Tips Tuesday – Site Security, Pinterest Hover Buttons, Authorship Return, Kadence Blocks
Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!
Tips this week include:
- BB Hub Plus Membership has launched
- Theme speed tests are complete – and when the post will be out
- What new tests and tutorials are underway
- Status on whether it’s time to update to WP 5.8 or not
- An overdue improvement to Kadence Blocks
- Issues with Pinterest hover buttons
- NameHero launches a private cloud service
- .com domain extension price increases 7% on Sept 1
- Is Google authorship back?
- Yoast has been acquired by EIG – sort of
- Automattic buys Titan, a pro Email Suite
- Where you can see a list of all major WP related acquisitions
- What the mid-year security report reveals that you should do to protect your site
Listen to the Podcast
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Spill the Beans Livestream tonight
Do join us live tonight at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. We spill the beans on this week’s news, breaking stories for the day too, and special info just for those who watch. And the replay is available here on this Tips Tuesday post later too. But the live party is so much more fun.
Replay
Who I Help
All BlogAid posts and tutorials are intended to assist business-minded, hands-on bloggers and webmaster designers who are serious about making money and who want to stay up-to-date with site changes. And our BB Hub is a private member site and Facebook group for my site audit clients that has lots of extra perks and support.
BlogAid Happenings
Holy cow! It’s a big news week for sure with some mega announcements from all over. But let’s start with the ones from BlogAid, shall we? I’ve been working hard to get caught up on my backlog and you’re gonna love all the new goodies I’ve got for you!!
BB Hub Plus Membership Launched
I’m delighted to announce that the BB Hub has moved to a paid membership program called BB Hub Plus.
The BB Hub is a member area and Facebook group for my site audit clients where they get all manner of extra perks, like:
- Breaking news for WordPress, themes, and plugins
- Group support – way beyond just site stuff – from BlogAid and other educated DIY site owners that’s spot on, tested advice and help
- Masterminds for marketing, ecomm, digital downloads, social media, and way more
- Tutorials that aren’t released to the public
- Invitations to test the latest site tech, plugins, SEO, and more
- Standing discounts on BlogAid courses that are lower than public sales prices
- Quick tips for keeping your site in top condition
- A DIY Site Owner’s Maintenance Guide
- Huge discount on annual audit check ups – (more info below)
- Reduced rate on any in-between fixes
- Invitation to our private HOA hosting that is far superior to all big box hosts
And yes, we will be resuming our masterminds on digital downloads as soon as I can get the next session scheduled, likely toward Sept so folks will be back from summer vacations.
Folks who are already in the regular BB Hub will switch over to the Plus side during their next audit checkup.
And all new site audit clients will get an insane discount to join so they can get a taste of all the awesome support.
You can see all of the details on the new Site Audit service page.
And yes, BB Hub is the nickname for it so trolls could not find us on FB and such.
Theme Speed Tests Complete
As y’all have heard me mention in recent Tips Tuesdays, I’m doing a juggling act with folks on the wait list this month as so many of them at the top are either on vacation or will soon be leaving.
So, I bumped up a few others lower down on the list and this week I’m circling back to those who are returning from vacation.
But that left me with a bit of a gap in my workload at the end of the week, so I updated my to do list to see what else I have coming for the rest of the year that I might be able to get started on.
And what I saw let me know that I could no longer put the theme speed tests on the back burner or I would never get to them.
So, I stayed up super late Thursday night to finish all of the testing and put that data into spreadsheets.
Over the weekend I started making the graphs that will become the images you see in my public post.
This is insanely mind-numbing work. And it takes lots of time to do, as evidenced by the 500-600 page report that it generates, if I stuck it all together in one doc.
The public post will have around 40-50 graphs, and I’ll have it out to you as soon as I can so I can move this thing off my plate. I hope that will be later this week.
But I can tell you now that all of the themes are plenty fast enough to use.
Speed will not be the determining factor in which one you choose as your base.
More tests and tutorials underway
The other stuff I’m juggling are the recipe plugin tests for the Video SEO Booster course. I have to wait on my volunteer helpers to set up the recipe posts in between tests.
During those waits I’ve started on the new Gutenberg tutorials for what has changed in the WP 5.8 release, plus some stuff that changed a few times since the 5.7 release, like Reusable Blocks.
I’ll be sending emails to course members as I release the new tutorials, so you can check them out.
And just as soon as I finish all that I’ll be running new tests and making tutorials on the huge news that Google may be bringing back Authorship. I’ve got more details for you on that in the SEO Tips section.
I’ve got to get all of this done prior to the next WP 5.9 release at the end of the year, with new Gutenberg changes, and then prepping for the live workshops in the DIY SEO course that start in January.
