Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!
Tips this week include:
- Plugins to get off your site that we dumped last year
- Why I want you to invest in your own success and stop relying on me as the maid of your site
- The DIY SEO live workshops start this week
- Whether including lazy load in the upcoming WordPress 5.4 release is a good thing or not
- If you should get busy converting old content to Gutenberg blocks before support for the Classic Editor drops in 2021
- Why I’m sending you less emails, and why reading Tips Tuesday matters more than ever now
- Google has released a new Removal Tool in Search Console and what’s in it
- The Chrome 3rd party cookie tracking changes start this week
- Why you don’t want SiteGround to update you to PHP 7.3 automatically
- Help for moving to better hosting
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Join me Live to Discuss Tips Tuesday
I hope you’ll join for tonight’s livestream at 8pm ET / 5pm 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
It’s been a week full of site audits and migrations to better hosts. And many of my site audit clients are combining their annual site checkup with a migration.
And that’s saving them money!!!
Some of the migration pre-checks and post-move security changes overlap what I would be checking or updating in the loyalty audit. So, it’s faster and even cheaper than it would have been anyway.
Get these plugins off your site
My main job at BlogAid is to keep you informed and ahead of the curves so you can make easy, and timely changes on your site to keep it current with latest best practices.
And I deliver most of that info in Tips Tuesday.
I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself and commit 15 minutes a week to reading it.
So, let’s help you get caught up now.
If you still have any of these plugins on your site, we got rid of them last year, some two years ago:
- Easy Updates Manager
- GM Block Bots
- PHP Compatibility Checker
- WP-Optimize
So get these gone.
I am NOT the maid
I’m going to wag my finger at some folks here for a minute about taking things for granted with your site.
Security and performance used to be things we could ignore.
That was 5 years ago.
We have to pay attention now.
And I’m making it super easy for you to do that.
To ensure you never miss a Tips Tuesday, subscribe to BlogAid News and actually open that email up and read it.
I devote 20 hours a week minimum to reading and research so I can keep you informed.
I’m asking you to invest 15 minutes a week into your own site success.
I am not the maid for your site.
It’s up to you to help yourself and keep up with the 5 minute changes in Tips Tuesday and to get regular checkups as site security and plugins and performance change all the time.
You wanna make money from your site? Then wake up to the fact that it is a technical thing and you have an expert webmaster in your corner making things as easy on you as possible with it.
But you have to do your part too.
DIY SEO Live Workshops Start This Thursday Feb 6
Woot! Speaking of making it easy for you, we are wrapping up our Quick Start Challenge for the DIY SEO course.
Those quick checks helped everybody ensure they had a solid SEO foundation with:
- Yoast
- Google Analytics setup
- Google Search Console setup
- Speed
- HTTPS
And the last challenge was to gather info from Search Console because our first live workshop this Thursday is on Technical SEO.
We want to ensure Google can crawl your site without errors, and dig into them if you have any so you can get them addressed.
It’s not too late to join us!!!
The standing videos for the things in the Quick Start Challenge are always available, so you can get caught up in one sitting.
And then enjoy live workshops that take you step-by-step getting your SEO foundation perfected on your site.
That’s all the news from around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.
WordPress Tips
WordPress 5.4 May Include Lazy Load
You may recall in last week’s Tips Tuesday that I mentioned 2 new auto update features that will likely be included in WP 5.4 when it rolls out at the end of March, and how we will not be turning those on.
Well, there is another feature that WP is looking to add for lazy loading images by default.
That has caused quite a stir as Chrome has talked about doing the same thing.
And many of us already use premium plugins to do that for us.
So you’re definitely going to want to read this post I published yesterday about what’s going on and if this is a good thing or not, or if we’ll just keep relying on our plugins for it.
Should You Convert Old Content to Gutenberg Blocks?
Designer and fellow webmaster, Michelle Phillips of Codefetti brought up an interesting question in our private Webmaster Training Facebook group.
She asked if we need to convert all of our old content over to blocks after switching to Gutenberg.
That got me to thinking about WP’s announcement even before Gute rolled out that they will be dropping support for the Classic Editor plugin in 2021.
And that made we wonder if they will be also dropping support for the TinyMCE editor on the Classic block, which is what all of your previous content goes into when you switch to Gutenberg.
I did some digging into this and wrote up a post for you with all of the details.
Less Emails for New Posts
If you’re subscribed to BlogAid News, then you may be wondering why you didn’t receive an email when the 2 posts I just mentioned published over the last couple of days.
Back in my 2019 Year in Review for BlogAid post I mentioned that I was committed to blogging more this year instead of just mentioning things in Tips Tuesday.
And, I’ll be using Tips Tuesday as what everyone thinks it is anyway, my weekly roundup newsletter.
