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Recent Posts
- Could AI Make Humans Extinct Within the Next Decade?
- Is Weebly Getting Out of the Website-Builder Business?
- Are You “Leaking SEO” by Linking to Other Websites?
- Wix Harmony Is Now in Google Gemini. So Why Are Users Still Complaining?
- When AI Sounds Confident but Gets It Wrong: The Mount Shasta Rescue
- When AI Agents Start Working Together, Who Is Really in Control?
- WPForms and Rank Math: Did These WordPress Plugins Create a Backdoor With Admin Access?
- AI Can Text Your Friends for You. Wait, Who Am I Talking To?
- Bill Gates Is Betting on AI to Help Healthcare – While Warning About What AI Could Do to Jobs
- Wix Says AI Website Owners Should Care About Portability. There’s Just One Problem.
- WordPress 7.1 Broke WP Rocket: The Fatal Error and the Plugin Problem
- WordPress vs. UltimateWB for an Artist Website: Which Should You Choose?
- Thinking About Switching From WordPress? What Should You Consider Before You Move?
- The Airtable Acquisition Raises a Bigger Question: Do You Really Own the Software Your Business Runs On?
- How to Use Google Search Console’s New Generative AI Data to Improve Your SEO
- How to Update the Same Website Content on Multiple Pages at Once
- Discovered vs. Crawled Not Indexed in Google Search Console: What’s the Difference and How to Fix Each
- The Small Business Guide to Auditing Google Ads and Website Costs
Categories
Tag Archives: plugins
WPForms and Rank Math: Did These WordPress Plugins Create a Backdoor With Admin Access?
There is a new kind of WordPress security issue that deserves a lot more attention.
It isn’t simply a case of a hacker discovering a vulnerability in a plugin.
It is a plugin itself introducing a mechanism that can give an outside service or AI system the ability to act on your WordPress site.
And two major WordPress plugins have recently put this issue in the spotlight: Rank Math and WPForms.
The situations are not identical, and it would
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Posted in AI, Compare Website Builders, Technology in the News, Website Security
Tagged administrative token, ai, ai agent, ai assistant, ai chat assistant, ai features, Awesome Motive, backdoor, claude, cursor, forum analytics, MCP, metadata, onboarding wizard, php, plugins, rank math, rank math support agent, schema, Search Engine Journal, security vulnerabilities, seo, seo plugin, setup checklist, Sybre Waaijer, third-party plugins, vulnerabilities, WAP, website security, WordPress, wordpress alternative, wordpress plugins, wordpress security, wp forms, wp forms lite
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The Developer’s Paradox: When No-Code Takes Longer Than Code
When searching for a development platform that wouldn't restrict their workflow, one developer reached out via our “Ask David!” support form with a familiar frustration:
"I tried Webflow for a client project. I'm a developer, and I found myself constantly fighting the interface instead of building the site. I just want to make sure that UltimateWB
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Posted in Ask David!, Compare Website Builders
Tagged bloat, cms, css, css gradients, database, div, gradients, html, javascript, linear-gradient, mysql, no-code, no-code website builder, php, plugins, third-party plugins, webflow
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Skool vs MemberPress + LearnDash: The Pitfalls, Hidden Costs, and a Better Alternative
The creator economy is facing a structural crisis. If you want to launch a paid community with structured courses, locked content, and tiered membership levels, the current software ecosystem gives you an ultimatum:
Sign away your digital autonomy to a restrictive, high-fee SaaS platform like Skool, or step onto the endless treadmill of the WordPress "plugin stack."
A recent debate on the WordPress Reddit community exposed the exact breaking point creators hit when trying to build these platforms. The
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Posted in Compare Website Builders
Tagged bloat, community website, learndash, lms, locked content, memberpress, membership levels, membership paywall, paid community, paywall, plugin bloat, plugin stack, plugins, reddit, saas, Skool, structured courses, third-party plugins, tiered memebership, WordPress
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The 30-Minute Job Interview That Steals Your Entire Hard Drive
If you're looking for freelance development work on Reddit, LinkedIn, Upwork, or similar platforms, be careful. Scammers are increasingly disguising malware as coding assessments and technical interviews. What appears to be a simple GitHub repository for a 30-minute coding test may actually be an attempt to get you to execute malicious code on your own machine.
