12 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Better Functioning of Your Site

Undoubtedly, WordPress offers a lot of features, still, there are several functionalities missing from its core software. And one of the best ways to leverage WordPress is to get the right plugins.

With WordPress plugins, site admin can change each element and customize it as per their preferences. There are more than 40,000 options available to choose from, excluding premium plugins. Among this stock, it can be difficult to choose the best for your website.

Below given some of the must-have free and premium WordPress plugins that can take your website to another level. Let’s have a quick glance.

1. Hummingbird

On an average, visitors don’t wait more than 8 seconds for a site to load and Google recommends to keep your site load time to the least, i.e. 2 seconds. To achieve this, Caching is the best and most effective way to increase your site speed.

Lightweight and fast, Hummingbird scans your site, caches, minifies, defers, combines,  and compresses, make optimization in-line with the Google PageSpeed. It turns your site into a speed machine.

2. W3 Total Cache

This plugin is designed to enhance server performance and page load speed by reducing download times. With reduced page load times, the overall performance of the site will be improved, helps you rank better in Google.

3. Defender

Defender helps you protect your site against hackers and evil bots with security scans, safety recommendations, vulnerability reports, customized hardening and blacklist monitoring.

As WordPress is one of the most popular and best options to create a website, this is a primary target for the hackers. Defender plugin can help make your security game stronger than ever.

This plugin searches website for vulnerabilities and if found something, let the owner know and patch those vulnerabilities in one click. It will help you even if your site is already hacked and also save the site from any upcoming disaster.

 4. Jetpack

It offers a complete suite of strong features for your site, including improved site performance, enhanced security, visitor engagement, and content tools.

Jetpack also offers an interactive, responsive, and lightweight mobile theme option, designed for tablets and smartphones.

5. Akismet

This plugin helps you filter out the comments from your blogs that you find spam. Akismet automatically checks all comments against its Akismet web service.

Users can also view the comments which have been cleared or flagged by Akismet with the history option.

6. Google Analytics +

It is necessary to track when and how users visit your website in order to check the areas where you can improve and attract more users. To get this, Google Analytics is a perfect tool and the Google Analytics + plugin brings all this information to the admin dashboard.

Moreover, with this plugin, you can boost your site’s performance by tracking certain tabs and working on them. These include tracking page views, visits, bounce rates, and average referrers and visit duration. You can also enable the advanced settings and track site’s demographic and analyze shopping behaviors.

7. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates an XML sitemap for the site. It is crucial to have an XML sitemap for your site to help search engine index your blogs in a better way. Sitemaps enable web crawlers to see your site structure and retrieve results efficiently.

8. iThemes Security  

This plugin helps you fix common loopholes in your site from the potential attacks. Because of the vulnerabilities that unknowingly enter your site due to some installed plugins, can make your site an easy-to-target option for the hackers and other evil bots.

9. Contact Form 7

With contact form 7, you can create as well as manage multiple contact forms. No more coding needed to create these forms as the mail content and form can be customized easily with its settings.

10. Snapshot

Snapshot lets you backup your site for restoration later. You can also save the backups in more than one location. backing up your WordPress site can save your time and efforts, even if the site goes down or gets hacked.

11. Ultimate Branding

With this plugin, you can add, change, or remove WordPress branding on the site or anywhere on the multi-site network.

When you handle your site and business simultaneously, it is important to look professional with your products and content. That’s why you can have a white labeling machine from WordPress.

You can also replace the WordPress logo, customize the admin panel, add your company name, customize login page, dashboard, admin bar, and footer, and every place where WordPress logo appears to get consistent branding for your site.

12. Optimize Database

WordPress keeps deleted posts, comments, pages, post revisions, unused tags, spam comments with its default settings. Until these sections are manually flushed from the site, they bloat, stick around, and slow down the site.

WordPress’ optimize database plugin helps you purge the database from the extra data tables that you don’t need such as expired transients. Once you have cleaned up the database, this plugin optimizes it for the smoother running site.

Hope this article has given you a clearer idea and helped you learn more about the must-have WordPress plugins you need for your site.

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Author Bio: Ritesh Patil is the co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech, leading healthcare mobile app development company in India, USA. He’s an avid blogger, loves innovation, and writes on diverse healthcare application areas. He works with skilled digital health app developers that has delivered innovative mobile applications. He believes in sharing knowledge and has leaned concentration on startups.

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6 Tips to Improve WordPress Loading Speed in 2017

Developing your business around WordPress site can be an amazing opportunity, but it comes with its pros and cons. It’s easy to use, intuitive and there are countless plugins, add-ons and similar features that can help you develop your website just the way you want.

 

On the other hand, biggest problem with developing a site with no previous experience can be its optimization. With so many things to keep in mind when maintaining your website, it may seem hard to grasp it all, but we’ve selected 6 tips that will help you increase the loading speed. With these you can get your website flying in no time.

 

 

Enable Caching

One of the quickest ways to speed up your loading time is to enable caching. With caching enabled at your site, there is no need for your code to keep generating one page all over again. There are quite a number of really helpful WordPress plugins you can use to help you with various types of caching on your site.

 

There is a down side to it all, however. It takes a little while to set it up, and it can be a bit confusing when you decide to update your site. Sometimes you have to specify whether you’re working on a live page, or cached one. It’s not hard to learn, and once you do, you will see how much it helps.

 

Enable GZIP Compression

Compressing the data transferred through your servers is something you should consider, if you want to increase your loading speed. Enabling gZIP compression for JavaScript, images or CSS helps lower the size of data transferred through the servers.

 

There are some ways you can enable this compression and the reason why it works so great is because it compresses the common strings made from a lot of repeated text and whitespace from CSS and HTML files. This way, page sizes and style sheets are reduced over 60%, which in return, increases your loading speed.

 

Find a Good Host

When deciding to take your business online, you have a lot to think about, and a lot of investments to make. It’s understandable that quite a number of people choose cheap hosting solutions, but this is not a good practice.

 

Higher the number the visitors, higher reliability from your server is needed. If you think of expanding, or professionally represent your business, good hosting is really important. With a good host that provides you with strong and stabile servers, your website is both safer and faster, so don’t worry about that extra few bucks – it will pay off.

 

Check for Unnecessary Plugins

Making your website as user friendly as possible is always a big plus, but do you really need 35 different plugins, some added to your site back when you were starting it?

 

Quickest way to speed up your website is to remove all those unnecessary plugins you have installed. Deleting those plugins, and themes is an easy process, and there are tons of useful tutorials how to properly address this issue. You should also remember to keep all your really useful apps and used themes up to date, to keep the loading speed of your site.

 

Optimize Images

Images are one of the most important elements in every website, and proper optimization is the key to great looking, yet fast website.

 

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that scaling images with HTML can be a true pain in the neck. You should always resize images before uploading them. Generally, images can withstand up to 70% compression rate without noticeably losing quality. There are lots of apps and plugins which can help you with optimization.

