Tips Tuesday – SiteGround Drops WP Support, Ultimate Addons Plugin, Cloudflare Plugin, Bing Tutorials

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Bing Webmaster Tools tutorials are near to release
• Upcoming chat with Web Stories makers
• The Site Success Chat with Chas Greener replay is ready
• What’s up with recent email delivery issues
• Why you need to get off junk email providers
• The carrot that is in front of my horse that’s causing long hours
• Update on the Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg plugin causing massive file build up
• The Cloudflare plugin lost its mind for a little while
• A bombshell from SiteGround as they drop WordPress support
• Why I’m exciting about WordPress core finding a way to host Google fonts locally and what this means for plugin and theme devs and us
• A synopsis of the important live Q&A from Webpage Test and its new owner, Catchpoint

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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

Who I Help

All tips, advice, and suggestions in this, and all BlogAid posts and tutorials, are intended to empower DIY site owners who are not on hosting that is restrictive in what you can and can’t do with your site and hosting setup. If you have any doubts about what type of host you are on and if the tips I give will work there, see this post on What is Managed Hosting?

BlogAid Happenings

Getting those new Google Web Stories plugin post and tutorial out last week really threw off my schedule. They took about 25 hours that I was not counting on. But, my analytics tell me they were well worth it.

So this week I’ve been putting in some overtime to play catch up because I have a major carrot hanging from a stick in front of me. And I’ll tell you about that in a moment.

Bing Webmaster Tools Tutorials near release

Five of the new Bing Webmaster Tools tutorials are complete and I’ll be finishing up the rest to go into a whole new section for them in the DIY SEO course this week.

I basically wiped out my Bing account and started over for these tutorials so I could see the new onboarding process in the new interface.

And I’m so glad I did.

It most definitely has bugs that you’ll want to know how to deal with when verifying your sites and adding your sitemap and such.

But I’ll also say that I sure do like working in that Bing interface way more than Google Search Console. It’s far easier to read and find things. And not so cryptic in what it tells you either.

Folks in the course should look for an email when I release the new Bing tutorials.

Chat with Web Stories Makers

And I’ll be making a new section for the Google Web Stories plugin in the DIY SEO course too.

I’ve got more info coming with that, including a live session for the DIY SEO members who are already making Stories.

Some of y’all jumped on the beta and it would be great to see everyone’s Stories and what has become of your SEO on it too.

I’m thinking we’ll be meeting next week. I’ll send you an email as soon as I can get things cleared and setup.

Site Success chat with Chas Greener replay ready

Last week I had the pleasure of kicking off the new client Site Success Chat series with a live session in which Chas Greener shared what going through a site audit was like and how it helped her quadruple her revenue and increase her subscriber rate to 20-50 a day.

That replay is ready for you, in case you missed the livestream and definitely worth a listen.

I’ve already got more interviews lined up and I’ll be scheduling those as soon as I can get caught up again with these new tutorials and such.

Email Delivery Issues

For the past couple of weeks I’ve had clients report that they are either not getting my emails in a timely manner or that they are going to spam.

I called GSuites support and they said my entire setup is clean as a whistle.

I put this out to my webmasters and they said several of their clients are reporting the same.

So, I’m going to blame this on the raging DDoS attacks that are still happening.

Get off junk email providers

For me, the clients that seem to be having the worst trouble getting the emails are on spammy email providers like: 

• Hotmail
• Yahoo
• And even AOL

Folks, if you’re using those junk email providers, please step up to a decent provider. At least get on Gmail.

Better yet, get your domain-related email on GSuites. It’s only $5/mo and ensures you have the best email send/receive rate.

Video SEO is the carrot in front of my horse

I am beyond itchy to start doing all of the testing and research for my new Video SEO course.

I had planned to create that this summer, so I’m a wee bit behind, but not by much.

I have a little voice telling me to jump on this train now!!!!

And there is no point in having little voices if you don’t listen to them.

And that’s why I’m putting in late hours and even working on the weekend to get caught up from making those Web Stories posts and back on track with the Bing tutorials, plus all the client work.

I am not going to miss this train. I know huge opportunities are just waiting on me to get on board.

Responses to dealing with overwhelm

Last week I asked how y’all deal with overwhelm. A few of you emailed me with your tricks and tips and I thank you for those.

I’ve heard that highly successful folks act with a sense of urgency all the time.

I get that from being inspired and feeling the power of that wave under me.

But, that also requires a high degree of discipline to not run off with a new, shiny thing too much and hold focus on what’s in front of me until it is complete.

Because there are always new shiny things to get distracted by, aren’t there?

Get your site service request in now

Even though I am keeping pace with my projected time-frames for current site services clients, new requests are still coming in.

We are now into mid and late November for the wait list.

So, if there are site projects you want to guarantee get finished before the end of the year, you need to get those requests in now. 

Keep in mind that the wait list time I’m giving you is the start time of the project. And some of these things take weeks to complete.