So, now you know what I meant about it being now or never for the theme speed testing!!
WP 5.8 Update Status
We are still on hold and will not be updating yet.
For the most part, I’m only hearing about small glitches, not sites breaking.
But we may well wait for the 5.8.1 release on this one.
Site Services Update
My waitlist is moving closer to December now, best guess. And please do realize that any timeframe I gave you when you contacted me was best guess. It could be weeks either side of that and all depends on what each project actually takes to do.
That’s a lot harder for me to judge with new clients as I have not seen their site yet and it could be a can of worms.
I’m working at capacity of how many client projects I can take on at a time. It’s a juggling act every day, and I can only keep so many balls in play at a time before something gets dropped.
And I’m outsourcing what I can now too, like the actual migration if it’s manual and email setup and deep troubleshooting for hacks and such too.
I appreciate your patience with the process.
Even more, I appreciate everyone with an open project keeping right on top of their parts of it and getting them done quickly so we can keep things in motion every day.
Gutenberg Tips
Overdue improvement to Kadence Blocks
I heard from my webmaster designers that Kadence blocks lacked the ability to do a 3 column layout with rows.
It looks like Kadence has released a way to do that now.
But I also heard an update broke it, or something else with it.
So, not perfect yet. But this was a big layout design element missing from Kadence and good to know that they are trying to fix it.
Plugin Tips
Issues with Pinterest Hover Buttons
If you use a plugin to provide a Pinterest hover button, be sure to check that it is working.
So far the only folks reporting issues with it are all on SiteGround.
And if that turns out to be the only common denominator, that’s just one more reason to leave that goofy hosting.
You’ll definitely want to hire me to help you migrate as there are 30+ pieces of SiteGround junk that needs to be removed. Plus, everything at the old host needs to be deleted due to security, that’s with a move from any host.
And you can combine your migration with an audit to save money on both services.
Please just keep my waitlist in mind, and go monthly with SG if you have to.
Hosting Tips
NameHero Launches Private Cloud Service
It looks like NameHero is moving away from using LiquidWeb servers exclusively.
They recently launched their own data center in Kansas.
I don’t know what packages will be on their new, private servers, though.
And I don’t know if there is a cost difference. I don’t see one on the website.
But I do know that VPS type packages are getting too expensive from LiquidWeb. So it’s not a surprise that hosting companies who use those servers are looking elsewhere for these top tier packages.
Domain Tips
The .com domain extension price increases by 7% on Sept 1
Just a quick reminder about an announcement from last May.
All .com domain extensions start their price increases on Sept 1, which is just a few weeks away.
They will go up by 7%. Which comes out to be pennies.
And they will continue to go up every year for at least the next decade.
If you can afford to do so, you may want to buy more years on your domain now.
But by the time the renewal comes up again you may be in for massive sticker shock.
The cap was taken off pricing for all .com extensions earlier this year. I’ve seen some going for thousands of dollars if there is a big brand potential for them.
SEO Tips
Is Google authorship back?
Remember G+ and the author triangle you could set up with it?
Well, Google may be bringing something like it back, but in a different way.
They are now supporting the schema markup that has to do with the author.
Yoast came out with support for that schema markup back in May with version 16.3, but it is only in the paid version
All this news broke last Monday, after I had already produced Tips Tuesday, but I talked about it in my livestream that evening, if you want to catch the details.
Google was asked the next day if they were concerned about author spam with this new schema support.
That was the clue to me that Google is either cooking something up for another verified digital identity like we had with G+ or is just looking to see how we adopt the new schema markup.
I’ve given more details to folks in the BB Hub and in the DIY SEO groups.
And I’m keeping very close watch on this for us.
We will have to make some sort of new triangle with it, and I’ll be doing some testing to see how best to make that happen, depending on what else Yoast SEO may be coming out with for it.
Acquisition Tips
Yoast has been acquired by EIG – sort of – but not really
Before the Yoast hater rumors get out of hand – know the truth.
Yoast was acquired by Newfold Digital, which EIG was rolled into as well. Same as the Kadence theme was acquired by iThemes, who is owned by Liquid Web, who own other plugins and Interworx control panel too. Same as StudioPress/Genesis was acquired by WPEngine, who owns other plugins too.
WPTavern has a nice article on it about how the solid funding will allow Yoast to expand in the way it has wanted to anyway. EIG will not have a hand in it, but we may see them bundle the paid products, just like WPEngine does.
Yoast has 12 million installs.
That’s over 10 times more than their nearest competitor.
Every plugin that outputs rich snippets strives to integrate with Yoast SEO. That includes recipe and how-to plugins.
Yoast SEO outputs the schema markup that is the same as Google’s own schema markup generator. RankMath outputs very different schema markup. I actually looked at it, have you?