 

Smushing images is also a great way to optimize them. This process removes all the additional data from uploaded images, data like GPS coordinates, and camera model or image creation date. This way image size is dropped, which in turn helps your website work faster.

 

Clean Your Database

Great way to make sure your website is working properly and it’s using all of its potential is to optimize and clean your database occasionally. You can think of it like it’s just regular disk formatting and defragmentation on your PC.

 

Database optimization can be quite tricky. It requires monitoring code, finding slow queries, caching queries and optimizing server configuration. Even though this step should require professional help, there are some plugins you can use to easily optimize your website and increase your website’s speed.

 

Conclusion

Naturally, there are a number of ways to help your website loads faster, and these are just some we’ve gathered up for you. These tips can help your website fly, but you should always keep in mind that your business and your services are what visitors are coming for, so even though speed is important, it’s not everything. Regardless, there are lots of easy ways to speed up your website, with practically no trouble at all, and in this way, help you satisfy your visitors.

 

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Author Bio: Steven Clarke is a business consultant at WPCREATIVE WordPress Development Sydney. In his spare time, he likes to write about his ideas and share them with the world. Steven is a regular contributor to several websites.

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Which Managed WordPress Hosting Will be Best for Blogging?

Regardless of the type of business you are in – small or large scale, blogging will be an integral part of your business. From the innumerous benefits of having a blog, below are the top reasons for owning one:

• It will help you in driving traffic to your website.
• Positioning your brand name in the market.
• Increasing your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking.
• Building and maintaining lasting customer relationships.

Running a blog and maintaining it is not as easy as it sounds, but with CMS platforms like WordPress, it is!

 

Whenever we talk about blogging, WordPress cannot be missed out. It is one of the most used content publishing platforms that enjoys a 58.9% share in the CMS market (which is the maximum) as on 11th April 2017 per W3Techs.

 

WordPress is an open source software that helps you maintain everything from a simple personal blogging website to a large commercial site with hundreds of sites. But, there are many other factors that a user needs to ensure while going for a WordPress hosting like security of the site, uptime guarantee, use of plugins and themes, etc.

 

When you start a blog, you have less things to manage, but as your blogging business starts spreading wings your need for apt management also increases. Your site can face downtime issues due to excessive server load, lack of proper security features can lead to your data getting compromised. Eventually, a stage may come when more than developing your blog you will be caught in solving the technical issues. That’s a waste of time and resources.

 

 

So, what is the solution?

 

Considering the issues of WP management, many service providers like WPEngine, HostGator, ZNetLive offer Managed WordPress Hosting services.

 

Managed WordPress Hosting – complete management of your site

A managed WordPress hosting will allow you to leverage the power and simplicity of WordPress without having to maintain the regular updates, security, or other technical adjustments.

 

One of the biggest advantage of taking managed WP hosting is that you get a server space dedicated to your site needs, so you don’t necessarily need to worry about web cache or bandwidth – as your website performance would be nearly blazing fast.

 

You can get the maximum of your WordPress site if you are taking it from the right host. The right host should be able to:

• Provide complete security to your site through various security patches.
• Ensure that your data and other intellectual property is safe within the web control panel.
• Scan your website for all types of malware and can block any hacking attempts as well.
• Provide developer tools like version control and staging environment to manage your site effectively.
• Provide complete support, with a dedicated team who will look into the working of your site and handle any technical issues as and when they arise.
• Maintain daily remote site backups to ensure availability of your data.

ZNetLive’s Managed WordPress Hosting

ZNetLive has been providing web hosting services and cloud-based services and productivity solutions since a long time and is known for their quality products and on-time support facility. They also provide Managed WordPress hosting in India and around the world to help you manage your WordPress site effectively. They offer various WordPress hosting plans for meeting the requirement of all with – Starter, Standard, Professional, Premium and Enterprise plans all backed with the powerful management through the Plesk Onyx control panel.

 

Their latest WordPress toolkit 2.0 enabled managed WordPress hosting has got many additional functionalities and features to support your WordPress Environment. Let’s have a look at them:

 

A) Installation and Updates

• The latest update, allows one click installation of everything. With one click you can download WP which will further create a database with the DB user and create an admin account in WordPress and initialize its use.
• It also provides one click hardening feature that scans all your installation to protect your site against any suspicious activity.
• You can easily transfer your WordPress site from one host to another. As soon as you transfer, your site will be added to the WordPress toolkit automatically.
• They also let you develop a staging environment within the toolkit, where you can perform various coding activities without making changes to the live production site.

B) WordPress Development

• You can easily synchronize data between two WP instances on your server.
• You can manage all debug options in WP or on a per-instance basis from a single interface.
• It allows site indexing, with which you can enable or disable site indexing based on a per-instance basis by search engines.
• You can set password protection for your staging environment, so that only the authorized person can perform any development activity.

C) WordPress Maintenance

• You can make changes to all your installations either in one-click or manage each individually and have complete information regarding its version number, security status etc.
• Get the option to activate WP maintenance mode while adding any plugin, or themes with a single click.
• Get Easy and quick access to all plugins and themes with the ability to enable/disable any plugin on one or more instances or to remove them from any.
• Get the benefit of automatic updates from a central point of control.

D) Enhancements

• Run any WP-CLI command present on WordPress. Easily import database, create new users, update themes and much more.
• You can even automate WordPress Toolkit simply by connecting to its API or CLI.
• With Reseller management facility, you can manage all the WordPress instances that are owned by your customers that too from a single point of entry.

Apart from all the amazing features, they provide complete support to help you manage everything with ease. So, if you are looking to buy managed WordPress hosting then ZNetLive is worth a shot.

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The 5 Common WordPress Mistakes Must be Avoided by Photographers

WordPress is the most frequently used CMS platform on the web. It is an ideal platform for those who want to display their creative stuff to the world. Most of the professional photographers are using this platform to show off their portfolios and artistic piece of work to a large number of web audiences.

Undoubtedly, WordPress is considered to be the most convenient content management systems. But, many of the photographers don’t use it to its maximum potential and do commit some common mistakes. If used correctly, you can create the world class photography website with ease. Although, it is easy to use platform, most of the users end up with some common WordPress mistakes.

In this blog post, I will share the top five WordPress mistakes that every photographer site owner should avoid while creating a WP website.

1. Forgetting about Content Delivery Network

One of the crucial factors that determine the accessibility of site is the website’s speed. Location of the server can affect the rate of a page load. This means the closer your visitors are to your site’s content, the faster their web page will load.

To improve the speed of your site, you should make a use of Content Delivery Network. Many of the photographers forget about using CDN services and then end up with a sluggish site.

You can use CDN service to offer a team of servers located across the world that includes copies of your static media content.

There are various CDN service providers on the web market. You can select the most suitable option according to your business needs and specifications. Amazon Web Services S3 account is one of the most popular CDN service providers across the web. It is affordable and affiliates well with the W3 Cache Plugin.

