Basic Security Tips for WordPress Beginners

 

Welcome to WordPress.

You are now a part of a sprawling community of WordPress users, developers, and geeks. And your website is one of 16 million others currently powered by WordPress.

You already know about user-friendliness, the vast variety, and utter control you get to exercise over your WordPress website. But it’s not all fun and games until you learn how to keep it safe.

WordPress is as secure as you make it. So let’s harden your defenses against common attacks.

1. Back Ups

These are necessary for maintenance, security, and just general peace of mind.

A backup is your safety net in times when a) your website crashes, b) you lock yourself out, and c) you get hacked.

All you need to do is install a trustworthy backup plugin and use it to create scheduled backups of your website. Try one like Backup Buddy (premium, has good auto restore features), BackUpWordPress (free), WordPress Backup to Dropbox (mostly free, great for creating and storing site wide + database backups on cloud), and SaaS like VaultPress, UpdraftPlus, et al.

Tip: Create a backup schedule that coincides with your general maintenance schedule. Essentially, anytime you upgrade something on your website, your backup should save it. 

2. Download from Trusted sources only

Most WordPress websites are open to attack through theme and plugin vulnerabilities.

Make sure you download absolutely nothing from sources that reek of malicious activity: typically websites offering premium goods for free are major culprits. A few bucks saved now will come back to give you grief later.

Trusted sources like the official WordPress repositories (for themes and plugins) are safe, along with large marketplaces like Envato (ThemeForest and CodeCanyon), iThemes, StudioPress, etc.

Tip: Exercise the same caution before hiring a custom WordPress development services provider.

3. Strong Passwords and Admin username

It may sound harsh, but if you’re too lazy to change the default username and couldn’t be bothered to use a strong password, you deserve to get hacked. At this point you’re practically inviting attackers.

Long, strong passwords are your first line of defense against ‘standard’ brute force attacks. The length and complexity exponentially increases the time it would take to crack your password. Mix up random letters in upper and lower cases with numbers and characters.

Also change the default username (“admin”, are you kidding me?) to something less obvious.

Tip: Set up a new account and assign admin role to that, and delete the previous “admin” username account. It’s one of the simplest ways.

4. Security Plugins

Oh, now we’re talking.

Security plugins are your website’s personal anti-virus systems, in that they will whet your website and exterminate any malicious bits left behind by potential attackers. This is essential: WordFence (The best and largely free plugin with exhaustive features for site security, login, two factor authentication, etc.)

There are more options (like Login Lockdown, iThemes Security, etc.) but WordFence has enough features to do all their jobs on its own.

Tip: Feature packed plugins fulfill more requirements, and make it easy to keep your plugin-count under tight control. This is good for both security and performance.

5. Update Consistently

Most good Plugins and themes, and the WordPress core itself, roll out updates on a regular basis. Your job is to update to the latest version.

You may have noticed that within a few weeks of every major platform update (last one was 4.4 Clifford), you will get minor version release notices (last one was 4.4.2). These are fixes for security vulnerabilities.  Themes and plugins also keep pace with the updates for error-free performance and more tightly-knit security.

So update. Consistently.

Endnote

Once you have set up a routine for maintenance and security, you can progress to advanced tactics to harden WordPress by checking out even more security tips and this complete checklist.

It’s a war out there. Do your part by keeping your wits around you, and be safe.

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Everything You Need to Know While Picking a Responsive WordPress Theme

The rapid use of different mobile devices for browsing internet influences web designers and webmasters to create mobile-friendly websites. With the use of a responsive WordPress theme, you can design or optimize your business website for different mobile devices and viewports. These themes are cross-browser compatible and offers lots of customization options to improve the usability of your site.
 

However, with such an extensive range of options, it becomes quite challenging to make an intelligent decision on what to consider while picking a good responsive theme – free or premium.
 

To make your work simpler, we bring you some of the useful tips you need to consider while picking out the most suitable and powerful responsive theme for your site.

1. Decide what resolutions are supported and obviously how
 

If you are new into the web design world, let me tell you that responsive designs utilize Media Queries to reformat the design of a site when the screen resolution is under a particular number of pixels. For instance, a site’s design might restructure for the mobile device when it encounters the screen size is 480x or below.
 

You can make a use of Resizer tool in your browser to automatically put your PC browser window to test common device sizes. With this tool, you can test the desired responsive theme before making any final call.

2. Consider the content hierarchy
 

If your site’s content doesn’t fit at mobile screen sizes, then you can simply drop it out from your site. For instance, widgets and sidebars of a website are usually hidden at smaller screen sizes and they won’t appear on a scrollable page.
 

It might be okay for your purposes, but identifying what is hidden, and what is re-designed as your window size becomes smaller.
 

