WordPress Roundup: How the GDPR effects your WordPress business

In this month’s WordPress Roundup, we are taking a look at Gutenberg, GDPR, Theme Frameworks and learning more about Thin Content from Yoast.

Buckle up! Let’s ride.

April 2018 WordPress Roundup

My Gutenberg Experience Thus Far – WP Tavern

Are you ready for Gutenberg? One of the most anticipated new features for WordPress, Gutenberg is set to be released around or after WordPress 5.

Jeff Chandler of WP Tavern recently posted an article about his experience with Gutenberg to date.

While Gutenberg has some good features, according to Chandler, one of the biggest issues is incompatibility with many of his most used plugins. In short, the rest of the ecosystem is not quite ready for Gutenberg.

Chandler asks a very important question.

Gutenberg is supposed to make everything we do in the current editor easier and more efficient. If it doesn’t, then I have to ask, what’s the point?

What concerns me the most about Gutenberg is plugin support. Some of the plugins I mentioned above are active on 10K sites or less but are important to the way I craft and publish content in WordPress. WP Tavern

Have you tried Gutenberg yet? What has been your experience?

What GDPR Means For Your WordPress And WooCommerce Business – A Starter Guide On What’s Important To Know And Do First – Codeable

I’ll admit, I don’t know a whole lot about the GDPR. It takes place in May of this year, so if you collect info from users in Europe, you need to beware.

If you’ve been reading blogs and tech websites recently, GDPR is all the rage. This acronym stands for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) announced by the European Union, which is a new law coming into effect in the next months (more below) governing the use and storage of personal information of all EU citizens. Codeable

There are a lot of questions and concerns and the article at Codeable will do a great job in getting started.

It is a pretty comprehensive article and includes information about the law and how it applies to WordPress websites.

May is just a few weeks away, and this article by Matteo Duò can help you get started learning more about GDPR.

Beginner’s Guide: What is a WordPress Theme Framework? – WP Newsify

Recently I asked a question in the MainWP Users Group about how developer’s start their projects in terms of themes. We got some really good answers.

When I started using Genesis, I became aware of the idea of using a theme framework as a starting point. More recently, I tend to start with Astra.

What theme do you start with?

A framework is a nice way to rapidly develop your websites and it is the standard for themes according to WordPress.

Daniel Pintilie discusses what a theme framework and goes over a few of the top theme frameworks.

SEO basics: What is thin content?

The evolution of using content for SEO has completely involved in the past ten years. It used to be that publishing regular content, regardless of whether it was good, pinged the search engines and gave your site a boost.

Search engines are more complex now and can make a determination about the quality of content.

Michelle Foolen breaks down thin content,

So what is thin content? Thin content is content that has little or no value to the user. Google considers doorway pages, low quality affiliate pages, or simply pages with very little or no content as thin content pages. Yoast

Google is looking for quality content, not thin content that has little to no value.

On top of that, Google doesn’t like pages that are stuffed with keywords either. Google has gotten smarter and has learned to distinguish between valuable and low quality content, especially since Google Panda. Yoast

Be very careful about duplicating content. It is better to write original, high-value content. In short, it is time to up your content game.

Wrapping it Up

That’s it for another episode of our WordPress Roundup. Which of these changes have you dealt with?

How has GDPR effected your business? Are you up to compliance? Changes happen rapidly in our industry, and it is tough to keep up. How do you handle these kinds of changes?