Category Archives: Wordpress Guide

worpress web development

10 Reasons Why You Should Consider WordPress Web Development

Blogging Tips, Wordpress Guide

In the blogging world, WordPress is one of the most popular platforms to reckon with. This CMS – Content management system – which was primarily designed for blogging now, powers millions of large and small websites around the globe. Even enterprise level sites are not left out, as it also holds to capacity to power them.

Most Content Management Systems available today are highly becoming flexible and customizable, of which WordPress is chief. Due to its overwhelming flexibility, extensibility and outstanding ability to support businesses with adequate opportunities to scale, WordPress has risen to become very much popular. With its ability to support eCommerce, WordPress has experienced tremendous transformation over time.

Introduced as a simple blogging site in 2003, WordPress has risen to become a dominant open source web development platform. It has gone from being a mere ubiquitous blogging site to the world’s most popular content management system. WordPress web development has been sought after by Fortune 500 companies such as eBay and UPS, notable music icons such as Katy Perry and Jay-Z, and Topnotch publications such as CNN and The New York Times.

If you are looking to build a new website, here are some undeniable reasons why you should consider WordPress web development.

Easy to Use

WordPress is very easy to understand and easy to use. Even if you don’t have a web development company or a programmer on staff to assist you and you are unfamiliar with content management systems, it’s interesting to know that you can still build a professional looking website with WordPress.

Unlike its competitors, WordPress is renowned for its significant ease of use particularly in terms of administration. It has a much more intuitive administrative interface. With just a little effort you can install plugins and add content. Generally, using WordPress is both quick and simple.

As a matter of fact, you don’t have to rely on a web development company or be dependent on a web programmer to build a website on WordPress. Adding, editing, or removing content, images, and videos can be easily done with just a few clicks. All you simply need to do is to log in to your dashboard and carry on from there.

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

 

seo concept with bulb and gears

Inherently, WordPress is not built to be SEO-friendly, but you can fix this yourself through various ways. The WordPress platform is enhanced with a good number of efficient SEO plugins and extensions that can be used to enhance SEO on any site without much stress. Apart from being very effective, these tools are also very easy to configure.

Many WordPress websites are designed to be SEO friendly, thanks to the availability of simple and constant codes that make them suitable for Google indexing. Also, these components help to enhance customizability for pages that may require high ranking in search engines.

Customizable Themes

Themes allow you to make quick changes on your website design. Make your site look fresh and dynamic with attractive WordPress themes. In a bid to make the platform look more robust and highly useful, several web development companies and enthusiasts have worked together to provide users with an ample supply of customizable themes. Depending on your choice and convenience, there are several options of ready WordPress themes available that can be downloaded. Apart from helping to give your website a fresh look, you are bound to create a highly functional site through this simple process.

Strong Community Support

Worpress Community

One of the most apparent reasons for using WordPress is its strong level of community support. When compared to other platforms, this platform tends to be overwhelmingly supported by a thriving, engaged community. According to a recent survey, about 27 percent of the websites on the internet is managed by WordPress. A large community has been thriving on WordPress due to the large about of users. As a matter of fact, there are thousands of enthusiasts, developers, and designers out there to help if you get stuck.

Extend Your Site’s Functionality with Plugins

Just so you know, WordPress has millions of plugins that can effectively extend the functionality of any site. Whether you are looking to turn your site into an online store, track metrics for your site, do a podcast or integrate social media, there are pretty good chances that you find a plugin for any task you want to perform on WordPress. With these options, you can easily customize your site however you want to and this can be done with just a few clicks of a button.

Built-in and Ready to Go Blog

wordpress post dashboard

Blogging capabilities on WordPress are built-in and very easy to integrate as this is what the platform was originally created for. As a matter of fact, you can easily add the most recent blog posts to other of your site’s pages, set up comment capabilities and RSS/email subscriptions to your blog. This can go a long way in making your site highly interactive and even more dynamic.

Regular Updates

As an open source web development platform, WordPress provides ample opportunities for modification. Unlike websites created on sophisticated platforms, you can easily add new features and functionalities on your WordPress-based site without having to pass through any stress. In just 3 easy steps you can easily install the relevant plugins. Furthermore, the design and development community constantly provide users with credible feedback, improvements, and updates on new features and functionality.

Gain Full Control of Your Site

You stand to have full control of your site when you build it on WordPress. In fact, you need little or no support from a web development company to run your WordPress-based site. You can easily make simple updates to your site without having to wait for your web designer. Almost every aspect of your site can be controlled on WordPress.

