Tips Tuesday – DDoS Attacks, Backup Check, SiteGround Migrations, Gutenberg Webinar

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Gutenberg Webinar is in the works
• Live Pinterest chat with my site audit clients on Wednesday
• The DIY SEO Jump Start Challenge begins soon ahead of our live workshops
• SiteGround is doing internal migrations and what you’ll need to update
• What to do if you want to move off SiteGround to better hosting
• The DDoS attacks are ramping up and shutting sites down
• How to check to ensure you have a full backup of your site
• Upcoming release dates for all future WordPress major versions through 2021
• The new Gutenberg features you won’t be seeing in my course for a while and why that’s a good thing

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Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday

I hope you’ll join for tonight’s livestream at 7pm ET / 4pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. It’s a great way to get the deeper story on what’s reported in Tips Tuesday. And, I almost always have breaking news for the day too. So come join us live for the party.

Replay

BlogAid Happenings

Let’s Make 2020 the Best Year Ever!!!

Welcome to 2020 y’all!!

I’m not one to make New Years resolutions. But I do make plans and set goals for what I want to accomplish. And they are just as ambitious for this year as they were for 2019.

You can see last week’s Tips Tuesday for links to my 2019 year in review posts for both BlogAid and Heartwood Art.

In the BlogAid one, I share a little about my goals for this year.

Gutenberg Webinar Coming in a Couple of Weeks

One of those goals is to do a lot more show and tell this year.

Me telling you how great I think Gutenberg is got a few of you interested in switching.

But showing folks 8 Pages You Can Make in 15 Minutes with Gutenberg really got everyone’s attention.

I’ve already got the outline done for a Gutenberg webinar where I’ll be answering the most common questions and then showing you just how fast you can create pages and special layouts in Gutenberg.

And then I’ll open it up for your questions and see if you have examples of anything you need recreated in Gutenberg and just do it on the spot.

I’ll be inviting my Gutenberg Ninja affiliate partners to the dry run through soon and see if they have any questions or suggestions for things to add to it. And then I’ll have blog post out for you with the time and where to register.

It’s a free webinar and there will be a replay, but you get to ask your questions in the live event.

Pinterest Live Chat

I am REALLY looking forward to meeting with my site audit clients live this week. We will be swapping Pinterest info and strategies.

What I’ve learned about Pinterest is that it’s just like website advice in that there is a LOT of misinformation out there. Or, it’s good info, but doesn’t work for all site types or niches.

So, we are going to have a safe space to share and see what we can learn from each other about it.

That’s the power of the village.

DIY SEO Jump Start Challenge Begin Soon

Every year before we jump into our live workshops, we do a Jump Start Challenge so folks can quickly check their basic setup for Google Analytics and Google Search Console, as well as Yoast SEO settings.

That’s because the very first workshop is for Technical SEO, so those things need to be completed first and in good working order.

We want to make sure that Google is not having any issues crawling the site before we try to look at the rest of the reports for ranking and moving through how to improve rank.

So, if you’re in the course, look for an email for that soon.

And if you are in the course and not in our Facebook group yet, be sure to jump in there as that’s where we will report that we have completed each challenge.

That’s all the news from around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.

Hosting Tips

SiteGround Doing Internal Migrations

Right after Christmas some of my clients got emails from SiteGround that they would be moving them to a new server. 

They only gave 3 days notice and some clients didn’t see that email until they returned to work after New Years.

My clients are all on Cloudflare and their IP addresses had to be updated there.

I made a video tutorial for them in our BB Hub member area, which is free to all site audit clients.

Some of my clients are also on VaultPress and the FTP and SSH restore connections run on the IP address too, and those had to be updated as well. 

And a few folks had to make some changes for their email setup too.

Moving Off SiteGround

If you’re on SiteGround and tired of their goofy stuff, like I’ve written about in the past, and you’re ready for not only better, but faster hosting, then seriously consider moving to NameHero.

And be sure to contact me to help you move.

There are 30+ goofy SiteGround things that need to be removed from your new hosting account, plus ensuring that everything gets deleted at SiteGround before you close that account. That goes way beyond just your WP files and database.

Right now I’m booking into March, so you want to get on my waiting list asap.

And if you do plan to leave SiteGround, turn off auto-renewal and remove your credit card info. They auto renew 2 weeks ahead of your expiration date.

Security Tips

DDoS Attacks Ramping Up

This past week A2 Hosting was under a severe DDoS attack for at least 2 days.

Besides making the site and cPanel run slow as molasses, it did damage files at one of my client’s sites.

I also saw a mitigation screen at Namecheap. It had a big warning symbol and a reCaptcha box for me to prove that I was human.

I’ve seen other vendor sites running super slow too, meaning that they were likely mitigating an attack at the time.

Mitigation means that their security service is scrutinizing every request for access to the site.

Think of it as a checkpoint that causes a bottleneck.

And if the attack is severe to the point that it overwhelms the checkpoint, the host may even have to shut down the server for a while to keep it from frying.

My client at A2 suffered that first, and that’s likely when the files got damaged.

Ensure You Have a FULL Backup

THE single most important security measure you can take is to ensure you have a full backup that you know how to restore.

You must have your:

• WordPress files
• Database
• Files below WP like .htaccess and robots.txt
• Files below WP like Google and social media verification files

If you are using a plugin, ensure that it is set to the right frequency of backups for how often your posts change.

If you are using VaultPress, make sure your fastest restore connections are made for FTP and SSH else it will take a full day to restore your site. And, you need to download all of those files below WP manually, as they are not included in the backup.

See my backup checklist for more on all of the above.

If you are relying on your host for backups, read the fine print. They are not guaranteed, even if you pay extra for them. Plus, if the server fries, you lose your site and your backups.

You NEED your own backups stored off the host.

WordPress Tips

Upcoming Release Dates for WordPress

The WordPress devs are hard at work on version 5.4, which is scheduled to release at the end of March.

They have also published the tentative release dates of WP versions all the way up to 6.0, which is projected to happen in Dec of 2021. 

Webmasters, you may want to get the full 2020 schedule marked on your calendars so you prepare yourself and your clients.

Gutenberg Updates

Since the release of WP 5.3 I’ve advised folks remove the Gutenberg plugin if they were using it, as all of those features rolled into the core with 5.3.

I’ve still got the Gutenberg plugin on my test site so I can keep up with the new features. 

But, I won’t be including them in the Gutenberg Ninja course until they roll into the WP core, as we don’t want to run a beta plugin on our live production sites.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t be talking about them!!!

I’m very excited about the rapid advancement of Gutenberg and I’ll be sharing those exciting features with you as they become viable.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

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