Determine What Changes a Plugin or Theme Made to a WordPress Site

Installing a plugin (or theme) means that you are entirely trusting your site into the hands of their developers. There are no restrictions on what the code you’re putting on the site can do. It can move all your buttons to the left by two pixels because of a CSS bug, but it can also purposely wipe out all your files and the entire database. Installing plugins from the official WP repository eliminates chances for the second scenario, but it still leaves you wondering – what changes did a plugin make to my site? In practice, what changes do plugins make?
Before the realistic scenario, let me repeat the theoretical one, one more time. You are installing and activating a 3rd party piece of PHP code on your site. There are absolutely no limits on what the code can do as long as it’s in the realm of PHP and it’s capabilities and privileges on the server. It can certainly delete files, modify them or send them to a remote server. Same goes for the data stored in the database. You can’t stop any of that once the plugin is activated. So, don’t use nulled plugins or themes and if you’re installing sketchy plugins on a live site make a backup first.
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18038/determine-what-changes-a-plugin-or-theme-made-to-a-wordpress-site

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/determine-what-changes-a-plugin-or-theme-made-to-a-wordpress-site/

Write a Blog Post That Converts: 7 Modern Rules of Sales

Writing blog is one thing but writing a blog post that converts your readers into customers is totally another thing. You can write loads of blogs and keep hitting that publish button, but if you think that doing that is all that is required and rest will happen automatically, then I have to burst that bubble for you. There is a lot more than that you need to do.
If you are posting blogs on your company’s blogging page or website and not receiving many conversions, then you need to do conversion optimization to your blogs.
What does conversion optimization mean?
Conversion optimization is what many bloggers and marketers miss out on when writing and publishing a blog.
You can write blogs as you wish but if you are writing them to boost your sales, you need to make sure that they have the qualities that retain the users and make them your customers.
If you are posting bulk articles and not focusing on making them conversion oriented, then there is no point of posting at all.
By doing this, you surely will be pulling a lot of visitors, but if they are not getting converted into customers, it is all a waste of time.
What does it mean to convert a customer?
Well, converting a reader
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18037/write-a-blog-post-that-converts-7-modern-rules-of-sales

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/write-a-blog-post-that-converts-7-modern-rules-of-sales/

Report on the Accessibility Status of Gutenberg

On October 3rd, the schedule for WordPress 5.0 was proposed. Prior to this, the accessibility team had not been made aware of a release time frame, and had no reason to believe WordPress 5.0 and the Gutenberg editor were under time pressure. The schedule proposed a release date of November 19th – 6 weeks from the announcement date. The initial reactions to the announcement of the release schedule were negative, which is unfortunate. We have no desire to increase the fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the release of Gutenberg. To that end, this article is intended to shed light on the issues the WordPress Accessibility Team sees as most critical to the success of Gutenberg at release.
We want to give some background on the Accessibility Team, the commitment WordPress has made to accessibility, and then dive into the issues in Gutenberg as of this writing. The issues addressed come from reviews of version 4.1.0 of the Gutenberg plug-in released on October 24th, 2018.
Who is the Accessibility Team
For anybody reading this post who’s not already deeply involved in the WordPress project, it’s important to give some background about the team structure in WordPress
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18036/report-on-the-accessibility-status-of-gutenberg

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/report-on-the-accessibility-status-of-gutenberg/

How should PPC and SEO work together to gain visibility?

Getting PPC and SEO to work together effectively is always a key goal, whether we’re managing just one of the channels or both of them.

Although it sounds easy in principle, it’s generally not. A typical request cropping up is around sharing top-performing PPC ad copy by category and using this to update meta descriptions.

Sharing ad copy performance is something PPC teams should definitely be doing with their SEO counterparts; but unless your meta descriptions are awful the impact here is minimal.

This brings us to the first problem you encounter — although there is lots you CAN do, picking and prioritizing what you do when is vital.

The second common request is switching off PPC ads when you rank in position one (P1) organically. Initially this makes perfect sense and gets the attention of sharp CMOs and CFOs. But this is the second key challenge to overcome; how do I get the right data in the right place to know if it’s actually working.

Let’s take a typical example: car insurance. Here we see MoneySuperMarket ranking P1 organically:

The inevitable push comes; can we turn PPC off in [car insurance] because it’s really expensive and we’re ranking P1 organically.

Well, probably not. Yes, your report is accurate: you rank P1 organically. But you’re actually the fifth result on that page. On my work monitor the organic ranking is well past halfway down the page. On mobile you’re well below the fold:

This is where getting the right data is key.