Search Engines Love WordPress Sites

wordpress-seo-friendly

Most WordPress-based sites tend to have well-structured content and they’re also frequently updated. To this end, they often get meaningful ranking on search engines like Google. When compared to a static website, a WordPress site tends to rank very quickly on Google. In case you do not know, this can give you an edge over your competitors. As a matter of fact, Google even recommends WordPress for business sites.

No Code Required

wordpress code

As a self-contained system, managing WordPress does not require the knowledge of any HTML editing or FTP software, such as Dreamweaver or Adobe Contribute. You can easily upload image galleries, video files, documents, images, format text, create new blog posts or pages and even edit them without having the need for additional FTP or HTML software.

wordpress or blogger

Which CMS is better WordPress or Blogger?

Blogging Tips, Wordpress Guide, , ,

In today’s world, there is no business that can survive without its official website. Especially talking about the newer or the small scale businesses. A website will act as a medium for creating awareness about the different products and services among the visitors.

There are a number of web building platforms that are available for creating a website. These platforms will offer you a number of tools that will enable you to edit, modify and publish the content of a website. Two of the most common CMSs that are widely in use nowadays are WordPress and the Blogger.

Which CMS is better WordPress or Blogger?

Uncomplicated and Intriguing Interface

wordpress dashboard

If you are well versed with WordPress, then you would have read enough blogs about the ease of usage that the platform provides to its users. Any user can quickly familiarize himself to WordPress and start using it as compared to Blogger. Talking about the interface WordPress’s dashboard is much better than that of the Blogger.

Where Blogger is a mere blog posting platform, WordPress is an all in one solution for publishing a blog and developing websites. Among all the CMSs that are available for building a website, WordPress stands apart from all of them.

You Own Your Website, not Google

6 Reasons WordPress Is the Best Platform for Your Website

As WordPress is a third party application, you get to have a complete authority over your website. But with Blogger this is not the case. As Blogger is owned by Google, your website can be suspended in a situation where you do not follow or violate any of the policies drafted by Google.

You will receive a mail regarding the suspension of your website from Google. Usage of any kind of content that is duplicate is also against the policies of Google and will result in your website getting shut down.

Plethora of Design Options

In the WordPress Vs Blogger battle, one aspect where no other CMS, be it Blogger or any other can defeat WordPress, is the wide range of design options that it has on offer. With WordPress, you will get thousands of themes that will help you in designing your website and fulfil your requirements. Some of the themes will fit perfectly in the design of your website. This will save a lot of your time that you would have otherwise invested on customizing it.

However, with Blogger you only get a few number of themes and customization options. In terms of the overall look and feel the themes offered by Blogger are no way near with that offered by WordPress.

Better Search Engine Optimized

wordpress-seo-friendly

With respect to SEO, the websites that are built using WordPress are better optimized when compared with that of Blogger. WordPress will enable you to make use of the numerous plugins like W3 cache, Yoast SEO for keeping a track on the SEO status of a website.

With Blogger, you are all by your own while managing the SEO of your website. You don’t have the ease of using any plugins that will do the analysis for you. Therefore, optimizing your Blogger website is not that easy as it is in the case of WP.

Extend The Functionality of Website

wordpress post dashboard

In WordPress, you will get a plugin for basically any feature or enhancement that you want to add to your website. There are plugins for sharing your content over the social media, translate the language of the content, enhance the security of your website and much more.

You get to choose from a wide range of more than 40k plugins in WordPress. With plugins, you will be able to develop your website even if you are poor in coding. There are some simple copy paste functions that you need to do for designing your website.

Self-Host Your Website

WordPress gives you an option to self-host your blogs and websites. You don’t have to pay additional money for this. You have to pay the fees only for the hosting services. WordPress, when compared with Blogger, provides a much better option for long term purposes.

At an initial level Blogger is a good option but not in the long run. However, the lack of features and the urge to make your website stand apart from your competitors will persuade you to migrate your Blogger website to WP. Due to the number of options and features available in WordPress, it proves to be the best CMS platform.

WordPress Website Loads Faster

wordpress speed

A website developed in WordPress will tend to load much faster when compared with that of Blogger. There are certain plugins in WordPress like WP Super Cache which make sure that the factors that reduce loading speed like images are compressed that will allow your website to load quickly and smoothly.

