Category: WordPress

Do you have a WordPress site that is visually outstanding and rich in content, but when it comes to site traffic, it is as nonexistent as life in a desert? Well, as a beginner at WordPress, you are not the first one to face this issue. If you don’t optimize your WordPress site for the search engine, you will not see much traffic even in years.

And that leads us to learn some strategies for WordPress optimization. There are various plugins, widgets, and tactics that you can apply to boost the SEO of your WordPress site. Read on to find out the best WordPress SEO practices for 2021.

1. Choose a Suitable Hosting

Your WordPress site speed, security, and uptime all depend on hosting. If the website launching speed is slow, your SEO will be affected. There are various options available for WordPress site hosting- free, VPS, shared, or dedicated. While you might have to pay more for a reliable host, it will be well worth it in the long run by increasing your website’s visibility to your audience. 

There is a vast difference between the site performance of free hosting and a paid hosting. You can understand this if you create a sample website on each hosting and compare the outcome.

2. Install a WordPress Theme That Supports SEO

While WordPress comes with the default theme and myriads of free and premium themes, not all of them are SEO-friendly. Besides, some SEO-friendly themes come with additional plugins and scripts that you might not require. Having these extra features will slow down your site noticeably. Make sure your WordPress theme is perfectly coded and suitable for any browser and device. 

To check the theme’s suitability, you can open it in different browsers, and if there is any flaw in coding – it will be apparent. Besides, the WordPress theme should be user responsive – navigation, loading time, and accessibility should attract traffic. You can look up online best WordPress themes that are the most SEO-friendly. 

3. Install an SEO Plugin

Installing an SEO plugin is essential for optimization. And you can find various free and paid plugins for it. While the plugin itself can’t take care of the site SEO, it can be a massive help for you to optimize the site.

Yoast is popular SEO plugins that have both a free and a premium version. To get you started, the free version of Yoast will just work fine. When you install Yoast, you will find an SEO command center for your every post. It will enable you to see how your post will appear in the search engine; depending on your preference, you can manipulate the post snippet. It will also suggest you the readability, title, keyword placement, and so on. Aside from individual posts, you can also gain SEO insight for the entire site in Yoast.    

4. Carry Out Keyword Research

Keyword research will enable you to focus on content that users want. With keyword research, you can also gauge the market needs and implement required strategies.

To conduct keyword research, create a list of keywords relevant to your site or topic. Run these through a keyword research tool to find which will attract the most traffic with the least competition. To gauge the competition, you can run similar sites through the keyword research tool and see how those keywords fare against competitors’ sites.

5. Optimize For Mobile Use

Almost 50% of all site traffic nowadays comes from mobile devices. And optimizing your site for mobile users is much more challenging because you don’t have that much processing space for flashy graphics and videos, and you have to work with a relatively small interface.

To optimize for mobile viewing, you have to cut down all the excess and flashy features and keep only the essentials. Besides, make sure you keep the buttons and tabs on a suitable scale, so it becomes easy to click from a small smartphone screen. Design your content in a vertical layout, so the interface becomes more mobile-friendly. Resize and reduce the size of your site images and icon; it will significantly boost the site speed for mobile viewers.

6. Adjust Permalink Structure

Permalink is the web address for your site or page, and it is cached in Google and other search engines. It is the address that the user sees in the search bar when navigating to your site.

Permalink can affect SEO as search engines use it to rank your page. Besides, the permalink informs viewers what your page is all about. From the address, they might decide whether to click on that link or not. While WordPress has several permalink structures, you should choose the one that resonates with your site structure. You can also improve the SEO performance by inputting keywords in your permalink.  

7. Link the Site to Google Search Console

Adding your site to the Google search console will allow you to track and monitor your site’s ranking, index, error, and security. Google search console is a comprehensive tool for monitoring external and internal links, crawl rate, total clicks, crawl errors, and so on. You can add your WordPress site to the Google search console simply by inputting your URL and installing the plugin to your WordPress.

8. Create a Sitemap

A sitemap is a list of pages within your domain that help search engines crawl and verify their importance. With this hierarchical flow chart, you will be able to determine which pages are essential and which pages you can discard. Besides, as search engine crawlers depend on sitemap to extract data, building an appropriate sitemap will increase your site’s SEO.

9. Incorporate Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to evaluate your SEO performance. It also helps you determine effective strategies. To conduct an SEO audit with Google Analytics, you need to create an account and input your tracking code.

You can extract information about overall site traffic, page-specific traffic, and organic traffic from the site statistics.

The Bottom Line

When it comes to optimization, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. As the SEO landscape is ever-changing, so are the criteria for site ranking. While these strategies might give you a good start in WordPress SEO, you still need to keep pace with the new SEO practices. And there are many plugins and resources that you can work in your favor. WordPress might be the best platform to put those plugins and strategies into action.

