Free Goods Of The Week – June 23
June 24, 2025
Valuable Tips | Interesting Articles This Week
For many small business owners, translating a website feels like a luxury they simply can’t afford. I know that feeling all too well. Here at WPBeginner, we’ve translated our site into multiple languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. And in the early days, we learned a tough lesson: traditional translation methods are incredibly time-consuming and expensive. For a small business o
Let’s say you‘re the CMO of a scrappy startup, and you’ve got limited (or no) budget. You’ve got no name recognition, and no time to waste. So, where do you start to make the biggest impact? Brand. I’ve seen this firsthand. I helped build Drift into a category-defining brand and turned my company, Exit Five, into a seven-figure media business. If I were starting from zero today, I wouldn’t wait.
The Beatles changed music. Starbucks changed coffee. Perhaps your project is aiming to reach a large audience. Consultants call it market share. What percentage of the available market have you reached with your idea? No one hits everyone, but many organizations seek to be a monopoly, or perhaps noticeable in scale. This flies in the face of embracing the smallest viable market.
Neve has long been considered one of the top ten WordPress themes in the official WordPress repository. It consistently gets high ratings and is active on hundreds of thousands of websites. It’s obvious that many people like it, but does that mean it’s a good choice for you? In this review we peel back the curtain and give you all the information you need to make that decision.
Nothing is perfect… But everything can get better. There’s never enough time… But there’s time enough to make a difference. Someone will always be opposed to the change we seek to make. And there’s always someone who wants to help. Anything can happen… But something will.
This is the way to understand business-to-business selling. After you’ve left with the purchase order, what does the buyer tell the boss? What does the boss tell the investors or the press? This helps decode why giant companies like Google or Facebook buy a company or don’t. It explains why McKinsey can charge 20 times as much for consulting as a former McKinsey consultant can.
I recently wrote about a case where a malicious plugin was used to steal admin credentials. Here we will examine yet another malicious plugin that creates a malicious admin user right in the website. Examining the malware While examining the site, we noticed a plugin located at wp-content/plugins labeled php-ini.php . This is strange since directories generally don’t contain extensions
Have you ever clicked on an image on a website expecting it to zoom in, only to realize it doesn’t? It’s a small thing, but it can be surprisingly frustrating for your visitors. When people can click to enlarge an image—whether it’s a product photo, a blog image, or part of a portfolio—they tend to stay on your website longer and engage more. I’ve set up this feature on several WordPress sites,
Even at a distance, we can sometimes tell if someone is educated, rich, powerful or physically attractive. But that doesn’t always correlate with smart, kind or honest. Strong signals might not be the same as useful ones.
As of July 2025, the WordPress Security Team will no longer provide security updates for WordPress versions 4.1 through 4.6. These versions were first released nine or more years ago and over 99% of WordPress installations run a more recent version. The chances this will affect your site, or sites, is very small. If you are unsure if you are running an up-to-date version of WordPress, please log
WordPress News / 4dAs of July 2025, the WordPress Security Team will no longer provide security updates for WordPress versions 4.1 through 4.6. These versions were first released nine or more years ago and over 99% of WordPress installations run a more recent version. The chances this will affect your site, or sites, is very small. If you are unsure if you are running an up-to-date version of WordPress, please log
Most web hosting providers promise the world but deliver headaches. Fast loading times become slow crawls, “reliable” uptime becomes frequent outages, and “24/7 support” becomes automated responses that don’t solve anything. I’ve been burned by this before, so when I heard about 20i’s Autoscale hosting, I rolled my eyes at first. But after yet another […]
We all know AI assistants can help with marketing tasks. But, here’s what most people are missing: Using AI as a prompt engineer is where the real productivity gains happen. I’ve been experimenting with this approach for months, and the results are mind-blowing. Instead of crafting prompts from scratch every time you need help with a campaign or strategy, you can use AI to build an entire library
I see a lot of marketing teams stuck in the same cycle: They believe in content. They’re creating constantly. But, they’re just not seeing the results they want. Add that the CEO is asking why the competitor is “suddenly everywhere.” Oh, and internally, there’s no real alignment on who you’re talking to, what you’re trying to say, or how you’re measuring success. That’s usually when I get the
Struggling to get noticed on LinkedIn despite sharing valuable content? Wondering how to use video to establish authority and become the go-to expert in your field? In this article, you’ll discover how to craft a powerful LinkedIn video strategy that builds credibility, fosters genuine connections, and positions you as a respected leader in your industry […]
We don’t get a chance to do yesterday over again. The best reason to think about the past is because it gives us the opportunity to improve the future. Because we don’t get tomorrow over again either. Happy Juneteenth.
