Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe to WPPlugins A to Z on Apple Podcasts | Podcast Index | Email | RSS
‘good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you happen to be hiding out there on the globe today! Coming to you LIVE from …’
Welcome to Episode 646 – The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Plugins: Boost Your Site’s Potential
We’ve got a couple of great in-depth plugins to cover for you, some recent news in both the WordPress World and the Tech World in general, and some awesome WordPress Tips!
Always remember to bring a banana to a party is such an over used line… Instead why not just bring a rubber ducky?? They even SQUEAK!! And, they can work as distractions so you can run away when you don’t want to interact with someone – just grab one out of your pocket, say ‘Catch!’ as you chuck it towards someone and book it while they are trying to catch the rubber ducky.
Or I suppose you could roll it like you would a cat toy, that might work too!
A few reminders before we start the show today….
Reminders:
Show starts at 12:30pm Pacific Time every other week on Monday! Join in for the pre-stream entertainment at about 12:15ish! You’ll find the show notes on the home page of wppluginsatoz.com within 24(ish) hours after every show!
This is a value for value show dear listeners, help us get some loven’ by hitting some like buttons, sharing an episode or two, or just turn our show on really loudly. We will catch somebodies attention!
If you stick around until the end, you will have a chance to hear some good Questions – sometimes meant for the greenies, sometimes meant for the very experienced – and sometimes the questions are just completely random. Stick around and have a listen, might help! Or at least entertain!
(Don’t feel shy about sending in a message just to say hi! Send along suggestions, questions, recommendations, news, art – we always love to hear from our listeners!)
Let’s start the show with this weeks Featured Artist:
Artist:
Our Artist today is Firefly! https://firefly.adobe.com/?media=featured
We would love some new art from our Producers out there! If you are so inclined, you can send it into us at https://wppluginsatoz.com/artwork/. If you need some inspiration, you can always go to our site wppluginsatoz.com and check out our Art Vaults – you will find the link for it on the left hand side.
…We can NEVER have too much art!
Breaking News in the WordPress World at large!!
If you have anything you think should be added please send it into me at amber@wppro.ca!
News this week:
WordPress Vulnerability Report
(https://solidwp.com/blog/wordpress-vulnerability-report-march-26-2025/) – In this report there are 240 vulnerabilities. 180 are plugins this week, with 9 Themes.
Plugins: 46 Patched / 180 Unpatched
Themes: 5 Patched / 9 Unpatched
WordPress Vulnerability Report from PatchStack
(https://patchstack.com/database/) – These guys always have the latest information on what is going on regarding the latest in vulnerabilities. At the time of writing this, most recent issue was 2 hours ago and was a Plugin named Infusionsoft Web Form Javascript, with a Cross Site Scriptiong (XSS) vulnerability.
WordPress 6.8 Release Candidate 1
(https://wordpress.org/news/2025/03/wordpress-6-8-release-candidate-1/) – The first version of WordPress 6.8 is out for testing!
Good luck and May the software be ever in your favour…
WPBeginner Spotlight 10: WordPress 6.8 preview, new AI tools, and plugin news
(https://www.wpbeginner.com/news/wpbeginner-spotlight-10-wordpress-6-8-preview-new-ai-tools-and-plugin-news/) – Now this is geared towards people newer to the WP world for sure, however I find it helpful to go through these WPBeginner Spotlights when they come out. Reading through this saves me hours every time, and helps me in other ways as well! AI is here to stay, its only getting better, and learning how to use the new integrations early on will help you down the road.
WordPress automated testing for developers
(https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/wordpress-automated-testing/) – This lists 5 plugins that might be worth testing out for automated testing for developers. We will be testing these out ourselves and bringing our favourites to the show – if you use or have tested any of these let us know what your opinion on the these plugins are!
Mett LLMs.txt, a proposed standard for AI website content crawling
(https://searchengineland.com/llms-txt-proposed-standard-453676) – This proposal is from Jeremy Howard; the llms.text will act similarly to robots.txt and XML sitemaps protocols, in order to allow for a crawling and readability of the full websites, and will put less of a resource strain on LLMs for crawling and discovering the site content. This would offer a full content flattening option as well.
Jets from powerful black holes can point astronomers to look for life in the universe
(https://phys.org/news/2025-03-jets-powerful-black-holes-astronomers.html) – I thought this was just so cool! The article explains what black holes are, and moves into how exactly a black hole could point us to life. So neat!