A Blogger website makes use of a single HTML template for making any kind of desired changes. Due to this, there is a significant increase in the load times of a website. It also has a negative impact from the point of view of SEO.

Sell Your Website Easily

One of the major drawbacks of using a Blogger website is that you won’t be able to sell it. As such, there is no option for selling and Google will penalize you if you try to do so. So, down the line, if you feel that you would sell your website then WordPress would be the better choice. Blogger is a product of Google, you will have no control over it.

Google strictly follows its policies and will directly suspend your website or blog if you don’t adhere to them. However, WordPress is a self-hosted platform so you can easily sell your website whenever you want to do so.

In The End

Above points highlight the benefits of using WordPress as a CMS platform. Apart from these points, there are many other benefits that WordPress will offer you. Due to its ever growing list of features and attributes, most of the people are converting their existing website created in other CMSs to WordPress.

6 Reasons WordPress Is the Best Platform for Your Website

6 Reasons WordPress Is the Best CMS Platform for Your Website

Wordpress Guide, , ,

While having your own business website is bound to be the irreplaceable first step to ensuring a digital footprint, you need to ensure a look and feel that represents your brand well. It is because often a brand is judged by its website and any shortcoming on that score can easily undermine your brand value. So, any business brand before anything else needs to ensure a classy and sophisticated look and feel for their website. The irony is the cost of building a dynamic website is not negligible if you decide to develop it from scratch.

This is where WordPress as a content management platform comes as an invaluable solution for any business including startups and small local businesses. You can create a highly professional looking website with minimum effort and cost. Most important of all, you do not need to compromise on the features, design elements, user experience and loading time. This versatility and strength of WordPress made it the most preferred CMS for websites of all types and sizes. Let us introduce here 6 key reasons to choose WordPress for your business website.

Why WordPress Is Best CMS Platform

1. You do not have coding knowledge, it’s ok

wordpress post dashboard

For a business, especially a startup it is often beyond the financial capability to hire a professional web development company. This is precisely why many businesses prefer building their own websites by taking guidance from the online community. At the initial stage, it is not altogether a bad idea. The only constraint is probably your lack of coding knowledge. Well, it’s not a problem at all since a CMS platform like WordPress allows you building a sophisticated website just with a theme and a whole array of plugins to add features and functionalities.

You need to choose a theme that goes perfectly with your brand and business objectives.
There are thousands of paid and free themes to give your website ideal look and feel.
There are thousands of free and paid plugins to allow you give your website the features and functionalities of your preference.
Lastly, to help you utilize the theme and plugins there is a robust community help. WordPress developer community spread across the world offers answers to every critical question concerning development and technical difficulties.

2. WordPress is SEO friendly

wordpress-seo-friendly

The principal reason for businesses to have their own website is to become discoverable and build an audience for their business brand. WordPress, unlike most other CMS platforms, offers a clean and highly user-optimized interface. This help Google and other search engines list pages from WordPress websites easily. Here are some key aspects that make WordPress SEO friendly.

The clean interface makes it easier for search engines to crawl a WordPress website.
WordPress is highly mobile friendly which is a crucial criterion for search engine ranks.
WordPress is fast loading across devices. Quick loading time is a big criterion for search engine rank.

3. WordPress is highly customizable

Many business websites prefer WordPress as their platform simply because it is highly customizable and versatile. From the ease of custom designing your website to giving your website a bevy of sophisticated features, WordPress allows you an unmatched scope of customization.

You have thousands of WordPress themes for every business type and niche.
You can further tweak the theme to customize the look and feel even more.
There are hundreds of plugins and add-ons that allow you creating custom feature and functionality.
WordPress is a modern CMS which allow a variety of contents including images and rich media files to give your website a visually optimized feel.

4. WordPress allow better control and manageability

A business website should be built in a way so that it can be managed by different people within an organization easily. Moreover, it should be easy to update easily. A business website needs to bring changes from time to time and the CMS should ensure that ease. WordPress offers a business website exceptional ease incorporate changes and manage while allowing optimum ease of control for all actions.

WordPress offers different roles such as an administrator, editor, author, contributor, and subscriber. All these roles have a different level of control.
To bring any changes to a WordPress site you do no need to bring changes in the code. Without any coding knowledge, you can bring in changes to a WordPress website.
There are ready in hand options and tools to do changes in your WordPress website from time to time.

