Tools + Resources Archives

Free Plugins to Manage, Organize, and Clean Up your WordPress Site

April 15, 2021 / Lydia Roberts / No Comments

If you’re in the mood for some spring cleaning of your WordPress site, here are some tools that will help you organize, manage, and clean up your WordPress admin area. There are thousands of free WordPress plugins available, but in this post I highlight six that are game-changers. Some will save your sanity like FileBird while others may require some training or practice like Redirection. Most of these are quick install-and-done plugins, so take a look and see what works for you.

All of the plugins below are free, though some offer pro upgrades.

1. FileBird Lite

Filebird screenshot — Screenshot courtesy of FileBird Lite

FileBird is amazing plugin transforms your media library with folders (and subfolders), much like your computer. My favorite feature is that it does not affect the urls to your media files, meaning you can safely activate and de-activate this plugin without affecting your existing media library.

How to use:

Install it, start creating folders in your Media Library, and then drag items into the folders to organize them. This will help you keep your media library clean and easy to use, especially if you collaborate with a team.

Useful when…

Your media library has gotten out of control!
You want an easy way to visually organize your files

2. Enable Media Replace

Screenshot of Enable Media Replace — Screenshot courtesy of Enable Media Replace

Enable Media Replace does exactly what the name suggests; it allows you to easily swap out an image, pdf, or anything in your media library. Instead of removing an image, uploading a new one, and manually re-inserting the image, you can simply swap out the file and the link to the file will stay the same. Yes!!

Useful when…

Replacing often-updated pdfs like a menu or downloadable form
Replacing outdated photos of people or staff
Replacing anything in your media library without the normal hassle

3. Featured Image Admin Thumb

Screenshot of Featured Image Admin Thumb — Screenshot courtesy of Featured Image Admin Thumb

A quick and easy plugin, Featured Image Admin Thumb will put your featured images into the Posts and Pages view in your WordPress admin area.

Easily see what posts/pages are missing featured images and update it straight from here instead of editing each page one by one.

Useful for:

A site that consistently uses Featured Images and wants to see and edit them at a glance
An online store – easily swap out main featured image for each product
An Events Calendar
A site using custom post types like for a Staff directory or Portfolio

Bonus: try Admin Columns instead

Want to see even more attributes in your WordPress admin columns? Try Admin Columns, which lets you add dozens of different columns and rearrange them. This plugin is much more robust but takes a bit of setup, which is why Featured Image Admin Thumb is a quicker solution if you’re only looking to add the Featured Image.

4. Redirection

Screenshot of Redirection — Screenshot courtesy of Redirection

Redirection may be too advanced for some users, but it will come in handy one day when you decide to delete a page or post. I install it on nearly every website I build because redirects are an important part of your site’s health and SEO.

Use this plugin to redirect – or in other words, point – old or deleted pages/posts to a relevant new page/post. This tells Google and other search engines where to find the new page. It also improves your website for your visitors – instead of someone seeing an ERROR page, they will blissfully glide to the right page, without even realizing they were redirected.

You can also use this for marketing. Create a redirect from a short link, like “mycoolsite.com/free” to a longer more descriptive url on your site, like “mycoolsite.com/free-wordpress-tools-2021”. Then use the short link on social media or a business card so it’s easier to remember and looks nicer.

Useful for:

Retiring (deleting) old pages/posts while pointing people to a more relevant page
Improving SEO
Pointing a short link to a specific page/post on your site

5. Disable Comments

Screenshot of Disable Comments — Screenshot courtesy of Disable Comments

Some sites do not use the built-in blogging feature of WordPress at all, or may blog very infrequently. For these sites I always install Disable Comments, which completely eliminates the Comments area of WordPress and shuts the site down to receiving comments on blog posts or pages. If you do not need or want to invite discussion on your site, this plugin is for you.

Useful for:

Sites that don’t need or want to deal with comments, ever!

6. Simple Custom Post Order

Screenshot of Simple Custom Post Order — Screenshot courtesy of Simple Custom Post Order

If you want fine control over the order of your blog posts or other post types, this is the plugin for you. Simple Custom Post Order lets you click and drag posts into any order you choose.

On this yoga retreat website, we wanted to blog about upcoming events, but need to order the posts by the event date – not the published post date. This plugin lets us manually re-order the events so that the upcoming events are in order by the most upcoming date.