(Go visit https://wpshout.com/comics/ for a fantastic brain break!!)
Rogue’s Corner News and Extras
New unique plugins available from WPProAtoz.com
Malware warning
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/malware-campaign-dollyway-breached-20-000-wordpress-sites/
10 Biggest trends in SEO
https://oceanwp.org/blog/seo-biggest-trends/
Woo is better than Shopify
https://rocket.net/blog/why-woocommerce-is-still-better-than-shopify/
WP Ghost has security flaw
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/wordpress-security-plugin-wp-ghost-vulnerable-to-remote-code-execution-bug/
70% WP themes using classic
https://wpmore.substack.com/p/issue-26
Some SEO info:
Understanding Keyword Research
https://alicerowancontentmarketing.com/blog/keyword-research-finding-meaning-data
Seven reasons PMax is stealing your search impressions
https://adalysis.com/blog/seven-reasons-pmax-is-stealing-your-search-impressions/
11 Years of Google Warming: Is Search Heating Up?
https://moz.com/blog/charting-the-google-algorithm
Discussion on AI and SEO replacement
https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1j6c886/is_seo_truly_dying_in_the_age_of_ai_why_do_you/
SEO is Dead Long Live SEO — this needs to be taken seriously
https://searchengineland.com/seo-visibility-search-social-ai-platforms-453165
Tip of the day
Talk about https://influencewp.com/ and the benefits of it for WP devs
Some Extras – check out our Facebook or Twitter!
Google March 2025 Core Update impact poll results
(https://www.seroundtable.com/google-march-2025-core-update-poll-39152.html)
Daily search forum recap: March 31, 2025
(https://www.seroundtable.com/recap-03-31-2025-39153.html)
Pagination and SEO: what you need to know in 2025
(https://searchengineland.com/pagination-seo-what-you-need-to-know-453707)
The next wave of search: AI mode, deep research and beyond
(https://searchengineland.com/search-ai-mode-deep-research-453744)
Dragon Rating Time with John!
John’s Plugin
Conversion Bridge
https://conversionbridgewp.com/
The Lowdown:
Conversion Bridge aims to be a one-stop solution to help site owners and agencies get their website analytics onto their site easily and track every important metric they need.
Use multiple analytic platforms at once! Conversion Bridge makes it easy to try out alternative analytic platforms so you can see if there is one that works better for your needs without losing important tracking data. This is a great feature for those wanting to test the waters outside of Google Analytics but are not yet ready to commit fully yet.
Rating 5 Dragons
PLUGIN #2!
Wp Descriptor
The Lowdown:
WP Descriptor, the ultimate plugin for content managers who want to take their WordPress websites to the next level. Whether you’re managing a blog, an online store, or a business website, WP Descriptor makes your images work harder for you by automatically generating compelling titles, descriptions, and captions.
Rating: 5 Dragons
WordPress Tips
We would love to hear some tid bit tips from some of our producers out there – what did you figure out by breaking something? Or what did you need to learn in order to help someone? You can send these tid bits into me at amber@wppro.ca
My tip to you today…
Ever had one of those weeks where you are pretty sure you just blinked, maybe sneezed or coughed a couple of times, and not just the week is gone but so is the weekend?
Yea, we all get those.
The question is….
When did you roll a poor ‘Awareness’ and walk through that teleportation fog?
No really what the question is, is whether you should call in sick and sleep since you missed the weekend, or if you should just keep going, or what to do. Will you get the work you need to get done if you just keep going, or will you be better off if you take a sick day?
My recommendation is to do neither – take naps. Toss aside those mental treats where you play a game, do some doom scrolling, read a book – and just sleep during those times. Set an alarm, and nap in between.
Did you know that naps have been proven time and time again to help workers be better at working? I mean in some places their work desk transforms into a napping area!
Naps are not just for toddlers, they are great for you too.
So after this show, go take a nap!
Dragon Rating Time with Amber!
Amber’s Plugin
Broken Link Notifier
https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-notifier/
The Lowdown:
I found this plugin while searching for something else, and realized that this could actually be very useful it it works well! So I decided to take the plugin home and test it out.
Once you have downloaded and activated this, you will find the dashboard for the plugin in the left-hand menu towards the bottom reading as: ‘Broken Link Notifier’.
