Throughout March, the WordPress core team was busy preparing the first major release of the year – WordPress 6.2, working on various release candidate versions and making last-minute changes to ensure bug-free core functionality.

But that’s not all that happened in March. Gutenberg and WooCommerce also rolled out updates to enhance the block editing experience. What’s more, various security patches have been released to ensure the content management system is safe from attackers.

In addition to WordPress news and updates, we’ll go over some new WordPress tools that will help you with website development. We have a lot to cover in this month’s WordPress roundup – let’s dive right in.

WordPress Updates

On top of the WordPress 6.2 launch, there have been other great updates that have made the site editor and Gutenberg better, like the distraction-free Gutenberg mode and WooCommerce block improvements.

WordPress 6.2

Wrapping up phase two of the Gutenberg project, WordPress 6.2 has revamped the Site Editor interface and taken it out of beta. This effectively means that the block editor is more stable than ever and will be the staple of site editing from here on.

We have covered the updates extensively in our WordPress 6.2 overview article. Here’s a quick recap:

• Browse mode. The new interface lets users browse and preview templates and template parts, seamlessly switch between them, and start editing.
• Style book. It displays all website elements with a given style variation, making it easy to check how it will impact the site.
• Openverse integration. A new interface lets users search and pick free-to-use stock images straight from the block editor.
• Navigation block improvement. A new UI for the navigation block tools is now available. It helps manage menu items more easily from the block settings panel.
• Distraction-free mode. A new feature that removes all panels and toolbars from the editor canvas, allowing users to focus on content creation.

Gutenberg Updates

Even though WordPress 6.2 came out this month, the developers still rolled out two Gutenberg updates – versions 15.3 and 15.4.

Note that these versions are not included in the WordPress 6.2 core backport. If you want to check out the new features, you must install and activate the plugin.

• Time-to-read block (15.3). The block displays estimated reading time, allowing visitors to decide whether to save the article for later.

• Global duotone filter (15.3). The global block styles panel now contains duotone global settings, allowing site-wide filter application customization.

• Color for Cover block (15.4). You can now customize the inner block color with a single setting.
• Template descriptions (15.4). New template descriptions for better documentation.

WooCommerce Updates

WooCommerce rolled out version 7.5.0 this month with the following updates:

• Global styles support for blocks. You can now customize the Product Button, Product Rating, and Product Price blocks using the core editor settings panel.
• Support for style book. A WooCommerce tab has been added to the Style Book, showcasing various WooCommerce blocks.

Other than improving the existing blocks, WooCommerce also introduced three new ones:

• Store Breadcrumbs block. The block displays breadcrumb navigation to let visitors know their position on the website and access parent pages quickly.
• Product Results Count block. Based on the query, it shows the number of displayed products and the total available products – useful when you have a large product collection.
• Catalog Sorting block. It lets visitors sort the displayed products based on several criteria. This comes in handy if you have many product categories.

Gutenberg Phase Three Planning

With WordPress 6.2 marking the end of Gutenberg Phase Two, the project now enters Phase Three, centered around real-time collaboration.

While this phase is still in the planning stage, the development team has already laid down the Preliminary Outline for Phase Three. Mat Mullenweg mentioned a lot of the points in his State of the Word 2022 presentation. Here are some highlights:

• Real-time collaboration. Collaborate with your colleagues in real time using the WordPress Editor.
• Asynchronous collaboration. No matter your time zone or physical location, draft sharing and inline-block commenting empower teams across the globe to work together.
• Publishing process. From time-saving flow improvements to easier editing, the publishing experience should be improved further.

WordPress Security News

Keeping the WordPress ecosystem customization-rich is not the only objective of the community. WordPress is always a target of security threats, and the developers constantly work to keep it safe.

WooCommerce Payments Vulnerability

A WooCommerce Payments plugin vulnerability affecting over 500,000 websites was discovered on March 22, 2023. It could be exploited by unauthorized parties to access the admin area and take over the site.

