Showing posts with label WordPress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WordPress. Show all posts

Thursday

Essential WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist [Infographic]

Posted By: Arin Dey - November 07, 2019
The wonder that is WordPress has not ceased to amaze the millions of people and businesses who have been using it. Offering you a range of features, ample WordPress plugins, and a wide variety of themes to build a website of your choice, the popularity of this CMS is increasing with every hour. However, no matter what CMS platform you are using (or have used) to build a blog/website, if you are not looking after its upkeep and maintenance, you are bound to suffer huge losses.


One of the most important tasks that all website owners need to undertake, without failing, is website maintenance. A well-maintained website helps you garner traffic while reducing the bounce rate. It helps you to increase rankings on the search result while improving the click-through-rate. More importantly, it protects your site from malicious cyber threats. Thus, ensuring that your website’s data and customer information is safe at all times.

A website without maintenance can fall into disarray, and fixing this, would require more resources than maintaining it would have required, in the first place. This can affect your brand’s credibility, which would ultimately hurt your bottom line.

One of the best things about WordPress, just like with everything else, it makes maintaining a website easy too. There are ample plugins that can help keep your site up-to-date, thus ensuring your site performs and functions optimally consistently. The below infographic offers you an overview of the essential website maintenance tasks that you need to undertake. Thus, check out this WordPress maintenance infographic now and make the most of it!


WordPress-Website-Maintenance-Checklist-Infographic

Monday

Most Popular WordPress Plugins For Your Blog [Infographic]

Posted By: Arin Dey - July 03, 2017
WordPress is definitely the most preferred blogging platform for bloggers. With WordPress, you are having the full control to modify and tune the performance of the website  accordingly to your requirement. So it requires few essential plugins which help your blog to sustain over net and increases feasibility on search engines. Here I have listed 25 Best WordPress Plugins of 2014. The plugins mentioned below will make your WordPress website fast and secure.

Most Popular WordPress Plugins For Your Blog [Infographic]

When it comes to functionality and performance, it’s hard to beat a WordPress website. But all that power doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of the plugins you select to solve problems and add features. There are thousands of plugins in WordPress database. Out of those many, this infographic recommends 30 of WordPress’s most popular plugins.

Wordpress Most Popular Plugins
Source: WPtemplate

Sunday

How To Get Maximum Speed With WordPress [Infographic]

Posted By: Arin Dey - July 02, 2017
With more than 72 million WordPress sites on the Web (and counting!), it’s safe to say that this content management system (CMS) is one of the world’s most popular site design platforms. And because it’s so ubiquitous and user-friendly,

How To Get Maximum Speed With WordPress [infographic]

WordPress attracts not only accolades, but expectations, from its users. The software itself is so intuitive and responsive that many of its adherents want the sites they create using it to share those traits; however, like any other application, WordPress has its limits as well as its perks.

Lets have a look the below infographic to know how to get maximum speed with WordPress.

How to get Maximum Speed with WordPress
Source : WhoIsHostingThis

Tuesday

Top 10 Essential WordPress Plugins For Your Blog [Infographic]

Posted By: Poketors - February 14, 2017
Most of the bloggers choose WordPress platform for their blog because of its useful plugins. With the right plugins, your WordPress blog can reach out the huge audience according to your niche. SEO opportunities will become easy if you use some essential plugins.

Top 10 Essential WordPress Plugins For Your Blog [Infographic]


There are many reasons webmasters should adopt WordPress as their content management system. Having access to thousands of plugins available for this platform is a pretty good reason. Plugins can enhance your site’s functionality and enhance your visitors experience on it. Let's look into this inforgraphic that explains the top 10 WordPress plugins uses and features. 

top-10-wordpress-plugins-infographic
 Source: OnlineMediaMasters

Friday

Not To Do Things With WordPress

Posted By: Arin Dey - January 24, 2014
People do start a blog with blogger/blogspot platform and once it is getting popular and able to create buzz in IT world. Once a blogger starts a WordPress site also keep the desire to make their site a stand-out. Obviously once you opt for this, would not let your WordPress go down by simple mistakes which could be ignored easily. This article will help you in learning how to avoid some common mistakes which in turn harm your WordPress site. 