Image Link-

https://www.pexels.com/photo/business-coffee-composition-computer-265667/

Any business that wants to succeed today must leverage everything to get more traffic to their website and customers to their door. Considering that more and more of any business is transferring online, it’s even more important to maximize your SEO and grow traffic. This means that you must add using Google My Business to your marketing strategy. Therefore, you’ll need to embed a Google Map into your WordPress website.

How to Insert a Google Map into WordPress the Easy Way

WordPress is the most popular platform of its kind and there are many solutions that simplify working with it. Therefore, the easiest and most efficient way to embed a Google Map into your website is o look up the best mapping plugins for WordPress. Then, it’s a simple matter of installing the plugin and following the step-by-step instructions it provides. You can have a map properly integrated within minutes and no knowledge of coding is required to do this.

Deoendi9ng on the plugin, it will be easy to customize the page with the map. You’ll need to provide a title, choose the size and placement, etc. Note that you can even place several maps on a single page. This will make browsing more convenient for customers of chain businesses. Be sure to include the “find the closest to me” feature into your website as well.

You’ll be able to manage the maps using your WordPress menu as the plugin will be added to it. But the exact features and settings will depend on the plugin you pick.

Adding a Google Map by Hand

It’s possible to insert a Google Map into your WordPress site by hand, although it will take longer. To do this, you’ll need to use the Google Maps service itself. Open the map and enter the location you need to show in the map.

As you’ll be doing this by hand, be sure to enter the location correctly. A simple mistake here might make the map on your website useless. And as this will cause frustration to visitors, your ranking will go down.

Once you have the location, click the right-hand panel and copy the link. Then, open your WordPress website and paste the code. You can paste int into a page, template, or post. The overall look as well as SEO will depend on it, so choose wisely.

Note that you can use the customize the embedded map panel in Google Maps to change the design of the map. But there aren’t many options to choose from in terms of style customization. You’ll need to do this before you embed the link into your post or page.

However, it’s important to note that this method allows you to effectively include only one Google Map. This means that if you want to insert several maps into your website, you will need to make a separate page for each.

Using the Google Maps Widget

You can also insert a Google Map into your WordPress website using Google’s own widget. This is a very simple and straightforward method. You’ll need to install the widget and activate it.

You’ll need to enter the address in the widget’s settings. After this, you’ll have several customization options. You will be able to choose the size of the map, pin color, zoom level, and so on. Overall, you do basic customizations and click Save. That’s all, the map is included.

This method is easy and cheap. However, it won’t give you a sophisticated look that various specialized mapping plugins can provide. Therefore, if you want to make a website that really stands out, you should consider a more professional approach.

In Conclusion: Never Dismiss the Importance of Local SEO

Did you know that almost half (46%) of all Google searches inquire about local information? Or that 88% of people who find info about a local business visit it within the next 24 hours?

Such is the power of local SEO and no business today can afford to ignore it. In fact, as we are going through a global economic recession now, consumer spending decreases. Therefore, there really is a battle going for attracting every customer. In this situation, promoting your local SEO through Google Maps must become a priority.

Adding a Google Map to your website instantly helps improve local SEO. But this also allows you a way to show off your reviews in a way that people using Google (which means almost everyone) will notice.

Also, don’t forget that Google Maps is a handy service on its own. Unlike some other maps, this one will provide directions and other perks to ensure your prospective customers can find your business easily.

But most importantly, adding this type of map increases site interactivity. Today it’s an important factor for high ranking. It encourages people to spend more time on your website, which increases your visibility.

Designing a WordPress site is easy. One needs very little programming knowledge since the open-source platform is very easy to use. However, you need to convert your PSD templates into WordPress themes to create attractive and interactive web pages. Now, the important thing is that there are some specific steps that you must follow to convert the PSD designs successfully to WordPress. Many people hire designers or WordPress experts to help them. Agencies can really help you with the PSD to HTML conversion.  But if you want to do it on your own, this guide will help you!

The Steps that Need to be Undertaken for the Process to be Successful

Follow these steps and your conversion process should be successful. 

Slice your PSD template

The PSD to WordPress conversion process begins with cutting the PSD template into multiple files. This enables you to save every PSD template design element separately. You can use a photo editing program or Adobe Photoshop itself.

Create an HTML and CSS template

You need to encode the cropped templates into the HTML format and then create the related CSS file. You can use programs like Dreamweaver or Fireworks to avoid the need for programming skills. However, a little knowledge of HTML and CSS becomes really useful in this step. Save the HTML template as index.HTML and the CSS file as Style.css. Here, in this step, you can decide whether you want a static or responsive website. 

Create a WordPress Structure out of the index.HTML File 

The WordPress theme has a specific structure and is primarily composed of two types of files – index.php and style.css. You need to split the index.HTML file into several .php files like the following:

• Archive.php
• Header.php
• Footer.php
• Index.php
• Single.php
• page
• Sidebar
• Category
• Search.php
• 404.php
• Comments
• comments popup.php

Structuring your files like this helps you extend your website in the future and add all the functionality you want. 