2. Non-Readable Image Filenames

Most of the photographers overlook the image filenames while uploading an image to the site. It is one of the essential tools that can increase the ranking of a site on search engine platforms. Instead of using a generic filenames like “Image 1”, or automatic filename numbers generated by your camera, you need to assign filenames that can improve your search results with ease.

You can use Descriptive keywords for filenames on the web. For an example, if you want to upload a black leather shoes on your site, then label the photo as “black-leather-shoes.jpg.” Try to use a dash (-), instead of blank space – as dash increases visibility by 20 percent.

3. Forgetting to assign Featured Image

WordPress 2.9 incorporated a “Featured Images” features that most of photographers fail to use. This feature enables you to assign particular posts, pages, and galleries to be features. In fact, many WordPress themes use this feature to craft thumbnails on the homepage and archive pages.

However, the WordPress 3.1 hides the Featured Images option. If you want to enable the featured image box, you will need to click on the Screen Options link in the right corner while editing a post or page -> Check the feature image box to activate the feature.

4. Photographers use Flash content

It will be better if you avoid using flash. If you use Flash content, you will need to ensure whether you have an alternative non-flash site that defines the content added in the Flash or not.

If you want to make your content searchable, then don’t use Flash for your WordPress website.

5. Forgetting to resize image files before uploading

While uploading your original, high-resolution images in WordPress, you are generating your digital negatives for downloads. Thus, it is good to resize the images to the maximum size that will reflect the integrity of the image without disturbing its quality.

Conclusion

If you want to run a successful Photography business, you need to avoid these common WordPress mistakes. You can make the use of proper structure, install WordPress plugins and themes carefully.

Author Bio

Maggie Sawyer is a professional web developer, a blogger by hobby and expertise in providing the best convert psd to wordpress theme services at very affordable range. Presently she works for MarkupHQ Ltd., a web development service provider company with a global reach. She passionate about sharing ideas and thoughts related to wordpress customization. Connect with her on Google+ and Twitter.

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Learn How Salesforce and WordPress are Integrated Today

One of the services that is provided on the Internet today is Software As A Service (SaaS). This is where some software resource is hosted in the Cloud and businesses can access it through their browsers on a subscription basis.

 

One of the software that is offered in this way is the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. This is a resource that helps businesses to attract new clients, get closer to their current ones and eventually convert them into loyal customers.

 

Another type of software that is offered is the WordPress Content Management System (CMS). This one helps businesses to build and maintain company websites and portals. These online resources are very popular among businesses today. Initially, they were run separately but they can now be integrated to work cooperatively.

 

How is this done? Read on to find out.

 

Integration applications

There are some specially constructed applications that can help businesses to integrate WordPress and Salesforce. They are developed by the WordPress development team and posted in the WordPress Plug-In Repository. Some of these applications are free to download while others require purchase. They have some unique characteristics which are:

• They are easy to install
• They can be installed across your entire Salesforce architecture
• They allow you to retrieve data from multiple forms at the same time

 

How are these applications helpful to your Salesforce CRM and your business as a whole? According to the salesforce git, they help you to retrieve information about visitors and customers who view your company's WordPress website. This information is important to a business because it can help the business to create leads and follow them up until they get new customers. There are various sources of this information.

 

They include:

• Subscriptions to e-newsletters
• Reports of recruits who have volunteered for jobs online
• Reports full of people who have registered to attend events

This is the type of information that these applications are capable of retrieving for you. Read on to learn about the specific applications.

 

Integration applications

As indicated above, some of these applications are free while others require to be purchased. The free integration applications are:

• WordPress to Lead
• Gravity Works

These two applications are available for free on the WordPress Plug-In Repository. They will collect data from the website and push it to the Salesforce CRM. They can also allow you to manipulate more than one form at the same time.

The premium applications that require payment include:

• Click & Pledge FaaS
• Zapier
• Snap Logic
• Visualforce
• Salesforce API

These premium applications are capable of many more activities than the freely available ones. They can perform collection of complex data from WordPress websites and channel it to the Salesforce CRM. With this information, the CRM can create contacts, cases, leads and identify opportunities for the business.

 

Conclusion

Integrating the WordPress CMS and the Salesforce CRM is a great business strategy. With more information coming in from WordPress, you can use the Salesforce CRM to create high quality customer relationships and follow more leads to greater revenue. These applications can help you to achieve this for your business.

 

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Author Bio: David Wicks is a WordPress developer. He plays a major role in developing these integration applications for businesses across the globe. He has been quoted in a number of Salesforce and WordPress articles, interviews and salesforce git posts and shared that knowledge in this report.

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Top 9 Social Media WordPress Plugins That Drive Huge Traffic

Social media has become the buzzword of the online world and it is extremely imperative for webmasters to incorporate social sharing buttons on their website in order to drive traffic from such web giants.

 

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn host millions of active users. In fact, according to a recent study, Facebook has 1,590 active users followed by Twitter with 310 million active users.

 

Thus, by incorporating social sharing and bookmarking buttons into your site, you allow your visitors to quickly share your content on their accounts to drive more traffic to your website.

 

Since WordPress has dozens of useful social sharing plugins, we compiled a list of top best social media WordPress plugins to help you narrow down your options and choose only the best.

 

1. SumoMe

SumoMe is a free and impressive social sharing WordPress plugin that is equipped with features of premium plugins. The plugin lets you monitor your site with the help of click analysis feature. 

 

SumoMe has been used by many big online brands such as Social Media Examiner, The 4 Hour Work Week, the Chive, 24JG, Airbnd and so many more.

 

 

Impressive features of SumoMe:

• Comes integrated with heat map feature to help you understand what's actually working on your website
• Also enables you to increase your daily signups by 20% with List Builder
• 100% fully responsive and highly customizable

2. Monarch Social Sharing Plugin

Developed by Elegant Themes, Monarch is a popular premium social media plugin that offers more than 20 social sharing networks to add to your site. In addition, the plugin lets you add the sharing buttons at a wide selection of locations including above and below content, floating sidebar, on images and videos, automatic pop-up and automatic flyin.

 

 

Impressive features of Monarch Social Sharing Plugin:

• Comes with 6 automatic Pop-up and Fly-in Triggers
• Integrated with 20 social networks to choose from
• Lets you display follow buttons with a short-code and in any widget area
• Has a clean, customizable design
• Also lets you choose Hover effects, Colors and Button shapes

3. Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress

Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress is yet another popular social sharing WordPress plugin that offers a comprehensive solution for your social media integration needs. The plugin offers you a range of features and options to work with and customize the sharing buttons as per your needs.

 

Moreover, Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress is very flexible and versatile that automatically adjusts its functionality to meet your requisites.

