Tips Tuesday – WP 5.8, Ecomm Masterminds, Deleting Sites, Gutenberg Tips

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• We start our E-comm masterminds this week in the BB Hub
• An update on theme speed testing and which theme to use
• An update on theme SEO testing and new tutorials coming
• Why you should use a child theme instead of customizing on the framework
• An update on the recipe and how-to video SEO testing
• Why brand new sites need security audits too
• Why removing WP files is not enough to delete an abandoned site
• Why I delete sites at the old host after a migration
• Help with retiring a site properly
• The WP 5.8 release is today, and why we won’t be updating
• When I’ll be releasing a What’s New video tour of 5.8 and Gutenberg tutorials
• Clarity on the confusing image upload setting in Gutenberg that will save you time
• A super cool rotating gradient background for Gutenberg blocks
• A new domain alignment feature for MailerLite users
• Why you need to get your email off your hosting

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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.

BlogAid Happenings

I sure hope you are having an enjoyable summer, or winter for my Aussie and South African peeps. 

I’ve got a bunch of posts and tutorials coming for you, which I’ll tell you about in a moment.

Ecomm Mastermind this week for BB Hub members

My BB Hub members are site audit clients who signed up for extra perks and support.

I am thrilled to have 2 special guests with us this week for a live e-commerce mastermind session with them.

Fellow webmasters Larry Snow and Dustin Hyle will be joining us to share their experiences with:

• Woocommerce
• Shopify
• First look at MailChimp Shops

It is crazy important for bloggers to diversify their income streams now. And we are doing a series of masterminds to look into all the options for delivering your own products.

Next week we’ll be having a mastermind that specifically covers digital download platforms and we’ll even touch on courses a bit.

This will be an ongoing series with more of our BB Hub members sharing their rich knowledge from our own village as we all support one another.

And the best part about it is that all BB Hub members have been through the same DIY site owner education with their audits and fixes.

So, they know how to properly vet these services in relation to their site’s needs too.

They don’t add a bunch of junk that’s going to compromise their site’s speed and security.

Theme speed testing update

Y’all know that I’ve been doing deep theme testing on:

• Kadence
• Genesis
• Astra
• GeneratePress

The speed tests for the initial load and the demo sites are complete. 

Next I will be throwing WP Fastest Cache paid at them to see just how much faster I can make them.

It’s going to take me another month or so to finish those tests and graph all of the data, as I have other testing and tutorial priorities right now.

But, the bottom line is that you can’t go wrong with any of these frameworks for speed. They are all nearly equal as far as speed.

Where you can go very wrong with them is in the child theme you use. Some of those, especially 3rd party ones for Genesis, are insanely slow. And folks are dumping the Genesis framework because of it. That’s a mistake at this point, as Genesis continues to remain quite stable compared to all others. 

Astra is slightly faster, but has proved to be unstable.

So, my top 2 theme framework recommendations for now are Kadence and Genesis.

And I may have an easy way for you to come out of your current Astra theme in the near future too. So look for announcements on that in the coming months.

Theme SEO testing update

As I’ve been mentioning in the last few Tips Tuesdays, my highest testing priority right now is on the SEO all of these themes output.

Each one natively outputs the older Microdata schema markup language.

Yoast SEO and RankMath both output the newer JSON-LD schema markup language and that is the one that Google prefers.

Schema markup are sets of extra tags that help define sections of your site info together. It’s a hierarchy, meaning that it has a top-down structure that has to be coordinated to get the biggest benefit.

I have verified that Genesis fully backs out its native schema entirely when it detects that you are using an SEO plugin that outputs JSON-LD. So, nothing for you to do with that one.

I have also verified that the special code you can add to Astra and GeneratePress back out all of their schema except for one minor thing.

But for Kadence, there is no generic code tutorial to back out all of its schema markup. What I found in support forums and such was entirely child theme dependent, and that may be a big issue if you are creating your own child theme, which you should be doing no matter which of these theme frameworks you are using.

But, one of my webmasters checked with them, as he has a license, and they gave us a generic code to try. I tested and it works when applied to the base framework, as well as to a child theme without having to input the child theme name.

So look for tutorials forthcoming in the DIY SEO course as well as the Video SEO Booster course as well as the Webmaster Training which is primarily for designers.

Switch to a child theme

Because so many site owners did their customizations directly on the theme frameworks for Astra and Kadence, I’m looking into ways for you to cheaply port over those styles to a child theme. 

And then that’s where this special schema filter code should be added, along with any other special type code filters you may need in the future.

If you add it to the framework, then every time the framework updates it would wipe it out.

I’ll let you know when I have someone who can do this switch out for you.

Recipe and how-to video SEO update

I’ll be moving on soon to testing video SEO in recipe and how-to cards, as those plugins each add their own schema markup. And all of it has to be coordinated in that schema markup hierarchy.

And hopefully the new schema markup code filters will clear up all of the craziness I saw in the initial SEO tests I did with my BB Hub members back in December.

Then all of this info will go into new tutorials for the Video SEO Booster course too, along with the Yoast Video SEO tutorials that are already there, as all of these plugins have to work together.

On top of it, Google may not be supporting the VideoObject schema markup as properly as it should and the order of your video loads may make a difference.

This is the kind of deep testing you get in my Video SEO Booster course and why it is like no other on the planet.

