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How to Set Up WordPress SEO by Yoast for WooCommerce

March 26, 2015 By John Leave a Comment

How to Set Up WordPress SEO by Yoast

The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast with over 16 million downloads is easily one of the best plugins that you need to have on your website. Whether it’s a personal blog, an e-commerce store, or a company website, you should have this plugin. In fact, many WordPress developers have WordPress SEO by Yoast in their list of plugins to install each time they create a new website. Many of you may already know a bit (or a lot) about SEO and that’s okay. That just means you’ll make better use of this plugin. And for those that don’t know much about SEO, don’t worry. The plugin is user friendly. I’ll walk you through all the functionalities so you’ll know how to set up WordPress SEO by Yoast for WooCommerce.

Installing WordPress SEO by Yoast for WooCommerce

To install the plugin, head over to the plugin developer’s website. Once there, download the plugin and upload it at the plugin page of your WordPress Dashboard.

You can search for the plugin on the plugin repository by going to your WordPress Dashboard. Click on “Plugins” and then “Add New”. From there just use the search bar to search for the WordPress SEO plugin and click on “Install Now”.

SEO Plugin Especially for WooCommerce

For WooCommercestore owners, getting the premium Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin is a worthwhile buy. When used with the WordPress SEO plugin, you can better optimize your WooCommerce store. It enhances the existing Open Graph and Twitter Card enhancements in the WordPress SEO plugin. It will also optimize your sitemap for an ecommerce store setup, among other things. For a guide on how to set this up, check out this post.

Optimizing Product Pages for SEO for WooCommerce

The single most important function of the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast is its ability to help you optimize your blog posts and pages for SEO. That includes WooCommerce products. WooCommerce products work just like posts/pages so it is the same procedure. So when I say page or post, the same applies to WooCommerce products.

Optimizing posts/pages is easy enough. You can do it right after you finish creating the post/page in WordPress. When you’re on the post or page, just scroll down and there will be a section named “WordPress SEO by Yoast”. On the General tab, you’ll see a Snippet Preview. This is how your post/page will show up on the Google search results page. And the fun part is that you can edit how your post will show up. First off, you set a focus keyword. This should be the keyword that you want your blog post or page to rank for. What you should be aiming for is to have this focus keyword in:

  • the title of your article
  • in the body of the content especially in the first paragraph
  • and the meta description which you can set in the field where it says meta description

If you got that all right, you should be seeing all green below the focus keyword that you set.

post-optimization

You can also click on the Page Analysis tab to get more information and other suggestions to improve your post/page. You don’t have to follow all the suggestions. But following everything will help increase the quality of your post/page.

page-analysis

You can tweak a bunch of other settings under the Advanced tab so feel free to change them as you see fit. You can even change how your post would appear when it gets shared on social media under the Social tab.

Optimizing WooCommerce Product Categories for SEO

woocommerce-product-categoriesSimilarly, you can also optimize WooCommerce product categories for SEO. Just go to “Products” and click on “Categories” Edit the category that you want to optimize. When you scroll down to the bottom of the “Edit Category” page, you’ll see a section called Yoast SEO Settings. Fill in the SEO Title and SEO Description fields and click on Update.

optimizing-product-categories

Unlike when optimizing product pages, you don’t get to set a focus keyword. However, you can still target a keyword by including the keyword in the SEO Title and SEO Description fields. You should also put it in the Category Description field above the Yoast SEO Settings section.

Note that not all themes are able to display product category description on the category page but if your theme supports this function, the text that you put will appear on your product category page.

product-description

Verifying Your Website with Search Console

Verifying your website with different Google Search Console tools is important if you want your site crawled. It will have your website crawled by spiders. I don’t mean actual spiders. I mean search engine spiders that index websites on different search engines. Verifying with different webmaster tools can be a complex process but this is made easy with the WordPress SEO plugin.