 

 

Impressive features of Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress:

• 100% fully responsive and retina ready
• Offers unlimited possibilities of views
• Has colored, dark and light skins
• 11 counter positions and 6 total counter positions.
• Popups and fly-ins to encourage social shares.
• Support for various positions.
• Support for short-code placement.
• Equipped with Sticky Mode View option
• Has more than 30 social networks to choose from
• Optimized for speed and is super light

4. Social Buzz WordPress plugin

Social Buzz WordPress plugin makes it super easy for you to integrate social sharing buttons into your website while capturing your visitors' attention. The plugin allows your audience to share by providing visual feedback along with aesthetically appealing social share buttons. The plugin also adds a shares graph to every post you publish on your website.

 

Impressive features of Social Buzz WordPress plugin:

• Equipped with 3 inbuilt styles
• Works for blog page, webpages and posts
• Is super easy to install and configure
• Has super lightweight code
• Supports multiple browsers including Opera 10+, Firefox 3+, Chrome 3+, iOS Safari and IE9+
• Integrated with awesome Social Buzz Graphs

5. Social Warfare

Social Warfare is a popular and most preferred social sharing plugin that not only allows you to integrate aesthetically appealing sharing buttons to your website but also gives access to a number of features.

 

Social Warfare is one-in-all plugin that fulfils your social sharing needs.

 

 

Impressive features of Social Warfare:

• Offers support for various social networks
• A number of eye-catching themes.
• Display total and individual share counts.
• Display share counts only when above a specified number.
• Display floating share buttons.
• Add “click to tweet” boxes within your content.
• Add custom tweet text for individual posts.
• 100% Fully mobile responsive

6. Image Sharer

Image Sharer, as the name suggests, lets your audience share your images across social media networks. Image Sharer is basically an app, which is also developed by SumoMe team and supports a range of social networks. Sharing images gives you an extra edge over your competitors and help you drive more traffic.

 

 

Impressive features of Image Sharer:

• Built-in URL shortener makes your shared links look much cleaner.
• Make your images shareable for Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and/or Yummly.
• Add to a variety of places, for example – bottom left, middle, top right etc.
• Lets you select which devices or pages these image sharing buttons are added to.

7. Shareaholic

Shareaholic is more than just a social sharing WordPress plugin. It is not only compatible with WordPress but also with other Content Management Systems. The plugin offers a range of looks for your sharing buttons, all of which automatically captures the attention of your audience.

 

 

Impressive features of Shareaholic:

• Support for social analytics.
• Offers support for Shopify, Drupal, Tumblr, WordPress and more
• Support for short-code placement.
• Control whether or not share counts are displayed.

8. WP Social Sharing

Easily add social sharing buttons of top 6 social networks including social giants such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn with WP Social Sharing WordPress plugin. The plugin comes with settings page that lets your automatically display sharing buttons on your site.

 

 

Impressive features of WP Social Sharing:

• Add share buttons using short-code.
• Add Twitter usernames to your tweets.
• Resizes for mobile devises.
• Allows you to customize social button text.
• Supports 6 of the main social networks.

9. Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar

Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar is yet another free social sharing WordPress plugin that lets your users share your content across 9 popular social networks including YouTube, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Google/+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. The plugin gives your audience tools to share product details, your contact details and your content.

 

 

Impressive features of Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar:

• Supports a range of social networks including Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook
• Lets you display share buttons on your categories/archives, posts, pages, or home page.
• Lets you hide the floating buttons for mobile devices

Author Bio:

Terra Davis is a professional WordPress developer who has vast experience in developing a web application in less time. She is associated with Stellen Infotech, a leading firm offering WordPress design services to global clients. She loves to share her knowledge with others on the web in her free time.

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Get 50% OFF on Tesla Themes

Tesla discounts are here!!

 

Telsa, the website theme cart website offers 50% OFF on all themes on the occasion of their 3rd anniversary.

 

Tesla themes are neatly designed, SEO optimized, responsive and fast loading. There are whole 50+ templates on the website to grab from.

 

If you are a blogger or an internet marketer, this is time to grab a few wonderful themes with 50% anniversary discount. This offer can be claimed till 31st of May of 2016.

 

 

The popular themes on Tesla like Megalith, Hotelia, Narcos, E-Event, Daily Post are even available for 50% cut off prices.

 

How to buy Tesla Themes for 50% Off

Go to TelsaThemes.com and search for your favorite theme. Enter the following coupon code while checking out. The offer will then be applied to your cart price and the total price will be shown. Checkout paying the half amount shown.

 

Coupon Code: TESLA3YEAR

 

Note: This offer will be valid till 31st of May 2016. If Tesla Themes extends this offer, we’ll let you know.

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WordPress Shortcodes and Plugins You Might Want to Try

WordPress shortcodes and plugins are a great way to improve the functionality and add more elements to your website. If you have been working with WordPress for quite some time, you'd probably be using a lot of shortcodes and plugins to perform various tasks. Shortcodes are basically WordPress-specific code written to help you to do various creative things without having to mess around with the code of the core software. To put it in a non-technical user's terms, shortcodes are shortcuts to a long script or length piece of code.

 

 
Though WordPress comes with an assortment of shortcodes that can be used within your website pages and posts, there are a whole lot more shortcodes offered by WordPress, with immense flexibility. Shortcodes can be integrated into your website with the help of a plugin or you can do it manually. However, the bigger problem is to find the right shortcode and plugin that suit your website needs and demands.
 
Today, in this article, we are going to share a list of some useful WordPress shortcodes and plugins to jazz up your website without the risk of having to re-do everything when you plan on using a different theme.

 

WordPress Shortcodes:

1. Post Content Shortcodes

Post Content Shortcodes is a plugin that allows you to add two shortcodes i.e. Post list and Post content.

 

 

[post-list]

This shortcode showcases a list of posts nested in another post. The shortcode also allows you to add additional arguments including excerpts, display images, post types/statuses to use, order options and more.

 

[post-content]

It allows you to showcase the content of a single page or post inside another page or post. The shortcode needs an argument to specify the post ID. Other arguments such as post title, post excerpt and a featured image can also be used.

 

2. Shortcode

 

Shortcode is a simple yet powerful plugin that offers a variety of shortcodes to improve your site's functionality. Some of the codes included in this plugin:

[postcountbr] – Displays the count of the published blog posts
[catcountbr] – Displays a count of categories that includes one or more than one post
[tagcountbr] – Displays the count of tags that includes one or more posts
[totalwords] – Displays the count of words in published blog posts
[commentcount] – Displays the count of approved comments
[pagecount] – Displays the count of the published pages

 

3. Column Shortcodes

 

Column Shortcodes, as the name suggests, allow you to create columns inside your pages and posts. The plugin comes with a shortcode selector pop-up that lets you choose the column width you need. Once you have selected the column width, it will automatically be integrated into the post editor. Column Shortcodes come with 10 column widths ranging from full width to one-sixth width.

 

4. Insert AdSense Ads

This shortcode does not come with any plugin and can be easily added to your blog. It allows you to display AdSense ads within your posts and pages.
 