Useful for:

Taking control over the exact order of your posts (or custom posts like Events, Portfolio items, Staff, etc)

I hope this list of plugins gives you some ideas on how you can improve the editing and organization of your website for you or your team. Let me know what your favorite plugins are by contacting me – I’m always on the lookout for a great tool!

Why SSL is crucial for your website

January 7, 2020 / Lydia Roberts / No Comments

You’ve definitely seen it: a small lock icon next to the web address of your favorite website. Like this:

An SSL enabled website shown in three different web browser address bars — SSL is enabled on wordpress.org, as seen in the address bar

That lock icon symbolizes something important: an SSL Certificate.

What the heck is SSL?

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a secure connection. An SSL certificate encrypts all the data that passes between your visitors’ web browser and your website’s server where your website lives. This secures your website and makes it much harder for malicious parties to read the information coming to and from your site.

Websites using SSL can easily be identified by their web address:

https://wordpress.org

Note the “s” in the address – it stands for Secure and signals an SSL certificate is used.

Why do I need SSL?

Trust, Ranking, Security

An SSL certificate is key for providing a visual “ok” signal to visitors. That lock icon basically tells visitors to your site:
“This website is secure, and you can trust it.”

SSL is required for any website selling a product or containing forms such as a contact form or email signup. But over the years, Google also started using SSL as a ranking factor, meaning they get ranked higher. For this reason, around 2017 it became important for ALL websites to use SSL, no matter what.

But even in 2020, three years after SSL became a ranking factor with Google, many websites still don’t have SSL enabled or properly configured.

This is what it looks like if there is no SSL present:

A Not Secure message shows in the web address bar on an insecure site — An example of a website without an SSL certificate shows various Not Secure messages.

Making the Switch

Contact your trusted web developer or your web hosting company. Ask if there is a yearly fee and how you can properly set up SSL on your site.

After switching to SSL, your web address will change.

no SSL: http://www.myawesomewebsite.com
with SSL: https://www.myawesomesite.com

Update all listings of your website

Update your website listings — social media accounts, Google business page, email signature — to match this new address starting with https. This helps Google find your site at the new https address faster.

Watch for mixed content and Not Secure warnings

“Mixed content” happens when parts of your website such as images still originate form their old http address instead of https. This causes a warning of Not Secure to show up in the address bar, even though you have SSL!

If you see a Not Secure warning, you can identify the culprit by using the built in browser inspector tools in Firefox or Chrome. However, it’s usually best at this point to contact a web professional such as yours truly to root out and fix the issue. It often only takes a few minutes.

Keep SSL active and watch for renewals

Sometimes SSL certificates need to get renewed each year, especially if it’s a paid service. Mark your calendar for when it will renew and make sure you have an active card on file at your web host company. Your website can go down temporarily if it can’t find the certificate.

That’s it!

Once you have SSL, visitors will have increase trust and confidence in your website, and so will search engines like Google.

A depiction of a login form for a website

Password Management: We’re doing it wrong

September 16, 2019 / Lydia Roberts / No Comments

Raise a hand for each of the following that you’ve done:

Kept track of passwords on scrap paper or notebook
Kept track of passwords in a spreadsheet
Forgot to update your notebook or spreadsheet when a password changed
Used the same password, or variation of the same password, for multiple logins
Used a weak password, like real words with some numbers in it. h0wAb0utTh1s! (yes, this is a weak password!)

Did you run out of hands to raise?

You are not alone! Many of us, myself included, have done all of the above.

Most people are bad are managing passwords because we’re not computers. Or at least, not computers in the way that allow us to randomly generate and remember long strings of random characters!

Enter Password Management Tools

We all know that passwords are a giant hassle. They can be impossible to remember and difficult to organize. And because it’s so difficult, we often end up using weak passwords that are easy to hack. We’re doing it wrong.

Thankfully, many years ago I discovered free password managers like LastPass*, and I went frolicking through the hills like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.

Actress Julie Andrews with arms outstretched in the film The Sound of Music with the caption Me discovering password management — Me (a name, I call myself)… upon discovering the existence of password managers like LastPass circa 2012-ish

Ok, How does it work?