It impacts websites that use WooCommerce Payments versions 4.8.0 that 5.6.1. A security patch has been released – it comes with version 5.6.2.

The WooCommerce team collaborated with the WordPress.org Plugins team to force updates on affected websites. However, if you use this plugin, we recommend checking your plugin version and updating immediately if necessary.

Elementor Pro Vulnerability

A severe Elementor Pro vulnerability has also been discovered. It allows unauthorized parties to instantly create an administrator account.

The vulnerability affects websites with Elementor Pro version 3.11.6 or older and WooCommerce installed. Version 3.11.7 has addressed this issue – make sure the plugin is up to date if you use it.

Patchstack State of WordPress Security 2022

Are you curious about WordPress security statistics for 2022? If so, the Patchstack State of WordPress Security 2022 whitepaper is a good read.

This document compiles all WordPress security facts, statistics, and trends in 2022 – immensely valuable to anyone building WordPress websites or developing extensions.

Here are some of the highlights:

• 26% of plugins with severe vulnerabilities were never patched.
• There’s been a 328% rise in security bug reports in 2022.
• Almost 30% of security bugs in 2022 were cross-site request forgery (CSRF), with cross-site scripting (XSS) coming second at just over 27%.

One of the coolest characteristics of the WordPress ecosystem is the abundance of tools and extensions that can help you with website development. Here are our picks for this month’s featured WordPress tools.

docs_dangit

A Cloudfest 2023 Hackathon project initiated by Milana Cap, docs_dangit is a search engine that helps WordPress developers find code examples from various documentation resources. All you need to do is enter the keyword – be it a PHP variable, WP-CLI command, or a function snippet – and the results will show up.

Currently, docs_dangit relies on WP Code Reference, WP Dev Notes, WP-CLI Documentation, and PHP Docs as its references.

Inspiro Blocks Theme

Released in mid-February, the Inspiro Blocks theme from WPZOOM has already racked up over 1,000 active users, and that’s for good reason.

This theme has six style variations and 23 built-in patterns, so it’s got plenty of overall site design options. Combined with a modern and minimalist design, this theme is perfect for anyone looking to quickly build a portfolio or business website.

AI Tools for WordPress

AI is a growing trend in web development, and the WordPress ecosystem is no exception. A few weeks ago, we covered how to build a WordPress website with ChatGPT, showing that AI has become a useful tool for WordPress development.

This month, we checked out a couple of interesting AI tools that can simplify WordPress content creation.

AIOSEO AI Title/Description Generator

Meta titles and descriptions can make or break your content marketing campaign. A good meta title helps you rank higher in search engines, while a meta description encourages readers to click on your post.

Writing a great meta title and description can be challenging. That’s why AIOSEO have launched a new feature called AI Title/Description Generator – a result of their partnership with OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.

The feature is quite simple. On the post editor’s AIOSEO section, click the robot icon next to the post title and meta description fields, and it will generate five suggestions based on your content.

One caveat of this feature is that it’s only available in the premium version. So if you wish to use this new AI tool, choose one of their premium plans that start from $49.6/year.

EveryAlt

Alt text helps visually-impaired readers – effectively, it’s a text description for an image. Having alt text on your images is a must to ensure your content is accessible.

EveryAlt can help you with this. It will generate an alt text suggestion based on a given image. Simply drag and drop the image to the interface, and it will generate the text which you can also modify.

Here’s an example of an image with the alt text generated by EveryAlt.

Currently, a free account will get 25 image credits. It costs $9.99 to get an allowance of 1,000 images.

The EveryAlt WordPress plugin, which is currently in beta. Once it’s fully released, you can expect the same convenience in your WordPress admin panel.

What’s Coming in April

Even though WordPress 6.2 has finally been released, that doesn’t mean the community is slowing down. For instance, there are thousands of WordPress plugins and themes out there that still haven’t been compatibility-tested with WordPress 6.2.

