SiteCare

Whether you're running a successful blog, taking orders online or generating leads for your business using your website, ensuring emails sent from the website are delivered to the intended inbox is crucial. We've had countless clients ask why they're not getting emails from their site, even simple password resets. Usually, the answer is simple. They're relying on their web hosting provider to send emails instead of utilizing an SMTP service. What is SMTP? We're glad you asked! It stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. So, instead of relying on your hosting provider to send emails, an SMTP is a server you can set up that's dedicated solely to sending emails from your site. Setting up a mail server might sound scary, but it can be a relatively simple process. First, you need to find an SMTP provider. We like SendGrid and use it to deliver on our 100% Email Delivery promise in our plans! Once you have your SMTP provider, you have to set it up by connecting it to your WordPress site using an SMTP plugin and adding a few verification records to your domain. Once everything is set up, test it out to make sure it works! For good measure, you can use a service like https://hubs.li/Q02HG8Jz0 to make sure there are no other blockers preventing your site's emails from landing in an inbox. No more lost leads, missing order confirmations, or comments left unanswered! SMTP is a necessary tool to ensure your site is communicating properly. Want to ensure email delivery from your site? Check out our plans at https://hubs.li/Q02HF_7f0 to learn more about the 100% Email Delivery promise along with our other awesome features! #smtp #wordpress #wordpresstips

Here's a 🔥 hot tip (you'll thank us later). Secure your login page now! One of the first lines of defense for protecting your WordPress site is the login page. Adopting a security policy to prevent hackers from accessing your admin accounts is easy to do on WordPress and at this point, there's no excuse not to. Sure, it can be annoying but your website is a valuable business asset, and losing it can be costly. Here are our top 4 tips for securing your website's login page. 2️⃣ Set up two-factor authentication: 2FA is another easy policy to implement on your WordPress site. A simple plugin will enable you to either send an email or text with a code confirming you are trying to log in. Take it one step further by setting up an authenticator app instead of a text or email code. 🔐 Force strong passwords: it's too easy to set a password that's simple and rememberable for easy access to your site. But this kind of complacency can get you into trouble if you're not lucky. Enforce strong passwords on your site and gain the peace of mind that everyone has to use a hard-to-crack password. ❌❌ ✔️ Limit login attempts: this one is a no-brainer for preventing a brute force attack but can be particularly annoying if your password is forgotten easily or isn't saved properly. If you decide to turn this feature on, be sure to not attempt your logins past the limit or risk getting locked out of your account. 🕵️ Hide the login URL: being one of the most popular CMSs in the world, it's common knowledge what the default login page is for a site hosted on WordPress. By changing the URL of your login page from the default, you'll make it harder for bad actors to even attempt to access your site's backend. Remember, it's easier to deal with the annoyance of setting a strong password and two-factor authentication than dealing with a hack. If you want to implement any of our login security tips and want additional security for your WordPress site, leave a comment below! All our plan comes with top-notch security protections and practices to make it harder for your site to be hacked. #WordPressSecurity #WordPress #WordPressHelp #WordPressLogin

One of the great things about WordPress is how easy it is to collaborate directly on the dashboard with your team or developers. Adding new users to the site to help with publishing content, editing, and general maintenance is so simple. However, we've noticed that so many site owners will automatically add each new user as an administrator. This may seem like the best way to prevent bottlenecks in publishing and updating your site but having too many admins can lead to some serious issues. A WordPress admin user has full access and abilities on the site. They can change the theme, install new plugins, and have free range over the content. This kind of access can be dangerous for your site's security and functionality. Inexperienced admins can harm a site by being too cavalier with their actions, such as deleting content, uninstalling plugins, or switching themes. If an admin account gets hacked, this can lead to lockouts, malware injection, and even the loss of the entire site. We encourage our clients to keep the number of admins as low as possible. This means utilizing the other roles available for WordPress users: - Editors have full access to all posts, pages, comments, categories, and tags. They can also upload media. - Authors can write or edit content, upload media, and publish - Contributors are similar to authors; however, they can't hit publish or upload media. - Viewers can read and comment on posts and pages. They also have access to private pages. Adding users and granting them only the access they need to perform their duties will reduce the chance of your WordPress site being damaged. Did you know that custom roles can be made in WordPress too? If you want to fine tune access with very specific capabilities, WordPress allows for that. Be proactive about your site health! This is your reminder to audit your account users now and restructure their roles on the site! Want to ensure your site is better protected and supported? Reach out by leaving a comment below to learn more about our support and maintenance plans. #WordPress #WordPressSecurity #WordPressHelp