5. WordPress is built to deliver security

web security

Irrespective of the nature of your business and type of your website, you never can compromise on the security aspects of your website. In fact, the core of WordPress is designed to ensure optimum security for any website. WordPress is built to protect your site information and prevent any malicious act taking a toll on your website. What are the key elements that make security elements of WordPress awesome? Let’s have a look at them.

WordPress releases security updates from time o time to address all the latest security threats and concerns.
You can always strengthen your security with any of the hundreds of security plugins to ensure more safety.
Every subsequent version of WordPress comes loaded with more advanced security features.

6. Unmatched support and community help

wordpress plugin directory

Finally, WordPress stands unparalleled with its support mechanism. Having been there for more than one and half decade WordPress has a global community of developers who can come to your aid in building or managing a website all the time.
Here are some of the avenues and tools to avail support and help for your WordPress website.

The biggest reserve of support comes from official WordPress information database and support forums.

You have an array of online tutorials and courses including both free and premium ones.
Every theme and plugin have its separate forum for support.
Search Google for any WordPress difficulty and question and it is very unlikely that the search results will not offer several helpful answers for the respective queries.

With so much of resources and with so little to bear as a cost, WordPress comes as a natural choice for any small business website including startups. With WordPress powering your website you can build a modern feature rich website without spending a fortune.

wordpress widgets to boost blog visibility

7 Free Widgets to Boost your Startup WordPress Blog’s Visibility

Blogging Tips, Wordpress Guide, , ,

WordPress widget is basically a small block which is designed to perform a unique function. You can easily add such widgets in sidebars of your web page. These areas are available for widgets.

The widgets on WordPress were designed basically to provide a user-friendly and interactive way of giving total control to structure and design of your WordPress theme. You can easily drag and drop the widgets in a specific area. All you need to go to Appearance > Widgets section to check the list of widgets available and widget area in WordPress dashboard.

With the help of widgets in WordPress, you can easily add features and content in the widget areas of the theme that is generally sidebar. But these widget areas can be found in the footer, header, sidebar, or below the content, or any area in the theme. The widget areas available in your theme may vary according to the specific theme.

Most of the wordpress themes are widget ready and they are likely to have several widget areas. Themes are generally not needed to have areas for the widget. If widget areas are not found in your theme, it is sure that the theme doesn’t support widgets.

You can find several kinds of widgets available. By default, WordPress has several widgets, such as tag cloud, categories, calendar, navigation menu, recent posts, search etc. If recent post widget is dragged into the widget area, it can have the recent posts listed.

Generally, widgets are separate areas which contain codes to perform a specific and predefined function. Plugins also add their signature widgets to provide added the control to the user over the display of its functions. For example, OIO Publisher is a plugin widget which lets users add a separate banner ad area in the widget areas.

In this guide, I am going to introduce you to seven WordPress widgets that are quite useful and can help increase the visibility of your site in different ways.

1. Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnails

Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnails

WordPress features a recent posts widget by default. It showcases a simple list of recent posts. With the help of Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnails, you can easily show recent posts in your blog with thumbnails. For a thumbnail, it adds the first image in your post or a featured image. From the settings screen of widget, you can easily adjust the width and height of the image.

It is a simple and light widget that comes with plenty of options. It is based on the widely used default widget on WordPress “Recent Posts”. But it is extended to show more details on the posts like excerpts, thumbnails, and assigned categories.

It will add thumbnails from featured image or from the first image of the content on WordPress blog. If you don’t have a content image or featured image, it can let you show a default thumbnail. You can easily set its alignment. The thumbnail basically is aligned left to the post titles if they are featured in left-to-right languages. Otherwise, it will be aligned on right side.

2. Category Posts

Category Posts wordpress widget

As the name implies, this widget does nothing but simply shows recent posts from the category you select. It can also let you show post titles in the list or show thumbnail and excerpt. When it is used with Display Widgets, you can easily see the hidden widgets on specific WordPress pages.

With the help of Category Posts widget, you can easily place the list of posts linked from the same category in widget area or sidebar. You should activate “Williams Category Post Widgets” to use Category Posts widget.

Here are some of the most common uses of Category Posts widget –

  • You can make a menu-like widget in the sidebar in which posts are linked in a category.
  • Add thumbnail images and display a random post from any category you choose.
  • Show dates on time-based elements like News & Latest Announcements.