Always keep an eye on your WordPress update admin panel and update your plugins and themes whenever a new version is available.

For the past few weeks, the Internet has been all abuzz with excitement over AI writing tools, with one, in particular, going viral: ChatGPT. It’s not hard to see why. ChatGPT is an advanced chatbot tool from OpenAI, which also gave us DALL·E 2. It may be a chatbot, but it can respond to requests with surprising accuracy, generating written work like essays, stories, poems, and even software code and lecture notes. Unlike more rudimentary writing AI tools, ChatGPT often produces work that is surprisingly well-written and appears to be well-researched.

The general response has been a mix of excitement and skepticism. Similar to the recent debates surrounding AI art, writers worry that their jobs might be replaced, while businesses wonder how they can use it for their benefit. However, many experts are exercising caution to widespread adoption just yet. While it’s a fun tool to play around with, it’s far from perfect, and certainly no replacement for humans.

Speaking with CNN, Bern Elliot, a vice president at technology research and consulting firm Gartner, described ChatGPT in its current iteration as nothing more than a parlor trick:

“It’s something that isn’t actually itself going to solve what people need, unless what they need is sort of a distraction.”

It’s difficult to argue with that assessment when examining the AI ​​tool’s flaws.

The downsides of ChatGPT

AI prose might read surprisingly well, but important elements of writing — including accuracy, human nuance, and genuine insight into a topic — are not quite there yet. It’s important to remember that the AI ​​is giving you answers based on keywords you input — it can’t genuinely understand these words in a human manner. This leads to common quirks in the answers it provides.

For example, June Wan, technology editor at ZDNET, asked ChatGPT to write a review of the iPhone 14 Pro. Wan was generally impressed with how the review was written, providing a complete intro-to-conclusion piece that backed up its claims with an analysis of the product and how it may impact user experience. However, beyond that, the information provided was not always completely accurate. Wan believes this is because the AI ​​can’t distinguish whether a source is reliable.

“It doesn’t know if the data it’s pulling is true or false, especially in more complex situations like when needing to describe a specific iPhone model.”

Another major issue is that the data it pulls from is outdated — the AI’s most recent training data is from 2021. It goes without saying that a lot has changed in the world since then.

This is precisely why Min Chen, a vice president of legal research and data company LexisNexis, told CNN that they wouldn’t be using ChatGPT for serious legal research anytime soon. Chen believes it just isn’t reliable enough: “In some cases, ChatGPT will give a very verbose answer that seems to make sense, but the answer is not getting the facts right.”

Beyond reliability and accuracy, although Chat GPT can write passably well, the content it produces isn’t very engaging or interesting, probably because it’s regurgitating what it found on the Internet. One key part of being a writer is the ability to think critically about a topic and form your own arguments. This is not something ChatGPT can do.

Wordable CEO Brad Smith told Forbes:

“Unless AI is basically robotically plagiarizing other content already on this subject, it can’t compare alternatives like this or provide additional context as to why one argument might or might not be legitimate.”

Bias and ethics

There’s also the issue of bias. Many users have revealed instances of ChatGPT providing racist or sexist responses. In a Twitter thread, computational cognitive scientist Steven Piantadosi shared some disturbing answers the tool gave when he gave it certain prompts, such as a Python program to rank who would be the best scientists based on their race and gender. Abeba Birhane, a researcher at Mozilla, shared sexist lyrics generated by ChatGPT:

“If you see a woman in a lab coat,
She’s probably just there to clean the floor,

But if you see a man in a lab coat,

Then he’s probably got the knowledge and skills you’re looking for”

OpenAI has admitted that this may occasionally be a problem and is hoping that its moderation API and user feedback will eliminate the issue in time.

The idea of ​​businesses using writing AI also raises ethical concerns, especially when you don’t inform users and customers that’s what they’re dealing with. According to Vice, mental health nonprofit Koko came under fire after revealing it experimented with using the ChatGPT to help develop responses to at-risk people seeking counseling services. The company reported that the AI ​​responses were rated higher than human ones, and helped cut the response rate by 50%. However, when people found out they had been dealing with an AI and not a person, they felt “disturbed by the simulated empathy.”