Add Tags

In this step, you must add the built-in function tags to the .php files you created in the previous step. This completes the creation of a custom WordPress theme. You can activate it via the WordPress dashboard.

Add Extra Functionality 

Since it is always room for improvement, you can add all the extra functionalities you need to WordPress in the last step. It is always better to get the basics done, ensure you have something up and running before you start adding extra functionality, however. That’s why we’ve put it at last.

The process of converting PSD to WordPress is simple, but if you find it a bit confusing, hire a WordPress developer. You can easily find one at a reasonable price, as there is no shortage of experienced WordPress developers. Moreover, you can find many free webinars and tutorials on PSD to WordPress conversion if you want to learn more and have more visual aid.

Leading content management systems like WordPress have made managing websites much easier, but there are still things you still have to do manually out of the box, such as publishing content, performing backups and security/malware scans, database backups, and more.

Fortunately, some of WordPress’ inbuilt features and additional plugins can further automate your daily website tasks and workflow. And according to Website Advisor, WordPress is one of the best free website builders. Let’s take a closer look!

1. Scheduling Posts

If you’re blogging or producing a content website, then you need to spend time publishing your posts. But, what if you have a backlog of content that you want to publish at regular intervals or you have found an opportune time of day to push out your content?

Then, you need to start scheduling your posts in advance. Fortunately, WordPress has this feature inbuilt. All you have to do is change the publish date and time in the box on the right of every post editing page.

You can also find plugins with more advanced scheduling features of the basic feature isn’t enough for you.

2. Automatic Updates

WordPress will notify you in the Admin panel when there is a new version of the platform to update and there is also an option to do this automatically. For the vast majority of people, this is a perfect solution and you shouldn’t have to worry about okaying updates or doing them manually ever again.

However, you may want to tread a bit more carefully when using the automatic theme and plug-in updates, as these can sometimes wipe your content or modifications. For example, if you’ve added a bunch of code to your theme files and you aren’t using ‘child themes,’ you could end up having to do it all again if the theme is automatically updated.

3. Backing up Your Site

No matter what type of site you run on whatever platform, it is important to perform backups in case there’s a security breach or something else goes wrong. You want a clean copy that you can re-upload.

You can various backups from within WordPress manually and you can also do this server/web host side if you have access.

There are also plug-ins, such as BackupBuddy and UpdraftPlus that can perform backups automatically.

4. Image Optimization

If you upload a lot of images in your content, you probably have an optimal height (or at least width). You also probably don’t want to waste a lot of bandwidth with large image file sizes.

One option to tackle these problems is to use an automated image optimization plugin like WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer.

WordPress itself has come a long way and allows you to use different sizes by default and even add ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tags to all of your images for SEO purposes.

If you’re particularly concerned about bandwidth and site-load speed, you might consider a full-blown caching system like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.

5. Social Media Sharing

Being able to automatically share your new WordPress posts across social media platforms is a huge time saver and can be accomplished in a number of ways—the easiest with exiting WordPress plugins.

AccessPress Social AutoPost is one of the most comprehensive options, but it does require you to pay a one-off fee. It lets you link all of your major social media accounts and define which content you’d like to auto-share based on your chosen parameters (i.e. only sharing from one specific category etc).

You can also schedule exactly the times you wish posts to be shared.

Tip: Some premium plug-ins can be expensive, so you might want to consider taking out an instant approval loan if you don’t have the funds upfront.

6. Comment Moderation

WordPress now does a good job of filtering out spam comments automatically, but for more options, we recommend installing a third-party commenting system like Disqus, which has advanced blacklisting settings.

Disqus also integrates social media engagement and is less of a hassle for users, who can log-in to Disqus across multiple sites rather than having an account on your website specifically.

Do you run a WordPress Website and have further automated your daily tasks? Let us know how in the comments below!

With the internet today makes most of our tasks easier by the internet solutions available in the form of websites and portals. With the easy availability of such solutions in every budget range, anyone can launch their website effortlessly. There are many website building platforms, some designed especially for the beginners and some might need a prerequisite knowledge about technical coding. Few of my personal favorite website building platforms are:

• WordPress
• Joomla
• Drupal

Now, when website development has become feasible, website management also needs to be made feasible enough for the developers to maintain their website online. Website development is not the only thing that needs to be done. A website will always be incomplete without set user plugins and add-ons that enhance its performance and enable it to function smoothly.

For example, in WordPress, its highly customizable nature lets you utilize numerous services that offer premium plugins, different themes, backup options, etc.

We require a platform, which single-handedly manages all such requirements of every website owner. One such internet service that helps us deal with these points is 10Web.