LastPass, 1Password, and other password managers remember your passwords in an online vault. I’m most familiar with LastPass, so here’s how it works:

As you go about your day and log in to your favorite websites, LastPass remembers each password for you and collects them into an online vault which you can access by clicking a button. When you need to make a new login on a website, LastPass can automatically generate a strong password for you and then store it, so you never have to record it yourself. It can also remember information like addresses and even credit cards (only if you choose) to save you time when making online orders.

All you have to do is remember your one master password to access your vault. That’s it. One password to rule them all!

Oh, and it also makes it super easy to securely share your password with others. And…it works on all devices. And it’s free. Pretty awesome, right?!

A screenshot of the password vault by LastPass — The Vault! Screenshot by LastPass

Is it Secure?

I’ve told countless people about password managers because it’s made my online life easier, and I’m often asked if the service is secure. “What if the password management service is hacked?” you ask. It’s an important concern.

A password management company has a huge investment into security, because their entire business model relies on it. Which is more secure: their system, or my “system” of using weak passwords? Probably their system. Ok, definitely their system. To read more of a technical explanation of how LastPass stores your passwords securely, check out this page: How It Works.

For me, the daily benefits and time-saving sanity of LastPass — which I’ve used for upwards of 7 years — vastly outweighs the possibility of my vault being comprised (in which case I could still control access by resetting my master password).

What about letting Chrome/Safari/Firefox remember all my passwords?

There’s nothing wrong with using this method, except that it can encourage the weak password habits we talked about above.

If you need help generating strong passwords, check out this generator you can use for free: https://www.lastpass.com/password-generator

(I’ve also found that most people don’t know how to view their saved passwords – Here’s how to sync and retrieve your passwords in Google Chrome.)

“81% of hacking-related breaches leveraged either stolen and/or weak passwords.”
– Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 2017

Follow these Two Rules for Password Success

It doesn’t matter what tool or method you use to manage your passwords, as long as you follow these two rules:

Use a unique password for every. single. login.
Let me repeat that.
Use a 100% unique password (not a variation) for every single website.
Use a strong password – that means random letters and numbers, or a random string of words, of 12-16 characters.
Example: 9Bm!Te@MEti5

If you can do that with a notebook or a web browser, more power to you. For the rest of us humans, there are password managers.

PS – If you liked this, check out my post on Online Tools to Save Time and Stay Organized which I recently updated.

*This post uses an affiliate link to LastPass, but I am not paid. I think I get a free trial of their premium service? Let’s find out, sign up already! 😀

Online Tools to save Time and stay organized

July 20, 2017 / Lydia Roberts / No Comments

Here are a few tools that have saved me time, effort, and in many cases, sanity.

LastPass (Password Management)

If there’s one tool everyone with an internet connection should have, it’s a password management system. And no, I’m not talking about the notebook where you scrawl down your latest account login or even the massive spreadsheet you’ve been keeping since 1999. A password management tool like LastPass not only saves passwords for you – it can auto-fill them and even auto-fill forms so you never have to write out email address again. LastPass has been saving me oodles of time for over 6 years, and it’s free.

Ublock (Ad Block)

This does just what it says – blocks ads on webpages. Mosto f the time ad block is smart enough to block the bumper ads on YouTube. Want to support a certain site by viewing their ads? Disable ad block on that particular page.

OneTab (Browser Tab Management)

If you spend much of your day on a computer, chances are you have a bit of browser tab buildup. That’s right, I’m talking about the 87 tabs currently open in your browser (oh, maybe that’s just me!). Don’t lose your tabs ever again and keep them organized into groups, or tuck them away to clear the clutter. This little browser extension has made a big difference in my workflow!

JumpCut (Copy/Paste helper, Mac Only)

JumpCut allows you to see the last several items that you copied to your “clipboard” (the magical space where things go when you copy a piece of a text and get ready to paste it). This is super useful when you need to copy/paste lots of stuff all the time like me! This way you can copy several pieces of text in a row, and retrieve them in JumpCut.

Bear (Notes)

Everyone has their favorite note-taking app, and Bear is mine. Bear lets you write in markdown which makes it easy to write for your website and paste it in without losing formatting. It also syncs with all devices if you use the paid version (~$15/yr). I mainly like the way everything is tagged and organized, and it looks super clean. SimpleNote came close but I love Bear!

I’m always looking for little web helpers, and I’ll be sure to share them here. I hope these tools are useful for your online workflow!

Last updated: October 2019