Shortcode: [adsense]
 
Code:

function adsense_shortcode( $atts ) {
extract(shortcode_atts(array(
'format' => '1',
), $atts));
switch ($format) {
case 1 :
$ad = '<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx";
/* 234x60, created 16/09/08 */
google_ad_slot = "0834408702";
google_ad_width = 234;
google_ad_height = 60;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>';
break;
}
return $ad;
}
add_shortcode('adsense', 'adsense_shortcode');

 

5. Show Related Posts

Show Related Posts, as the name suggests, allow you to display related posts above or below the content.

Shortcode: [related_posts]

Code:

function related_posts_shortcode( $atts ) {
extract(shortcode_atts(array(
'limit' => '5',
), $atts));
global $wpdb, $post, $table_prefix;
if ($post->ID) {
$retval = '<ul>';
// Get tags
$tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID);
$tagsarray = array();
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
$tagsarray[] = $tag->term_id;
}
$tagslist = implode(',', $tagsarray);
// Do the query
$q = "SELECT p.*, count(tr.object_id) as count
FROM $wpdb->term_taxonomy AS tt, $wpdb->term_relationships AS tr, $wpdb->posts AS p WHERE tt.taxonomy ='post_tag' AND tt.term_taxonomy_id = tr.term_taxonomy_id AND tr.object_id = p.ID AND tt.term_id IN ($tagslist) AND p.ID != $post->ID
AND p.post_status = 'publish'
AND p.post_date_gmt < NOW()
GROUP BY tr.object_id
ORDER BY count DESC, p.post_date_gmt DESC
LIMIT $limit;";
$related = $wpdb->get_results($q);
if ( $related ) {
foreach($related as $r) {
$retval .= '
<li><a title="'.wptexturize($r->post_title).'" href="'.get_permalink($r->ID).'">'.wptexturize($r->post_title).'</a></li>
';
} else {
$retval .= '
<li>No related posts found</li>
';
}
$retval .= '</ul>
';
return $retval;
}
return;
}
add_shortcode('related_posts', 'related_posts_shortcode');

WordPress Plugins:

1. Members

WordPress Members plugin gives you complete control over your blog by offering an intuitive and user-friendly user interface for WordPress's robust cap and role system. The plugin is a content, role, and user management plugin that was introduced to improve the functionality of this content management system. Moreover, the plugin is a components-based system and thus, it allows you to use only those features you want.
 
Additional features included:

• Comes with a users widget and login form widget
• Allows you to give content permissions
• Integrated with clone roles
• Has explicitly deny capabilities

2. Related Posts by Zemanta

Related Posts is the most loved feature in WordPress that allows webmasters to show related posts above or below the content to hold the interest of the visitors. Related Posts by Zemanta is a great plugin for suggesting related posts from the archives at the end of a post.

 

 
Additional features included:

• Comes integrated with in-text links which are similar to related posts
• Allows your readers to explore other related content by automatically linking to other published posts
• 100% fully responsive and customizable

3. Ecwid Shopping Cart

Ecwid Shopping Cart is easy to use, secure and powerful online store solution that allows you to add a full-fledged shopping cart to your WordPress powered website.

 

Additional features included:

• Offers immense functionality
• Has 40+ payment options and secure HTTPS checkout
• Offers support for 45 languages
• Comes with a free e-commerce support

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About Author: Anna Lewis is a professional WordPress Developer and currently working with Wordsuccor Ltd., One of the best Outsource WordPress Development Company. She is a passionate writer and has actively writing useful blogs and articles about technical stuffs.

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How to Secure Your Website from Hackers

This guest post was contributed by Caroline on behalf of Secure Thoughts, one of the best possible online sources for information regarding internet security.

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Hosting a website can be very useful in the Internet Age. But if that website is not protected, then you, your data, and the data of your visitors, clients, and potential clients is in danger. Thus, keeping your website protected is of utmost importance. Fortunately, there are simple steps that can be taken to protect your website from these hackers:

 

 

Stay Updated and Up-To-Date on Everything

Staying updated and up-to-date is the most important and simplest means of protecting your website from hackers. But staying “updated” means several different things:

 

First, stay updated with the latest news and information regarding the most current hacking threats. You can do this by paying attention to trustworthy periodicals, websites, blogs, podcasts, and radio programs that focus on the nature of hacking, current hacking threats, and computer security. By doing this, you will be better aware of the dangers threating your website and will, thus, be able to take proactive measures to prevent being hacked.

 

Second, because hackers are constantly devising new ways of infiltrating their target, it is necessary to keep all platforms and scripts up-to-date. After all, platforms and scripts are often times updated in order to better protect the user from these destructive and hostile invaders.

 

Third, install all the latest security plugins for the platforms or scripts used by your website and update them as soon as updates are released. Security updates are created for a reason: They are there to protect you and your website.

 

Further, there are also many third-party security applications that can be used with various platforms or scripts. These can provide an added layer of security. Prices vary with some, like Acunetix WP Security, costing nothing at all. In any instance, a little bit of research can go a long way to discovering which of these might be useful for your website and keeping your website more protected.

 

Put a Firewall between Your Website and the Hacker

Nonetheless, even by staying updated and up-to-date, your website still remains vulnerable. A web application firewall (WAF) better alleviates this vulnerability by reading all of the data that passes between your website server and the data connection. Reading this data means that known malware, Trojans, spyware, or other unwanted entities can be traced to their origin and deleted before they infect your website or computer system. Thus, your data remains a bit more secure.

 

Protecting Your Website Means Protecting Your Computer

Defending your website does not only require, however, that you build a layer of security around your website. If a hacker wants to access your website badly enough, he will stop trying to break the lock on your window and steal the key to the front door, that is, rather than hacking your website, he will attempt to hack into your computer system. There, he can gain access to your website as well as all sorts of other personal information.

 

The first way to protect your computer is reactive but still effective: install anti-hacking software and run it regularly (at least once weekly but daily if possible). Find any unwanted entities left by these hackers and then delete or quarantine them; this can be one of the more effective means of removing the backdoors hackers may have placed on your computer.

 

A second, more proactive, and, thereby, more effective means of protecting your computer system (and website) is to prevent hackers from first accessing the gateways to your personal files and folders that constitute it at all. Perhaps the most efficient means of doing this is to install a virtual private network (VPN). Essentially a VPN uses a third-party server to encrypt your data whenever you access the internet. By using a VPN, a hacker will be unable to trace your internet usage back to you: it will be re-routed to a server elsewhere. The data you share online is thus secure and, so too, is your website. You can research more information about VPNs to find the one that has the features that are right for you.

 

Closing Remarks

In short, while there are many other ways to protect your website from hackers, the simplest way is by combing these three dimensions of security: 1) stay updated and up-to-date on everything, 2) use a WAF to trace information as it travels between the website server and its data connection, and 3) prevent entry into the website indirectly through the use of anti-hacking software and a VPN.

 

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* If you have any complaints regarding this guest post, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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Possible Solutions to DNS Errors After Changing URL in Webmaster Tools

Bloggers and webmasters often encounter DNS errors in Google Webmaster Tools. The message saying “Over the last 24 hours, Google bot encountered 40 errors while attempting to retrieve DNS information for your site. The overall error rate for DNS queries for your site is 14.8%.” will worry you till it is resolved.