With over 59,000 plugins available on WordPress (that's not including the thousands available elsewhere), it can be easy for the number of plugins installed on your site to grow. You may think you need XYZ functionality, or maybe you installed a plugin just to test it out, but keeping a large repertoire of plugins can potentially harm your #SiteHealth. Even if they're not all activated, too many plugins lead to too many problems. Why is that, you might ask? Well, we're happy to explain. Here are our top 5 reasons for keeping your plugin installs and activations as low as possible 1. Too many plugins can cause performance issues and bloat. 2. Troubleshooting becomes more difficult to find the root of the cause 3. The more plugins you have, the greater the chance of security vulnerabilities 4. Maintaining a lot of plugins can become time-consuming 5. Your WordPress dashboard can become cluttered and hard to navigate The video below is an extreme example, but it is not far off from what we've seen on some sites. At this point, you might be wondering what is the right number of plugins to have active on your site. And to that we say no more than you actually need. Which is our way of saying to be choosy with the plugins you install on your site and if in doubt about what plugins to choose, checkout our comprehensive list of the best WordPress plugins to supercharge your website: https://hubs.li/Q02H073Y0 Do you have too many plugins and need help managing them all or finding which ones to ✂️ cut? Comment below to learn more about our SiteCare plans.

Our Chief of Staff, Ryan Sullivan, knew back in 2012 that care plans for WordPress sites were going to be needed. That need led to the inception of our maintenance and support plans, which have grown and improved over the years to become protection and a helping hand for our clients. 🎙️He was interviewed on Breakdown—A Gravity Forms Podcast and talked all about the inception of these care plans and how they've evolved over the years. Listen as he discusses the inception of these care plans and how the WordPress support space has changed over the years. Listen in for the full story! https://hubs.li/Q02G_ZJG0 #WordPress #SiteCare #WordPressMaintenance #WordPressSupport

There are over 59,000 free plugins on WordPress available for sites to activate and use, but not all plugins are alike, and some are what we like to call "abandoned." How do we determine whether a plugin is "abandoned"? That's easy; any plugin that hasn't been updated in over 6 months by the developer is what we deem to be abandoned. A healthy WordPress ecosystem requires regular plugin updates to ensure everything is performant, secure, and compatible with the latest WordPress Core and PHP updates. When you're browsing WordPress for the next plugin to add to your #WordPress site or reviewing the plugins you currently have installed, check for these two things: ✅ Was the plugin last updated less than 6 months ago? ✅ Has the plugin been tested against the most recent major releases of WordPress? If the answer to both of these questions is yes, the plugin is not abandoned! If the second question is no, proceed with caution! Are you running an abandoned plugin on your site (find out with the SiteCare Score plugin: https://hubs.li/Q02GFBGZ0)? Ask yourself what functionality the plugin provides and whether it can be easily removed or replaced. If in doubt, we've done countless plugin reviews for our clients and can do one for you too! Drop us a comment below to learn more about our plans and get your site running like a well-oiled machine. #wordpress #wordpressplugins