Here are some of the Common Features –

  • Change all Short Code options easily in customizer
  • Supports several short codes
  • Added option to use multiple widgets one after another for post offset
  • In order to edit shortcode, it can add customizer link on admin bar with just one click
  • Insert Shortcode buttons added to editor
  • Lets users to set dimensions and show post thumbnail by height and width.
  • Responsive Layouts with fluid images
  • Set hover effects for thumbnail
  • Enable excerpt filters from plugins and themes
  • Supports “Social Buttons on Posts” of Jetpack
  • Added option to activate excerpt filters from plugins and themes
  • Thumbnail can be set as default thumbnail
  • Change posts ordering.
  • Disable banner, social buttons in excerpt.

3. Simple Social Icons

Simple Social Icons

This widget is really very easy to add social icons to the sidebars. The widget’s settings include all the configuration options. You can pick the social media icon to link and add URLs of your profile. The icon can also be modified by choosing icon font color and background. By far, it is the best widget to add social icons. It is a customizable, user-friendly way to show icons with which visitors can be linked to several social profiles. By using it, one can easily customize size and color of icons, profiles to link to, and you can also align them to center, left or right from the widget form.

4. Google Maps Widget

Google Maps Widget

Fed up of slow and lagging Google Maps default plugins that take forever to install? The Google Maps widget gives the ideal map with a light-box and thumbnail that can be set up in minutes.

Google Maps Widget is the shortest and easiest way to integrate a map on the sidebar of your WordPress site. You can easily display Google Map in the empty area with this simple widget. So, when someone clicks on the map, it will open a lightbox popup to display a larger view of the map. To display location and address of your business, it is the best WordPress widget.

5. Testimonials Widget

Testimonials Widget

With the help of Testimonials Widget, you can randomly list or slide selected quotes, portfolios, texts, or reviews with videos or images on your blog. You can simply add testimonials through theme functions, shortcode, or widgets with tag and category selections and have several options to display, including specific or random ordering. For improved search results, Review Schema is also inbuilt.

The Testimonials Widget can easily add social proofing to the website. It can help you slide or list reviews through short-codes, functions or widgets. All in all, it is more than a typical Testimonials slider.

Key Features

  • Fade, carousel and slide transitions
  • Random display
  • Filter slideshow content through tags, categories or post ID of WordPress
  • Responsive Image Slideshow
  • Styled well for adapting easy theme
  • Slide content which is rendered with short-codes and compatible with shortcodes, such as Gravity Forms and WordPress galleries.
  • Slide text which is vital to rotate testimonials
  • Slide images which conduct responsive slideshow
  • Shortcode and widget ready
  • Performs video slideshows

 

6. Image Widget

Image Widget

Without writing HTML in a text widget, you cannot add an image to the sidebar. But it causes issues for the beginners who don’t know HTML and are unable to style image. But this problem is fixed with Image Widget. Users can easily add an image with WordPress media uploader. It also provides a user interface to add alt text, caption, and choose the image size. It is a simple widget which uses the default media manager of WordPress to add an image to your site.

Key Features

  • Manages image alignment and resizing
  • MU supported
  • Description & Title
  • Link image
  • It has given all fields optional.
  • Link to External Image, upload, or choose an image from media storage with the in-built Thickbox browser.
  • Responsive
  • You can override template for the theme

7. YouTube Channel Gallery

YouTube Channel Gallery

With the help of this widget, you can easily show latest videos on your blog from your YouTube channel directly. All the videos will be arranged perfectly in a grid layout which is also space efficient and makes it look more appealing. First of all, you have to setup and activate YouTube Channel Gallery plugin. Once the plugin is activated, display latest videos through “Appearance> Widgets” in a sidebar widget. Just drag and drop this widget to the sidebar.

This widget is very configurable. So, you have to install it. First of all, you have to provide a playlist ID or user ID in widget’s feed tab. To set thumbnail and player sizes, click on thumbnails and player tabs. Save changes once everything is done. YouTube can also work as HTML5 Player for mobile devices by using IFrame Player API of YouTube.

Summary

We hope you liked this post and it would help you pick the best WordPress widget to improve your site ranking and visibility as per your needs. By using the above widgets, you can easily improve your website’s overall presence and make it as lightweight as possible to attract visitors.

optimize wordpress speed

How to optimize your WordPress website for Speed and Performance

Blogging Tips, Wordpress Guide,

The time your website takes to load greatly contributes to the success of your online business. If it’s slow, it will turn your visitors away. In fact, if it takes forever to load, they may not even think twice to hit the back button before letting your website load completely.

