This is the fourth edition of UnlimitedWP’s WP Roundup. As agency owners ourselves, we pay close attention to the world of WordPress and look for opportunities to help other agencies fine-tune their tasks and workloads. Read on to find some useful plugins, themes, and tools to help you make the most of WordPress.
News to Know
- XML-RPC brute force attacks. WordPress has enabled XML-RPC by default for more than a decade, but hackers can use it to attack WordPress sites. Disable it if you have not already. This feature is also responsible for enabling the pingbacks and trackbacks. These are the notifications that you receive when a blog or a third-party website links to your website.
- Are GPL licenses for plugins trustworthy? WP User Avatar was a free plugin used by more than 400K users for updating user profiles. Upon being acquired by a third party, the plugin’s functionality completely changed in a single update. This obviously disappointed user, who were not warned about upcoming changes at all. The plugin started receiving 1-star ratings on wordpress.org.
- Two Ways to Find Out Who is Hosting a Certain Website. Use either of these two methods to find out who hosts almost any website on the Internet.
Useful Themes and Templates
- Blocksy is a new WP theme focused on speed, compatibility, and Gutenberg. Could it be a challenge to Astra? I believe this would be the only theme on WordPress.org with more than 20k active installs and 400+ 5-star ratings. The most amazing thing? Not a single rating under 5 stars.
- Big Changes with StudioPress. Genesis Framework and the Genesis Sample Theme will be made free to download and distribute. Never before were these available for free. StudioPress now allows anyone with a paid WPEngine or Flywheel plan to download them for free with the new upcoming update. Moving forward, StudioPress themes will no longer be sold individually. All StudioPress themes will now be sold in a single bundle.
- Astra vs Kadence – Which WordPress Theme is Better? Kadence Theme created by the Kadence WP team snuck its way into the WordPress world of themes in 2020 and has gained traction extremely quickly. Along with Blocksy, it looks like Astra will have to take a more assertive stance to keep its user base loyal.
Useful Plugins
- LearnDash and LearnPress are two competing learning management systems (LMS) for WordPress. Anyone who sells courses, trains employees, or tutors students through a WordPress website can benefit from one of these plugins.
- MemberPress has been our plugin of choice to create membership websites on WordPress for years. MemberPress will help you build astounding WordPress membership sites, accept credit cards securely, sell online courses, control who sees your content, and sell digital downloads. Amazingly, it achieves all of this with a simple, no-nonsense configuration process.
- UpdraftPlus gets our approval for backup, restore, and cloning WordPress websites. It’s a solid piece of software that should be in every developer’s toolkit. It saves our developers countless hours every day!
Agency Growth Tools and Resources
- This eBook covers some of the most common questions web agency executives have when considering whether to outsource. It also covers the benefits and drawbacks of these arrangements and provides a point of reference for your own contracting agreements. Read on and discover how you can leverage the remote workforce to increase your profits.
- FREE TOOL ALERT: We came across a community-developed free test automation tool. Our team has already begun using it, and it has proven itself awesome so far.
- Unique Tool: With ghostlab you can synchronize multiple browsers and devices while scrolling, navigating, filling forms, and performing any other kind of interaction. This tool makes life much easier for our QA team. We have two large screens, two phones, and one tablet all in sync, opening and interacting with the same web page for testing.
Thank you for reading this edition of UnlimitedWP’s WP Roundup. We do not have an affiliate relationship with any of the third party sites, services or products mentioned above on this page.