Experts have criticized the experiment, pointing out numerous red flags, including the lack of informed consent from users. Emily M. Bender, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, told vice that using AI for mental health services has a great potential for harm due to their lack of empathy and genuine understanding of a situation of a person in crisis. If the AI ​​happens to make harmful suggestions, the issue of accountability is also called into question.

The future

While ChatGPT may not be ideal for everyday professional use right now (particularly in certain sectors), it’s likely to improve over time, although the jury’s out on whether it will ever be good enough to replace real writers. If you’re interested in seeing how the tool develops, OpenAI has opened a waitlist for a paid experimental version called ChatGPT Professional.

Since AI is no replacement for real writers, why not work on improving your own skills? Our blog has a wealth of great content on just that, such as 5 Free Online Tools to Help You Write Great Copy and 6 grammar mistakes that drive blog readers nuts. And if writing’s not your bag, check out this guide to hiring freelance writers.

Pop-ups often get a bad rep.

When done poorly, they can harm your site’s user experience and give your website a spammy look. But when done right, they can be one of the most effective tactics for engaging your audience and converting users into leads.

So how can you make the most of pop-ups without making your website annoying to your visitors?

If you’re looking to launch a pop-up campaign, we’ll walk you through all the best practices you should follow.

Hostinger Academy Webinar: All About High-Converting Pop-Ups

A 3-Step Guide for Your Next Pop-Up Campaign

Unsure how to launch a pop-up campaign? With some thought and planning, pop-ups can give you important information about your users or help you increase your bottom line.

1. Start With Why

First things first – think of what you want to achieve with your pop-up campaign.

Your ‘why’ will determine the action visitors should take on your pop-up window. Should they enter their email address and sign up for a newsletter, or should they fill out a quick form instead?

From there, think of the campaign’s details, such as:

• What conversion metrics should you track to measure the pop-up’s success?
• What type of offer will convince users to take your desired action?
• When and where should the pop-up window appear?

Here’s an example: say you own an online clothing store, and the holiday sale season is getting close. A pop-up campaign is perfect for drawing visitors to your discount rack when they have just landed on your website. Add a coupon code as a cherry on top to draw potential customers in.

2. Think of your target audience

Besides knowing the ‘why,’ you also need to know ‘who’ will see the pop-up.

Want to acquire new leads? First-time visitors are the best audience to target. That means you will need to place the pop-ups on pages where new users are most likely to land, such as the homepage.

You can also design pop-ups for existing buyers, encouraging them to share a referral link after they have just completed their purchase.

Expert Tip

Visitors on the Receipt Page are highly engaged. One of our clients launched a referral pop-up campaign on that page with a conversion rate of 46.25%. So this is a nice way to spread the word about your brand to your paying customers’ friends and family.

Sofia M.

Head of Partners at Sleeknote

Differentiate your campaigns by user journeys to build a personalized experience for your target audience. It’s proven effective in establishing a connection with website visitors, resulting in more conversions.

The travel blog Nomadic Matt does this wonderfully by tailoring the pop-up’s copy to the blog post the user is reading.

3. Ask for the Most Relevant Information

In most cases, two input fields in one pop-up are enough – one for the user’s first name and another for their email address. The more there are to fill out, the more time-consuming it feels.

If you need more information, use a multi-step campaign – that is, splitting your questions into more than one window. This way, users will feel less intimidated to fill out the form.

The food magazine Bon Appetit runs great multi-step campaigns. The first window asks the visitor to enter their email address. They are then redirected to the next pop-up to choose the type of content they want to receive in their inbox.

4 Best Practices to Launch High-Converting Pop-Ups

Sure, you can sprinkle a few pop-ups across your website and get on with your day. But you will get the most out of your pop-up campaigns with a little bit of attention to detail.