#WordPress 6.6 gets released today, and we're excited 🎉 about many of the upgrades and features this update will bring. Below are the top 4 updates we think are notable with this release: ✏️ Improvements to the Site Editor—6.6 will streamline the Site Editor experience to make editing content a breeze. Fewer steps and previews will help users find what they're looking for quickly. 🔍 High-Level Editing—A new zoomed-out experience will allow editors to see the whole picture when developing patterns. 🔄 Overriding Synced Patterns—Now, you can override specific blocks and attributes of synced patterns. This means you can edit the pattern's design without affecting the content where it currently exists on the site. 🔙 Rollback Auto-Updates— With 6.6, it will now be possible to rollback plugin auto-updates that encountered a fatal error. No more White Screen of Death and greater peace of mind for site owners! While keeping WordPress up-to-date is important for your #SiteHealth, you should always take caution and follow best practices when updating your site. Ideally, you'd process your updates on a staging site and then navigate through the site to ensure nothing is broken. If you don't have a staging site to test updates on, and even if you do, ‼️ always ‼️ take a backup of your site prior to processing any major updates. Worried about updating your site? Drop a comment below and learn about our support plans. Leave your site's updates in the trusted hands of the SiteCare team. #websitemaintenance #wordpressupdate

After 19 years, we've seen it all, and we've used this experience to develop the SiteCare Score plugin. Everything we check with our plugin is crucial to the overall health of WordPress sites and can be easily overlooked or misunderstood by WordPress users. This is especially true for our check on inactive themes. You may be wondering why having too many themes on your site can be a problem, especially if they're inactive. Each theme contains directories and files that make up how your #WordPressWebsite looks and functions. Some themes are built to be lightweight, while others are filled with bloat and features you'll never use. Regardless of how the theme was built, they all have something in common: code. PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and markup languages like HTML can be written insecurely and contain vulnerabilities. The more themes you have installed, even if they're inactive, the more attack vectors bad actors can exploit. But like most things in life, it's good to have a backup. In the rare cases that a theme is accidentally deleted or the files get corrupted, having an inactive but installed backup theme like WordPress's Twenty Twenty-Four can help keep your site and content live while you resolve the issue at hand. Our rule of thumb is that your site should have no more than three themes installed: your main or parent theme, a child theme if you have one, and a backup theme. Wondering how your site's health scores? Take our SiteCare Score plugin for a drive to find out! https://hubs.li/Q02Gb6d80 #WordPressThemes #WordPressHealth #SiteHealth

Picture this: you've been churning out content for months, and your search engine traffic has been sitting at 0 the entire time. You're following all the best practices for SEO and creating well-written, keyword-optimized content, but the needle hasn't moved even a little. You're starting to lose faith in your ability to show up in search engine results at all when you decide it's time to figure out what's holding your site back. Sometimes, it just takes time or a change of approach or the implementation of a tool, but there is one thing you should always check before changing your strategy. Many seasoned WordPress users know the search engine visibility option that can be found under the reading settings of a WordPress site. This setting, when enabled, will tell search engines not to crawl your site. It can come in handy if you want your site's access to be restricted, if you're running a test, or if your site is incomplete. But, most of the time, you don't want that setting enabled. If you've made major changes to your site or created a new one, and your organic traffic doesn't seem to budge, check to see if this setting is enabled first before you make any other adjustments. We've had clients come to us dismayed over their lack of organic traffic and, many times, it was due to search engines being told not to crawl their site. It's a small setting but powerful. If your organic traffic isn't improving and you're at your wits end for the cause, leave us a comment below and we'll perform a free Ahrefs site scan on your website to see what we can uncover. #SEO #WordPress #WordPressSEO

We looked deep into the Divi theme and page builder and closely analyzed its usability, security, and performance. While on the surface, Divi seems like a great builder with world-class support and glowing reviews, we've discovered several red flags that might change your mind about using it on your #WordPress site. 🚩 Divi locks in your content making it difficult to change themes 🚩 The page-building experience is clunky, sluggish, and not intuitive 🚩 Divi has had several medium to high-severity security vulnerabilities 🚩 The code base is bloated and causes performance issues Read more on our blog where we uncover the pros and cons of the Divi theme: https://hubs.li/Q02G9Ftx0