Linking with Social Media Profiles

You can connect your website with your social media pages with the WordPress SEO plugin. You can do this by going to “SEO” and then clicking on “Social”. Here there are three tabs: Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

How to Connect Facebook

Linking Facebook to your site allows you access to Facebook Insights. If you already have a Facebook page, you just need to get the URL of your Facebook page. Copy the URL and then paste it where it says “Facebook Page URL”. You can then set the administrators for your page by clicking on Add Facebook Admin. If you are an advanced user, you can tweak a bunch of other settings. When you’re done, just click on “Save Changes”.

facebook

How to Set Up Twitter Cards

Do you use Twitter? Have you ever seen links in Twitter that show a snippet of the page that it links to? That’s called a Twitter card and you can enable that on your website using WordPress SEO. The usual thing is that enabling Twitter cards would call for you to add some lines of code to your header. But WordPress SEO eliminates the need for that.

twitter

How do you do this? On the Social section of the plugin, click on Twitter. Fill in your Twitter username on the appropriate field. Specify the kind of Twitter card that you want to have then click on “Save Changes”. You’re not done yet. You still need to confirm your Twitter card. Head over to this link. Specify the URL and click on “Preview Card”. After that, click on “Request Approval” and fill out the form. Finally, click on another “Request Approval”.

Soon, you’ll be able to see Twitter cards on your Twitter links.

The premium YoastWooCommerce SEO plugin will further help you optimize your Twitter Cards if you have that.

How to Connect Google+

To connect your website with Google+ means setting your Google+ profile as the publisher of your content with the “rel=publisher” markup. “Rel=publisher” is an authorship markup which connects websites to Google+ pages (not personal profiles).

To connect your Google+ company page, head over to the “Social” section of the plugin and click on Google+. Fill out the field with the URL of your company page on Google+ and click on “Save Changes”.

google+

You might have heard of “rel=author” which links the content to the Google+ profile of the author. When implemented in the proper way, “rel=author” should show a snippet of the content with a photo of the author in the SERPs page. If you’re a writer and you’re hyped by that, I’d hate to burst your bubble but “rel=author” is no longer supported by Google. You can read more about it here.

Improving Sharing on Pinterest

Pinterest is another social media platform that’s worth mentioning. It has great potential for e-commerce stores. Why? Because Pinterest is image-based. The YoastWooCommerce SEO plugin makes sharing on Pinterest more worthwhile. After setting Twitter products and Schema Open Graph additions, your pins on Pinterest will start to show in a different way. In most cases, WooCommerce product will show up like posts. But with the plugin configured, your products will show up as “products”. They will show product related information such as price and variations.

Implementing Sitemaps with WordPress SEO

In a nutshell, sitemaps communicate with search engines to let the latter know when there are changes to the website. There are a lot of plugins that lets you create a sitemap. If you are already using the WordPress SEO plugin, just use the built-in sitemap module. Looking for another plugin just add an extra load to your server.

sitemaps

To get your sitemap, go to the plugin’s “XML Sitemaps” tab and then tick on the first box to enable sitemaps and click on “Save Changes”. There are a bunch of settings that you can tweak. You can have a look at them and change them as you please. They are pretty much self-explanatory.

You also might want to get the WooCommerce SEO plugin, which was mentioned above a couple of times. This removes some unnecessary bits from your sitemap in automatic fashion.

Check out our post on how to create a sitemap for your WooCommerce store to learn about sitemaps and other means of creating it.

Permalink Settings

Permalink settings all have to do with your URLs. I would not recommend changing any of the settings here but you are free to check them out and change them as you please.

Enabling Breadcrumbs with WordPress SEO

Breadcrumbs, when enabled, helps users identify where they are on your website. It also helps search engines determine your website’s structure. See the image below.  Where the yellow arrow is pointing at, that’s the breadcrumbs.

Enabling breadcrumbs on your website is simpler than snapping your fingers. Just go to SEO and then click on Internal Links. You should see a box that says “Enable Breadcrumbs”. So just tick that box and save. There are a few settings that you can tweak so just change them up as you need.

breadcrumbs

Did we miss anything? Or do you have any questions about the WordPress SEO plugin? Let us know in the comments.