About 10Web

10Web provides everything for WordPress websites. It is an international WordPress CMS support service. WordPress website owners are offered with 50+ premium plugins, various themes, add-ons and much more at reasonable prices.
10Web is complimented especially for its instinctive and easy-to-use features. The popular services offered by them comprise of SEO, image optimization, automatic backup. They are planning to introduce Hosting, Security, and Uptime services as well. You can manage multiple websites easily from a single dashboard.

Services provided

SEO: You can use the tested SEO methods to improve the presence of your WordPress website over the internet. Using the SEO services, you can easily increase traffic and conversions.

Image Optimization: To improve the buffer time used in loading your WordPress website, automatic resizing and compression of all the images can be done with the help of image optimizer service. This will also help in saving space.

Automatic backup: 10Web offers secure backup provision for your WordPress site files and database. These backup solutions are quite simple, yet powerful and you can easily restore the backup files from 10Web’s dashboard anytime you want.

Manager Plugin: Connect and manage all your WordPress websites on 10Web dashboard with the help of 10Web’s Manager plugin.

Numerous Themes: You get the access to 60+ themes to play with. These easy-to-use high quality yet lightweight themes are your collection to choose from.

WordPress Plugins: WordPress has made it possible for beginners to make their customized websites and hence, has become the most preferred and used platform because of the various plugins available. You get an entire store of high-quality plugins to choose from and download.

Security: 10Web will soon be adding another great feature to the list, that is, their security service for WordPress websites for adding extra protection against hackers. All your personalized data will be secured.

Pricing and Plans

There are three different plans to choose from according to the user’s requirements. Each of these three plans has different features and are priced according to the services they offer.

Basic

• Price: $12 per month
• Three domains
• Slider, Gallery, Form +60 Plugins/Add-ons
• Unified Dashboard
• Backup: 10GB storage
• Use Premium Products Even After Cancellation

Standard

• Price: $30 per month
• Ten domains
• Backup: 40GB storage
• Rest features same as the Basic plan
• Use Premium Products Even After Cancellation

Premium

• Price: $80 per month
• 50 domains
• Image Optimizer: 250,000 Images/Month (New)
• Backup: 140GB storage
• Use Premium Products Even After Cancellation
• Rest features just like the Basic plan

10Web offers you a full-featured, 14 days free trial for all of the plans to let its users make sure if their services are worth your time and money. And one of their genuine features is that you can cancel anytime and use the premium plugins lifetime even after cancellation.

So, if you own a website or planning to start with one, 10Web will be your best Website manager!

Although online marketing has changed a lot during the recent years, its ultimate goal is still to attract more users, drive more traffic, increase conversions, and ultimately bring more sales. With as much competence on the web, it gets harder to stay out from the crowd and get the desired attention to your website.

Best WordPress Plugins for Better Marketing Results

For WordPress powered websites things seem a little bit better. There are hundreds of great plugins out there that help marketers to autotomize time wasting activities and result in achieving goals in lesser time. In this post, I want to introduce to you some great WordPress plugins that are widely used by marketers and are sure to contribute a lot to your marketing efforts. Since WordPress is one of the most popular website builders, we decided to focus on WordPress plugins that will help you improve your marketing results.

Mailchimp WordPress Plugin

Mailchimp WD will help you convert your site visitors into subscribers and customers. It seamlessly integrates with Mailchimp and lets you manage your forms and listings directly from your site’s dashboard. It comes with an intuitive form editor which allows you to create and edit forms with custom design and styling. The plugin allows you to customize the form header, and add custom fields to the forms, such as PayPal, file upload, custom select, checkbox, survey tools and more. The most outstanding feature of the plugin is its conditional fields functionality, which lets you hide or display form fields to your visitors based on the conditions you specify. You can choose from various pre-made form themes and use the available topbar, popup, scroll box and embedded form display options.

Ad Manager

If you want to publish ads on your website and make additional money, Ad Manger WD is a great option to go with. It’s easily configurable and feature-packed ad management plugin, which allows you to create, manage and display ads. The plugin supports any type of code and lets you display the advertisement banners on any page, post or widget area. You can organize the ads into groups and publish them in three modes: default, dynamic and block mode. Moreover, you can publish ads based on the specific schedules by setting start and end dates. The plugin comes with an internal tracker and lets you get detailed information about the ad clicks and impressions.

WordPress Google Analytics

Google Analytics WD will help you identify how effective your marketing strategy is by giving you detailed reports on your site performance, traffic sources, sales stats, and more. It comes with a long list of built-in reporting types and in addition, lets you set and obtain custom reports on the metrics and dimension Google Analytics doesn’t automatically track. You can also get reports for your AdSense and AdWords accounts, and eCommerce sales stats. The plugin lets you compare reports from different periods, and allows you to export the reports to PDF or CSV formats, or email them to multiple recipients.

Social Warfare

If you want to share your content across various social platforms with style make sure to check out Social Warfare. It’s a fast and fully customizable plugin that supports a myriad of a social network, button styles, and placement options. You can track your shares by enabling share counts, and set up Analytics tracking to monitor the all the inbound links that come as a result of your shares.