Yoast will not slow down your site.
That rumor was started by someone who didn’t understand what was being reported about how all of the extra 3rd party integrations in Yoast will slow down the back side. Do what everyone in my DIY SEO course does and turn that stuff off.
That rumor was fueled by how Yoast handled some things with the database. First, you had to have an enterprise level site to notice the speed loss. Second, that was fixed years ago.
And I have yet to see ANY hard data that Yoast slows down the site. I’ve asked for it – for years – nada. I’ve run my own tests – nothing. It’s just not true.
Yoast SEO breaks now and then – ALL plugins do.
WP breaks sites sometimes too – but you don’t dump it.
When WP and Google got in a room to discuss how WP could be natively generate XML sitemaps, they called in Joost de Valk (Yoast) to consult.
Yoast pays for “volunteers” to staff the WP core dev team, as do other big WP related companies.
They have helped avoid some major issues with WP development. And right now they are helping refactor the way Gutenberg holds user preferences to be in the database and not in the browser so we stop seeing the Gute Welcome screen or jump to Fullscreen edit mode when we purge our browser. Their help goes WAY beyond SEO stuff.
Team Yoast travels the globe to financially support and attend WordCamps everywhere. They are heavily involved in the WP community.
So, before you jump on the Yoast hater bandwagon, consider the truth – and ensure you know it for yourself and are not just spreading rumors.
If you just like another SEO plugin’s interface better – okay – but check the schema markup output and ensure that it is what Google wants.
And let’s not forget that we have been using the Yoast SEO plugin for free.
It amazes me how many folks forget to show any gratitude for something that has served them well for over a decade but are quick to fry a company over one mistake.
As a side note, EIG was purchased by an even bigger company, Clearlake Capitol and then EIG and their holdings were split into several groups.
Newfold Digital is one of those groups and it also has all of the hosting companies under that umbrella, as well as several domain registrars.
Automattic Buys Pro Email Suite Titan for $30M
And the acquisitions by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, keep coming too.
You may recall last week that I reported on them buying up a podcast app.
Well, this week Automattic shelled out $30 million for Titan, which is an email startup for business-level white-labeled email solutions.
The acquisition appears to be aimed at how WordPress.com will handle emails going forward.
So, I don’t think this is something that self-hosted WP site owners will see an impact with.
But I will be keeping my ears open if anything should come of it.
Acquisition Tracker
So many WP related companies buy so many other WP companies that it can be hard to keep track.
And then even bigger investment groups buy them up.
The nice folks at Post Status have a WordPress Acquisition Tracker to help us all keep up with the changes, if you want to have a look.
Security Tips
WPScan partners with Wordfence for Mid Year Security Report
I’ve been telling you all year that the cyber security situation is worsening.
Folks, security and performance go hand in hand.
If you want a fast site, you need to get it locked down.
Bad bot hits are chewing our hosting resources up to the tune of 30k-50k hits a month.
That’s more bot traffic than humans for a whole lot of site owners.
At some point you are going to top out of your limited hosting resources and you’ll need to purchase a bigger package. That just gives more room for the rats to run.
The joint security report confirms that we are on track to have “a record-breaking year for WordPress plugin vulnerabilities.”
THIS is why I can’t sleep without BlogAid being on the Cloudflare Pro version. It has a WAF (Web Application Firewall) that has a LOT more security to bridge us over the 2 most common plugin vulnerabilities, including those in the report, such as:
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities accounted for more than half of all them (52%), followed by Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) at 16%, SQL Injection (13%).
Folks, that adds up to 81% of the security issues.
So, Cloudflare Pro is definitely worth paying for and I take my clients through that setup live, as well as the other 30+ settings that I never see a host, or many site techs, configure properly.
And they are shocked to see the up to 30k bad hits blocked by Cloudflare in a 24 hour period too. Those are not all bad bots, but the overwhelming majority of them are. And most all are from countries that they don’t do business with too.
The biggest attack vector reported is on passwords.
This is why it is mandatory in site audit fixes now for site owners to remove all users who do not currently need access and to rotate passwords on all users who are left. We do this every year during their audit checkups. And I encourage them to use the LastPass service and rotate passwords on all of their online accounts, plus to never use the same password twice.
And 33% of those attempted password attacks are via XML-RPC, which is one of the doors we slam shut, lock and then hide in our site audit fixes too.
Wrap Up
That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.
Gimme some love!!
Please leave a review of this podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to it. And thank you to all who do!
Share this post with all your blogger buddies and blogger groups to support all the free info and help you get on BlogAid – and help your buddies too!!
Subscribe to all BlogAid Posts via email so you never miss anything!
Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.