Bloggers or website owners can make an amazing WordPress site easily with some equally amazing content and images. And with the help of so many SEO plugins your blog an be visible in Google SERPs. But only if we care the below mentioned 3 important guidelines which many of us don't give much importance.

1. Avoid Free Hosting :

Free hosting is somewhat good and helpful for the starters or beginners who just stepped into blogging world. But after opting for WordPress you might have desired for better ranking and visibility for your blogs. So you can't expect free hosting will serve you as the same way what paid hosting does. We should always keep in mind that nothing is ever free. By using free hosting service you may be saving some bucks for the time being but it’ll cost you later in other ways. All the companies which offer these ‘free hosting’ services have to pay their bills somehow. The only way for them is spamming your website with ads and get money from advertisers. It does not annoy you only but distracting for your website visitors also. So go for some paid hosting service.

2. Avoid Downloading Free Widgets :

Apparently free widgets are great by looks and features. If you populate all this widgets in your blog then your blog loading speed may go down and it any widget doesn't work it may stuck in browser also. Available freely doesn't mean you have to feature all these widgets on your site. Always try to keep them limited and only install widgets that add some value to your site and its useful for your blog.

3. Avoid All Updates :

WordPress keeps releasing new updates very frequently including updates to the core, theme and plugin updates. Ignore all the update alerts if it is not that much necessary. Analyze first which updates are relevant to the functionality of your site then go ahead and ensure that it’s done timely basis and correctly using the services of a web host. Relevant updates will surely help your WordPress site to keep properly optimized and search engine friendly.

Thursday

How To Remove Comment Spam In WordPress

Posted By: Poketors - January 09, 2014
Comment spam has been one of the common problems with any blogging platforms. Being the most used blogging platform WordPress is also having the problem..

Comment spam is done by some website owners who want to boost their Google rankings by having lots of links pointing to their own websites. The result of this might be any of the following:
  1. Once Google finds content spam, they will often block the site it’s coming from because it messes up their ranking system.
  2. It consumes and wastes your valuable time and internet bandwidth to remove them.
  3. Commenting spams heavily is a situation in which the server tries a lot to post bad information or deliver notification emails to you for each comment which in turn increases you server load.Consider a situation where a blogger received over 1 thousand email notifications of the comments on a single post which needed approval. In this case that bloggers will be getting more and more gradually and ultimately crashing his mail server resulting website unavailability.
If each of the comments goes for approval then it would be a serious problem. WordPress is having multiple plugin but one of the mostly used and popular is Akismet plugin for WordPress.

How Akismet Plugin for WordPress Helps In Removing Comment Spams :

Akismet is a WordPress plugin which is there to help you filter out those spammers. It is very easy to get it installed into your WordPress system. 

Follow the below steps to install Akismet Plugin :

1. Download the plugin, and upload it to the blog directory on your server in the plugins subdirectory under wp-content. 
2. Now activate from the WordPress plugins menu. 
3. If you get any message which says that you need the Akismet API, go to the WordPress website and search for one.

There will be an instruction in Akismet, which says “forget that spam was ever a problem.” So you don’t have to do anything else at all. Eventually the spam will simply be bounced. You will not receive a notification, nor will you have to delete spams wasting time.

Did You Pass Math plugin for WordPress :

Among the various plugins for WordPress, one more popular plugin is there for eliminating spam is the “Did You Pass Math” plugin. It basically makes the user perform a simple math problem before submitting a comment. The advantage of using this plugin is that most humans can understand this and most spambots can’t. So it is obvious that a comment posted through this is a legitimate comment. Here you can show a notice of caution that comments will be deleted if the math answer submitted is wrong.

What if all plugins fail ?