So, if it’s info you need, but not critical, or breaking news type info, I’ll be including it in Tips Tuesday, but not sending you an individual email when it publishes.
However, I will be posting it to the BlogAid Facebook page and my other social media, so you can follow me in your favorite place and get the posts there as they publish too.
This way you get an early head’s up about what’s coming and I get the news indexed by Google as it’s happening.
When it’s time for you do actually make a change, I’ll let you know that in plenty of time too.
SEO Tips
New Google Search Console Removal Tool
At first I was really excited when I saw the news last week that Google released a new Removal Tool in Search Console.
But it’s primarily for temporarily removing pages from Google’s index.
And, there’s an old content removal tool that is a wee bit scary at first read, as anyone can report content that is no longer available, and I initially see places for abuse with this among competitors.
But, I need to dig into more and once I do, I’ll have a blog post about it.
Plus, I’ll be including a tutorial for it in the Search Console section of the DIY SEO course too.
Chrome 3rd Party Cookie Changes Start This Week
The first stages of the rollout for Chrome blocking third-party cookie tracking begins this week on Feb 6.
This will be phased in over the next 2 years, but I’ve been seeing warnings about our cookies in Chrome Dev Tools since Nov.
And Firefox and Safari have already rolled out their version of this.
So, go read my post from last week on what’s going on and keep a close eye on your analytics and affiliate marketing ventures.
Hosting Tips
SiteGround will update from PHP 7.1 to 7.3 in late February
Several of my clients who are still on SiteGround alerted me that they received an email stating that SiteGround planned to move all sites still on their automated management system from PHP 7.1 to PHP 7.3.
Okay, there are a couple of things happening here that need clarity.
First, SiteGround has three types of automated management for sites, and this is only one of them.
Second, if you already set your PHP level to 7.2 or 7.3 yourself during all the many months I talked about it last year leading up to support for 7.1 dropping on Dec 1, 2019, or, took action to go up to 7.3 after reading that Chrome cookie post from last week, then you’re already out of this particular automation and have nothing to concern yourself with.
If you have done none of the above, you need to do it asap so you can check your site yourself to see if anything has broken.
See the tutorial for How to Check or Change Your PHP Level for details if you are on the original version of SiteGround’s control panel, as it is just their goofy build over cPanel.
You will not be able to change your PHP options, though, as shown at the end of the tutorial.
If you are on the new custom control panel, you’ll need to find SiteGround’s tutorials for how to make this change.
I’ll have a post with more details about all of this out later this week, and yes, this will be one that you will get an email on when it publishes if you are subscribed to BlogAid News.
Move to Better Hosting
All of this is just one more reason I say that SiteGround is moving into pseudo managed hosting that is getting goofier by the day.
Just leave when your time for renewal comes up there and get with a good host.
See my site services page for migration help, as you’ll need 30 SiteGround specific things taken out after you move to the new host, plus a way to change over the security at the new host immediately too.
And please keep in mind that I’m booked well into March and even April at this point and we need at least 2 weeks to get your migration project started prior to your renewal deadline. So get on my list now for a spring move.
Wrap Up
That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.
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Thanks for always keeping us up-to-date! On the topic of PHP 7.3, here’s an interesting chart I came across this week that shows what percentage of WP users are on the latest versions of both WP & PHP. BlogAid followers are definitely ahead of the game!
https://wordpress.org/about/stats/
Wow, that’s eye opening!!! Scary how many folks are running on unsupported versions of PHP. (Everything from 7.1 down).
Thank you for checking into the issue of converting old content to Gutenberg blocks, MaAnna! It will be so helpful moving forward!
I appreciate you bringing it up, Michelle!!
MaAnna,
What was the reasoning on getting rid of Easy Updates Manager? I can’t find that info on your site. I added it per your instructions and I and my tech person found it helpful.
Thanks,
Shirley
WP reserved the 5.0 release for Gutenberg to come into the core. They didn’t realize it was going to take as long as it did to get ready, therefore they were running out of major releases for things that HAD to go into core.
So they started putting major release stuff into minor release versions. Minor releases auto update, and we couldn’t have that, as there were bugs in the releases.
So we temporarily installed that plugin to stop minor releases from auto updating.
By the time 5.1’ish came out, we no longer needed it.
FYI, there likely would not have been a single post on the site to remove it. Would have been mentioned in a Tips Tuesday. Seriously doubt you could find that by searching the site, or even Google.
Also, we NEED those minor releases to auto update now, for WP, themes, and plugins, as many of them contain security fixes and you want those implemented as soon as they roll out.
Thanks so much for the thorough explanation, MaAnna! I will pass on to my tech person.
Shirley