WordPress

 After the introduction of WordPress, let’s move to the benefits of using WordPress. If you are asking yourself “why should I Use WordPress?”, then you’re in the right place. If you are thinking of using WordPress, so you probably heard about it from a friend or read about it in an article. You may have researched WordPress recently, but you are still confused about its benefits; that’s why we’ll break down the most important benefits of WordPress for you, giving you the reasons why it’s the most popular content management system in the world. Why Use WordPress?  There are many CMS – content management systems and website builders out there, some of them are open-source and others are paid, but why should you use WordPress over all of them, that’s what we will explain in this article.   WordPress is Open Source and Free  WordPress is open-source software and completely free to use since 2003. Open-source means that it’s developed by contributors. WordPress especially has a large community involved in the software development process from the development phase to the software’s production phase.  WordPress is so-called self-hosted software, so you can easily download it from WordPress.org and upload it to your hosting and be online. Also, if your web hosting includes cPanel as a hosting management tool, you can easily install WordPress on your domain with a couple of clicks through it.   WordPress is adaptable, You can make any type of Website with it  One of the most common misconceptions about WordPress is that it’s for building blogs and news websites. In fact, in the past WordPress was developed as a blogging platform, but that has changed completely with the different releases over the years.  So, besides that WordPress is one of the fastest and professional ways to start a blog, it also can make almost any type of website.  So, when it comes to the question “What can I Build with WordPress?” the list of answers is endless, but here’re the most common types of website that you can build with WordPress:    Blogs Business Websites eCommerce Websites Membership Websites Forums Portfolios eLearning Websites Rating Websites Wiki Websites Q&A Websites Chatrooms Websites Galleries Websites Personal Websites Jobs Websites Listing Websites Reviews Websites Non-Profit Organization Websites Media Centers Websites Auctions Websites And a lot More…   WordPress is Easy to Learn and Use  Because WordPress is open-source and can be used by anyone and the userbase isn’t limited by pricing or premium customer support membership, so you will be able to learn many things about WordPress from using the dashboard to the plugins and the widgets, which by the way are all easy to learn.  WordPress powers about 35% of the websites on the planet and has a huge community so you’ll find a lot of resources to learn from such as WordPress official documentation, blogs, videos, forums, Facebook groups, and more.   Fully Customizable and Scalable  As we already mentioned, WordPress themes, plugins, and widgets make it easy to build and create your website, but all of these features are important to scale up. Let’s learn more about each of them and mention an example of scaling up your website functionality.  First things first, Themes are used as a foundation for your website design. Themes are used to define your website design, colors, font type, logo places, and your website pages like home page, about, terms, etc. And don’t worry there are thousands of themes to choose from, so you’ll build a unique, beautiful, fresh-looking website.  Then comes the plugins that control your website functionality. There are plenty of plugins to help you create a fully functional website, from small plugins such as plugins for search engine optimization and contact forms to the big ones like plugins to make an e-commerce store.  Last but not least comes widgets. These are small pieces to help you optimize your user experience on the website, so, for example, if you want to make an event calendar for your users or a customized navigation bar, you’ll find plenty of widgets to use.  When it comes to the ease and capability of scaling, this is where WordPress shines. For example, if you ever need to add a new section to your website, let’s say that your users need a membership section, you can easily find a plugin for membership management and add it to your website with a few clicks, so WordPress is one of the easiest CMS to scale up your website.   WordPress is Easy to Manage  As we mentioned previously, WordPress is used by millions of people, one of the reasons for that, that it makes it easy for you to manage your website ins and outs.  Some of the web development companies charge monthly fees for maintenance, but when it comes to WordPress, there is much that you’ll have to do; it’s a few things like choosing a good hosting provider and hosting plan, making sure to run backups regularly, updating themes, plugins, and WordPress software, and always trying to improve the website speed and SEO.  All of these tips for managing your WordPress website take literally a few clicks, and this is one of the reasons that makes WordPress one of the easiest CMS to manage in the world.   SEO Friendly  Along with the SEO plugins that exist for WordPress, it has built-in SEO software so that WordPress automatically generates meta descriptions and title tags for all of your website pages and posts. This makes the search engines know your content, index it well, and improve the rankings.  As with every detail in WordPress, some plugins and tools offer advanced SEO features, such as Yoast SEO plugin which one of the must-have WordPress plugins when it comes to SEO, and many more.   So, Why Use WordPress? Because it’s Amazing!!  In the end, WordPress is truly an amazing and complete CMS with great features that make anyone from big corporations to individuals use it for their online presence. I think it’s time