If all the plugins fail to remove spammers then there is one option by denying them access to your comments area. It does not mean you have to disable your comments section. For this you need to set up a filter.

Blocking their IPs would not help this. Most of the spammers use random IPs, while blocking IPs may reduce for a short time. Spammers are also experiment hijacking other people’s IP addresses. But if you are looking for short duration solution, you can try it. The IP address is included in the information packet for the comment. It is as easy to detect like traceable phone number. Search for patterns in your IP numbers.

Working with .htaccess file :

Best way to prevent them by using the .htaccess file to block unwanted IPs from even seeing your blog. Fro example, below lines can be added to the file:

order allow,deny

deny from 123.123.123.123

deny from 456.456.456.*

deny from 789.789.*.*

allow from all


As we all know that IPs are four-part numbers, such as 192.168.0.1, and if you see a pattern with the first two sections being identical, you can block all IPs of that type by simply listing them as 192.168.*.*, as you see above. It screens out all these IP numbers. In this case all the blocked IPs will get a 403 error page. Now you can customize yours so that your contact details are listed in case you’re blocking out a legitimate user. Never use your regular email because a spammer can harvest that too. Instead, encode your email so that it’s not automatically readable.

Once you realize that your problems are addressed, you can remove the block from your .htaccess file. If it still doesn’t work, or if you don’t see an IP pattern, it’s likely that spambots are hijacking someone else’s machine to attack your site. In this case, do not use the IP block. In other case, if you don’t have an IP pattern of attack, this may not work. An IP follows almost the same pattern, with the last of the four sections referring to the specific computer it is attached to.

Google’s Nofollow Attribute

You can use the Google Nofollow attribute for links. This attribute is embedded automatically by modern versions of WordPress.

It does not remove links, instead it makes those links irrelevant to Google. As a result it doesn’t hurt your rank in Google, and it doesn't allow a spammer to send data to your site.

It is not a quick fix. But it is a way to make your website resistant to spammers in the future. In case your website is already a target, you’ll have to work with it slowly, incorporating all these fixes. else you can turn on the nofollow option in your WordPress system; this will reject any spambots. Better you should upgrade your WordPress version or use soem similar plugin which will work in this principle.

Friday

How To Protect Your WordPress Blog

Posted By: Arin Dey - September 23, 2011
We very often hear that someone has hacked or stolen the Blog user information and get into it and made a lot of changes which result in providing the ownership to the hacker. But you can secure your blogs by following some security measures using WordPress security features.

How To Protect Your WordPress Blog

Lets discuss on those 'Always' protection methods which will secure your WordPress blogs:

1. Always use latest WordPress version :

First and foremost thing you should is that update your WordPress to latest. If you are not using the the up-to-date version will cause a lot of trouble. Currently, the version is 2.3. So better to install the latest version and we need to keep track on the newest releases. Some releases were there recently for just security fixes like, SQL Injection. It may seem like doing a hectic job but in reality upgrading is really good for your blogs.

2. Always change your default password :

If you are using the same password provided via email to you at the time of installation to log into your wp-admin page then definitely we would suggest to change it now. Because the password provided is only 6 characters and it's alphanumeric. So there is a high possibility that your password may be hacked and you are in trouble. Better to avoid any kind of pain change the password to a complex string and keep more than 10 characters. DO NOT use words used in blog title, make it a nice mixture of letters, numbers, and special characters. One more thing you have to remember is that you should keep changing your password at the hosting site for your account login and the control panel logins, like cPanel. Make it a practice once in a month so your password will be secured. 

3. Always use SSH/Shell instead of FTP :

The most important and widely used option. We would say that this one is the best option among all as we all know that SSH is a secured method of accessing files. In any case, if someone gets your FTP login information (usually not encrypted and easy to get) then they can do modifications to your files and add spam to your site without your knowledge. So better disable FTP (recommended) and start using SSH. Yo uwill find everything is encrypted including the transfer of files,and of course the login. 

