Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Content sliders are everywhere these days! They can also be very polarizing. Tons of people love them, while others despise them. But it’s important to realize that sliders aren’t a cure, they are merely a tool. This means that they need to be used appropriately and populated with great content in order for you to realize their main […]
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Most WordPress themes are set up so that your latest blog posts appear on the front page of your site. Or, if you have a static homepage, your newest entries appear on a dedicated page. Regardless of how these posts are displayed – in a list, in a tiled view, or what have you – […]
The post How to Hide Posts on Your WordPress Homepage appeared first on WPExplorer.
Moving your WordPress site to another location can be a stressful and fiddly experience, not helped by the fact you can’t just simply move your files and database. No, that’s just not how WordPress works.
Fortunately, WordPress has a handy “Import” and “Export” tool built in. But unfortunately, it’ll only suit some basic requirements and you need to improvise a little to achieve other effects.
In this article, I’ll show you step-by-step how to migrate your WordPress installation’s content to a new place.
Let’s get cracking!
Some WordPress installations or server setups may present you with unique challenges on migrating content. Although this article will deal with an additional unique eventuality (namely that you only want to transfer a part of your WordPress installation’s content), there’s no guarantee that the steps detailed here will unfailingly work for every setup.
It goes without saying that you’re solely responsible for your site, even when following this guide to the letter; there’s some database work involved depending on what you want to do, and if you accidentally delete a huge chunk of your site, that’s down to you. Basically, be careful with this!
For the purposes of this post, I’ve created two separate localhost installations of WordPress to provide you with pictures of each step. You might like to try moving your content to a test site to check it works.
To that end, I’d recommend making a backup of your entire site at this point. Of course, you do that regularly, don’t you? (If not, you definitely should be. Get to it.)
If you want to do this manually, remember to include both your database and site files (primarily because this includes your website’s Uploads folder).
You can create and download a ZIP of your site files via FTP. How to do this varies per FTP client but is generally fairly obvious. Make sure you download and securely store your backup compressed file – just as with any backup.
Login to your phpMyAdmin account and select the database in which WordPress is installed.
Select Export from the top menu. For most people, “Quick” options will be adequate. However, if you have tables other than the WordPress installation you want to back up in the same database, click Custom to select the tables you want to back up; all other options should remain untouched. Finally, click Go to download your database backup file (.sql format).
Hopefully, those backups won’t be needed, but it’s always advisable before embarking upon such work. If the site to which you’re migrating content already has content, make sure you back up that one too.
With precautions out of the way, let’s get to work!
If you’re just looking to change your website to a new URL or otherwise want to transfer absolutely everything from one installation to another, the good news is that you’ve picked the easy option. WordPress’s own import and export tools will work perfectly for you so no need to do anything too complicated under the hood.
Here’s how to transfer all your WordPress content – pages, images and files, posts and everything else – to a new installation.
Incidentally, it is probably easiest to create a new installation on your new server (or even the new location within a server) and import/export than to change your files’ configurations. However, if you’d rather do it that way, the WordPress Codex can advise. Your installation should be up-to-date with the latest WordPress version so it won’t be a problem, but if it’s not, upgrade your old installation first. If you really can’t update for some reason – such as keeping a plugin that doesn’t work with new versions – your new installation can be an old version. This is far from recommended because many old versions of WordPress have critical security flaws.
Go to your WordPress dashboard and select the Export item from the Tools section.
Because you’re exporting everything, it’s easy: keep the All content option selected and hit Download Export File.
An XML file will be created. Keep it in a safe place and go across to the installation to which you’re migrating.
On the new WordPress installation, go once again to Tools, but this time select Import.
You will be shown a list of importers, from which you should select the WordPress option.
Click Install Now and wait for the importer plugin to download and install.
If it all works, you can click Activate Plugin & Run Importer on the next screen.
At this point, you’re all ready to import and the XML file you generated earlier comes into play.
Click Choose File on the screen that follows and select the XML file you created on the old site.
Next, click Upload file and import.