Though WordPress, as a CMS, is very well-coded, a majority of webmasters mess their WordPress sites by choosing a poor web host, installing plenty of low-quality plugins, and filling it with piles of garbage.
But even if you do not do such things with your website, there is still a possibility for improving your website’s performance and speed. There are various techniques that you can leverage to optimize your WordPress site for speed and performance while boosting your conversion rate.

Steps to Optimize WordPress Speed & Performance

1. Use a Caching Plugin

Wordpress Caching Plugin

WordPress is a server side programming language which is written in PHP. This means whenever your website is visited, it submits a request to the server to process it and then displays it on the screen.

This makes your website slow when multiple users try to access your site. However, WordPress enables you to break this monotonous process and display a cached version of your website to the user by reducing calls to your server and preventing it from downloading the same files on the user’s system again.

In order to generate a cached version of your website, you need to use a cache plugin such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. A caching plugin enables your website to load static content such as JavaScript files, CSS, and images from a reliable caching source. It’s much faster to load your website from the cache instead of the server.
Additional caching features include Content Delivery Network (CDN) support, Gzipping, caching of feeds, minification and much more.

2. Enable gZip Compression

Wordpress GZIP Compression

The third most effective way of optimizing your website for speed and performance is gZip Compression. GZIP compression decreases the size of the web files including HTML, CSS, JavaScript files and images that are being transferred between your users and the server. GZIP compression compresses your files up to 70-80%, which are then sent to your visitor’s browser. But before rendering the files, the browser automatically decompresses it and displays the extracted files.

Note: To check if Gzip Compression is already enabled on your website, you can use https://www.giftofspeed.com online tool.

To enable GZIP compression, add the following lines of code to your .htaccess file.


  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
# For Olders Browsers Which Can't Handle Compression
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
  BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Enable GZIP in WordPress

Though this method is not always recommended as it involves PHP for enabling GZIP compression, it can be used by those who are new to WordPress and don’t know how to add code to the .htaccess file. But still, if it’s not the last option left, try not to use it.

Steps to enable GZIP in WordPress:

Navigate to http://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/options.php
Look for gzipcompression setting
Once found, change the value of GZIP field from 0 to 1

2. Enable Browser Caching

browser caching

As a matter of fact, many files on your website do not change including images, JavaScript files, CSS files and more. The most effective way to take advantage of this is to enable browser caching, which enables your users to store a cached copy of your site locally to speed up its loading time.
To enable browser cache for your website, you need to add the following lines of code to your .htaccess file.

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

The above code indicates how long a specific file must be stored locally. If the time expires, the files will be downloaded again automatically.

4. Optimize your images

optimize images

There is no denying the fact that visual content plays a crucial role in making your website more engaging and user-friendly. However, adding tons of images to your website makes your website a lot slower. So does this mean you should stop using them? Of course not! However, you need to ensure that the images you are using on your website are accurately optimized.

There are plenty of image editing tools that enable you to save optimized images without losing their quality. One such tool is WP Smush.it. It is a popular image optimization WordPress plugin that automatically smushes your images to get rid of all the additional information attached to it such as GPS coordinates, the camera used for the photo, creation date and more, thus decreasing their load time significantly.

5. Optimize your WordPress Database

optimize your wordpress database

If you have been using WordPress for quite some time, your database will probably be filled with tons of data that’re of no use. Thus, it’s important to optimize your database performance and speed.

Well, this can be done simply by using a WordPress plugin such as WP-DBManager, WP-Optimize or WP-Sweep plugin. It cleans up your WordPress database for orphaned meta, post revisions, trash, pending spam comments, auto-saved drafts and more.

Conclusion

Optimizing your WordPress website has become the need of the hour. Slow loading websites not only leave bad impressions on users but also influence your search engine rankings. Moreover, as reported by a survey, a web user tends to abandon a website that takes more than 3-5 seconds to load. I’m pretty sure, you wouldn’t want to be in the category of abandoned websites.

Before you optimize your website, check it’s current speed using Pingdom’s Site Speed Test to know how much your website has improved.

Wordpress beginner mistakes

WordPress Guide: 4 Typical beginner mistakes to avoid

tutorials, Wordpress Guide, ,

Avoid WordPress beginner mistakes : It’s a testament to our basic human nature that we learn from our mistakes instead of crawling in a ditch, praying for Earth to open up and swallow us whole.