Filed Under: How-To Articles, SEO For E-Commerce Tagged With: blog, breadcrumbs, content marketing, Google Webmaster Tools, Google+, how-to, navigation, optimizations, plugins, SEO tools, social media, Twitter, WooCommerce, WordPress, WordPress SEO, XML sitemap, Yoast

Things to Do Before Your Website Goes Live

May 7, 2015 By John Leave a Comment

checklistThe bulk of the work is done. Your website is ready to go live. But are you sure it is really ready? Here’s a handy checklist of things to do before your website goes live. Make sure everything is working fine before you click that “Go Live” button.

Page Content

  1. Proof read web copywriting, spelling and grammar are correct
  2. Paragraphs and headers and formatting are correct
  3. Copywriting date on the footer shows current year
  4. Company details and contact info are accurate all throughout the website.
  5. Lorem Ipsum has been removed
  6. Images, videos and audio files are properly formatted and are working on different devices
  7. Premium content such as PDFs, whitepaper, ebooks, etc. have been proofread, spelling and grammar are correct. These files are properly stored in their respective libraries.
  8. Images, font and other content are properly licensed or have proper citation

Design

  1. Site pages are compatible across different browsers (Firefox, Safari, IE 7, 8, 9, and 10, Chrome, Opera)
  2. Pages are compatible across different devices (tablets, laptops, desktops, and other mobile devices)
  3. Check for CSS and HTML error, fix and validate
  4. Favicon is uploaded and is rendering properly
  5. Paragraph and styles are working properly

design

Functionality

  1. Forms are submitting data properly
  2. Thank you message or confirmation message displays after the form is submitted.
  3. Form data is emailed to the recipient
  4. Auto-responders (if any) are working properly
  5. Internal links are working
  6. External links are working
  7. Social media icons are working properly
  8. Feeds are working properly
  9. Company logo is linked to the homepage
  10. Site load time should take not more than 2-3 seconds
  11. 404 Redirects are in place
  12. Integration with third-party tools such as e-commerce software, CRM, Marketing software platforms are running smoothly
  13. Site structure is clean and should be easy to navigate and maneuvered by your users
  14. Payment processing should be live
  15. Shipping options checked
  16. Credit card transaction checked
  17. Run a test order. Check tax, sub-total, total, coupons, etc
  18. Confirm order is placed
  19. Reset order number
  20. Verify MyAccount
  21. Dummy orders and test accounts are cleared.
  22. Test email from client to merchant
  23. Cart icon is on each page
  24. Checkout button should be large and is strategically located on the page.
  25. Search box with suggestive search
  26. Feedback tab at the bottom of each page for users to notify the webmasters when having problems with the site.

SEO

  1. Page titles should be unique, less than 70 characters and should include keywords.
  2. Meta Descriptions are unique and should not exceed 156 characters
  3. Keyword per page not more than 10, depending on the # of words per page
  4. Metadata for RSS in place
  5. Metadata for social media sharing in place
  6. Metadata spelling and grammar correct
  7. Alt tags for images
  8. Dynamic XML sitemap created and submitted to search engines
  9. Breadcrumbs in place
  10. Slugs should reflect site structure and should be short with relevant keywords.
  11. 301 redirects for old URLs are in place
  12. rel=”nofollow” tags are in place on applicable links and pages
  13. Site indexing is on

Google Analytics

  1. Analytics codes are properly inserted
  2. Relevant IP addresses have been excluded from analytics tracking.
  3. Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics are synced
  4. Google Adwords and Google Analytics are synced

Security and Backups

security

  1. Monitoring scripts installed.
  2. Copy of the final website stored in a safe place
  3. Ongoing copies of the site is being generated everyday (depending on how large the site is)
  4. Usernames and passwords stored in a secure database
  5. Check robots.txt file to restrict access to sensitive pages

Compliance to Web Rules and Regulations

This may vary depending on the country and industry.