Coschedule

Coschedule is a multifunctional editorial calendar for marketing and social scheduling. It comes with advanced tools and lets you easily plan your blog posts and social media sharing, send and receive emails, and organize your team work. You can share tasks and resources with your team members, as well as add color labels to the tasks to never miss an important event. Coschedule will save you a lot of time by automating your social shares and sharing them at the time your visitors are most active. The plugin is analytics integrated and works well with other widely used tools, such as Google Docs, Evernote, etc.

SumoMe

SumoMe comes with a bundle of tools to help you grow your website and improve your marketing efforts. It features a list builder, social sharing buttons, a welcome mat, text highlighter, smart bar, and a couple of other tools that make it easy for people to find your blog, read your posts and share them across different platforms. With its list builder, you can create an email subscription popup and easily collect subscribers. The plugin integrates with a number of email subscription services and makes it easy to build an audience online.

Newsletter

It’s a powerful newsletter plugin perfect for list building and growing your audience. It comes with a drag and drop email composer and lets you send unlimited emails with tracking. You can see how many emails you’ve sent and how many of those were opened. The plugin helps you collect subscribers with its customizable subscription widget or with a form. You can create either single or double opt-in form. The plugin is fully configurable and is compatible with other mailing systems as well.

Hustle

Hustle is an advanced marketing plugin developed for list building, lead generation, improving conversion and your marketing efforts. You can create various types of subscription forms and fully customize them regarding colors, styles, layouts, animations, etc. The plugin is equipped with powerful display features and exit-intent technology to help you find target your audience. It provides stats on how many times your forms have been displayed and lets you make stats driven decisions for your marketing strategy. The submissions are managed from the WordPress dashboard.

If you want to improve your marketing results here are eight great plugins to help you get the job done. They all come packed with powerful functionality and are super simple to setup and use.

There is a major difference between having a blog and having a successful blog. The most notable is the fact that a successful blog will receive a large quantity of traffic on a daily basis. In return, this may very well equate to large profits. If you happen to have a WordPress blog, you can increase your traffic and bring new viewers to your site by utilizing a few simple techniques. For your consideration, some of these will be explored in greater depth below.

Use Social Media

When looking at the biggest social media networks, you will discover that the combination has approximately 2 billion users, with many using these sites on a regular basis. In fact, Facebook alone has more than 1 billion regular uses. By using these websites, you will be able to inflate your traffic. Simply sign up and participate, while simultaneously posting your content to these social networks. Leveraging these sites in an attempt to acquire more traffic can be effective, but it also required patience and practice.

Guest Blogging

Writing content for another site’s blog might seem foolish at first. However, it can prove to be enormously beneficial in the long run. By guest blogging, you will be able to spread your site further, while simultaneously bolstering your site’s backlink portfolio. You should also be willing to allow others to post on your site. This can encourage the writer’s fans to visit your website to read their content. In return, they may stick around, read your content and subsequently become a fan of your blog as well. Just be sure to choose sites with a moderate, relevant audience. This will help to ensure that your efforts are actually worth it.

Leave Blog Comments

While the mass majority of blog comments are nothing, but spam, there will be times when a good comment will come around. And of course, some blogs will allow you to leave a link alongside your comment. It is wise to do this, but you’ll need to do so strategically. This could get you a backlink, while also increasing your site’s traffic. Just be careful and make sure your comment doesn’t resemble spam.

SEO Optimized Content

Search engines connect Internet users with relevant websites using SEO terms and words. In order for the search engines to make this possible, webmasters will need to embed relevant keywords into their content. Solid optimized content will definitely do the trick. However, it is important to note that the content must be relevant to what the user is searching for, if you want them to return at a later date. If the content is not optimized the search engines will not be able to find your website, when a user searching for a topic that is relevant to your content. Inexpensive SEO services will be able to aid you in this regard.

Interlinking

You should also include interlinking as part of your SEO strategy. By linking from one of the blogs to other parts of your website, you will be encouraging visitors to check out everything your website has to offer. There is a variety of plugins that will automatically interlink specific blog posts together and you can set the words that you want to have interlinked. WordPress also offers quick and easy interlinking, with a default feature.

Many of you may wonder what SSL is and why should you need SSL on your website. To answer both questions, SSL is a secure method to encrypt and protect data while transmitting between client and server. It’s an essential way to protect users’ data, especially if you have an e-commerce website that processing credit cards.

SSL represents the “S” character in HTTPS, which you may see in the address bar of your web browser when visiting some secure sites like eBay, Paypal or even Google. Technically, SSL adds a new layer of encryption to regular HTTP, to verify the receiver and only allow authorized receivers can decrypt the encrypted message to see its contents.

All sensitive data like personal details, credit cards, email or password should always be served through HTTPS. However, many newspaper sites and blogs have activated SSL to increase trust and reliability, or take the reward from Google that helps to boost their rankings in search results. So even if your website is not an online store that accepting and processing payments, there are still good reasons to consider HTTPS.