Keyword universe

One way in which we’re improving SEM data for our clients is via a Keyword Universe. This isn’t perfect by any means, but it gives us a working framework on which to build our reporting and optimize efforts. A template can be found here.

It uses PPC search query data as a starting point. It’s important to use this; instead of the Paid v Organic report you can find in Google Ads or Search Ads 360. The reason for this is that Shopping search query data isn’t included in this report, so for retailers you’re likely to be missing out on a ton of data!

Layer this with organic data from Search Console and you’ll start to be able to build up an idea of your coverage.

Pulling in conversion data at a keyword level for PPC is easy; organic not so much. What we recommend here is using the category column to categorize your terms and then pivot up. You can then assign landing pages to categories and understand organic conversions and revenue. Not a perfect solution, but it gives you something to work with.

Then you can add in search volume estimates from Google Keyword Planner or other tools you may use. You can use this to figure out what your paid, organic, and SEM share of voice is. This gives you a few ideas:

• Where is PPC very dominant and SEO not so much? What can you do to improve rankings across these terms?
• Are there areas where PPC has coverage but conversion rate is poor, and you can perhaps sacrifice this spend and allow organic to pick things up?
• Do you have a good share of voice across SEM across your key categories?

You can then add in search queries where you only rank organically and see if you want or need PPC coverage.

Finally, you could add in keywords you might want to target and ask the PPC team to run some tests to see what kind of volume and competition you will be up against. Run PPC temporarily until organic rankings get up to scratch.

The categorization element of the report is the most time-consuming.

Brand testing

As you can see, the argument for switching off generics can be blurry at best. However, we tend to also see an argument for switching off brand. It’s generally the next conversation once a client realizes that turning off a generic head term is perhaps not going to have the impact there were expecting.

Again there are a multitude of options and approaches here but we’ll cover the most common ones:

• Turn all PPC brand off because we’re ranking P1
• Leave PPC brand on all the time and gun for 100% impression share
• Switch off desktop

There are tech providers out there which offer, in various guises, ways supported here. The important thing to remember is that you are not allowed to scrape Google search results if you are also making changes to bidding. So for example, ad monitoring platforms which can tell you what competitor creative is for certain terms can do that because they are allowed to scrape the results — but they cannot use this information to make automatic changes to your account. That means an account manager jumping between both monitoring tools and search engines on a daily basis to eke out minor gains. It’s possible; but probably not a sensible use of time.

The challenge we have with the strategies outlined above, respectively, are:

• Turning it all off will lead to drop in traffic and a potential drop in orders and revenue.
• This can be expensive; you don’t necessarily need to protect your brand all the time, and you can use saved budget elsewhere (i.e use it to grow your brand with YouTube)
• You lose data because you aren’t bidding for your terms.

As such, we’ve been establishing a more balanced approach – which takes time, but will help save budget and, most importantly, keep the data flow going so you can explain WHY the results are as they are.

Key steps to a more balanced approach

1. Understand the lay of the land:

• Use Google Ads to report on your top spending exact match brand terms. You’ll also want to include search impression share and search exact match impression share.
• If you are in position 1, with 100% exact match share (or 95%+ overall search impression share), you can probably stand to save some budget by reducing your costs-per-click. If you aren’t in P1 with 100% impression share then this gets more complex; and you’d need to understand the reasons for not being at those levels. However, you can still follow the next steps to help you monitor overall performance.
• You’ll also want confirmation you are ranking P1 for the terms you are looking on PPC. It would be very rare that you wouldn’t be — but worth checking!

2. You now want to identify a target search exact match impression share. This is a little bit finger in the air as the idea is to drop this gradually over a period of weeks; but you need a starting point. We’d recommend:

• If the auction for your terms is usually aggressive then play it cautiously – drop from 100% to 95% and monitor from there.
• If the auction tends to be weak (i.e not many competitors) you can afford to drop to 90% or 85%; but we wouldn’t recommend going lower than that in week one.

3. A report template can be found here. All you need to do here is to populate the table with your data. Take the PPC data from Google Ads for the campaign you are testing and then Google Search Console data and look for your branded terms.

4. Fill out the report every week, with both your PPC and SEO teams feeding into it. What you are hoping to achieve is SEM traffic staying static and your overall PPC investment declining.

Key benefits of brand testing

This is a good starting point for brand testing. The key benefits are:

• If you keep spend going through Google Ads, you can monitor your cost savings, your traffic drop and how aggressive the auction is getting.
• It allows you to measure where the point of no return is; once you start seeing SEM traffic drop, you can bump up your bids a little bit to regain the traffic – although we’d recommend not being too jumpy here. Day by day things will change – look at this over weeks rather than days.
• A common concern is the time taken to manage this; but typically you are looking at a handful of keywords – no more than 10 which actually spend the greater share of budget – and making changes maximum twice per week.

