Right now, small to medium businesses are under attack and are the primary target of international hackers and enemy nations. Wow! That sounds pretty fantastic and out there, I know. But it is very real. You may be scratching your head as to why hackers would be targeting small companies. The fact is that there is more money between a high volume of small businesses than can be gained from "big fish," and the...
This update addresses emails everyone has received from Google Search Console regarding "New reason preventing your pages from being indexed." We recently marked the page used to allow subscribers to manage their email subscription to no-index. The reason is that this page only functions if users follow the link in an email from your website to the Manage Email Subscription page on your website. Going to the page in any other way will not...
Phishing is a process of tricking a user into going to a fake web page that looks like the page they expect to see where the user attempts to sign in or verify the account, at which point the attacker has the user's sign-in information for that service. The best way to avoid a phishing scam is to double-check the address in your browser to be sure the domain name is correct for the...
We have developed our own website monitoring system for websites under our management. The user interface will have a few more features in the near future as we wrap up the other changes we're rolling out, but it is otherwise ready for daily use. You can find the status monitor at https://status.gapcreekmedia.com. The system currently alerts us to HTTP Status Code changes, and we have plans to expand this to client notifications before the...
WordPress has RSS functionality built in, but we've never utilized this. This is because RSS was a declining technology, so much so that Google and other big tech companies stopped working on and even ended software products related to RSS. If you aren't familiar with RSS, check out Wikipedia for details. The most important part of the Wiki to this blog post is at the bottom, where it details the end of RSS Readers...
As the end of the year approaches, we are doing many things to prepare for the incoming year and season kickoff. Part of that involves cleaning up Google Search Console. Throughout the year, as you've made requests to remove pages, add services, or redefine your services, your website has grown and changed. Some links Google crawled eight months ago have moved or do not exist. However, even though they have been removed from the...
Over the last week, we've had intermittent downtime across several websites. We identified the problem as a shortfall in memory when Mailpoet runs background processes. Our solution was to double the swap file size, creating a memory-to-CPU ratio that should prevent memory exhaustion. We're still watching this closely, but the results thus far look stable. Keep up with our blog or sign up for our Newsletter to stay informed about what we're doing to...
We're adding MailPoet Premium to our website plugins and list of third-party software. This is also going to replace our use of the WP Forms SMTP plugin, which required us to make use of the default email addresses on Rackspace for your domain to send out emails from the website. Instead, emails from your website will be sent through the MailPoet sending service. Their sending service is also designed around email marketing, which brings...
This blog post provides information about the ongoing updates of our services concerning the functioning of the websites under our management. We are providing this update due to advancements in the software we use and changes we make because we are always getting a little better at what we do. Please contact us if you have any questions about the information in this blog post. Your website or websites are now running PHP 8.2...
This year we began with a blog about revamping our services on all managed websites. Some of those changes were followed by a secondary change, and some went very well. This blog post recaps what the revamp was all about and what the results were when the dust settled. But, of course, we will always be in a state of improvement, so these blog posts are never intended as a conclusion but more of...
Statcounter is the software we use to track website visitor statistics. We use Statcounter over other analytics solutions because they comply with privacy laws worldwide, combined with valuable and actionable visitor data. You can find more information about Statcounter and useful links on our Performance page. Since we rolled out Statcounter to all managed websites, we have noticed that not every client finds a need or use for this software. We are making Statcounter...
In this blog post, we are talking about load times on mobile devices. One thing that may not be immediately obvious is that when it comes to visual appeal and functionality, you often have to choose between these two factors and strike the right balance. Of course, you want the site to look good, but the extra images and Javascript animations make the total size of the data that must be transmitted to the...