However, with the use of good responsive theme, you will easily handle your sidebars and also create flexible widget areas for your site. With content reformatted for smaller screens, you need to consider the content hierarchy to make sure that the order in which it arrives is suitable for how you propose to showcase your site rather then moving down the content on the scrolling page.
 

3. Know how menus are managed
 

The width of your navigation area can be affected by several items and the length of your navigation labels. In fact, it can affect the look of your navigation bar on different devices. If you can’t handle your navigation bar, then your nav might split in odd places on small mobile devices.
 

But you can choose the best responsive theme that uses the compelling navigation system. When the desktop version uses a traditional link bar, then this changes to a tappable menu while reformats for small screen devices.
 

You can also make a use of custom WordPress theme development at HireWPGeeks to ensure a more accessible and usable design for your site.

4. Advertisement on your website
 

Some of the ads serving systems do not optimize the ad content for different devices. And this creates conflicting issues with a responsive design. In fact, ads are dealt with JS tags and iFrames, and it can cause formatting issues badly.
 

If you want to serve ads, try to work out on a strategy of how you will either turn on/off advertisement at multiple sizes, or you can also provide alternative ads only for mobile visitors.

5. Video handling
 

Videos play a vital role in encouraging potential visitors towards your site. But it can create issues with the responsive design because of the nature of embedding. If you want to optimize the size of your videos for multiple devices, then you need to employ the special HTML markup correctly.
 

Note: if you don’t find a video in the theme’s demo, you can ask the author for any provisions made in your responsive theme to handle video content.

Conclusion
 

These are some of the useful tips that will help you create a mobile-friendly design for your website.

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How Switching your Website to WordPress can Benefits you

Undoubtedly, WordPress is the most promising software used for building and customizing company websites, service-based sites, professional and personal blogs and even e-commerce stores. This content management system has gained a lot of popularity because it’s advanced and user-friendly features including the extensive range of themes and plugins.
 

With the help of WordPress themes and plugins, you can customize the look and feel of your site according to your needs. And the best part of using WordPress is that you don’t need to a technical expert. Yes, you heard it right. You can edit your site, without getting your hands dirty in coding. And this is the main reason why businesses are switching their traditional sites with WordPress.
 

Here, in this post, we will discuss the five advantages of switching your site to WordPress.

1. WordPress is Manageable
 

It is super-easy to create, edit and delete the content on WordPress sites. WordPress also keeps their back-end upgraded so you don’t need to take stress on the part of a site’s safety and security.
You can install the plugins and themes into your sites without any technical knowledge and also tweak the design within a few clicks. In fact, you can easily update your installed themes to the newer coding standards just after creating a solid foundation.

2. WordPress is Accessible
 

This content management system allows you to add, edit and publish content on the site anywhere, anytime with an internet connection.
 

It means you access your site and upload the content even from your mobile devices. Isn’t it incredible!

3. Search Engine friendly
 

There is a false myth that WordPress is a search engine optimized content management system.
Of course, it is a search engine friendly tool, but still you need to optimize your site manually to get best possible results. And with the help of SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, you can optimize the content of your site for search engines quickly and efficiently.
 

Note: WordPress offers a super-easy framework which makes it simple for Google to crawl your site on SERPs.

4. WordPress is fully Customizable
 

Customize or tweak the design of your WordPress site/blog with beautiful and fully responsive themes. WordPress offers myriads of free and paid themes that you can use to create a customized site. You can change the design, color, size and overall appearance of your site within a few clicks.
 

Well, you can also hire the WordPress customization expert that can help you in creating more advanced, more reliable and more professional website in a short time period.

5. Easy to learn CMS
 

Now you don’t need to be a technical expert for creating a professional looking WordPress website. You don’t even need to learn any programming languages like JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and HTML.
 

In fact, you can also watch tutorial videos on how to set up a first business site on WordPress? Or other related tutorials to gather some basic knowledge about this CMS.
 

With the guidance of video tutorials, you can create and develop anything from a business site to well-developed online store, without getting your hands dirty in codes.


Conclusion
 

WordPress as a content management system makes it simple to set up a fully-functional and intuitive website, without any coding. Plus, it offers countless benefits that you won’t find in any other CMS software. And that is the reason why people are converting their HTML sites into WordPress.

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Advantages Associated with Responsive WordPress Themes

From the today’s point of view, responsive web design is playing an indispensable role in the web designing sector. The growing usability of smartphones and tablets are imposing the website owners to optimize their conventional websites for different mobile devices and screen sizes.

However, designing a website for different devices and mobile platforms is not a cup of tea for non-technical users. It requires serious coding, time, money and in-depth web design technique. But with the introduction of Responsive WordPress themes, you can easily optimize your website in minutes.

WordPress offers plenty of responsive themes that will help you create not only a beautiful web design for your site, but you can also make your site compatible with multiple devices such as desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Plus, these themes are packed with various advanced features such as valid and secure coding, cross-browser compatibility, SEO and

performance optimized, and multiple language support.