Purchasing and activating SSL on your website will cost you more money per year, especially if you are using a shared web hosting. Accordingly essential requirements, you must have a dedicated IP that assigned with your website in order to install and activate SSL. Most web hosting services will charge you $4 per month per an IP address or $48 per year, plus $12 for purchasing SSL certificate. So total would be $60 per year to maintain SSL on your website. Not really cheap for a small site, right?

But I don’t talk about premium SSL, which cost you a lot of money to maintain in this guide. I’m going to show you how to set up and activate SSL on your site quickly and totally free!

Let’s get started.

How To Set Up SSL On Your WordPress Site For Free

The first step to activate HTTPS on your WordPress website is to sign up for a free cloud DNS service, called CloudFlare. If you don’t know what DNS is, I suggest that you take a few minutes to learn before going further. The UsefulPCGuide blog does a great job by posting a useful article with an infographic and video that explained how does DNS work, check it out!

Set Up Your CloudFlare Account

Once you have completed the register process, it will ask you to enter the domain name of your WordPress site to get started.

When the CloudFlare’s scan process is done, choose “Continue Setup” to move to the next step.

Review your current DNS records again and make sure it’s correct. Next, click on “Continue” button.

Choose “Free Website” plan, which will cost you $0 per month.

CloudFlare will show you two nameservers, where you need to change your current nameservers to.

After changing your nameservers, it could take up to 24 hours to take effect. In the meantime, there are a few other things that need to be done before your website going to work with HTTPS.

Change Your WordPress URL From HTTP To HTTPS

In order to work with HTTPS, your WordPress URL must be changed from HTTP to HTTPS. You can simply do that from your WordPress Dashboard, under Settings → General. When you click on “Save Changes” button, you will have to log in to your WordPress Dashboard again.

Update All Links To HTTPs In Database

Now it’s time to scan and replace all regular HTTP links in your WordPress database to HTTPS. You know, it could be a link to a particular image, an internal post or page. If your WordPress blog has some posts, it’s very easy to do by editing one by one. However, a blog with a hundred posts or more – will take you a lot of time.

But don’t worry, there is a tool called “Database search and replace script in PHP”, which will help you to scan and replace all HTTP links to HTTPS automatically. Just click here to download, unzip and upload into your root folder of your WordPress site.

Then visit that URL in your browser, for example, http://your-domain.com/search-replace-db

You can insert what you want to replace, such as:

• http://www.your-domain.com to https://your-domain.com
• http://your-domain.com to https://your-domain.com

I would recommend you to run the “dry run” first to verify what this tool will replace in your database before using the “live run”, which will be affected your WordPress database. This process will update all entries in the database, and replace all URLs, including WordPress URL and hard-coded links on posts and page.

Force Redirect HTTP To HTTPS With .htaccess File

When you enable your WordPress site to use HTTPS, it doesn’t mean your website will run through HTTPS all time. For example, users who have bookmarked your site with HTTP, they still access your WordPress website through HTTP by clicking on the bookmark.

However, you can redirect all HTTP requests to the HTTPS protocol by adding new codes into the .htaccess file that stored in the root of your WordPress site.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule (.*) https://your-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Be careful and don’t modify anything between the # BEGIN WordPress and the # END WordPress tags as your WordPress site manages them. Every time you update permanent links or upgrade WordPress version, contents between both tags are refreshed. So if you add your custom code there, it will be gone someday.

Conclusion

By activating SSL on your website, you have helped to improve your WordPress site, protected users’ data and gain better results in search engines – without spending a penny!

We all know how cool WordPress is. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it even cooler. And that’s the best thing about WordPress. When you first get it, you’ll have enough of a functionality to post and publish whatever you’d like. However, If that’s not the option you wanna go with, you can supercharge it with the right set of tools that are necessary for your blog to stand out.

With this in mind I’ve made a list of 8 WordPress plugins that aim to power up your blog by enhancing its functionality in so many ways. They target different aspects of your blog and make sure it looks and functions at its best. On with the list!

WordPress Google Maps Plugin

Google maps are used for many purposes and can be found on almost all kinds of blogs and websites. Apart from maps, they also provide tons of other functionalities that will come in handy no matter what’s the focus of your blog or what’s your niche audience.

Google Maps WD is a versatile and user-friendly plugin for adding functional maps to your blog. It comes with road, traffic, satellite, terrain and hybrid map styles, and allows you to spice your maps up with polygon, polyline, circle and rectangle overlays.The plugin features a store locator functionality, which shows the selected location on the map within a specified radius.It is a great option for corporate blogs or business sites. Mark any location or spot on the map with custom made icons,and give them your personal style with the available map themes and skins.The plugin, however, is not limited to only pointing out locations, it also gives the opportunity to provide directions to any location with walking, driving, bicycling and transit modes. The maps are responsive and fully customizable.