Build an environment that encourages sharing

Aside from the more practical tips outlined above, we’ve found the most important strategy in getting PPC and SEO to work well together is enabling a method for the teams to talk to each other. If this is internal it should be easy; but across different agencies it’s likely to be a bit more difficult. Our top tips for this are:

1. Establish a monthly learning deck. This changes from client to client but typically looks like this:

• A top-line view of performance versus targets for key metrics (orders, revenue, ROAS, traffic to site, etc.). Do this for each channel individually.
• A review of the tests / learnings that have been made in the past month
• It’s also important to focus on what is important to both teams, including:
  • New keywords / new negatives from PPC
  • Any kind of landing page testing
  • Any kind of a copy testing
  • Any data regarding audience from PPC. We’re finding content teams are able to use PPC data to help ideation. For example; what are people’s affinity segments, what are their detailed demographics?
• A review of what is coming up and anything that’s currently in progress.

2. Have a monthly call. This can be tweaked depending on the scale of work that’s going on; but monthly works for a lot of our clients. It takes 30 minutes and we run through the monthly learning decks and highlight areas of opportunity. One example of a benefit here was landing page testing. An SEO team had struggled to make a case for changes to the organic page because the internal brand team were winning the argument on what the page should look like. We used PPC landing page data to evidence how a change in the position of a call to action had a significant impact on the conversion rate of the page; immediately the SEO team got the green light to start testing new page designs and performance improved!

3. Make sure you’re sharing anything you think may be relevant. Sometimes even the smallest detail can be important. For example SEO teams may be planning for AMP pages; but that means new Floodlight tags for PPC teams if they are using SearchAds 360.

4. Don’t forget about the other teams. I know this is an SEM post; but audience data is already a key pillar. Search has had to play catch-up with the likes of Facebook; but the stuff PPC teams have access to at their fingertips is extensive. Make sure the social and programmatic teams know about it!

Getting PPC and SEO to work better together is a bit like the attribution conversation. It’s not always perfect; but it’s better than doing nothing! Hopefully these points give you a jumping-off point.

Martin Reed is PPC Account Director at Croud.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/29/ppc-seo-work-together-gain-visibility/

New Plugin Adds Elementor Templates as Gutenberg Blocks

One of the most pressing concerns for users in the Gutenberg era is how page builder plugins will respond. Speculation about the new editor “killing off page builders” has run rampant, but these plugins are slowly evolving ahead of Gutenberg’s imminent inclusion in WordPress 5.0. In February, Elementor, one of WordPress’ most popular page builders, announced the plugin would be completely compatible with Gutenberg beginning with its 2.0 version that was released a few months later. Like many other plugins, that meant a nominal compatibility without any custom blocks built specifically for the new editor.
This week marks a major milestone for the page builder, as Elementor introduced its new Elementor Blocks for Gutenberg plugin. The plugin goes beyond basic compatibility, allowing users to insert any Elementor template into Gutenberg with one click. Its custom block functions as a pipeline to the Elementor library, pulling in content and designs the user has already created in the Elementor interface.
Elementor Blocks for Gutenberg lets users compose with the new editor while maintaining convenient access to items designed in the page builder. It makes it possible
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18035/new-plugin-adds-elementor-templates-as-gutenberg-blocks

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/new-plugin-adds-elementor-templates-as-gutenberg-blocks/

Optimizing Images with WordPress? Let’s skip the bull and tell it straight!

Out of curiosity, why don’t all these blog posts from affiliate sites, hosting companies, theme developers, AdSense sites, plugin owners (or anywhere else) ever grow some gumption and say _(something like)_ : “STOP UPLOADING BIG ASS IMAGES IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!”
I can’t quite say I’ve ever seen a post resembling that much truthful bluntness. So, perhaps I can add a bit of gentle rhetoric around that message while still maintaining the importance of the above text in red. Here goes.
Use a FIXED WIDTH – NOT FLUID
Every WordPress Theme is unique. Some themes have an option of fixed or fluid width. Fluid width, flexible width, or full screen width might be additional terms to use – but the result is the same. On any screen possible, the theme is designed to take up as much room as possible.
That would also be known as incredibly impossible, not possible, no way in the world, not actually going to really happen, for your own sake please stop thinking that it looks cool in-your-own perspective.
As someone told me years ago, “This is Business: Unless Y-O-U can print your own money, your own opinion does NOT mean jack sh!t. Never forsake that
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18034/optimizing-images-with-wordpress-let-s-skip-the-bull-and-tell-it-straight

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/optimizing-images-with-wordpress-lets-skip-the-bull-and-tell-it-straight/

How to Show Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress

Do you want to display social media reviews on your WordPress website? You may have business reviews from your customers on different social sites like Google, Facebook, etc. These reviews are excellent social proof that you can use to attract new visitors towards your business. In this article, we will share how to display business reviews from Google, Facebook, and Yelp in your WordPress site.