In this blog post, we will share some advantages of using responsive WordPress themes for your WordPress websites.

1. One Site version from multiple devices

The best thing about responsive themes is that they look amazing on different devices and screen sizes. It means you can see a website version on all smartphones and large desktop computers. A responsive theme reduces the work of building multiple site versions for different devices (such as desktop computers and smartphones).

So, it is better to use a fully-responsive theme for your website as it will optimize your content, images and other aspects for different devices and mobile platforms.

Well, you can also opt for WordPress theme customization services if you want a fully-fledged mobile-ready website for your business.

2. Increase traffic on your website

Around 40% of web traffic comes from mobile phones, and having a responsive theme means you are allowing mobile visitors to access your site from their mobile devices. Through this, you will increase your web traffic and convert them into potential customers.

With responsive themes, you can create and customize your website to make it more engaging and eye-catching. You can instantly construct beautiful and well-coded web pages that can attract both web customers and search engines such as Google and Bing.

3. Enhanced Brand Awareness
 

A design of a website represents you and your brand. So, it is important for you to build a website that can fulfill the needs of both the desktop viewers and mobile viewers. You can give your visitors the enhanced user-experience by integrating fully-functional responsive theme.

You can give your web customers the opportunity to access your website even from their mobile phone. And if you have an eshop, then allow them to buy products online right from their smartphones or iOS phones.

4. Boosts search engine ranking

Search engine optimization is the most advanced online marketing technique that promotes your online business/website among web audience across the world. Under this technique, your website is optimized with an objective to generate the higher ranking for search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

But if you have a responsive WordPress theme, then you can instantly increase your search engine ranking because half of the searches being down with the mobile devices by the mobile visitors– which shares a huge percentage in web traffic.

Conclusion

So, what are you waiting for? Pick out the best responsive theme from the pool and integrate in your site to reap all the above mentioned advantages.

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Are You Struggling To Manage Your HTML Site? Migrate To WordPress Now!

Earlier, before the invention of WordPress, a popular and flexible Content Management System, websites were developed by compiling static HTML pages together wherein they all had the similar layout, but different content.

But the traditional method of developing a website was not up to the mark. In fact, there were times when styles and scripts were coded with the HTML framework, and this gave way to issues such as slow loading of the site as millions and thousands of same code will be loaded for each and every page.

Therefore, most of the companies (who have HTML websites) are switching their sites to WordPress.
The popularity of WordPress is not hidden from us and through this blog post, we will find out the reasons why people should migrate their traditional HTML site to Wordpress.

1. Develop Websites without Any Coding

WordPress is the easy-to-use content management system that let web user (with least web development knowledge) to develop their own website. It means you can design and develop a website, without generating a single line of code. You can easily add posts and pages, update content; embed images and videos without any technical assistance. Isn’t it cool?

2. Open to Search Engines

WordPress is much better for SEO motive as you will find many SEO plugins for your site which will help you get higher rank in search engines like Google and Bing. And if we compare WordPress with static HTML websites, then you can discover that WordPress is packed with numerous SEO features and functions that will help you increase your online reputation.

WordPress also offers various SEO plugins that will allow you optimize your site for search engines.
Now get higher ranking in Google by developing a site over WordPress.

3. Cost-effective

WordPress allows you to post, publish and update a new content in a website with ease. You can do all the managing work by your own, without hiring any professional web designer and developer –this saves both time and money.

But if you want to convert your existing HTML site into WordPress, then you need to hire a reliable WordPress development company that can offer you HTML to WordPress conversion services at affordable price.

4. Safe and Secure

WordPress offers a strong community support that means hundreds of professional designers and developers develop the system from the documentation to the coding itself. So we can say that WordPress websites are secure enough. In fact, it regularly releases new versions that come with advanced security fixes.

Plus, it offers tons of security plugins that will protect your site from hackers and other malicious activities.

5. It Offers Great Flexibility

Want to integrate social media, or want to add contact forms, registration forms or any other functionality into your site, use WordPress plugins. WordPress offers millions of useful plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your site, without any coding.

To an addition, it also comes with tons of beautiful and attractive themes that will give a fresh, crisp and appealing look to your site. You can change the design of your site in few minutes.

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Converting PSD to WordPress Theme is The Best Option for You

A Content Management System basically allows a web user to manage their content in a well-structured environment. With this, you can create and modify your website where you can store and display all your documents, images, videos and other related content in an organized way.

From the last few years, WordPress has emerged as the most powerful Content Management System across the web world. It empowers you to create and develop a fresh and new website with ease. In fact, most of the companies are making the use of WordPress to create a fully-functional e-commerce website that in turn boosted the popularity of PSD to WordPress conversion.