When you’re first getting started with WordPress, you have chosen your web hosting plan, installed WordPress, picked up your favorite theme, and launched your website. Still, you need to add some other functionality, for example, you need to add social sharing buttons, or you need to add Google analytics code to your website, or you need to optimize your website for search engines, and so on, here comes WordPress plugins. We’ll learn more about WordPress plugins today; what they are, what they can do, how they work, and how to install a WordPress plugin. So, let’s get started.   What is a WordPress Plugin? WordPress plugins simply are pre-coded applications that can integrate with WordPress website, WordPress plugins’ most important job is to provide the functionality to your website without having to code. There are thousands of WordPress plugins available out there, so you as a WordPress user can install any of these plugins with your WordPress website by navigating to your admin dashboard then the plugins page, and search for any plugin you need! WordPress plugins are what makes a WordPress site more than a simple blog. Plugins are made to give you wings in the WordPress world, so you can enhance your website with the plugins, customize how your website looks and functions, provide a good user experience, and almost anything you may need.   What can you do with WordPress Plugins? You may have understood by now that WordPress plugins add functionality to your website, but what kind of functionality could you add by integrating a plugin to your website? Almost anything you could dream of, you will find a plugin to make it! Among these thousands of plugins available, and to well understand what you can do with them on your website, let’s take some examples of what popular plugins can do: Plugins for security, automatic backups, speed Plugins to protect you from spam Plugins help you integrate your email service provider to your newsletter form Plugins allow you to optimize and enhance your blog posts for search Plugins allow you to make an eCommerce store Plugins build social sharing icons for you Plugins from Google like Google Analytics to help you monitor your traffic Plugins make you able to create forms Plugins allow you to make a podcast website Plugins help you create support and knowledge base sections in your website And More… There are thousands of plugins as we mentioned. The examples above are just a few of what you can do with WordPress plugins. You even can create your own plugin if you need to and able to code it.   How do WordPress Plugins work? As you know, WordPress is open-source software, so that means any developer can code its own plugin and add it to the WordPress plugin directory or even just use it himself. When you install a WordPress plugin, the plugin code will be registered in your WordPress database and you’ll be able to activate or deactivate it as you want anytime. In the end, as a WordPress website owner, you’ll find WordPress plugins the most useful thing in your day to day WordPress use because they will give you the ultimate power to achieve whatever you want in your website.  Just a piece of advice, continue reading WordPress performance

WordPress is a great tool for web developers, but it has not been a good choice for casual website owners and beginners. With WordPress 5.8 due to be released on July 20, this will change. WordPress is powerful enough to handle almost any task, but it was difficult to learn how to make the most of its potential. WordPress is often criticized for not being user-friendly. Here is where the simple-named “full-site editing” comes in. Today we will be discussing full site editing (FSE), and how it can help users to reduce the learning curve for WordPress. What is full-site editing? First, let’s go over the history of FSE. A couple of years ago, Matt Mullenweg, one of the creators of WordPress, introduced the Gutenberg block editor during his Q&A session at WordCamp Europe. This marked a significant change in WordPress’s approach to page/post building. Before blocks, users only had a simple TinyMCE editor at their disposal. To customize your pages, you had to treat them as a Word document and hope that they wouldn’t be broken when you move them around but, Blocks changed that. Your page or post can now be a blank canvas where you can place different blocks. These blocks can be any type of thing. You can have text, images, audio embeds, or galleries. Blocks make it easier to work on pages and blog posts that would otherwise be boring. This concept is taken one step further with full site editing. Blocks can be used to create pages or posts, but they can also be used to build whole websites. FSE is exactly that. You can use blocks (from the block editor) instead of only pages or posts to modify entire websites. WordPress users: What does full site editing mean? There are both good and bad things in website tech and software. FSE can have an enormous impact on your workflow depending on who you are. There are also power users, users who want to customize their sites as much as possible. Some power users don’t have the skills to code everything themselves. FSE will be a huge benefit to these users. There are also casual users who want a nice-looking theme without having to do any design customizations other than uploading a logo. FSE will not be noticed by these users. FSE allows you to move blocks around and customize your WordPress theme to suit your needs. FSE allows you to modify every aspect of your website’s design. This is especially valid if you’re a business and don’t want to rely as much on third parties to help you customize your website. Matt Mullenweg said it best: FSE is like expanding the accessibility of WordPress. This is my core belief in our mission. FSE will not force you to do any of these things if you don’t want to. You can use WordPress as you have always used it. Developers and designers: What does full site editing mean? Here is where things get tricky. FSE means changes. Single-purpose themes are almost gone. