Weekly Articles for WordPress Admins – Monday 5/30/2022

Welcome back and I hope you did something to celebrate WordPress’s birthday last week, maybe buy this great WordPress shirt or bake a WordPress cake, or cupcakes?

This week’s WordPress articles:

• How to Improve WordPress Search (and Speed It Up) (Intermediate)
  Even if you just have a few pages on your website, you should give your visitors the option to search your website. This article shows how to add search to your site, and how to improve the WordPress search experience. For more code examples on how to customize the WordPress search, also read Improve the Search Function of Your WordPress Website.
• WordPress Free vs Paid Themes: Which is Right for Your Next Project? (Beginner)
  With over 9,000 free WordPress themes on wordpress.org and another 22,000 premium plugins (see last week’s WordPress stats article), there’s a lot of options to choose from but first, should you use a free theme or a paid one? There’s a lot of great free themes available these days but most of the good ones use the freemium model, where you get the basic features for free but you won’t get the full features unless you pony up for the full version. Generally the paid theme is well worth the money and you’ll get support from the developer if you run into issues.
• How to Add a Web Application Firewall to Your WordPress Site (In 4 Steps) (Intermediate)
  A Web Application Firewall or WAF acts as a barrier to block a lot of the bad traffic to your website, keeping your site safer and reducing the chance of getting hacked. This article covers the need for a WAF, what it does and doesn’t do, and has recommendations for WordPress plugins to set up a WAF on your website. If possible, using a cloud-based WAF like Cloudflare is better since it filters out security threats before they even reach your website.
• Ecwid Review: A Free eCommerce Solution for Your WordPress Website (Intermediate)
  If you’re looking for a really easy eCommerce option for your WordPress site, you should take a look at Ecwid. It’s a separate service that you sign up for but it integrates almost seamlessly with any site and will even pull in your site styles, and it will automatically a Store button directly to your menu. Also, if you have under 10 products to sell on your site, Ecwid will be free for you. You may want to read about the pros and cons of Ecwid vs WooCommerce and here’s a link to sign up for Ecwid if you’d like to try it out. We use it on a few sites and love it as an alternative to WooCommerce.
• Practical Jokes in the Browser (Any)
  OK, these are not really WordPress related except for the CSS pranks. However, these are great fun and will give you some laughs as you play around with them. I’ve done “The Unclickable Folder” prank on friends before, and it definitely works. If you like this sort of thing, also take a look at the weekly pick on how to make your own Easter Eggs or my article on fun WordPress plugins.

That’s it, have a great week! Go forth and kick butt.

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