4. Always install LoginLock plugin :

Out of all available plugins, we would like to suggest you to use this plugin as this will automatically block the source IP address if somebody tries to log in your WordPress admin area after a certain number of attempts. LoginLock prevents spammers from continuously trying different combinations to crack your account password. It's the similar algorithm in which Windows works if you’re added in domain. LoginLock's locked out time is 1 hour default. 

5. Always create a blank index.html file in your /Plugins/ directory :

WordPress plugins folder is completely visible to anyone by going to http://www.domainname.com/wp-content/plugins. Go ahead and create a blank document in your favorite editor and save it as index.html and upload it to the plugins directory. Now when you try to access it, you only get a blank screen. This prevents hackers from finding out a security hole in one of your plugins. 

6. Always use .htaccess file to control access of wp-admin :
You can protect your WordPress admin folder by allowing access to it from a defined set of IP addresses. Everything else will bring up a Forbidden error message. In this case if you (only) access your blog from one or two places routinely, it’s worth implementing. Here you are supposed to create a new .htaccess file inside your wp-admin folder but do not replace the one at the root.

7. Always remove the version string from your header.php file :
It should be a normal practice to remove the version string so that in case you are running version 2.2 and the current release is 2.3, by default your blog always shows the used version i.e. 2.2 on every page and  here it will be very easy job for any hacker or spammer to crack into wp-admin.

8. Always block WP- folders from the search engines :
Needless to say this but sometimes we forget to do this. It is not required to have all of your Wordpress files to be indexed by Google. Therefore, the best thing would be blocking them in your robots.txt file. Add  Disallow: /wp-* to your list.

Hope the above steps will be useful to customize, maintain and protect your blogs. If you find some more additions to the above tips with more security measures which can be implemented for better protection of your blog, please share with us.

Monday

How To Migrate From Blogger to WordPress

Posted By: Arin Dey - September 19, 2011
When it comes to SEO implementation on your blog, we can't say that blogger is the best blogging platform. Blogger can be an option for spammer to create dummy pages for marketing purpose and also it has multiple limitations associated with it.  Blogger is staying behind the CMS (Content Management System) because it doesn't have that much support-ability of expert level compared WordPress for CMS on web.

Hence we have to acknowledge that WordPress is the best, most used and popular CMS. WordPress won several best CMS awards also. It is much more secured than Google's blogger. These are some reasons for which people are shifting their blogs from Blogger to WordPress because WordPress offers great support from the community. The main advantage using WordPress is that it offers lots of plugins to manage your blog and WordPress is therefor considered as the pioneer in the Blog-sphere.

How To Migrate From Blogger to WordPress
The first question comes here is that how you can transfer your Blogger blogs to WordPress? No worries. The answer is very simple. We will be guiding you explaining step by step process so that you can easily migrate or import your Blogger blogs to a WordPress. You will do it without any issues. 

Here are the steps to move from Blogger to WordPress

1. What to do with Blogger blogs ? (Assuming that you are using latest Blogger interface)

a) Log in to your Blogger account 

b) From Dashboard go to Settings -> Others .

c) Here you will find the option Blog Tools 

d) Blog Tools has three options :  Import Blog, Export Blog & Delete Blog 

e) Now click on Export Blog Link. You will get a box like the below figure.

f) This option is used to transfer the current blog to another Blog URL 


g) Now click on “Download Blog” button, it will ask you to save an .xml file with the current backup of the blog. 

In a summarized way we can say: Login into BlogSpot Blog> Settings > Others > Blog Tools > Click on Export Blog> Download .xml file.



2. What to do in WordPress Blog ?

a) Log in to WordPress Blog
b) From Dashboard go to Tools Section
c) Check for the option Import. Now click on this option.
d) Import Option will give you the number of options. From them, you have to select only the first option, i.e., Blogger) Now click on Blogger where it displays the message like below:

The first thing you need to do is tell Blogger to let WordPress access your account. You will be sent back here after providing authorization.”