(The values seen in bold are variable from site to site)

We will discuss the possible solutions to this problem and will try to find a solution(for which you came here) that can solve your problem by the end.

Solution #1:

Check for error rating – If the error rating is closer or equal to 100%, check if name servers are correctly configured or not. Go to your domain registrar’s dashboard that is provided to you when buying the domain and set the values correctly. If you have no technical knowledge to change them for yourself, ask the registrar without any hesitation.

If you find no clue of how to contact your domain registrant, please check the email format designed by our friend +Rohan Chaubey:

To The [company name] Customer Support Team,

I recently bought a domain from your site. I am facing some DNS errors after changing the URL in the Webmasters tools. While checking for error rating I wanted to verify if name servers are correctly configured or not.

I possess no technical knowledge to change them myself. I would highly appreciate if your staff could help me in getting them configured correctly.

I am ready to bear any charges for your time and service if needed. Thank you so much for your time and consideration. I look forward to hear back from you soon.

Thanks,
[Your name].
[Account details or web address].

Solution #2

Upgrade your hosting plan – If the error rate is less than 100%, the problem might be caused due to server overload. This happens mainly due the following 7 reasons:

1. Uncontrollable amount of natural web traffic trying to access the site within the same time.
2. Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) attacks on the server where you website is hosted.
3. Uncontrollable amount of unusual or bot traffic sent to your website.
4. Affected web browsers and computers due to viruses and worms.
5. Because you have hosted your website on a limited capability host and you get excess number of client requests to access that page that your server cannot handle.
6. Low speed internet connections finding it difficult sending request to servers and receive the response.
7. Maintenance or repairing of web servers

The possible solution to this problem is upgrading the resources to your server and improving the configuration that can handle ample of client requests at once. Also, consider security features in order to avoid hacker attacks on your website.

Solution #3

Fixing DNS problems on your own computer – Sometimes, the DNS configuration on your own computer might get disturbed due to the recent changes you have made to your network or the changes made by your ISP.

To detect if the error is with your computer, ask your friends to check if they could open your website without any glitches on their side. If they could open your site normally from their side, it would definitely your computer configuration problem.

I have faced this situation in the past once and worried why my website alone is not working on my side. Later, with the help of my online friends, I could figure out the real problem is and changed and back the DNS configuration from Google to default.

Solution #4

Fetch as Google – This is the simplest solution ever for this problem. Use ‘Fetch as Google’ option in Google Webmaster Tools to tell Google bot to re-crawl your website once. It will Google to update the status of your website.

Perform this step even after solving the problem once. It will be helpful in reducing the ‘URL not found’ errors due to this DNS blackout.

Hope these solutions would help you get your problem solved. Please share if you have any other or better solutions than specified ones. We’ll update them in the article with an attribution of your name.

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Also I would like to thank Rohan Chaubey, the wise soul in young body for helping us out with the letter format to contact the hosting providers. He’ll be with us from today, if you need any other help regarding the composing of any emails

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5 Tricks to Speed Up Your WordPress Site for Fast Page Loading

Do you have a WordPress blog? That’s why you are here, right. No one likes a snail-like website in this world of pace. So optimizing your WordPress site for speed is very much important. WordPress is a ready-made platform. It can do wonders for sure. But the biggest disadvantage is its page load speed. Comparing with the Google’s kid (Blogger), WordPress is very slow. But you can make your site load like a rocket by doing some tweaks. Here I am sharing some useful tricks to boost the loading time of your WordPress site.

 

Ready for the kill? Here we go.

 

 

1. Wisely Choose Your Hosting Providers

Hosting is the heart of a WordPress (self- hosted) site. We have to choose it wisely because you are very well aware of what happens if the heart stops working. There are many types of hosting like shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers and so on. Don’t be obsessed with the words of providers. Think thrice before purchasing from a host. If you are planning something big, don’t hesitate to spend some extra bucks. Because it is better to stay live rather than go offline after getting good traffic.

 

2. Use a Good Cache Plugin

This is an extremely important step. Because a good cache plugin can make or break your blog. In a site, some elements can be cached to speed up the overall performance. The fact is we need a third party to make elements cached. Cache plugins effectively do this job. There are two major cache plugins, W3 Total Cache, and WP Super Cache. Both of them are effective. Be careful not to install unpopular cache plugins. There are so many features like browser caching, minify etc.

 

3. Optimize Your Images

If you have a regular website, most of the hosting space is occupied by images. Higher the image size, slower the page speed. So don’t upload pictures with large size. You can make use of online tools like compressnow.com to reduce the size. There is also a plugin to do this job, called Smush.it. Install this plugin and it will compress your images automatically to a great extent. But I recommend you to compress your images with ‘compressnow’ and then upload it. This will do wonders.

 

4. Reduce the Number of Plugins

Plugins are a superb feature of WordPress. But too much of anything is poisonous. So don’t install all the plugins you hear about. Use your senses and know your needs. Then install only that plugins you extremely want. There are some plugins like SumoMe which can do multiple tasks like social sharing and list building. This way we can decrease the use of plugins. Increasing the number of plugins will cause to rise the database size.

 

5. Optimize the WordPress Database

WordPress is mainly written in PHP. So it is making use of the databases. Increasing database size will make your blog website a snail. We have a few seconds to impress our first- time visitors. So make sure to have a site with load speed at least under 2 seconds (1 second is excellent). If you don’t know how to optimize database, make sure you have WP- Optimize or WP- DB Manager in your plugin list. Both of them are good plugins and we can schedule optimizing tasks.

 

What do You Think?

There are some more tweaks to flash- load your website. You can enable lazy load effect for images and use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). There are so many WordPress resources like PHPMatters with which you can learn the utilization of it. Let me know your opinion about this tweaks after trying.

 

If you want to know more, you can also refer to some other speeding up suggestions.

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Web Design Issues To Take Care Of, For Bloggers?

This article is written by Sheela Joby, a freelance writer with an experience of 10 years. Apart from writing she is into photography, traveling, music etc. You could reach her at sjindia2013@gmail.com

 

She has written some more article on Amfas Tech. You can check them out here.

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Consumer tastes and preferences tend to change from time to time. Pictures say a thousand words as compared to words. Here are some of the latest blog design trends which have become very popular in the recent months:

 

 

Look for sponsorship posts

Though there are numerous brands which offer information about a product or service. But only a handful of them are sponsored. Therefore, you should give emphasis on sponsorship posts to gain greater visibility on the web.

 

Prominence of the mobile

A majority of the users are switching to their mobile devices when going online, so all blogs which are published on the web would need to have smaller screens. Though having mobile phone is a necessity, mobile is the now the major focus. Incase a site isn’t very effective on mobile, then you are neglecting a major section of our audience.