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to create a theme that is independent and can deliver unique features. FSE makes it more difficult. FSE is not compatible with all themes. This can lead to higher development costs. However, boycotting FSE is a sure way to fail in the long term. FSE is not a popular product, but you can’t afford to miss out on the party. With WordPress heading towards a 50% market share, no developer wants to miss out on a cake of that size. Here’s what Hardeep Asrani, WordPress contributor, and developer with Themeisle, had to say about FSE and its impact on the WordPress ecosystem: FSE will make WordPress truly what you see is what you get. Developers will have an easier way to help users create their websites without the need to install page builders and learn CSS. This will change how themes are built. We are moving away from large PHP files that handle many different templates, and towards CSS with JSON configuration files.

Making the decision to start a blog is easy, but what happens when you start the whole blogging process and then something goes wrong? What are the most common mistakes that new blog owners make? There are several, and I’m going to address some of the more common mistakes that I see. The last thing any new blogger wants is to make a mistake in their very first few blog posts. So, let’s get started!   Forgetting about SEO A lot of wordpress beginners forget about SEO. SEO, for those of you who don’t know, is short for search engine optimization and is the process of optimizing your website for search engines in order to rank higher in search queries. This is very important because you want your blog/website to rank higher to get more traffic to your website, So you should make sure your website is optimized for search engines. By making it easy for the search engines to index. Your website should always be listed in the search engine results pages, so you must make sure your title tag and meta tags are relevant to your site’s content. You can learn more about SEO basics here and learn more about the best WordPress SEO plugins here.   Choosing the wrong theme One of the most common beginner WordPress mistakes is selecting the wrong theme for your website. When you install WordPress, you should always choose the “All-In-One” theme. This is the theme that makes everything work together. It is usually the easiest theme to change from and it comes with everything you need to get started. You can check this article for more WordPress design tips.   Not keeping up with security practices Keeping your wordpress website secure is your responsibility and you really shouldn’t ignore it. Getting hacked will cause you many problems, and some of them are irreversible, so don’t take the risk and keep up with the latest security practices that you can learn more about in this article.   Using too many plugins or conflicting ones A third common mistake that many people make is using too many plugins or plugins that conflict with one another. For example, if you have two plugins that aren’t meant to work together, then using both of them on the same site can lead to security and performance problems. WordPress will alert you whenever a plugin conflicts with another, and it will also try to fix the plugin versions that conflict with the other one. However, if you don’t test your plugins before using them, you might end up with two very similar plugins, with completely different coding, security issues, and so forth. By using best practices and avoiding these common mistakes, it’s much easier to build a website that works as well as possible. If you want to learn more about how WordPress plugins work, you can check this article.   Not making use of development practices Another mistake I have seen mainly from people who use WordPress without a development background is not using development best practices. There are several different ways that you can develop your WordPress site, and by “development best practices” I mean things like separating your content from your header, keeping the header simple and testing all content on a new version of WordPress before applying it to the site. Some developers think that the WordPress template engine is the best way to achieve this, but it can be very time-consuming.   Making all of your posts really long Putting all of your posts into one big post. There’s a big problem with this; first, it slows down the post-viewing experience and second, it takes longer for your blog to load. Your content is very important, so you want people to read your content and visit your website. It’s okay to have multiple long posts on your blog if you need space to explain something. Just don’t use this space to try to fill up every single post.   Not backing up your website Many people think that nothing can go wrong and they will never have to worry about backup and say it will not happen to them. This is wrong, you never know what can happen. That’s why you should regularly backup your website in order to protect your data should anything happen. [themify_layout_part slug=”web-hosting-discount”] Not checking your website performance If your website is slow, people won’t check it. That’s because human attention span is continuously decreasing, and studies show that people most probably will leave your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. That’s why you have to regularly check your website performance and speed to make sure that it’s working perfectly. You can check out our guide on how to increase your WordPress website performance and how to check your WordPress website performance.  