website there are a number of great plugins you can use. I like the following:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/accelerated-mobile-pages/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/

As AMP’ed websites are important from Google viewpoint and Google is actively showing AMP pages in the mobile index, it is important to know and understand why your website needs to embrace AMP now.

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What Does It Mean When WordPress Removes a Plugin?

Expect the unexpected.
Expect the Unexpected.

Just today WordFence notified me that the Feedburner WordPress plugin had been removed from WordPress.org. What does that exactly mean for you?

When a plugin is removed from WordPress.org it means either the plugin has been compromised, it does not work with current WordPress versions,  or that it has been abandoned.  Plugins cannot work with current  versions of WordPress if the plugin author is not doing regular updates.

WordPress.org polices their plugin archive and if a plugin may cause problems with new versions of WordPress they tag it. WordFence, which we use for security management of WordPress applications, scans the WordPress.org archive and advises us if plugins in use in a client WordPress installation are up to date.

There have been several instances lately where plugins dropped from WordPress.org had been used by bad actors on the web to send out malware and to spamvertise a website.

My rule is that if the plugin has been removed from WordPress.org, we remove it from our client sites. Find out more about this topic today.

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How to Use AMP on Your Blog for Google Part One

Man having an idea!
Mobile has shaken the world of search.

Use AMP or Accelerated Mobile Page for Google on your WordPress blog or WordPress website and you may just see your organic placement improve.

In the world of Google content is King and pagespeed is Queen. Google is really pushing implementation of AMP pages as they will cache them and deliver them to mobile devices instantly.

So how can you get in on this action and AMP up your site?

I use two plugins to create AMP pages for my blog and I manually hard code AMP pages for my PHP website.

For WordPress use these two together to get the best results.

Yoast SEO
Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP

I’ve found that validation of AMP is still quirky and questionable even with these plugins, meaning you will still see errors in the Google Search Console when you implement this, but the technology is getting better over time.

AMP pages will be striped down versions and nearly only text or in some cases, typically when you hard code them, use images that are responsive based on device.

Google is even testing AdWords and AMP as a beta right now and taking names for early implementation.

Check back on Wednesday for more information about AMP and your website.

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WordFence Free WordPress Plugin Reviewed

Nancy McCord
“Just Nancy” – My Point of View for Today.

I have been using a new WordPress plugin for my blog’s security and a number of my clients. I wanted to give you a quick review of the free version plugin from my personal experience.

I like the WordFence plugin. In fact I like it better than the Securi Security plugin that I have been using.

Here’s what I like about WordFence:

  1. Integrated firewall.
  2. Very thorough live scanning.
  3. Tons of configuration options.
  4. Allows me to offload a number of other security plugins as it is more robust than others.
  5. Cost if you choose to go premium is not outrageous and affordable from my point of view.
  6. Reporting in simple and actionable. Plus you can control easily the number of messages received.
  7. Has meaningful helpful alerts and click to correct actions.

So far my test has gone well and I am highly considering moving my blogs, sites, and clients into the premium version.

I would recommend that you try this plugin out for your WordPress security needs. It is easy to set up, easy to understand, and does much more than most security plugins even in the free version.

I am not paid for this review, I just wanted to share something of value with you today.