  1. Pages offer accessibility to users with disabilities
  2. Users need to be informed if site is using cookies
  3. Compliant to usage rights of images, fonts, videos, etc.
  4. Terms and Privacy policy for users should be readily accessible and visible to site visitors
  5. Website is PCI compliant
  6. SSL certificate properly installed. Check receipt and checkout page, my account and my account details in SSL mode.
  7. SSL mode for logins and registrations

Filed Under: How-To Articles Tagged With: 404 error, backup, best practices, breadcrumbs, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, how-to, redirection, security, SEO strategy, website development, WordPress

How to Create a Child Theme for Storefront

February 26, 2016 By John 2 Comments

how-to-create-a-child-theme-for-storefront

Optimizing your website usually means making changes to your theme. These changes can range from simple to complex. It’s easy to make changes on your website but the problem is that you will lose all your changes when you update your theme.

There are ways to update your theme without losing your customizations and the best way is to use a child theme. In this post, we will teach you how you can use a child theme to make the website development process easier.

We’ll teach you how to create a child theme for Storefront theme. Storefront is the official theme for WooCommerce. It’s a good parent theme to work on as it’s built with the same high standards as WooCommerce. It is entirely free and 100% compatible with WooCommerce.

What is a Child Theme

A child theme is not a full theme. It only inherits all the code, styling and functionality of the main or parent theme. Changes made in a child theme do not affect the parent theme. This allows users to tweak a theme without having to worry about losing the customizations when updating the theme. Using a child theme is best practice for altering an existing theme.

A parent theme is the default of all your WordPress themes. It contains the templates, design and functionality needed to run your website on WordPress. Note that parent themes are different from theme frameworks. A parent theme is a complete theme that you can use right away while a theme framework like Genesis is a developmental template.

Why You Should Use a Child Theme

There are thousands of themes out there that you can use for your WordPress installation. The problem is they all look generic and may not exactly fit your website needs. Modifying the theme with CSS is recommended. Here are some reasons why you should use a child theme:

Speed Up Site Development

Child themes allow you to quickly add or modify specific functions or template files. It allows you to significantly speed up site development as you would not need to write a lot of code from scratch. You’ll get a great deal of flexibility especially from powerful theme frameworks like Genesis.

Preserve Theme Changes

Themes get updates from time to time. These updates are important as these address security exploits that come to light. Updating your theme will wipe all the changes you made to the base theme. However, if you use a child theme, you can preserve any changes you make to the child theme when you update the base theme.

Safe Fallback

Creating or editing a theme entails a lot of work. However, when you make customizations on a child theme, you have your parent theme’s codes and functionality as fallback in case you mess up something. The child theme will only change a specific function or style when you want it to.

Secure Your Site

WPBeginner found out that 83% of hacked WordPress sites are not upgraded properly. The safest way to update your theme is by using a child theme.

When to Use Child Themes

If you are in any way customizing your theme, then you should be using a child theme. Using a child theme is best practice.

If you are not familiar with CSS and PHP, creating your own child theme can be a challenge. You would also need to learn about the functionalities of your parent theme.

Robust frameworks can be more challenging as they have their own filters and hooks.

How to Create a Child Theme

Setting up a child theme for any WordPress theme is easy but you need to pick a good parent theme. Not all themes can be good parent themes. We recommend Storefront or the Genesis framework.

A good parent theme is a solid foundation for your site. You will be building your child theme over it so it has to be flexible and coded properly.

You can use plugins to generate a child theme or you can do it manually. You just need three things to start: child theme directory, style.css file and functions.php file.

Child Theme Folder

This folder will serve as the container for your stylesheet and function files. It is ideal to use the name of your parent theme as folder name and append it with “-child”. In this case, we named our directory “Storefront-child”. Make sure that your child theme’s directory name has no spaces to avoid possible errors. For the meantime, you can create this folder in your computer.

child-theme-folder

Child Theme Stylesheet

This is a basic style.css file. You need to set this stylesheet to inherit the styles from your parent theme. To do that, insert the stylesheet header below and replace them with relevant details. Note that customizations done here will override parent theme styles.