 

Therefore, major emphasis of any web design process needs to be centered on mobile. Therefore, any web design process needs to be based on mobile. Therefore, for any web design process to be based on the mobile, you need to design it to work on a desktop screen.

 

Large background photos are important

Large background photos have gained popularity because of their capability to fill in an otherwise sparse, simple site. This trend has gained widespread popularity because of an increase in bandwidth across the globe and helps sites with large pictures and a lot of information. Using large background pictures is an effective strategy for web pages, and when used with flat-design buttons provides a stylish appearance to a website or blog.

 

Enhancing the content layout

People using their mobile phones for browsing usually don’t have significant screen space to work with. They are often frustrated when their mobile phones zoom out automatically. In order to improve their experience of visiting your website, you will need to minimize the number of columns on your site. Do away with sidebars, so as to ensure that people who are visiting your website find your content interesting and informative.

Most of them would have liked specific pieces of your site’s content. At this point, they have no interest in navigating the menu which includes the entire screen, or a huge sized inbox. You can access a number of websites so as to ensure that they find the content engaging and easy to read.

 

Make users familiar with the content that is shown

There are clearly an extensive variety of sorts of programming and locales, all conveyed for different markets and gatherings of spectators. What looks "incredible" for any one particular swarm will change. This suggests that you should outline the look and feel of your interface for your gathering of spectators. Moreover, feel should be used as a piece of offset and to reinforce limit. Adding a level of sparkle to the interface is different to stacking it with pointless incredible sight.

 

Therefore, you will need to ensure that the content of your website is updated with latest information. This will not only create interest in the minds of the consumers, but also help you gain greater visibility on the web.

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WhatsApp Sharing Button for Blogger and Wordpress

Social media sharing buttons are one of the necessary ornaments for any blog these days. whenever your blog readers find the article too cute to be shared, social media buttons will help them chubby your article with their love and support.

No matter where do you place them, make sure you put them in reach for your readers. I recommend you to put them right under the article body rather than sticking them to the sidewalls of the site that scrolls through the article.

So far, we had social sharing buttons for major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg and Pinterest and so on, assuring us the subscribers from all these different social networks.

After watching the increased priority for mobile rendering of webpages,  social sharing plugin developers for websites are also adapted the ‘mobility’ for content sharing.

According to BuzzFeed, iPhone users are tapping on WhatsApp button more than twitter’s.



This resulted in the addition of WhatsApp sharing button along with the rest of their social networking buttons.

Check out the AddThis announcement of new services being added to their plugin including WhatsApp.

Checkout this announcement by paper.li about the adding of sharing button to the header of the paper.

However the WhatsApp sharing button can be manually added in your site code. But as per the information provided by the Whatsapp-Sharing.com, old code added prior 16-09-2014 will not work if not updated to latest version.

Here is the updated version of the code:

<a href="whatsapp://send" data-text="Take a look at this awesome website:" data-href="" class="wa_btn wa_btn_s" style="display:none">Share</a>

You can add this code to your site where you wanted to the share button appear. Remember to make it appear closer to content.

Adding WhatsApp Sharing button for Blogger/Wordpress

To add the WhatsApp button to your Blogger/WordPress blog, you can do it in 2 ways.

1. By using the readymade plugin
2. By adding the code shown above manually

1. By using readymade plugin – Go to AddThis.com and create your own widget > Get the code > Add it to your blog.

2. By adding the code manually – Copy the above updated version of the code and paste it where you wanted it to display on your blog.

However, there available another ready-made plugin for WordPress called mobile-sharebar which can make your task much easier.

Till next time!

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Blogger vs. WordPress: The Debate Ends Here

This is not going to be another discussion or conclusion saying that there are pros and cons with both the major blogging platforms. I would like to take you through can-dos and can’t-dos of both the platforms and at the end you will find solid reasons to stop comparing apples with oranges.

 

One of my blogging friends, +Rohan have gathered opinions about this from expert bloggers and revealed some facts in his myth bursting blog post. Though, the conclusion ends up in ‘have-their-own-benefits’ tone.

 

Before we really compare these two blogging platforms, let’s talk about what are concerned to bloggers at most.

 

 

Bloggers generally worry about,

• Design of the blog
• Its SEO capability
• Its technical feasibility
• Control

Talking about design

When it comes to design, there are some myths in blogosphere about these two blogging platforms. Let’s burst them.

 

#1 Blogger have no good themes available compared to WordPress

Yes! WordPress have beautiful themes available on the web but, it is not really true that Blogger don’t have any such. Every template/theme that is available in WordPress is copy-designed to Blogger and vice versa.

 

Even blogger have beautiful templates available these days since responsiveness is taken as a SEO signal.

 

#2 WordPress themes can be customized, but not Blogger templates

This is totally a myth. Any template or theme can be customized unless it is a limited version. Designing has nothing to do with the comparing as it depends on the skill of the designer. The template of Amfas Tech is an example of how better that we can design a blogger template than we could imagine.

 

The worst consequence of believing this myth is, people not even try to change the design or test how better they can customize a template before they take a decision to switch to WordPress.

 

#3 WordPress themes are expensive but Blogger templates are available free

This is also totally a myth. The reason why WordPress themes are expensive and very few of them are available for free is that the lack of people who have knowledge in PHP where as there is no need to have the knowledge of any other technology other than HTML, XHTML, CSS and JavaScript for designing a Blogger template.

 

So, there available more free beautiful templates for Blogger compared to that of WordPress.

 

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So, it is clear that there are no differences between these two blogging platforms regarding the design and it is dependent on the creativity and skills of a designer.

 

Talking about SEO capability

If there is something a blogger would care equal to content, it is nothing but search engine optimization(SEO). If there is a fight between two different blogging platforms, there would surely be the ‘SEO’ as a metric.

 

To the question, which is the most search engine friendly platform? I’d say ‘human(blogger)’ as an answer. Both the platforms have their slots and knobs to handle SEO in a better way. We cannot compare any two slots or knobs of two different platforms at once. Because, they work the same way.

 

In fact, there are some myths regarding this point. Let’s burst them first.

 

#1 WordPress can provide better SEO than that of Blogger

The reason behind people saying this has a strong involvement of one of the best features of WordPress, the ability to install plugins.

 

A plugin is nothing but a packed snippet of code that automatically installs into the code and also updates periodically. Blogger lacks this feature and no Blogger widget automatically updates unless intervened manually.

 

An SEO plugin can do the cooking for you with WordPress and in which it needs a manual involvement in Blogger. This doesn’t mean that WordPress can do better but can do it in easy way.

 

If you know about optimizing the blog in a right way, it doesn’t matter what platform you choose. Blogger is no less powered than WordPress. All it matters is the SEO knowledge of the person using it.

 

As there available different plugins for WordPress, there are chances to optimize a WordPress blog using different strategies. Because, every plugin differs form one another.

 

Talking about technical feasibility

Talking about the technical possibilities, both the platforms are good enough to allow third party code into their templates. They both allow CSS, JQuery and JavaScript which are the basic technologies needed for coding any interactiveness on a webpage.

