Weekly Articles for WordPress Admins – Monday, 4/4/2022

Last week I shared an article on how to optimize webfont loading but that is only part of Google’s Core Web Vitals. The first pick this week will cover that topic in a lot more detail!

This Week’s Featured Articles:

• How to Optimize Core Web Vitals for WordPress (Ultimate Guide) (Intermediate)
  This guide is a great introduction to Core Web Vitals (CWV), why having a good score is so crucial for your WordPress website in terms of traffic and user experience, and a few ways to improve your your CWV scores. If you’re not familiar with Core Web Vitals, this is a must read.
• 15 Best Domain Name Generators (Tested by Hand) (Beginner)
  You think you found the perfect name for your business and then you check for the domain name and it’s taken. You try a few more and they’re taken too – sound familiar? This article shares a bunch of domain name generators to help you find an available URL that’s a good fit for your business. If you’re still working on your business name, start by finding out which domain names (focus on the .com extension) you can buy. And one more to include: BusinessNameGenerator.net
• How to Create a Chatbot for WordPress (Beginner)
  Rather than adding just a regular chat to your website for customer support, why not add a chatbot instead? A chatbot can automatically answer questions for your visitors or direct them to the resources they are looking for. They can also collect information from your visitor before you chat with them. This article does a great job introducing chatbots, the free WP-Chatbot plugin, and IBM’s Watson Assistant which provides machine learning. Another free chatbox solution that I’ve had great success with is Tidio.
• 16 htaccess Hacks to Speed Up, Optimize and Secure WordPress (Advanced)
  What’s in your .htaccess file? Chances are that it’s the default WP .htaccess file and possibly some additional entries from your security plugin. There’s a lot more that you can do with your .htaccess file to improve your site’s security, speed, and more.
• 20 Free Placeholder Image Generator Websites (Any)
  As you’re building your site, you may want to show placeholder images to see how your layout looks. Or you may be looking for a temporary image while you’re hunting down the perfect photo. This article includes a lot of useful image generators and some fun ones that generate pics of Bill Murray, kittens, bears, and more. If you’re also looking for placeholder text AKA lorem ipsum, see the placeholder text generators article from a couple of weeks ago.

One more note on the first pick this week: Understanding Google’s Core Web Vitals is crucial to having a fast site that ranks well in the search engine but there’s an easier way to get great scores. It’s a service called NitroPack that I’ve personally used on over a dozen sites with tremendous results. For most sites, the setup is super easy and their tech support is great to work with. Use this link to get 5% off: https://nitropack.io/#DQUMPI

That’s it for now – I’ll catch you again next week!