This importer allows you to import posts and comments from your Blogger account into your WordPress blog.To use this importer, you must have a Google account and an upgraded (New, was Beta) blog hosted on blogspot.com or a custom domain (not FTP).

f) You will find now the authorize button. Click on that button and this option asks Blogger to grant authorization and permit WordPress to access your account.

g) Click on Grant Access Button and sign in to your Blogger account.h) When you grant access it will import all your Blogger's posts and transferred to WordPress account blog.

3. Changing the URL (ATTENTION required in this step) :

The main issue here is that the images hosted on blogspot blog cannot be imported on WordPress blog. So to do this:

a) Login to your WordPress Admin Panel and go to Settings.

b) After clicking on “Settings Option”, it will display a set of options. In this options list you have to click only on “Permalinks”

c) When you select Permalinks Option you will see number of sub-options. In this list you have to select “Custom” and then type the following line
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
d) In this step we match the post structure of your Blogger blog

e) It basically minimizes the number of broken links and redirects.

f) Now go to Blogger account blog back. Click on settings.

g) Under Settings select Basic -> Publishing and click on the Blog Address -> Edit -> Advanced settings.

h) Now in the domain field, type your new domain, i.e., http://www.yourblog.com and save it.

i) It will transfer the links automatically to your own domain.

j) In Blogger blog, go to Layout

k) Now click on the option “Edit HTML”. Add the following code anywhere after section:
<meta content='0; url=http://YOURNEWURL.com/' http-equiv='refresh'/>
l) It will send the visitors to your blog homepage directly i.e. to your new URL.

m) This is considered as one of the safest methods of redirection in Search Engine Optimization

n) Finally the above change in URL structure shows a warning page that you are taking all to another domain. Continue here.

IMPORTANT : After successful migration, remember to delete your old blog from Blogger to prevent from content duplicity.

Below is a  step by step video from Amit Agarwal of Labnol. This video will guide you to move from Blogger to WordPress platform.


In this process you can also use 301 Redirects to Fix your Broken links. Here you have done migration successfully from Blogger to WordPress blogs. Now you can give your blog a wonderful and catchy look. Let us know if you face any issue while doing this process and also share your experience.

12 Important WordPress Plugins

Posted By: Arin Dey - September 19, 2011
WordPress plugins are the keys to blogs SEO practices. We will discuss about the 12 most downloaded WordPress plugins which have been downloaded from web the most. In this post we mentioned all the the 12 plugins which have been downloaded a trillion times. So needless to say that these are the best plugins you can use in your blogs.

12 Important WordPress Plugins

Here we go with the 12 plugins for WordPress by listing them in most downloaded to least order.


1. All in One SEO Pack : Mostly used and almost each and every WopdPress blogger use this. It automatically optimizes your blog for Search Engines (A preferred tool for Search Engine Optimization) 
2. Google XML Sitemaps : It creates a Google sitemap compliant XML. A complete reference to the Sitemap of your blog.

3. WP Super Cache : This one is a very fast caching engine that generates static html files.

4. Contact Form 7 : This plugin is very simple to use and flexible too. 

5. Sociable : It automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking websites to your posts, pages and RSS feeds.

6. WP-DB-Backup : This is mostly used when there is a need for on-demand backup of your database.

7. Google Analytics : It adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics for better working.

8. Google Analyticator : It is also similar to the Google Analytics which enables Google Analytics tracking.

9 Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button : It basically provides readers the platform where readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using a service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google+ and over 100 more.

10. WP-Polls : It basically adds an AJAX poll system to your blog. So you can add a poll into your blog post or the pages individually as needed.

11. Sidebar Widgets : It adds “Sidebar Widgets” panel under Presentation menu. 

12. WP-PageNavi : It adds a more advanced paging navigation your blog which enables better nevigation.

Most of the WodrPress Bloggers use All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, WP Super Cache and Contact Form 7 on their blogs. So there plugins can be considered as the mostly used plugins. 

**Akismet is not included as it comes with the default installation for WordPress blogs.

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