WordPress Form Builder

No matter what kind of a blog you run, the chances are high you’ll need some sort of a form on it. And the bad news is that WordPress doesn’t come with a form making functionality. No worries!

Whether your visitors want to apply for a competition, register for an event,or simply contact you, Form Maker will take care of all of them. It allows you to create any kind of application, registration, survey, questionnaire, or contact forms with tons of field options that you may ever need. It comes with various text input fields for names and addresses, times and date fields, password input, country select and custom select, check box for multiple selection options, etc. You can fully customize the forms, either using the plugin settings or choosing one of the 41 editable themes that Form Maker comes with. And if the style customization options are still not enough, its theme CSS is open for editing.

WordPress Slider Plugin

Sliders are trendy and we all love them. Why? Because they bring a nice touch to the website and are able to display various information. None of the WordPress default themes come with a slider, so if you want to feature one (or several) on your blog you need to get the right tool for it.

Slider WD is the best option you can go with, as it will not only equip it with an advanced slider, but will also enhance the design of your blog with its transition effects and custom styling options. It allows you to add both images and videos to the slides, embed content from Instagram, Flickr and Dailymotion, display social sharing buttons, and spice it all up with carousel and parallax effects. The slider also supports image, video and hotspot layers and filmstrip view option. The plugin is responsive and fully customizable as well.

Sumo Me Plugin

Want to display email subscription forms to your visitors? Encourage social sharing? Add call-to action box on your blog ? Sumo Me comes with all that functionality and even more. It’s a feature-packed WordPress plugin that equips your blog with a highlighter, welcome mat, heat maps, smart bar, image sharer and list building tools.

The plugin comes with various customizable templates to make sure the pop-up boxes look exactly as you want. It’s also analytics integrated to show you what people do and where they click on your blog. The plugin is mobile optimized and ensures mobile surfers enjoy the best experience on your blog.

Header and Footer

Take the header and footer sections of your blog to the next level by adding various services and tools to them. Header and Footer plugin allows you to insert Google analytics code, custom tracking code, Google Webmaster tools, etc, to your blog’s header and footer parts and easily manage them. You can also insert those codes before, after or in the middle of any of your post and pages, or everywhere on your theme using placeholders. The plugin allows CSS edits and works out of the box.

WP Super Cache

A super fast loading blog is a total advantage nowadays. I don’t mean that WordPress loads slowly, but over time, as you publish more posts and, therefore, get more traffic, you may encounter loading speed issues. To guarantee your blog’s high loading speed and provide a better user experience you’ll need to check out WP Super Cache plugin. What it actually does, is serving static HTML files with mode_rewrite to your blog visitors instead of loading heavy PHP scripts. As a result your blog loads faster. It uses legacy caching feature to provides cached pages to the known users as well.

All in One WP Security and Firewall

WordPress is secure itself, but if your want to add some additional levels of security to it All in One WP Security and Firewall will help you to get the work done. It checks your website for security risks and vulnerabilities, and grades the level of your security based on the features that you have activated. The plugin is equipped with advanced user account,user login, user registration, database security features, and also has a powerful security scanner tool that alerts you instantly when something goes wrong with your WordPress system. Its comments spam security function monitors your comments section and automatically blocks IP addresses that have already submitted several comments labeled as spam.

WordPress SEO Plugin

Search engine optimization is crucial for your blog’s success. Without proper optimization techniques it’s not gonna drive much traffic, and your blog is bound to stay unexplored. Luckily, there is a super advanced WordPress tool that is there to supercharge the optimization of your website and make it easily discoverable by search engines and your niche audience. And that’s Yoast SEO.  It helps you optimize your website for better search rankings by helping you to write keyword rich content, better headings and post titles, monitors the length of the meta descriptions of your posts, and reminds you to implement some useful techniques for better results. Its snippet preview feature instantly shows all the changes you have made to the content, and displays how your posts will look like in search results.

This is a short list of highly useful WordPress plugins that are sure to power up the functionality of your blog and take it to the next level. They will bring different functionalities to it and enhance not only its features, but its look and feel likewise.

If you have other great plugins in mind that I’ve missed out, please let me know by commenting below. I’d love to hear from you.

Gayane Mar is a passionate web-blogger who started her blogging activity a few years ago. Her posts are all about web design and web development. She writes all these posts for good people who need some guidance or advice with web development. The driving force behind her writings is the great hope that her blog posts would be helpful for each and every one reading them. If you are interested you can follow her own blog wpcapitan.com.

Have you ever tried to find out why building blog on WordPress is so popular than other CMS? Why is marketers’ first choice is WordPress?

The answer is, WordPress provided the best customer support and equipped with plenty of plugins. Even Google loves WordPress websites, and most of the popular websites use WordPress platform for their content management as well.

Why You Need A WordPress Blog?

