How To Back Up Your WordPress Site To Dropbox

Last Updated on January 24, 2021.

Backing up your WordPress site is a necessity, but it can be hard to find an affordable, easy-to-implement solution that covers all the bases. There are a lot of possibilities out there, but the following have served me well over the years. I usually only have to use them on shared hosting plans. Some of my sites are on managed WordPress hosts who take care of backups as part of the plan.

Here are my criteria for a backup solution:

  1. Ability to back up both database and files
  2. Ability to schedule these backups separately – I haven’t found too many situations where a full file backup is needed as frequently as the database backup
  3. Offers backup to an off-site 3rd party. You don’t want to keep backups on your server because if something goes wrong with the server, your backups could be lost. Backups sent via email are usually only realistic for the database, full site backups would be too large to email.

My preferred solution is to backup sites to my DropBox account. You can get 2GB of storage with a free account.

I typically use one of the following 2 plugins to back up my sites:

Both are free plugins that meet the criteria described above.

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2 Ways To Sell Using PayPal and WordPress

Sell Products With PayPal And WordPress

Last Updated on November 28, 2020.

There are many, many ways to sell things from your WordPress site, from physical products to digital downloads or access to content. The best solution will depend on your particular circumstance and needs. While WordPress can get quite sophisticated in the ecommerce department, a lot of folks just want to be able to sell a few items quickly and easily using PayPal.

In scenarios like this where the user wants the simplest possible solution and knows they want to use PayPal, a fully featured shopping cart / ecommerce solution such as WooCommerce might be overkill. Sometimes simple PayPal buttons will suffice.

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A Guide to Moving WordPress Sites

If you work with clients using WordPress in any capacity, or even if you are a solo site owner, at some point, you will probably need to move a site from one server to another (also known as migrating).

In this guide I’ll show you 3 methods of migrating a WordPress site.

Migrations are required in numerous situations, such as when you’re switching webhosts, when turning a development site into a live site, or when making a test site. Even restoring a site from a backup has some similar steps.

Understanding how this process works will greatly empower you. There are a few moving parts but it’s completely possible to do, even if you are not a developer, and you will feel like a champ. I’d suggest practicing on a test site before handling anything that’s important 🙂

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The 7 Most Customizable, Free WordPress Themes

 

Last Updated on October 11, 2020.

I must start with a caveat – I don’t believe any one theme should be all things to all users. A few years ago, a theme used to simply be a pre-made design that you could apply to your site – an overall look and feel, not a “website in a box”. You used a theme because you didn’t have the design and/or coding skill to create your own. But, nowadays users want to be able to control every aspect of their site’s look and feel – basically design their site themselves, without doing any code. If you are not an actual designer, then there are many downfalls to this approach. But that is not the point of this post.

Now, as I write the update, Gutenberg is in full force. It’s still being improved but it’s already a very powerful tool, giving site owners a lot more control in laying out their pages. The theme landscape is evolving, and at this particular moment, it’s still figuring out what it’s going to become. The power of themes seems to be tending toward the set of blocks and pre-made layouts they can provide.

Needless to say, people like free themes and they also like flexibility. So here are 7 themes that fit the bill. I’m not saying they will do anything and everything you want, but for free, they are pretty extensive. I’ve tried to point out the features that are useful and/or unique, but that doesn’t mean I’ve included every possibility. But these themes are free, so you can try them for yourself at no risk!

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How Will Google’s Core Web Vitals Affect Your WordPress Site?

Core Web Vitals are the 3 key metrics that Google believes indicate healthy performance for your web site.

Whether you agree with their selection of metrics or not, soon you will not really have a choice.

Unlike their previous PageSpeed metrics, which did not impact ranking at all, Core Web Vitals will eventually be used as a ranking signal.

Today, we’re building on this work and providing an early look at an upcoming Search ranking change that incorporates these page experience metrics. We will introduce a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals for page experience to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html
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