one of the common reasons for bad performance websites is the hosting plan you are purchasing. to avoid this problem you must choose the most suitable web hosting plans for your business. WE WILL LEAVE HERE A LINK FOR THE BEST WEB HOSTING PLANS  [themify_layout_part slug=”web-hosting-discount”] Forgetting to update WordPress WordPress updates are very important because they patch vulnerabilities, fix bugs, increase your performance and introduce new features. Not updating your website will have serious consequences such as performance penalties and of course, leaving your website vulnerable to be hacked will cause a lot of problems.   Duplicating content The final beginner WordPress mistake that I want to talk about is creating multiple posts from one post. Creating a series of blog posts with different variations of the same content is called duplicate content. This is a big no-no in WordPress.   A word before you go All of these beginner WordPress mistakes are very easy to avoid if you know what you are doing. WordPress is a powerful platform that is used by thousands of professional bloggers, businesses and individuals everyday. If you don’t know how to use it properly,

Table of Contents: SEO Overview What is SEO? Why SEO is Important for Your Website? WordPress SEO Best Practices Choose an SEO-Optimized WordPress Theme: Change Your “Permalinks” Structure to an SEO-Friendly Form: Create A “Sitemap” for Your WordPress Site: Register Your Website on Google Search Console: Use “Categories and Tags” Properly in WordPress: Internal Linking is Important: Add and Update Your Content Regularly: Focus on Content Quality: Do Keyword Research: Install a WordPress SEO Plugin: Top 5 WordPress SEO Plugins   Yoast SEO Plugin   SEMrush Plugin   All in One SEO Pack Plugin   Rank Math Plugin   SEOPress Plugin Performance and Security for better WordPress SEO   Optimize your WordPress Website Performance   Optimizing Your WordPress Website Security Conclusion   Welcome to the most comprehensive guide on the Internet for mastering WordPress SEO.  First of all, improving your WordPress SEO is not an option if you want more traffic, revenue, or conversions from your website. You might have heard that WordPress is SEO friendly, and this is why it’s the most popular and used content management system. Despite WordPress generating high-quality code that follows the SEO best practices, you need to do more work to enhance and optimize your website if you seek a better ranking on search engine pages.  In our guide, we’ll be covering the WordPress SEO from the ground up, so you’ll find a table of contents to make it easy for you to browse through the different parts of it. SEO Overview  We know that the process of optimizing WordPress for search engines looks intimidating for beginners, but don’t worry, it’s not that complicated. Let’s learn the basics first and then try to apply what you learned and you’ll feel the difference. What is SEO?  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. “SEO” is an expression used to express the process of optimizing a website for a better ranking on search engines to get more organic traffic.  Optimizing a website for search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, or so on is about creating that website well coded and formatted, making it easy for search engines to find your website and understand its content properly.  When people search the web for any topic you write about, your search-engine-optimized content will appear in a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and you’ll get more traffic/visitors visiting your website. Why SEO is Important for Your Website?  Search engines are the biggest source of traffic on the Internet, which makes them the most targeted source to get more traffic to a website. The point is search engines decide how to rank websites based on some advanced algorithms. They use these algorithms to understand the websites’ content and properly rank them on search engine results pages. However, these algorithms are not perfect. They still need help from website owners to understand the website content and to properly rank the website on the search engine results pages.  The point here is, if your website is not well-optimized for search engines, the search engine algorithms will not understand your website content and will not know how to rank it, and in this case, you are more likely to lose a lot of traffic.  The importance of SEO lies in optimizing your website for search engines to maximize the odds of getting more and more traffic as they are the biggest source of traffic on the Internet. WordPress SEO Best Practices The process of optimizing your website for search engines isn’t too complicated as you might think. And if you’re already using WordPress, you don’t have to be a tech geek to follow the search engines optimizations best practices. Let’s start by explaining some actionable steps towards optimizing a WordPress website for search engines. 1.Choose an SEO-Optimized WordPress Theme:  When it comes to optimizing a WordPress website for search engines, the first step is always to make sure to choose a well SEO-Optimized WordPress theme. A well SEO-optimized theme doesn’t mean to pick a well-looking one only. Still, you need to pick a theme that has a clean code that will give you two main advantages, the first one is, it will load fast, and the second is, the theme will be optimized to generate HTML code that follows the search engine optimization standards.  