The setup looks completely legitimate. A recruiter or startup founder reaches out with what appears to be a freelance opportunity. The interview
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Posted in Technology in the News
Tagged coding, developer, downloads, freelancer, GitHub, linkedin, malicious code, malware, phishing, plugins, reddit, reputation, sandbox, scammer, tech interviews, third-party code, third-party plugins, trust, upwork, virtual machines, vm
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Why Is Google Indexing New Blog Posts So Much Slower in 2026?
“Ask David!” question: "Google used to index my new blog posts faster, what happened?"
If you logged into your Google Search Console this week and saw your brand-new posts sitting in that annoying "Discovered - currently not indexed" status, don't panic. Most likely your website isn't broken, you haven't been blacklisted, and you didn't accidentally flip a "hide from Google" switch.
What you are feeling is a very real, intentional shift in how Google handles the web.
Here is exactly
... Continue readingWhat’s Going On with the Etch WP Team? (Digital Gravy Drama Explained)
If you’ve been tracking the recent product rollout from Digital Gravy, you know their new website builder, Etch WP, launched with a massive amount of hype. It was marketed as a revolutionary "clean code" visual development environment that would completely shake up front-end development in WordPress.
But despite all the promises of a stable future, there is a lot of buzz right now about the Etch WP team leaving, and web agencies are trying
... Continue readingWooCommerce Subscriptions Cost: Avoid the $279 Add-On Trap
If you are building an online shop with WordPress, the initial pitch sounds incredible: the core software is open-source, and WooCommerce is "completely" free.
But there is a catch that catches almost every small business owner off guard.
The exact moment you try to move away from simple, one-time checkouts and add a recurring revenue stream - like a monthly subscription box, a premium membership, or a repeat service plan - you hit a major financial wall.
Suddenly,
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Posted in Compare Website Builders, E-commerce
Tagged bloat, core web vitals, e-commerce, hacked, open-source, pagespeed insights, performance, plugin vulnerabilities, plugins, stability, subscriptions, third-party plugins, vulnerabilities, woocommerce, WooCommerce subscriptions, WordPress
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The Right Way vs. The Wrong Way to Do Programmatic SEO (pSEO)
If you’ve been tracking digital marketing trends lately, you’ve likely run across the phrase Programmatic SEO (pSEO). The pitch is incredibly seductive: instead of writing blog posts one by one, you connect a database to a page template, press a button, and instantly deploy thousands of pages targeting long-tail search terms.
Traffic multiplies overnight, you dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs), and you win.
Except, that’s exactly how you get your entire domain penalized and deindexed.
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Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Tagged algorithm changes, authority, automated page generation, bloat, core web vitals, database, duplicate content, google algorithm, google algorithm penalties, Google Search Console, google search engine ranking, indexing, long-tail keywords, organic traffic, plugins, programmatic seo, pseo, scalable, scaled content abuse, search engine results pages, seo, serps, spam, thin content, third-party plugins, trust, trustworthy, url structure, visibility, webflow, WordPress
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Is Your Google Search Console “Average Position” Lying to You?
You log into Google Search Console (GSC) and see massive numbers under your daily impressions. Your site is popping up in thousands of search results! Then, you check your sitewide Average Position metric. It hovers somewhere between 10 and 15. On really good days, you might even celebrate hitting the coveted single digits - positions 7–9.
But then you look at your actual traffic, and the click count is surprisingly low.
With AI Overviews and Featured Snippets now eating up
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Posted in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Website Traffic
Tagged ai overviews, average position, bloat, clean code, click-through rate, clicks, ctr, fast loading times, fast website, featured snippets, Google Search Console, gsc, html, impressions, long-tail keywords, plugins, ranking position, search engine ranking, seo, third-party plugins
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Your Website is Your Silent Salesperson: Is “Basic” Costing You Money?
Should I upgrade my website?
Every dollar matters when you’re building a small business. Early on, it’s natural to look for the fastest and cheapest way to get online, which is why so many businesses start with “basic” website templates.
At first glance, these platforms seem practical. They’re quick, affordable, and require little technical knowledge. But over time, a more important question emerges:
What is your current website actually costing you in lost trust, missed leads, and reduced conversions?
Because
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Posted in Ask David!, Business, Website Design
Tagged bloat, bounce rate, conversion optimization, conversions, convert leads, core web vitals, crawlability, custom websites, design trends, digital marketing, fast load times, fast website, first impressions, indexing, mobile friendly, online business, plugins, responsive, roi, scalability, seo, slow website, small business, templates, trustworthy, up-to-date, ux design, visibility, web development, website builder, website design, website performance, website ROI
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