Why You Should Display Business Reviews in WordPress?

Your customers often leave positive reviews about your business on social platforms like Google, Facebook, or Yelp. These reviews are excellent social proof and can be used alongside customer testimonials on your website.

You can show these business reviews on your WordPress site to build trust and boost conversions (Bonus: see 29 more ways to use social proof to increase conversions).

Normally, you would need to install separate WordPress plugins to show reviews from multiple social platforms. Each plugin has different settings, and it may even conflict with each other.

We recommend using WP Business Reviews plugin by WordPress. It’s an all-in-one solution to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp business reviews.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress.

Showing Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress

First thing you need to do is to install and activate the WP Business Reviews plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to go to Reviews » Settings page in your WordPress admin area. Under the ‘License’ tab, you need to add your license key and activate it.

You can get the license key from your account on WP Business Reviews site.

Once the license key is successfully activated, you need to go to the ‘Platforms’ tab and select the review platforms from where you want to display business reviews in WordPress.

Once you have selected the platform, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store the settings.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will select Google, Facebook, and Yelp to pull reviews from. You can choose the platforms that you like.

Next, you need to go to the ‘Google’ tab on the left side and add the Google Places API Key to show Google reviews on your website.

You can login to your Google account and click on the visit Google Places API documentation link to get your key.

It’ll change the platform status from disconnected to connected. Make sure to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to continue.

After that you need to head over to the ‘Facebook’ tab and click on the ‘Connect with Facebook’ button. It will ask you to login to your Facebook account.

Once logged in, you need to give permissions to Facebook for the connection. Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Now, go to the ‘Yelp’ tab and click on the create a Yelp App link to get your Yelp API Key.

Click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to change the platform status form disconnected to connected.

After connecting all the platforms successfully, you can go to Reviews » Collection page in your WordPress admin area. From here you need to create the collection of your business reviews.

You can do this by clicking on the ‘Add Collection’ button on any platform to create your reviews collection.

It’ll take you to a new page where you can build a reviews collection.

Start by adding a title and selecting a review source on the right side. After that you need to click on the ‘Get Reviews’ button on a resource to retrieve reviews from the source.

It’ll show all the reviews from this source on the left side of your screen.

Next, you can open the ‘Presentation’ options on the right side. In these options, you can select style, format, maximum columns, and maximum reviews for the collection.

Nextx, you can go to the ‘Reviews’ tab to enable / disable the review components like reviewer image, name, star rating, etc. You can also define the maximum number of characters for each review.

Lastly, you can go to the ‘Filters’ tab. There you’ll find Minimum Rating and Blank Reviews filters. You can select the star rating and show your best reviews to the new visitors.

Once you are satisfied with all these settings, click on the ‘Save’ button and then click on the ‘Copy Shortcode’ button.

You can add this shortcode anywhere on your WordPress site to display the business reviews collection.

This shortcode will show the complete collection of reviews that you created above.

If you want to show a single review on your WordPress post, page, or sidebar widget, then go to Reviews » Single Review page and copy the shortcode of the preferred single review.

You can paste this shortcode anywhere on your posts, pages, or template files to display the single review instead of the complete reviews collection. It also allows you to manually add custom reviews in WordPress.

If you want to show the reviews in a widget area of your website, then you can do this by heading over to the Appearance » Widgets in your WordPress admin and draging the WP Business Reviews Collection widget to the preferred widget area.

Next, simply select the reviews collection in the widget dropdown to show business reviews in your sidebar.

Once you are done, you can head over to your website to see the business reviews in action.

You can create multiple collections of Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews for different pages in WordPress. It lets you customize the style and presentation of all your reviews, so they appear beautifully on your website.

That’s all. We hope this article helped you learn how to show Google, Facebook, and Yelp reviews in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to add a customer reviews page in WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Show Google, Facebook, and Yelp Reviews in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

source https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-show-google-facebook-and-yelp-reviews-in-wordpress/