Practical digital marketing insights, tested in the real world.
The useful question about an AI agent is not whether it can do a task. It is what happens the times it does the task wrong. Capability questions produce arguments. Failure questions produce decisions, and they stay answerable as the capabilities move. An agent, for the purposes of this article, is a system that takes […]
Start by establishing whether it ran at all, because a trigger that stopped firing and a task that nobody performed look identical. That distinction splits the whole diagnosis in two, and getting it wrong sends people to check credentials for a problem that was a renamed form field. Open the run history first. Everything below […]
You already have a sitemap. WordPress has generated one in core since version 5.5, served at /wp-sitemap.xml, with no plugin required. And you may not need it. Google's own threshold: you might not need a sitemap if "Your site is 'small'. By small, we mean about 500 pages or fewer on your site" and it […]
BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) is a DNS record that tells supporting inboxes to display your logo beside your messages, and it only functions on domains with DMARC at p=quarantine or p=reject. The logo must be an SVG in a specific restricted profile, and most inboxes require a paid certificate proving you own the […]
Every transactional email provider claims excellent deliverability, and none of them can promise it, because most of what decides delivery is on your side of the connection. Your domain's reputation, your authentication, your content, your bounce and complaint rates. A provider supplies infrastructure and hygiene. It cannot supply a reputation you have not built. What […]
Most AI email features optimise against open rate, and open rate stopped being a measurement in 2021. When Apple Mail Privacy Protection began pre-fetching images regardless of whether anybody opened the message, a large and unknowable share of reported opens became machine activity. Corporate security gateways add more, fetching images and following links before delivery […]
WordPress makes a set of SEO decisions for you at install, before you write anything. Four of them are wrong for most sites, and none of them is fixed by a plugin. That is the useful frame for this subject, because "WordPress SEO" is usually presented as a plugin choice, and the plugin is the […]
Pricing models in this category change more often than the products do, and every comparison article carrying prices is wrong within a quarter. So this page carries none. What does not date is the question of what happens when things go wrong, which is where these platforms actually differ and where comparison articles rarely look. […]
Generic output is almost always a context problem, not a prompt problem. A model with nothing specific to work from produces the average of what has been written on the subject. That is not a flaw to be worked around with better phrasing — it is the correct behaviour given no information. The fix is […]
No email service delivers your mail for you — sender reputation attaches primarily to your sending domain, and the domain moves with you between platforms. A sending platform sets the floor on deliverability. Your list and your sending behaviour set the ceiling. That is the honest frame for this comparison, and it rules out the […]
Choose your permalink structure once, at launch, and use the post name. /blog/your-post-title — short, readable, and it does not date your content. The reason to be deliberate is not that one structure ranks better. It is that changing it later breaks every URL you have published, and fixing that means redirecting all of them. […]
A DMARC aggregate report is a gzipped XML file sent daily by a receiving provider, listing every IP address that sent mail claiming to be from your domain and whether each one passed SPF, DKIM, and alignment. Reports arrive at the address in the rua tag of your DMARC record, one per provider per day. […]