Therefore, you must choose a theme that is built with SEO in mind or in other words an SEO-friendly theme. When you look for a theme, try to look for one that offers features designed specifically to improve your SEO. Fortunately, there are hundreds of themes available that will suit your needs on both sides, well-designed and SEO-friendly. 2.Change Your “Permalinks” Structure to an SEO-Friendly Form:  Permalinks are short for “Permanent Link”, and they are the URLs that point to your website’s individual pages, posts, and other content. WordPress offers many options for automatic permalink types, some of them are based around numbers like the “Plan and Numeric” which aren’t perfect since they have no useful information for either search engines or users; instead, you can go with the “Post Name” option since it expresses clearly what the content of the page is about. Let’s see some examples: Non-SEO Friendly Permalinks: “https://v2.hostilica.com/blog/193847?p=2894/” SEO Friendly Permalinks: “https://v2.hostilica.com/blog/how-to-install-wordpress”  Notice that the SEO-Friendly permalinks are readable and the visitor can easily guess what he’ll see on the page by just looking at the page URL. On the other hand, with the Non-SEO Friendly permalinks, the user cannot guess what he’ll find on the page by looking at the page URL. Using SEO Friendly permalinks structure will make it easy for both humans and search engines to understand your website’s content, increasing your chances of getting a better ranking in search engine results pages. 3.Create A “Sitemap” for Your WordPress Site: A “Sitemap” is a list of all of your website pages and other content, it’s usually organized into a hierarchy and it provides a way to see how your website is structured and what it includes. The primary

After you understand the importance of page speed, let’s start on how to boost your website speed.  How to speed up your WordPress website and increase its performance surely is a very hot topic nowadays. Fortunately, there are easy ways to help you increase your WordPress website performance significantly. But why do you even need to care about your WordPress website performance and page load time? Your website performance and page load time are actively affecting the bounce rate of your website. Studies said that if your website page took more than 2 seconds, you would have about 47% bounce rate; besides that Google and other search engines consider the page load time as one of the most important ranking factors in their result pages. So, you need to take your WordPress website’s performance as a serious matter for your website’s success. In this article, we’ll tell you how to speed up your WordPress website speed and performance in the best ways possible, so let’s get started.   1. Choose a Good Hosting Provider: The very first reason that affects your website speed is your web hosting quality. So, if you are just starting your website, it’s fine to choose a shared hosting plan, but we recommend you to make sure that your hosting server storage type SSD; if you already have launched your WordPress website for a while and your traffic volume is increasing, you probably will need to upgrade your hosting plan either to a higher shared hosting package or to a VPS hosting.   2. Use an Optimized Lightweight WordPress Theme: A WordPress theme with too many elements, widgets, sliders, etc. could look very shiny, but if the theme has too many components with a higher page size, it will affect your page load time. Another important factor is theme optimization. You need to make sure that the theme is well-coded and don’t forget to look at its reviews and buy it from a trustworthy place.   3. Use a WordPress Caching Plugin: WordPress pages are “dynamic”, which means that they’re built on the fly when anyone visits a page or a post on your website to build a page, WordPress behind the scenes has to run a process to find the requested information, then display it to the visitor. This process has multiple steps to be done, so sometimes it could slow down your website when multiple users visit it at once. Here the caching plugin comes into play, it can make your WordPress website more than twice faster. The caching plugin role is that instead of going through the whole page generation process every time a user visits the page, it (caches) makes a copy of the page after the first time the page loads and then serves that cached version to every upcoming user.  There are many good WordPress caching plugins, but we recommend using WP Super Cache, it’s free!   4. Optimize Image Size: Images help you boost engagement on your WordPress website content, but they will negatively affect your website if you don’t optimize them. In fact, non-optimized images are one of the most common performance issues seen on beginner websites. So, you need to optimize your images to speed up your WordPress website. So, either manually optimizes the images using Photoshop, Chrome Pagespeed Insights extension, or any other tools, or you could use image optimization WordPress plugins such as Optimole or WP Smush. This way you’ll reduce your website images and improve your website performance and speed.   5. Regularly Update your WordPress Website: WordPress is frequently updated; each update offers new features and may contain security fixes. As a WordPress website owner/manager, you are responsible for keeping your WordPress website, themes, and plugins up to date with their latest versions. If you don’t update everything regularly, you may cause performance issues to your WordPress website or you may end up vulnerable to security threats.   To conclude Always put your WordPress website performance and page load time as one of the most important factors that affect your website/business success.