/*
 Theme Name:   Storefront Child
 Theme URI:    http://sitename.com/storefront/
 Description:  Storefront Child Theme
 Author:       Nick J
 Author URI:   http://sitename.com
 Template:     storefront /*this is case sensitive*/
 Version:      1.0.0
 License:      GNU General Public License v2 or later
 License URI:  http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
 Tags:         light, dark, full-width, responsive-layout, accessibility-ready
 Text Domain:  storefront-child
*/
/*Theme customisations start here*/

We won’t teach you how to use CSS. It is impossible to cover that in one article. You can learn CSS here or have a developer do the CSS tweaks on your website.

Child Theme Function

Previous methods suggest that you use “@import” in your stylesheet to load your child theme. This is no longer considered best practice. You just need to “enqueue” your parent theme’s stylesheet in your child theme’s functions.php file. To do this, you can use “wp_enqueue_scripts action” and use “wp_enqueue_style()”.

The stylesheet for your child theme is usually loaded automatically. If not, you will need to enqueue it as well. You also need to make sure that the child stylesheet gets priority. You can use the code below instead. This code sets ‘parent-style’ as a dependency so your child-theme stylesheet loads after it.

<?php
function theme_enqueue_styles() {
$parent_style = 'parent-style';
wp_enqueue_style( $parent_style, get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css' ); wp_enqueue_style( 'child-style', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/style.css', array( $parent_style ) ); } add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'theme_enqueue_styles' );
?>

Activation

To add a child theme to your WordPress themes, you need to create a .zip file of your child theme folder. You can use 7-zip or Winrar to do this. Make sure that you have your style.css and functions.php inside your child theme folder.

It is best to take note and keep records of other plugin settings before you activate your child theme. Once you’re done, you can upload this in your WordPress via Appearance > Add Themes.

child-theme-activation-storefront

WordPress will install your child theme just like any other theme. Once installed, you need to activate this by clicking on ‘Activate’.

child-theme-activation-storefront-2

You can also choose to activate your child theme later when you go to Appearance > Themes.

child-theme-activation-storefront-appearance-themes

Once installed or activated, you can apply any edits to functions.php and to the stylesheet directly on the child theme files

Popular Child Themes for Storefront

If creating your own child theme is proving to be a bit too difficult for you, you can always purchase one.

There are a handful of child themes for Storefront right now. Note that you should install Storefront base theme first before installing these child themes.

Boutique

boutique_popular-child-themes-for-storefront

Boutique is simple and easy to customize. You can start selling after you create your color theme, add your logo and content.

Deli

deli_popular-child-themes-for-storefront

If you want to add more personality to your store, you can use Deli. This child theme is great for small businesses. It has color schemes and textures that are inspired by nature.

Conclusion

Having a child theme is best practice when doing development work on your WooCommerce site. More importantly, using a child theme allows you to freely update your theme without losing any customizations you made on the child theme. A good and solid foundation is important for child themes. Hope this article has been helpful. Do you have any questions about child themes or anything you’d like to add? Let us know in the comments.

Filed Under: Code Snippets, How-To Articles Tagged With: best practices, child theme, code snippet, CSS, design tweaks, how-to, optimizations, Storefront, website development, website maintenance, WooCommerce, WordPress

13 Routine Maintenance Tasks that You Should Do on WordPress and WooCommerce

April 2, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

Routine Maintenance Tasks for WordPress

Maintaining a WooCommerce store is a lot of work. There are a lot of routine maintenance tasks for WordPress and WooCommerce that need to be done on a regular basis. In this post, we list down the most important tasks that you should do on your WooCommerce store.

1. Create Regular Website Backups

Create Regular Website BackupsCreating regular site backups is critical. It is your first fallback in case something breaks on your site. While you can make backups manually, it is important to make regular automated backups. Check with your hosting provider if they create regular backups of your database as well as a complete backup of your site. You can also install a backup plugin such as Updraft Plus or BackWPup and set it up to make regular automated backups for you. We still recommend creating manual backups before doing major work on your WooCommerce store though.