TranslatePress lets you easily create a multilingual WordPress site using a visual, point-and-click interface. You can use manual or automatic translation (or both) and everything stays on your site’s server. Learn more in our hands-on TranslatePress review.
A few weeks ago, we received a support request from a website owner who was experiencing unexpected redirects. Visitors landed on the website normally, but after about 4–5 seconds, the site redirected them to unrelated and suspicious websites. During the investigation, we discovered a malicious plugin that was responsible for this behavior, continuing the trend of attackers using fake WordPress
I’m a teacher, so I’m now used to the faces of students who are scared to learn. More specifically, they’re scared to fail to learn. It’s ingrained early in our studies — As are good, Fs are bad, and you’d better learn the right answers before time runs out. That mentality crashes and burns in the world of growth marketing. Few other areas of life encourage you to fail as often as you will with
A cloud hosting solution that adapts to your site’s traffic, never slows you down, and comes with enterprise-grade security sounds good! This Autoscale by 20i review covers a high-availability cloud hosting platform that developers, agencies, and e-commerce sites all trust to deliver uptime, speed, and peace of mind – every day of the year.
A friend reached out to me recently after discovering something alarming in their WordPress posts. They were using Yoast SEO Premium with the Classic Editor, and they found Yoast had been automatically inserting odd-looking CSS classes like ai-optimize-6 , ai-optimize-9 , directly into their content. The problem is that these classes remain permanently embedded in the posts even after disabling
Please who? If you’re on a social media network, are you seeking to optimize for the algorithm, the owners of the tech stock or your personal goals? If you’re publishing a book, are you working for the book or is the book working for you? You might be able to get the folks in the back row to smile a bit if you play your hit song just like it is on the radio, but perhaps your objective is
Like many buyers in America today, I cringe whenever I swipe my credit card. Amid a “shifting economic landscape” (read: messy economic times), we’re all watching our wallets, trying to keep spending down, and questioning where our dollars go. And it’s not just consumers — businesses, too, are monitoring budgets and seeking better deals. All told, these budget-conscious prospects want great value
LinkedIn might be the most underrated growth channel in marketing right now. I‘ve been obsessing over this lately. While everyone’s fighting for attention on every other platform, LinkedIn remains a place where smart marketers can still build massive audiences without burning through ad budget. I sat down with LinkedIn creator Hala Taha recently to see how marketers can meet the moment.
From automating writing tasks and boosting productivity to generating stunning visuals, here are some of the top AI tools transforming WordPress content creation in 2025.
Stick around ‘til the end for a sweet birthday surprise… In today’s edition: AI is building plugins, but is it also breaking the repo? (Plus: the “vibe coder” problem in one brutal tweet). 22 years old and still the life of the party. WordPress, you magnificent CMS, we raise a glass to you! Genius tools you’ll wish you’d built yourself, including a /edit cheat code and a post-shuffling script.
Feeling overwhelmed by the constant demands of marketing content creation? Wondering how to use AI to make your marketing more effective—and feeling exhausted? In this article, you’ll discover use cases for streamlining your marketing efforts with AI—from planning and production to automation and optimization—so you can save time, reduce stress, and focus on what matters […]
This sits right next to, “I made a bad decision,” in things that are hard to say. But there are many moments when we’re confused about what actually happened. You might not have made a bad decision. And it’s also possible you didn’t make a mistake. It could be that there was simply a bad outcome. That’s different. Annie Duke opened my eyes to the distinction, and it’s critically important.
Advertising is one of the most common ways to monetize a website, but managing display ads in WordPress can be tricky. Inserting ads can lead to unexpected layout issues, inconsistent ad positioning, and performance issues that wreck the user experience. Many WordPress users manually place ad codes where they want the ads to appear, which […]
If you’ve ever stared down a sea of bland AI content and whispered, “Is this my job now?”, you’ll enjoy this master’s take: “The amount of blog posts that are written with AI is at an all-time high… And all of it is trash. ” Ross Simmonds joins us with some spicy takes on
Interesting Articles This Week