It is an ideal platform for those who want to convert their PSD file into a fully-fledged WordPress website. If you are not familiar with this topic then you should read this blog post.

Today, we will share the advantages associated with the PSD to WordPress conversion in this blog post.

The advantages of converting PSD to WordPress:

1. It Doesn’t Require Any Technical Knowledge 

If you are new into the web development industry and scared of using WordPress then let me tell you that WordPress is open source software that allows you to create and develop a website, without any coding. This means you can update, customize and delete your site’s content, without any technical knowledge or assistance.

2. An Immense Collection of Plugins and Themes

Apart from a user-friendly feature, WordPress also offers a huge inventory of plugins and themes (both free and paid) that can help you build a highly-interactive website easily and quickly. With the use of plugins, you can extend the functionality of your site (you can easily integrate additional functions such as social media icon, contact form, registration form, and more into your site).

And WordPress themes allow you to enhance the beauty of your site that can help you get attention and establish your unique identity in the web world.

3. SEO Friendliness 

Most of the people are converting PSD file to WordPress website because the codes written in WordPress sites are simple, clear and easily accessible by the search engine crawlers.
No doubt PSD files can easily drive the viewer’s attention, but it cannot be accessed by search engine crawlers.

 But by converting it to WordPress, you can ensure that each and every code is properly written in your site. It also offers various compelling SEO plugins that can help you increase your online presence.

4. Cross-browser Compatibility

One of the biggest disadvantages of PSD file is that they are heavy and incompatible with different web browsers. On the other side, WordPress is a cross-browser compatible CMS platform that supports all major web browsers which in turn boosts the conversion rate of your site.

5. W3C Validation

W3C validation is a great feature of WordPress that gives a flexibility to create a well-organized and error free website that meets all your requirements. It ensures that your website has been developed according to the World Wide Web norms. Thus, it improves both the performance and the quality of your WordPress site.

Conclusion

Well, these are some of the great advantages of PSD to WordPress conversion service. If you really want to convert your PSD files into well-coded and intriguing WordPress theme, then you need to hire a reliable WordPress development company.

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X Theme: Create a Perfect Responsive Website with Ease

Creating a top-notch website becomes imperative if you want to stay ahead from your competitors in the online World. With the help of handy plugins and themes, you can make your site unique and professional.

In this blog, we will learn how to create a perfect responsive website that is merged with bbPress, Buddypress and other essential plugins to keep your site protected from viruses and spam bots. We will also go through the X Theme for WordPress. It is one of the popular themes for WordPress because of many reasons.

X comes with four, beautifully designed Stacks that you can activate with a single click. X Stacks are also known as WordPress Templates. With the help of stacks, you can begin the designing of your site. All four stacks offer an innovative purpose and will perform their function independently for assorted business models. You can choose any of the stacks as per your business needs.

Four X Theme Stacks are: 

1. Integrity

It offers a smooth and clean design that has pinstripe shadowing all around elements and borders all over the layout. It is one of the great stacks as it is best for online marketing type of websites.

2. Renew

Renew provides a flat and sleek design that is unique and focused on functionality and color elements. If you are hunting for a stylish or contemporary design, then you can use this stack. 

3. Icon

It is a minimal design that utilizes unique elements to make it apart from other stacks. Icon is completely focused on imagery and low distraction points. In fact, it looks striking in any layout, but you can use it in either your left header layout, or the sidebar fixed on the right. 

4. Ethos

If your business is based on magazine style layouts, then you can use this stack. Ethos is unique as it displays blog posts and widget content in a stylish way.

Conclusively, these four stacks provide the potential to have Header position as: top fixed, Top static, right and left header positioning. They have the ability to make the X theme an exceptional one when it comes to custom options. X is also improved for speed with every line of code.   

 
X also offers 40 straightforward shortcodes that can help you to add striking features in your WordPress site. 

Let’s overview the most promising 10 shortcodes:

1. Color Container
2. Killer Buttons
3. Tabs
4. Animated Counters
5. Featured Headlines
6. Social Sharing
7. Text highlighting
8. Promo
9. Table of Content
10. Responsive Light box

And many more. 

X Theme provides Integration with Buddypress, bbPress and a wide range of extensions. This is really important if you want to run a social community on your website. We will go through the exact steps that you need to take to setup the X Theme as a WordPress community and Social Network. X Theme is an essential part even for Wordpress web development as they are pretty useful in marking responsive website.

With a few clicks and easy configurations, you can make your WordPress website perfect for the big leagues. Ultimately, you have the ability to run different forums, friend requests, private messaging, social groups and much more by using the X themes extension add-ons.

With the help of these steps, you will understand how to keep spam bots from registering on your BuddyPress registration page. In fact, you will also learn how to protect your WP multi-site setup with the WP plugins.

X theme offers great features that can help you create a perfect responsive website. In fact, many professional developers recommend X themes for WordPress websites.

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