We saw how awesome WordPress is, now let’s talk about you, who are you? Are you a developer, a designer, an expert, a freelancer, or a writer? Whatever you are, you need money to survive, isn’t it?

If you are nodding yes, and looking for a way to make money online, then WordPress blog is exactly what you are looking for.

Let me show you how you can make money online with your WordPress blog.

1. Build and Sell WordPress Plugins

If you own a WordPress blog, you already know the importance of WordPress plugins.

Every blogger who works on WordPress uses at least 3-4 plugins. Using plugins improve their working speed and add some extra features on their blog.

There are thousands of WordPress plugins available in the WordPress directory, some of them are free, and the rest are premium ones.

If you figure out a problem that bloggers are dealing with and create a plugin for it, then there is nothing that can stop you from making passive income from it.

First, analyze some other existing successful plugins, find out how they work and learn how can you make one better than that?

If you have decided to earn money through selling plugins, then make sure it focuses on a particular need.

You can sell your plugin on your WordPress blog or other sites like Freelancer, Elance, etc.

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2. Develop WordPress Themes

If you are a designer or a developer, then you can make money by developing WordPress themes.

You don’t need to be an expert coder or a developer to develop an elegant WordPress theme. All you need to know is what are you designing and who is it for.

Otherwise, you will end up with nothing but failure.

There are several companies and some Probloggers like Brian Clark, Chris Pearson, etc., are already making passive money through selling WordPress themes.

If you are an amateur designer or developer who doesn’t know much about the creating WordPress theme, then besides doing all by yourself you can take help of other professionals or developers’ team who are already building themes.

You can sell your WordPress themes at Themeforest, Creative Market, Mojo Themes, or you can sell it on your WP website. You can also provide custom WordPress themes services for some extra money.

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3. Provide WordPress Consulting Services

One of the best ways to use WordPress for making money is by offering consulting services. If you are expert in WordPress then you can offer consulting services, create custom designs or WordPress tutorials for the beginner or advanced bloggers.

Create an excellent portfolio on your WordPress blog, if you want to use this option to generate passive income.

You can ask your existing customers to leave positive feedbacks on your website to create an excellent portfolio. It works like a charm for your potential clients, and they believe that you have provided this type of services before. You can develop logos for Bloggers by having a proper Logo Design Team.

To develop a complete WordPress blog, we need a proper logo + a kickass website design. So you can gather clients and customers by providing these services.

Logo Design: Prepare a color combination for your logo, it should match your niche topic. Make it professional, classy and attractive. Make the logo unique so that your client/customer can easily trademark it without any issues. The logo design should reflect the brand name as well. You should keep this in mind all the time.

Website Design: Since mobile rule the web, it’s better to optimize your website/blog theme for mobile first. Make your theme responsive and add all the possible needed resources. Make it fast loading and optimize it for better ad placements. If you take a look at all the popular website themes, they are not really loaded with plenty of features, most of them are minimal since they focus mainly on the content part.

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4. Promote Product as An Affiliate

70% of the bloggers make money through affiliate marketing. You might already know what affiliate marketing is.

But, if you are a beginner blogger who doesn’t know about it then here is a quick definition of affiliate marketing:

Affiliate marketing is the way to earn money as a commission by promoting other’s product or services. You find a product in your niche, promote it to others who need it and earn a specific amount of profit on each sale that you make.

Fortunately, there are several affiliate products available online like Amazon Associates.

Be careful when you are choosing a product for affiliate marketing. Select the product which provides you good commission and have demand in public.

If you want to boost up your affiliate marketing, then do email marketing. You can also place your affiliate product ads on your website.

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5. Offer Writing Services

If you are a content writer, then you can make money through content writing services. If you have good experience in writing, then you can offer your writing services on your WordPress blog.

Many writers offer their services through their blog.

You can find writing jobs on other websites like ProBlogger Job Board, Elance, Odesk, PeoplePerHour, etc.

You also can do paid guest blogging for other popular sites.

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6. Provide Blog Setup Service

If you are a busy beginner blogger who wants to make money using WordPress, then a blog setup service will be a good option for you. Even if you don’t have many WordPress skills, you can do this job.

Don’t know how?

Let me tell you then.

Many people want to start WordPress blog, but the problem is they don’t have technical knowledge about the WordPress.

Your task as a blog setup service provider will be to install WordPress, upload themes, and add recommended plugins, etc.

All you have to do is create a separate blog set up service page on your WordPress website or blog.

Promote that page through guest blogging, social media, or banner ads to get clients.

Remember, maybe new bloggers will not pay to you for blog setup service, but you can use your affiliate links somewhere and make money out of it.

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Final Thoughts!

WordPress could be an awesome way to generate passive income if you have talent. It not only enables you to make more money than you thought but also provides you the freedom to do anything that you want to do.

If you haven’t got any WordPress blog yet, then get one and start making money.

Which of the services do you think you can provide on your WP blog?