1. Get Creative With the Copy and Design

When crafted poorly, pop-ups can look spammy and send the wrong signal to website visitors. That’s why it’s important to make both the copy and the design as unique and attractive as possible.

Avoid clichés like “Sign up on our newsletter.” Instead, focus on a key reason that will persuade the visitor to click on the pop-up. Tell them how they will benefit, play with the fear of missing out, or build a sense of exclusivity with the audience.

IMPACT’s newsletter pop-up illustrates this very well. The copy establishes the company’s authority and builds trust with the audience by highlighting its popularity among industry experts.

When it comes to the design, it should coordinate with the web page where the pop-up will appear so that it doesn’t look out of place.

Expert Tip

Based on our research, a pop-up without an image has an average conversion rate of 2.1%. When you add a picture, that number nearly doubles 3.8%. That’s why we recommend adding some graphical elements to your pop-up design.

Sofia M.

Head of Partners at Sleeknote

2. Focus On User Experience

The last thing you want is to have users close your pop-up and exit the page. Prevent this from happening by thinking carefully about the pop-up’s placement and how many windows should appear within a single page.

Use a sidebar pop-up to notify users of important information without taking up too much screen space. The HubSpot blog utilizes sidebar pop-ups by clearly color-coordinating them to stand out from the rest of the page.

If you’re running multiple campaigns, limit how many pop-ups should be triggered in one session to avoid overwhelming your visitors.

As a rule of thumb, having three pop-ups is more than enough. One could ask users to sign up for a newsletter. Another could display a promotion when they’re showing exit behavior, and the third one could ask for feedback or offer assistance.

Most importantly, remember to adjust your pop-up design for mobile viewing. Make the font size smaller, rewrite the copy, or remove some visual elements to fit the smartphone screen. Always test your mobile campaigns before publishing.

3. Experiment With Timing and Scroll Triggers

The timing and trigger of a pop-up can determine its success in converting users.

Pop-ups generally work better on visitors who have shown some level of engagement with your website. If a pop-up appears right when a user arrives on your website, you may look too aggressive – leading users to close the window and move on.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for choosing the exact moment a pop-up should be triggered, so experimentation is key. Do a series of A/B tests to compare which second or scroll-depth will get you the most conversions.

Expert Tip

Our research shows pop-ups perform the best when they appear eight seconds after the user lands on the website or after they’ve explored at least 35% of the web page.

Sofia M.

Head of Partners at Sleeknote

4. Create a Sense of Urgency

The sense of urgency and scarcity are two ingredients you can use to win consumers, especially during huge sales like Black Friday.

Displaying a countdown timer is a common tactic for tapping into the fear of missing out. Knowing that the offer is limited may urge visitors to take action before the time or the product runs out. Awara includes an ‘add to cart’ button within their countdown pop-up to make it as easy as possible for the user to take action.

Alternatively, consider using your pop-ups to feature different offers every single day. This method is commonly used for Christmas advent calendar campaigns. Potential shoppers will feel intrigued to visit your website daily and check out what incentive they will unlock.

5. ‘Gamify’ Your Campaign

Gamification is a great way to get visitors to engage with your pop-up and take the desired action.

Corkcircle uses gamification to urge users to choose a favorite pattern to unlock an exclusive promotion.

You could also use a spin-to-win wheel as ColourPop does. Users can get between 2% and 15% off of their purchase, which they have to activate by creating an account later.

Expert Tip

We did an A/B test to compare the performance of a spin-to-win campaign and a classic one, and the numbers are pretty nice. The one with the game had a conversion rate of 22.26%, while the regular was 7.66%. This is the power of gamification.

Sofia M.

Head of Partners at Sleeknote

Start a Pop-Up Campaign on Your Website Today

Pop-ups don’t have to be annoying.

Having a clear goal and understanding your target audience will help you create campaigns that are meaningful and actually interesting for your site visitors. Get creative and experiment with your campaign to see what works best for your business.