2. Update WordPress, WooCommerce, Themes and Plugins

Updating all elements of your WooCommerce store should be done on a regular basis. Do this weekly if you have the time. If not, monthly updates are good enough. Updates include updating WordPress Core, themes, WooCommerce and all other installed plugins. Remember to backup up your site before proceeding with updates since updates could cause your website to break. If you have a development site, it would be best to test the updates first on this staging environment. Then, do some user testing to make sure that there are no errors. After that, you can proceed to update your live site. When that’s done, you will need to do another round of testing. Some important elements to test include checkout, add to cart, contact form emails, opt-in forms and other customizations that were done on the site.

3. Update WooCommerce Template Files

After updating WooCommerce, you will sometimes get an error notifying you of outdated WooCommerce template files. This just means that your theme has not updated to include the latest WooCommerce template files. In some cases, this could cause some formatting issues on your store. If there are no errors on your store, you can simply wait for your theme to release an update that includes the most recent template files. Or you can also fix this manually by following the steps in this documentation from WooCommerce.

4. Change User Passwords

It is important to use strong passwords. However, it is just as important to change passwords on a regular basis. There are times when security breaches can go undetected for a long time. Changing your password regularly blocks out these security breaches that you might not realize are there. You should change your password for WordPress admin, FTP, database and cPanel. And a pro-tip, never use “admin” as your username. This is the first username that hackers try out when brute forcing into websites.

5. Optimize Your Product Images

We’ve always emphasized the importance of optimizing images for your WooCommerce store to keep your site running fast. If you have uploaded any product image that is more than 100KB in size, it might be a good idea to replace that image with an optimized product image. To learn more, you can check out our blog post on how to optimize images.

6. Approve and Respond to Product Reviews

Moderate Product ReviewsIf you are not asking your customers for product reviews then you might want to reconsider. Most people who buy online look for product reviews before they decide to purchase something. One study found that 85.57% of users read reviews before they purchase. And if you are asking your customers for product reviews, then you will need to approve reviews on a regular basis. A word of advice, do not remove negative reviews of your products. Instead, make it an avenue where you can show good customer service. Respond to the negative review. Offer a replacement for a defective product or offer a refund. People reading reviews will want to see some negative reviews to get a well-rounded picture of your product. When moderating reviews, you only need to remove the spam reviews.

7. Approve and Respond to Blog Comments

If you have a blog that is made to drive customer engagement, then your blog will most likely attract comments. Same with product reviews; don’t delete the negative comments. Rather, address them positively. Remove any spam comments as this will negatively impact the user experience of your blog. If you are using Akismet: Anti Spam plugin, this will block out most spam comments. However, some spam comments can still get through and you will need to manage them manually.

8. Test Your Contact Forms and Email Opt-in Forms

Every now and then, you will need to make sure that your contact forms and email opt-in forms are working. Just fill in your forms and send. If you receive it in your email, then you’re all good. But if you don’t, there’s something wrong and you need to do something about it. Have your developer look into it.

9. Optimize Your Database

Over time, your database accumulates a lot of gunk and you need to clean it to make sure your website runs fast. Before you go about this task, make sure you create a backup. You can choose to clean your database manually if you are comfortable and familiar with working on your database. Otherwise, you can use a plugin to do the optimizations for you. Notable plugins include WP-DBManager and WP-Optimize. You can check out our guide on how to clean your database.

10. Test Your WooCommerce Store’s Speed

If you have not yet made optimizations to your WooCommerce store’s speed, you should consider doing it now. Site speed has become increasingly important for WooCommerce store owners. Google now considers site speed as a ranking factor for SEO. Also, if you have a slow site, this will negatively impact the customer’s experience on your site. It is easy for your customers to buy instead from your competitors. You can test your site speed on Google’s Page Speed test and Google will provide you with recommendations on how you can improve your site’s speed. Other notable tools that you can use to test your site are Pingdom Website Speed Test and GTmetrix.