No 1-off fix it services

I also want to remind folks that I do not offer 1-off fix-it services.

All fixes are in relation to site audits.

So, if you just need troubleshooting, then you’ll want to find another provider for that.

Those are the happenings around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.

Plugin Tips

Update on Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg Massive File Issue

Brainstorm Force support has been able to replicate this issue by working with my client who first reported it. There is a conflict with the UAG plugin when used in combination with the Astra Custom Layout when a full width banner was placed at the top of a post.

There will be a UAG bug fix sent out soon.

Thanks so much to Shelly of Frugal Family Home for catching, reporting, and working with support to get this issue resolved!

Cloudflare plugin loses its mind

Late last week it seems like Cloudflare mistakenly put out a new plugin release that went bonkers.

I believe it is fixed now, as I can’t see anything on the Cloudflare Status page to indicate otherwise.

And I want to thank Marilyn Lesniak of Marilyn’s Treats for the heads up about it. She posted about it in our private site audit client Facebook group. 

Jump into our Facebook group more often

And if you are in the group, but only pop in when you have trouble, you’re missing a lot.

I’d like to encourage you to be active more often so that FB shows posts to you in your news feed too. And, you’ll get the chance to help others as well, plus get some love on your posts and such too, as we’re having share days once in a while as well.

Hosting Tips

SiteGround drops support for WordPress

If you are on SiteGround, or planning to go there, or see them recommended in blogging groups, read this post.

My opinion of SiteGround has never been high and it just keeps dropping with every change they make.

Speed Tips

Hosting Google fonts locally

Ooo, I was thrilled to see this proposal from WordPress.

They are looking into the idea of hosting Google fonts locally and finally making an easy way to do it.

There are plugins and code that can do this now, but they say it does not make enough difference to speed to jump through the hoops to do it.

Well, it does make some difference to speed, but it makes even more difference to security with the way WP is getting super serious about connecting everything via the REST API.

You may recall me talking about API connections in the last several Tips Tuesdays, especially the ones for Facebook and Instagram, as those current connections are going to break Oct 24.

What me and webmaster designers need to know is how this proposal will impact themes.

What about FontAwesome? A lot of share plugins still use that font library for symbols. And it’s the devil for speed, way more so than Google fonts.

Plus, I have to wonder if all of this is coming about due to WP wanting to move from Dashicon support to new SVG images for symbols and such too.

We’ll be keeping our eyes on this, but because it is such a deep change, I don’t expect it to happen until next year, and even then, measures will be taken for backwards compatibility for existing themes and plugins.

WebPage Test Live Q&A synopsis

Two weeks ago you may recall me reporting on the sale of WebPage Test to Catchpoint.

WebPage Test is my workhorse performance tester.

Well, they did a live Q&A session last week to address any concerns and give us a vision of what changes they will be making with it.

For now, the previous owner, Patrick Meenan, is still the lead dev for it.

I was thrilled to hear him share more of the backstory on WPT, and how he has been running it off a server in his basement all this time.

I was also delighted to hear about the main changes they plan to make, which will be to get it off that one server and scale it pretty radically. And this is where Catchpoint comes into play, as they will be offering paid monitoring services once they hit that scalability.

You can now install a private instance of WPT to do that now, but this will make that service available for a lot more smaller enterprise level site owners who maybe don’t quite have a big enough IT team, or big enough servers of their own to handle that task.

The free version is not going to change much for now, or in the foreseeable future.

In the chat they talked about maybe bring the interface into something that doesn’t look like it was built in the 90s. But Patrick said that there is a lot of muscle memory to take into account and they don’t want to throw users off by not being able to find and click stuff as easily as they do now.

And I was beyond thrilled to hear that Catchpoint is dedicated to throwing money at hiring the folks needed to get all new documentation created for the tester.

Now, I think their focus for that will be enterprise-level users. But I may throw my hat into the ring on this so that they don’t forget about those of us who make a living helping bloggers.

I already create tutorials on it, so it wouldn’t be a big stretch for me to create that public documentation too. If nothing else, I’d like to collaborate with other pro users on it and see what other tips and tricks I can learn too.

Another thing I was thrilled to hear is that Patrick is now freed up to work on the tester itself and bring the checks up to speed, literally, with how the current Chrome browser works.

You may recall last week that I reported on issues with it not displaying lazy load facts correctly. I spent a lot of time with the WP Fastest Cache dev trying to figure out if there was an issue with the paid version of that plugin. Nope. There’s an issue with the tester.

So, I’d love to get a back door open with Patrick to get this specific issue addressed in the tester too, as it directly impacts our speed scores.

And it’s not that I can afford to take on another job, but the fact is, WebPage Test is vital to the success of my core business, which revolves around site audits.

And I’m doing some of these tests and tutorials for it anyway.

So, if I can get an inside scoop, and be paid for the time, then that’s a win-win for us all.

I’ll keep you posted on how this goes.

Wrap Up

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

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