Tips Tuesday – GDPR, Google Assistant, WordPress 4.9.6, Free Site Success eBook

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• A whole series of GDPR posts and more on the way
• Why you need to jump on getting your email list GDPR compliant now
• A new, free ebook I’m working on and will have for you soon
• WordPress 4.9.6 is due out this week with new GDPR Tools
• How you can get up-to-the-minute news from me
• Why I’m trying to curb my excitement about my fave fix-it guy possibly returning
• Is the hoohaa finally over with the Social Warfare plugin and is it safe to update now?
• Which resource hog plugin I recently tested that will kill your page load speed
• Google makes meta descriptions in SERPs short again and what you should do about it
• Why Google Assistant taking center stage at the I/O conference is huge news for you
• What’s up with Yoast SEO adding caching to images

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Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday

I hope you’ll join me live tonight around 8pm ish ET for the party and an interactive Tips Tuesday recap and breaking news discussion on the BlogAid Facebook Page. You can also catch the quick recap later that evening on the BlogAid YouTube Channel.

BlogAid Happenings

Help with GDPR

I hope you’ve had a chance to check out my GDPR posts.

• WordPress 4.9.6 New GDPR Tools
• GDPR Guide – Tips Tuesday Special Edition
• GDRP Compliance: How to Get Through it Without Overwhelm

Get Your Email List GDPR Compliant

One of the first things we all need to do with regard to GDPR is get our email lists compliant.

Now is the time for that.

What that means for you depends on who your list service provider is.

I use MailChimp and they have a bunch of GDPR tutorials for how to get your list in order.

Basically, you have to get new consent from EU citizens that have subscribed to your list.

After that, you’ll need to have a look at your process and wording for how folks sign up to your lists.

For instance, BlogAid News is my main newsletter list.

When you subscribe, there is also a checkbox to receive my blog posts via email too. That is a segment of the main list.

But the fact is, 99.999% of folks always sign up for both.

So, to be GDPR compliant, I’m going to merge the segment back into the main list and get rid of the segment.

That will also get rid of the checkbox, and that’s a good thing, because I would have to leave it unchecked by default.

And that means I would likely not get as many folks receiving my blog posts, which is what I want them to have the most.

I infrequently send anything to the main list. Just the rare occasion I run a discount or have emergency site info that you must see immediately.

New Optin on the Way

I’ve been wanting to change my optin for BlogAid News for months now. I took the weekend to rewrite a new one for what you need to know to have a successful site in 2018. It’s still going to be titled What Every Site Owner Should Know though.

I’m formatting it now and will have it available for you this week, I hope.

I’ll be sending it out to all current subscribers too.

WordPress 4.9.6 Due to Release This Week

Last I heard, the WP devs delayed the final release from May 15 to May 17 which is this Thursday.

They are furiously updating the beta right now. So, we’ll see if that schedule holds.

I’ll be updating my original post on it with the changes I see during tests this week.

I’ll also update my posts on whether the new Privacy Policy page creator in WP 4.9.6 catches all of the ways you are tracking visitors or not.

It will provide you with a good start on your policy, but you’ll still need to edit it with the things I mentioned in my GDPR Guide.

So, be prepared to do that by next week, if you haven’t already created your policy page.

And I’m working on tutorials to help you discover all the cookies you use on your site, so you can add any you may have missed to your policy.

Get Up to the Minute News

Be sure you Like, Follow, and turn on notifications for the BlogAid Facebook page.

That way you’ll see my BlogAid Today Tips and news livestreams as they happen. That’s where I always post breaking news first.

I will likely be sending these via the BlogAid News list too, so be prepared for more emails from me than you normally get.

Fave Fix-it Guy May Be Back

A little birdie told me that our long-time fave fix-it guy may be back in business under a new name. Those of you who have followed me for a while know who I’m talking about.

I’m checking into it and will have more for you when I confirm everything.

I’m happy about it though, because it will mean I once again will have someone to send you to for emergency site services.

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

Plugin Tips

Social Warfare Fixes Broken Update

I so hope you didn’t get caught in the Social Warfare update hoohaa.

They made major code changes to the plugin again. (I think this is the 5th time they’ve rebuilt the plugin.)

And that update broke sites all over the place to the point folks couldn’t even get back into their sites in some cases.

WP Rollback didn’t work on it either (like it does for other well coded plugins).

Folks had to restore their sites from a backup.

This is where UpdraftPlus really shines and makes that easy. You can restore just the plugins. Of course, you have to be able to login to the site to do that.

For the folks who couldn’t, most asked their host to fix it. And most of them just renamed the Social Warfare plugin folder or deleted it. That meant no share buttons on the site until it was fixed.

If that’s you, and you followed the plugin dev’s instructions to simply upload the fixed versions, it never found your old info in those renamed/deleted folders, so you lost your share counts and settings, and more.

What a freaking mess!

Beamer is a Resource Hog Plugin

AppSumo frequently runs lifetime deals on premium plugins.

Please mindful of more than just whistles and bells when you look at these things.

I just tested the Beamer plugin for a client, due to their recent promo.

What a resource hog that thing is!!

It provides a little icon that folks can click and bring up a message that slides out from the side.

Cool little function, but it pulls in 27 requests and slows down the site by 2 seconds.

You’ll suffer that on every page load.

And you’re never guaranteed that click, especially from repeat visitors.

So, that’s a heck of speed hit to take.

And makes that lifetime deal, not much of a deal after all.

SEO Tips

Google meta descriptions are short again

Have you Googled anything lately?

Did you notice that most meta descriptions are back down to around 150 characters?

Yep, Google experiments with different looks in Search all the time.

For everyone who edited your meta descriptions to longer ones, don’t worry about going back in and changing them again. Hopefully you followed my advice to put your most important info up front. And now you know why.

I suspect the Yoast SEO plugin will update its on-page module again, to reflect the shorter length if it seems like that’s what Google will be going with for a while.

But, don’t expect to be able to keep your green dot on that if you made them longer.

Google Assistant Takes Center Stage at Google I/O Conference

Google holds its most important I/O Conference about this time every year.

The keynote address always has an important reveal about what they are most focused on for the year.

And this time, it was all about Google Assistant.

I’ve been telling you for weeks now that voice is the future of SERPs.

It’s why I started my DIY SEO workshops 2 months earlier than normal.

We had a new workshop this time on the special formatting needed to help you get into Google Snippets.

And that will also help you get into Google Voice Search.

And that may get you on Google Assistant.

And that, is exactly what you should be aiming to do with your SEO this year.

I have a 1-on-1 training client right now that is building a whole new site based on this principle.

Why? Because she just sold her last site for big money and clearly sees the future of what will make this new site get massive traffic.

Yep, this trend is for real guys, and it’s a money maker for sure.

Let me put it another way.

Remember when blogging first started and folks made fun of the guy who posted what he had for breakfast?

And today, the Foodie blogging niche is a multi-billion dollar industry.

If you listen to my predictions and get in on the ground floor of the trends, that could change everything for you.

Yoast SEO 7.4 adds caching for images

I got a little concerned when I first read this.

I wondered how it was going to react with all other caching methods we use on our site, especially those of us trying to go for ultimate speed.

So, I left a comment on the post and got this reply.

Seems that Yoast has to calculate the dimensions of the images found in your post that you have the OG (Open Graph) tag on.

Instead of doing those calculations over and over, each time the post is shared, it caches the size calculations.

That’s super smart and saves on hosting resources.

Way to go Team Yoast and thank you!!

Wrap Up

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

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Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.