Tips Tuesday – AI Summit, WP 6.3 Video Tour, All in One Platforms

Hello happy site owner!!!

Tips this week include:

• The AI Advantage Summit is this Thursday – last chance to get your free ticket
• What’s New in WordPress 6.3 – see the video tour
• What was in that email from Google to review your GA4 property changes
• Is doing an easy integration better?
• Site builders – why not to use them
• All in One integrations – when this might be your best bet
• You can’t just point your domain to another platform
• When easy is cheap in a good way

The AI Advantage Summit – This Thursday

Get your free ticket right now to see 16 top AI experts show you the future.

You’ll see how to get ahead of your competition and save time in your workflow.

I’ll be speaking at 2:10pm ET / 1:10pm CT / 12:10pm MT / 11:10am PT on

AI images – including the legal aspects and a live demo on how to use them for social media.

WordPress Tips

What’s New in WordPress 6.3

It rolls out today.

See What’s New in WordPress 6.3 for a quick video tour of what to expect.

We will not be the first ones to update to it yet.

BlogAid News subscribers will get my exclusive instructions on how to do this update when I feel it’s safe for us.

GA4 Tips

Review Your GA4 Property Email

Many of us have received an email from Google to review our GA4 Property for new changes made by Google.

I checked into it and it involves some things they are migrating for us from our connected UA property.

I sent an email on Friday with details on it to all GA4 course members.

Is The Easy Integration Better?

There’s a price to pay for taking the easy way out with site setup, build, and integration.

The key point to remember here is that websites are technical things.

The next key point to remember is that there will always be creative, non-technical folks who have a vision for an online business.

So, folks who know tech and business see an opportunity to make an easy way for these millions of underserved creative folks to get into the game.

They basically build an interface that veils the view of the tech.

The problem is, that veil to hide the tech is not thin. It’s actually quite bulky and leads to other problems.

Here are 3 examples.

Site Builders

This past week I did a consult for someone on a GA4 matter and discovered that they had put all of their GA tags into a spot made for it by their site builder.

That’s not a good idea. 

Nor is it a good idea to put it in the same spot reserved by your theme.

Folks change themes and such too often now and they forget about all that special code.

The rule of thumb is to only put extra code into the theme that belongs to the theme.

But, the other issue is that they were using a builder.

They are cheap and easy for a designer to make. And the site owner is not required to learn Gutenberg to use them.

Here’s the problem. 

Those builders are crazy bulky and kill your site speed.

You have to throw the kitchen sink of optimization at them to bring them up to where a site with just Gutenberg starts with speed.

READ: Gutenberg vs Elementor: Which is Faster? for my case study that proves it.

The fact is, there is nothing that you can create with these builders that you can’t create with Gutenberg – nothing.

READ: 8 Pages You Can Make with Gutenberg in 15 Minutes to see the examples.

The point is, you can spend about 4 hours learning Gutenberg and do everything you need to do with your site. Or, you can spend just 1 hour with a builder and then suffer the expense and speed issues of using it for the entire time you own your site.

All In One Integrations

I had another consult this past week with someone who wanted to do a full revamp on her online business setup.

And her thinking was to get a separate platform for each of the types of things she did to make money.

That idea came from each one of those things being easy for her to use because they each did one thing. And that helped her avoid the bigger, all at once learning curve of a platform that integrated all of it. But, that type of scattered setup would end up being confusing for both the site owner and the clients.

WordPress could do all of those things, but the complexity of the integrations would be a nightmare to run.

This is when a 3rd party platform might be a better fit.

My only issue with some of these 3rd party platforms is that their SEO sucks – big.

But, if you don’t count on SEO for your marketing, then that doesn’t matter.

I don’t know any coaches that rely on SEO. And I don’t know many course creators who do either. That’s not to say there aren’t any. But they are in the minority.

WordPress is made for bloggers.

You can add on other things like memberships and products. But you also radically increase the complexity of the install.

Y’all know that I reported in recent Tips Tuesdays that I tried a bunch of new things with the AI Discover Hub setup.

It turned into having to learn about a whole new set of technical concerns. In fact, I’m still working through 2 of them.

And this from someone who has run member sites for nearly 10 years.

The new tech has new issues.

Me and the vendors will get them sorted, and then I’ll have a new stack of new stuff to bring to my clients that works better than any 3rd party solution for this particular setup.

The point is, tech changes all the time and there are new tools coming out all the time.

If you’re looking to put together a complex integration, you need to consult with someone who has done them and knows what’s out there and what will work best for your setup, even if that’s not WordPress.

You Can’t Just Point the Domain

I had another quick consult this past week with a site audit client who was also the volunteer manager for a club she is in.

Their WordPress site has done well for them, but they are ready to add more things to it, like a membership and other perks.

WordPress is not going to be the best fit for that and they went with a 3rd party solution that will likely work better for them.

But, their site and domain-related email had been properly secured.

And that means they could not just point the domain to their new platform.

We have to disentagle it from the current security first.

My site audit clients also need to work with webmaster designers who know:

• Speed
• Site security
• HTTPS security
• Cloudflare
• ADA compliance
• And SEO

Otherwise they could destroy all the work they paid me to do for them to get their sites fast and secure.

When Easy is Cheap in a Good Way

My site audit clients don’t have constant issues with their site.

And they don’t have to constantly pay someone to do things or fix things for them.

Once we got everything squared away, running their site has been cheap and easy.

And they know about big changes well ahead of time so they can jump on them with good tutorials and they aren’t in panic mode when deadlines hit too, like changes for:

• HTTPS
• Gutenberg
• PHP 8
• GA4

They know all of these things are done right, and in ways that makes Google love them more, like having all 5 HTTPS security headers and being listed on the Chrome preload safe site list that all other browsers copy with Google’s blessings.

All these extra tech things put them ahead of their competition.

Bottom line – they make more money.

And when their ready to add a new money-making dimension, they come right back to me for a consult on the setup that would be the best fit too.

I can’t help them setup the non-WordPress ones. But I can at least help them avoid expensive mistakes and help point them to a solution that will work best for their needs.