The Importance of WordPress Performance After we explained the WordPress plugins, we will move to the performance stage. WordPress performance is a big and important topic for any WordPress user because as you may already know, page loading speed is an important factor for SEO and user experience on your website, so this is one of the topics you always need to check and optimize. Are you just starting with WordPress or using it for a while?, but you need to check your WordPress site performance, then you’re in the right place.   Why is Page Speed Important? Studies say that the average human attention range has decreased from 12 seconds to only 7 seconds, so that means that you have very little time to show your visitors your content and give them a reason to stay on your website. You may have heard about the term ‘bounce rate’, which means how many users leave your website after visiting it. The main reason most times for users leaving your website is the slow loading of pages. Another important study from StrangeLoop that involved large sites including Google and Amazon said that a 1 second delay in your page loading time may lead to 11% fewer page views, a 7% loss in conversions, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. Google search engine algorithm has already started to push slow websites down in the search result page, which results in less traffic volume for slow websites. To wrap this point up, by now you know how much the importance of WordPress website speed and performance, so if you want to attract more traffic volume, more subscribers, and more profit from your website, you need to make your WordPress website fast.   You Must Check Your WordPress Website Speed As a beginner, you may think that your website speed is ok, just because you don’t feel it slow on your computer, but this is a big mistake because since you always visit your website, modern browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox store your website in something called browser cash, which automatically prefetch your website data, so as soon as you visit it, it will load fast because it’s cashed already in the browser; However, when a normal user visit your website for the first time, he may not have the same experience as you in terms of website loading speed. Also, users in different geographical locations and different internet speeds will have a different experience. This is why you must check and test your website speed using a good tool like for example isitWP’s WordPress Speed Test tool; it’s free and allows you to test your website’s real speed. After you have tested your website speed, you need to know that the good page loading time is under 2 seconds but put in your mind that the faster your website is, the better.   What could slow down your website? After you knew the importance of your website speed and how big its role in either search engines ranking or in your users’ experience, and after you checked your website load time speed, let’s talk about what could make your WordPress website slow, and try to fix or avoid them to make your website better day after day. The main reasons for a slow WordPress website are: Web Hosting: If you have a bad hosting service or your server is not properly configured, both could end up slowing down your WordPress website. WordPress Configuration: Sometimes when WordPress is misconfigured and isn’t serving cached pages, it will overload your server, so this will end up either slowing your website or crash your entire website. Page Size: Your website’s page size is a big factor for slowing down your website, and in most cases, the reason is unoptimized images for the web. Bad Plugins: Poorly coded plugins will slow your WordPress website, so before installing a plugin into your WordPress website, make sure to search about it and read some reviews. External Scripts: External scripts like font loaders, ads, analytics, etc. could also have a big impact on your website performance and page load time. Now that you know what could slow your WordPress website down, try to avoid making any of the causes that we mentioned above to keep your website performance as good as you can.   Good Web Hosting is Important for Your WordPress Website Always remember that the number one reason for your WordPress website slow could be bad web hosting. A good web hosting provider always takes the extra measures to optimize your hosting environment, resulting in a high-performance web hosting service that will help you optimize your WordPress website performance and page load time speed.