11. Scan Your Site for Malware

One way to keep on top of your website’s security is to regularly test your site for any malware. If you are connected to Google Search Console, it will let you know if malware is detected on your site. If your site has been found to have any form of malware, Google Chrome will actually alert your visitors that your site is dangerous. This can have devastating effects on your traffic and conversion rate. No one will want to enter their payment information on a site that has malware. In extreme cases, Google may block your site from appearing in the Google search results page. You want to prevent this from happening. It would be best to invest on your site’s security by installing a security plugin such as Sucuri Security and WordFence. Even if you have those plugins installed, it is still a good idea to a manual scan. You can scan your website at Sucuri’s Website Malware and Security Scanner, or at SiteGuarding. If any manual scans detect anything malicious, you can contact your developer to fix the issue. You should get it fixed before Google applies any penalties. Wooassist also offers a security hardening service to improve the security of your site so you can prevent this from happening.

12. Fix Broken Links

Broken links are bad for user experience so check your site regularly for any broken links. You can use W3C Link Checker or any other similar tool to check for broken links. Once you’ve found the broken links on your site, you can start fixing them. You can either remove the links or points the links to a new relevant URL.

13. Test Your Checkout Process

Last but definitely not the least; you should regularly test your checkout process. If you suddenly experience loss of sales, it’s a good idea to test your checkout. There might be an error that prevents your customers from checking out. Testing also gives you a feel of what your customers go through so you can optimize your checkout. Once you’ve determined that your checkout has problems, you can check out our post on how to fix the most common checkout problems in WooCommerce.

Final Notes

By doing these tasks on a regular basis, you can keep yourself on top of any issues that may occur on your WooCommerce store. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the all these, you can hire someone else to do it. You can also contact us and our team will be glad to assist with any of these tasks.

Are there any other routine maintenance tasks for WordPress and WooCommerce you think should be done on a regular basis? Do you have any suggestions? Let us know in the comments.

Filed Under: How-To Articles Tagged With: blog, contact form, conversion optimization, image optimization, plugins, security, site speed optimization, website maintenance, WooCommerce, WooCommerce products, WordPress, WordPress SEO, WordPress updates

How to Convert Your Old Posts and Pages into Gutenberg Blocks

February 5, 2019 By John Leave a Comment

Towards the end of 2018, WordPress 5.0, also known as the Gutenberg update was released. The notable thing about WordPress 5.0 is the introduction of “blocks”. Blocks have replaced the old WordPress text and visual editor.

Should You Update to Gutenberg?

Some WooCommerce store owners might be hesitant to update to Gutenberg. Gutenberg is a big change from the classic editor so being hesitant to move to Gutenberg is understandable. If you don’t really want to use Gutenberg, you can install the classic editor for WordPress. It is however imperative to update your site to the most recent WordPress version for security reasons. Sticking to an old version of WordPress will leave your site vulnerable to security threats. New versions of plugins and themes might also cause issues on older versions of WordPress.

Since WordPress 5.0 is a major update, we recommend testing your updates on a development site first. If you need help updating to WordPress 5.0, you can contact us and we can help you out.

Will Updating to Gutenberg Affect Your Old Posts and Pages?

Updating to Gutenberg will not affect your old posts and pages. Any new content you create will make use of blocks. Still, any old content that does not use Gutenberg blocks will be housed in a classic editor block.

How to Convert Old Posts and Pages into Blocks?

Converting your old posts and pages into Gutenberg blocks can be done in a few clicks. Click on Edit on the post or page that you want to convert. On the classic editor block, look at the upper right section. Here you will find an icon with three dots. Click that icon and click Convert to Blocks.

After that, you should see your post/page converted into Gutenberg blocks.

From here, click on Update to save your changes.

Repeat this process for each post or page that you want to convert into blocks.

After converting, be sure to check the actual page or post to make sure that there are no layout issues. If you are using shortcodes, check that the shortcodes are working as well.

If you have any questions about converting old posts into Gutenberg blocks, let us know in the comments.

Filed Under: How-To Articles Tagged With: blog, gutenberg, WordPress, wordpress 5.0

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