 

In WordPress, there is an advantage on the other side of technicality, that is the PHP an MySql. You can build your own applications using a front-end technology like PHP and a back-end technology like MySql on a WordPress site which is not possible in Blogger.

 

Though you have this wide possibility technically, not all WordPress users use it to its best. Many of the WordPress migrators don’t even know this fact yet.

 

In Blogger, there is a possibility to embed your own scripts and applications built using JavaScript and JQuery technologies. But it is not possible to connect your blogger blog to any of the database servers.

 

If you wanted to use any dynamically storage management with Blogger, you can achieve it by using Google docs and sheets. You can build apps that saves the data into Google sheets which is also we have discussed in the past.

 

Technically, we can also use Google docs and sheets in WordPress applications but we cannot use database association with blogger. This is where Blogger stays behind.

 

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As the WordPress sites are self-hosted by the user itself, he has the flexibility of increasing more space on the server. Also he can host as many sites as he can in his own server space.

 

Where as in Blogger, it is not possible to host any other site or application as it is owned by Google.

 

Talking about the control

As it is being said, users can have full control of their own WordPress site. That means you can keep it or remove from your server space and there would be no intervention of anybody in this regard unless some factors.

 

However, there is a shortcoming of this flexibility of control. WordPress blogs are more vulnerable than that of Blogger blogs. Where as it is as hard as hacking a Google account with Blogger. You won’t get your blog in someone’s hands unless your co-admin removes you or Google removes your blog in case of blogger.

 

Will Google remove Blogger blogs without notice?

 

This is one of the most famous myths believing in which why ‘Bloggers’ are migrating to WordPress. The problem arises with the lack of knowledge about the terms and conditions of that concerned platform and web.

 

When creating a Blogger or WordPress blog, we would go through ‘I accept’ thing at first which is just ticked ‘Ok’ without reading a word from it. Isn’t it? Generally, it may not appear while using platforms but will appear while creating ‘Google’ and ‘WordPress’ accounts.

 

It would be mentioned in there that if the sites entertaining any of the explicit, porn or hatred speech and etc.. content is found then it would be removed from the web without any prior notice. So, if you are not thinking about creating content that violates the policies of that respective platform, you may not have to worry about this.

 

Even WordPress is not safe in this regard. Not only Google, other major search engines may remove any blog from their databases that violates their policies.

 

It is better to take regular backups of your blog/website to avoid major damage when it is hacked or removed.

 

Is ‘Blogger’ for me? Or should I choose WordPress?

Is ‘Blogger’ for me? Or should I choose WordPress? This is a million dollar question that is worth more than ‘Blogger vs. WordPress’ discussion. The following answers might not impress you but will help you decide if it is Blogger or WordPress that is best for you.

 

If you new to blogging, it is better to start up with Blogger and flourish your passion for it. Later, after learning so much from it, if you wanted to have more features on your blog like you own applications and third-party help in organizing your content, you can then think of migrating to WordPress.

 

If you are just a blogger, where you just write blog posts on your blog, get handsome traffic for them and wanted nothing else from it but design, stick with Blogger as there is a feasibility of customizing the design of your blog to the extent you wanted it.

 

If you are an event blogger, there is no need to buy hosting and struggle setting up WordPress. Blogger can do the work better for you. Didn’t you read my last blog post about an event blogger making $6000 in just 5 days?

 

If you are not a techie, it is better to get along with Blogger where as you may not able to utilize the full-use of WordPress without any knowledge of coding and SEO.

 

If you don’t find any need of extended functionality, you can happily stick with Blogger and enjoy the possibilities of it.

 

If you are not earning enough, keep the migrating-to-WordPress thoughts aside. Because you might have to spend 4 times more money for hosting of your WordPress blogs. And the migrating-to-WordPress will help you earn more are all fairy tales unless you know the real strategies.

 

So, which is the best platform?

You cannot compare apples with oranges or dogs with cats. ‘The best’ is awarded based on the purpose you are starting up your blog. I cannot conclude as I might do it by keeping something on mind towards the platform I personally liked so far. For example, I could say WordPress because I liked its technical feasibility to showcase apps that I develop. Or I could say Blogger as I expertise more in it than in WordPress. The best comes with the purpose you use it for.

 

You can use a knife to cut vegetables but cannot consider it ‘the best’ without knowing its possibilities drawbacks.

 

The same way,

 

You cannot use a sword in war and consider it ‘the best’ without knowing its possibilities and drawbacks.

 

The fact is knife cannot do what a sword can and the sword cannot do what a knife can.

 

Hope it tells it all!

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How to Download, Install and Configure Windows Live Writer?

Windows Live Writer is one of the useful live essential tools provided by Microsoft. Though the prominence for them, after releasing Windows 8 has reduced to half, the prominence for WLW is never lost.

 

Windows Live Writer is my favorite blogging tool as it provides WYSIWYG user interface to blog. Take a look at the following screenshot and you will understand why.

 

 

Isn’t that quite good if we could blog using such a transparent environment?

 

Let’s see how to download Windows Live Writer to your Windows computer.

 

Downloading & Installing Windows Live Writer

Step 1: Go to Windows Live Essentials website and click ‘Download Now’ button. A web installer will be downloaded on to your computer(with a name ‘wlsetup-web.exe’).

 

Step 2: Run the program and you would see a screen asking to choose what to install.

 

 

Step 3: Choosing ‘Install all of Windows Essentials’ will install all the windows live essential programs. Choosing the other, ‘Choose the programs you want to install’ will install programs that you are going to chose in next step.

 

Step 4: Let’s choose the second option to see what other unnecessary programs are installing along with Windows Live Writer.

 

 

Step 5: Choose Windows Live Writer under ‘These programs will be installed’. In my case, I have already installed some of the programs. You can choose to install more than one program among the available list.

 

Step 6: Select the wanted programs and click ‘Install’.

 

Wait for a while till the installation completes. After installation is over, open Windows Live Writer and configure it with your blog as shown below.

 

Configuring Windows Live Writer

Step 1: Open Windows Live Writer and navigate to Options.

 

Step 2: Go to Accounts options and then click Add. Choose your blog provider and click Next.

 

 

Step 3: Then you will see the following window asking you to enter the blog URL, username and password of the account associated to that blog.

 

 

Step 4: Wait till your blog authentication completes and the downloading of the current template structure on your blog is being downloaded.

 

Once it is done, it is done! You are then good to go. You can now start writing your blog posts using this wonderful tool. You will even leave Microsoft Word for blogging if you get used to it.

 

Hope that helped you make blogging easier than before!

 

Note: Windows Live Writer will no allow you to text-in your own custom search description. So, after writing the post, add the labels and post it as draft. Log in to your blogger dashboard later and do the SEO part there.

 

You need to read this:

 

It is essential to save your drafts safely somewhere on your computer rather than leaving them to save in default Windows Live Writer directory, as there is a chance of loosing them whenever you change your operating system.

 

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