Site Services update

My wait list is solidly into September, if not October at this point. So, if you want any site service from BlogAid this fall, now would be the time to make that request.

New sites need audits too

And I want to clear up a myth while we’re talking about site services. 

I’ve had several new folks contact me for a site audit. And they have multiple sites on the same account, but only want their main site audited because the other site is so new.

ALL SITES need at least a security audit.

It’s bad for both performance and security to have more than one site on the same cPanel these days.

On top of that, every site you have, even on a reseller (WHM) account needs to be secured as each one puts the entire account at risk.

I won’t even take an audit job unless all sites will be secured. That would be like putting 15 locks on the front door but leaving the back windows open.

If you’re thinking about adding a new site, contact me for a secure site setup and get it locked down at the get go.

Fully delete abandoned sites

I’ve also jumped into audits where I found other live sites that the client didn’t mention.

It had been abandoned.

Folks, lack of updates is the #1 way that sites get hacked.

If you have an abandoned site, it takes more than simply deleting the WP files to get it completely removed. This is something you want to outsource. It’s cheap and fast to do.

Delete site after migration

Plus, deleting your site completely at your old host is something I offer in my migration service too. You can’t afford to have all the keys to your kingdom sitting at the old host unattended. Just because you terminate your account doesn’t mean that the old host wipes out the info.

And, I change all of your security keys at the new host too.

Free migration puts your site at a major security risk these days. It’s something worth paying for, not to mention getting you through the radical change in hosting environments.

READ: What is Managed Hosting? for more details on that.

Retiring a site

Some of my clients have been blogging since 2006 and they are ready to retire.

I’ve had more folks contact me for sunsetting their sites properly this year alone than in the entire time I’ve run BlogAid combined.

I do offer that service, I just haven’t advertised for it yet, but I will be adding that to the Site Services page in the near future.

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

WordPress Tips

WP 5.8 should roll out today

We will not be updating right away as a huge chunk of the new FSE (Full Site Editing) code is rolling into the core.

I expect we will hear a LOT of screaming about sidebars breaking over this.

That’s why WP released the Classic Widgets plugin months ago, and most of us will need it.

But, if you have the most recent Genesis update of 3.3.4, they fixed it already.

I have not read the changelogs on other themes to see if they have fixed it or not, and I don’t plan to. I’m literally going to be following in their Facebook groups to see what folks scream about.

Be sure that you are subscribed to BlogAid News so that you get my WP update instructions when I feel it is safe for most of us to update to 5.8.

If you receive Tips Tuesday in your inbox, then you are on the list already.

Delay in WP 5.8 video tour and Gutenberg tutorial updates

I’m also going to hold off on my usual “What’s New in WP 5.x” video tour that I usually post right before a release rolls out so that I can include any hidden gotchas that we need to be mindful of as well.

And I won’t be updating the Gutenberg Ninja tutorials until at least a week after I announce that it is safe to update to WP 5.8 as well. There is no point in confusing folks with new tutorials that don’t match the current WP version they are using.

Gutenberg Tips

You don’t have to change your image upload size

There are a few native settings in Gutenberg that can be super confusing compared to those same settings in the Classic editor.

One of them is the image block size setting.

I did a livestream in our BB Hub Facebook group to test what size image is actually uploaded.

It is full size even though the block drop-down shows Thumbnail.

That drop-down setting, as well as the percentage setting below it only come into play if you select them after you do the upload.

In other words, properly size and optimize your image prior to upload, and don’t worry about changing that setting. Your full size image was uploaded.

Rotating gradient background 

Here’s an eye-catching fun thing you can do with a Gutenberg block that won’t hurt your site speed.

Give it a rotating gradient background.

This may be something you want your designer to add with your brand colors, as it involves a bunch of CSS.

And, I’m not a big fan of putting extra CSS in the theme’s Customizer, but that seems like the way things are going.

Email Tips

MailerLite domain alignment 

For all of you who use MailerLite, they have come out with a new feature called domain alignment.

Here’s how they describe it:

“Domain alignment lets you incorporate your domain throughout your email campaign—starting with the ‘From’ address, all the way to the links you embed in the email.”

This will help your emails sent from MailerLite hit more inboxes than spam folders.

It requires you to:

• do a domain authentication process
• make some changes to your to and from fields
• and add DNS records at your host and Cloudflare, if you are using that

I sent an email to my BB Hub folks about it last week with instructions on how to get help setting this up, as it needs to be coordinated with the rest of their email setup and DNS records that we’ve been changing due to new security issues with them.

Get your email off your host

If you use a domain-related email – that has your domain as the extension like @blogaid.net, then you need to have it on a 3rd party service like Google Workspace (formerly GSuites) or Zoho or such.

You don’t want to run it through your host for free anymore. It is a security issue now.

And you want to have help setting this up as I have yet to see anyone do it correctly, or fully themselves by following the tutorials Google or Zoho give you.

You’re still missing important DNS records.

Plus, you need to modify the existing TXT and MX records at your host for a special security issue too.

Plus you need an SMTP plugin configured so that your email sends are detached from the hosting. That includes emails sent from your site for things like WP and backup notifications and such too.

This is a service that I make available only to my site audit clients. And most all of them have either already done it or will be doing it in their upcoming audit or audit checkup.

FYI, our new boutique hosting does not even offer domain-hosted email for this same security reason. That’s how big a deal it is for you to get this squared away.

Wrap Up

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

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