Now here you will have many options – Results, Omitted Links, Omitted Pages, Page Scan, Multi-Scan, Settings, Link Search, and Help.
Most of these are fairly self explanatory – add in links/pages you don’t want it bothering with, scan a page or scan multiple options, etc.
I did a Post scan on an older site of ours that I KNOW has broken links, and it actually managed to get through our 1128 posts within 8 seconds, and found the broken links I knew of, and others as well!
Next I told it to scan the Pages – we only have 43 of those, and it was done nearly instantaneously. The plugin found the broken links I knew were there as well – although I double checked and it did indeed find 2 more than I was aware of!
So once you have scanned it, you will see on the page you are in the entire list of everything found and the details on it. If you want to just go and see the results you can go back to the left-hand menu and click on ‘Link Search’. This will bring you to the page with all the broken links listed out for you. You can flip around with bulk actions to see the different kinds of brokeness listed here, and figure out what needs fixing pretty easily!
This plugin seems really awesome, they use normal people language as much as they can so there is as little confusion as possible, and I did not even need to complete my cup of coffee before I was able to navigate through this!
The plugin works really well, plays nice with others and is super fast and accurate!
I highly recommend this one to help you find those pesky broken links. Doing a scan for these once every 6 months or so will help your SEO in a major way.
Also I forgot to mention that this is an entirely free resource, so be sure to tip the maker if you like what you see!
Rating: 5 Dragon
Donations from across the galaxy!
Producership Credits are a thing that do actually exist – we offer them up to those who donate through Time, Talent or Treasure. You can use these credits to boost up your resume, add to your LinkedIn file, so on and so forth!
Even if you are not interested in receiving a Producership Credit, check out how you can use us as your own stepping ladder in the world of the internets – get yourself an interview, get us to make your announcement for you, let the world know you have something to say or a company worth checking out!
Have a look through our site wppluginsatoz.com. Check out the Time, Talent and Treasure pages.
Miscellaneous Announcements from all:
Have an announcement like a meetup, or to announce you’ll be on stage at a WordCamp? Let us know and we will add it here and help get your news out to the world!
WordCamp Nepal 2025 – April 4-5
Jornada de Disseny Web Amb WordPress Lleida 2025 – April 9
WordCamp Vienna 2025 – April 25-26
WordCamp Málaga – April 26027
WordCamp Bilbao 2025 – May 9-11
To see the entire list you can follow the link here in the show notes, then click on ‘More WordCamps’ right below the list of the next 5. https://central.wordcamp.org/
If you are interested in finding a WordPress Meetup somewhere around the world you can go check out the places here: https://www.meetup.com/pro/wordpress/
Keep checking back every week to find out what else is going on!
How to reach us:
Feel like sending us something through the snail mail system? You can do that thanks to our brick and mortar address that we provide for you!
You can also reach us the more common way of the internets – have both of our internets available down below for ya!
WP Plugins A to Z
C/O John Overall
20-754 E Fairview Rd.
Victoria, BC V9A 5T9
Canada
John:
My website:http://www.johnoverall.com/
WordPress Emergency Support:http://wppro.ca/wpemergency
email:john@wppro.ca
Amber:
email: amber@wppro.ca
Today’s Plugins we covered were:
John’s Plugin:
Conversion Bridge by webshine Inc
- Simplifies WordPress Conversion Tracking
- Page by page conversion tracking journies
- Custom tracking events
Rating: 5 Dragons
AND
Wp Descriptor by Web321
- Makes your images work harder for you by automatically generating compelling titles, descriptions, and captions.
- You have control over when it is on or off.
- Credits are affordable.
Rating: 5 Dragons
Amber’s Plugin:
Broken Link notifier by WordPress Enhanced
- Finds broken links
- Plays well with others
- YOU have control over when it is on – does not run in background. Only runs when you tell it to do a scan.
Rating: 5 Dragon
Q & A Time with Amber – Catch this info on our YouTube Channel
If you have questions you would like to have asked on the show, send them in to me atAmber@WPPro.ca – we may never stump my dad, but we can get some good conversation out of him at least!
- How do you keep all the information you need in your head?
- Do you store all the information you have collected in a place easily accessible by others or do you prefer to keep your library of information personal and why or why not?
Questions asked after closing credits:
- You use Dropbox a lot, do you have a physical copy of everything on there too?
- What is the main cause of external hard drives expiring?