Okay, I may be exaggerating a little.

Mistakes happen and we deal with them. The entire charade, however, is more of a nuisance than a learning experience when you can’t point your finger at the cause and resolve. This applies tenfold to web development, where so many things could go wrong at any given point.

In this post, we take a look at 4 typical WordPress development mistakes and how to deal with them (so you won’t have to waste hours dealing with the mess):

1. The website doesn’t appear in any known search engine result pages

Reason: Unless this is a recent development (your site showed up before but doesn’t anymore: Check Google’s Webmaster guidelines and your own site’s security) it means that you have kept it on ‘Privacy’ mode.

WordPress has an option that lets you choose whether you want to keep your site hidden (de-indexed) from the search engines or not. This setting comes in handy when developers are creating/customizing/or otherwise running maintenance on the website. Basically, it keeps the traffic from search engines off your site (Note: Only the search engine traffic, you’ll still get traffic from other sources: social media, PPC campaigns, etc.)

The Fix: Making your WordPress site visible to search engine (through the admin).

The change cannot be made by anyone who doesn’t have admin-level access.

What you need to do is:

  • Login to the admin panel
  • Go to Settings >> Reading screen
  • Uncheck the box titles “Search Engine Visibility: Discourage”

(Note: If it is already unchecked, check-and-uncheck again just to be sure)

  • Save changes

2. Certain themes and/or plugins fail to load

Reason: The theme/plugin (and any custom work/ modifications made by you) contains code that is deprecated by WordPress.

WordPress community is very proactive and usually, rolls out about 3-4 major version upgrades (and dozens of minor ones) to make sure the platform is running at the best of its capabilities without creating problems for those who are still on PHP 5.5 and previous version servers.

The Fix: There are several ways to make sure you are not getting beaten by outdated code.

  • Check themes and plugins: Use the plugins Theme Check and Plugin Check on a separate WordPress install to make sure they pass the latest WordPress theme/plugin review standards.
  • Enable WP_Debug
  • Use Deprecation Checker plugin and the Codex to keep up with all the functions deprecated by WordPress and their replacements.
  • Or you could go for theme developers like Chickthemes wordpress themes to all the work for you.

3. Installing WordPress in the WRONG place

Reason: You were probably unaware of the possibilities and consequences of WordPress installation in subdirectory vs. subdomain.

WordPress is a very SEO-friendly platform, and everyone knows that. But it’s not unheard of for a client with an existing website to wish for a WordPress “blog” or “shop” as a part/extension of the current website.

The trouble arises when you and/or the client forget to understand the SEO benefits and cons of WordPress installation in a subdirectory (www.domain.com/blog) and subdomain (blog.domain.com). They both serve different purposes in terms of online reputation, traffic, and yes SERP-rankings too.

The Fix: Here’s how to explain the difference firsthand to avoid drawbacks in the future:

  • A Subdirectory-blog is perfect when the client wants to increase the flow of traffic to the original website (www.domain.com). It’s also the cheaper and more manageable solution of the two as it’s controlled through the parent website.

The drawback is that the client gets no separate listing on SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

  • A Subdomain-blog will give separate listings on SERPs other than the original domain (you get listed separately from domain.com and blog.domain.com. The traffic to this blog is not counted into the parent domain. It’s a viable option if the parent domain has enough goodwill and reputation to kick-off a ‘new’ website in its name.

4. Not respecting WordPress’ Boundaries

Reason: In the creative/coding haze, developers often slip away from the basic, core structure of WordPress.

It sounds like a non-issue, but despite the inherent flexibility and scalability of the platform, it still needs to retain some form of its own to make sure you are still capable of working with it. The JSON REST API is great, but to work with WordPress-specific area of the live-integrated system you’re building, you’ll need to learn and respect the platform’s boundaries.

The Fix: Respect the standards WordPress puts in place. They’re there for your benefit.

For instance: Instead of writing CSS and JavaScript inline, put them separately in files and call them using wp_enqueue_scripts(), wp_head functions: It saves time, maintains consistency in design, lets you cache and minify the scripts and helps make revision easier. I fail to see one single disadvantage of this method, but enough developers still swim against this particular current obstinately.

Endnote

Learn from the platform, and grow with the community. The worst mistake you can make is to stay in the dark about the latest developments taking place within WordPress.

Get up, and keep up. You’ll be creating masterful interfaces in no time.