You’ll be given an option to assign content to existing users on the new site (if you have an account on both, you can assign your old posts to your new account), or create new users either with their old usernames or with a new one you select. This ensures all the content is attributed to an author account that exists on the new site.
If you have any images or files to move to the new site, make absolutely sure that you tick Download and import file attachments – it’s not selected by default.
Hit the Submit button and you’re done! The page may take a little longer than usual to load because it’s creating all the new rows on the database, but it will get through it. Just wait patiently for it to be processed and all of your content should be imported onto the new site ready for its life there.
So that’s the easy bit out of the way. However, if you’re looking to export only some of your content, I’m afraid to say that WordPress’s tools probably won’t cater for your needs on their own.
Selecting All content is the only way to export your attachments (files that appear under the Media section). Therefore, if you want to transfer specific parts of the content and your images, you’ll either need to move everything across then delete it (time consuming for larger sites) or poke around in your files and database – which I shall show you how to do now.
The exporting and changing SQL that I’m about to show you will be demonstrated for moving attachments, but you can also use a similar methodology to transfer the whole database across. This is useful if you want to transfer everything but your XML file is too large to upload through the importer.
Venture once more to the Tools > Export screen to begin with.
Once you’ve selected which content you’d like to export, click Download Export File as before. If there are multiple selections you’d like to make (eg. two authors’ posts in a date range, or someone’s posts and all pages), it’s entirely possible to go back and create multiple export files for each selection.
After you have all the WXR XML files you want, go to the new site and install the WordPress Importer as previously shown. You can upload your files (one at a time) as before and they’ll install the specific posts/pages/other content onto the site.
However, this is not the end, because you’ll notice that you still don’t have any attachments (eg. uploaded images) on your installation quite yet.
Go to your old installation’s FTP client and find the /wp-content/uploads/ folder. I’m using Windows 10’s File Explorer as my FTP client, but most should be able to compress files and download them.
Download the .ZIP file you generate and upload it to your new site’s FTP (or cut and paste it if you can access both sites through your FTP client).
You can then extract all the files from the compressed folder into the Uploads directory.
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of it; while your files are in the right place, your WordPress installation won’t know about them because the attachment details haven’t yet been copied across from the database.
Head over to your old site’s phpMyAdmin database and find the wp_posts table (replace wp_ with your prefix as necessary).
At this point, you need to find the attachment posts (those are the media posts) so paste in the following SQL (changing the table name to have the right prefix if necessary) and hit Go.
SELECT * FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_type` = "attachment"
Scroll to the bottom of the query results and check Show all so all attachment posts are showing. Once all rows are displayed, choose Check All then click Export.
At this point, things get a bit more complicated, but stay with me and follow the steps carefully and you should be fine.
This step is necessary if your new installation has a different database prefix to the one from which you’ve just downloaded your SQL export file.
Edit the .sql file using a text editor such as Notepad++, finding and replacing the old prefix with the new prefix.
If your prefixes are the same (eg. both tables are wp_posts), that’s fine and you can ignore this step.
Go to your new database and find wp_posts (or equivalent); click Import.
Click Choose File – make sure you click, don’t drag it in, as this means it won’t be uploaded in the right place – and select the exported SQL file.
Leave all other options as they are and execute the query by hitting Go. You’ll see a success message once it’s finished and all your attachments will now be visible under Media – although there’s a further step before your images will start showing up properly.
Similar to the previous database work, this time find your old installation’s wp_postmeta table and select the Export tab.
Select Custom settings again and choose data rather than structure and data, just as before.
This time, also locate the Data Creation Options heading and select REPLACE as the function to use when dumping data.
Once again, click Go to create and download your SQL file.
Again, you need to change the prefixes in your SQL file if the new database prefix will be different. You should also find all references to your old URL and replace them with the new one.
Go to your new wp_postmeta (or other applicable prefix) table and, exactly as before, import your edited SQL file into the new installation.
Your media library is now complete once more, ready to fit back into your transferred content (finally).
If you’ve got through all that, well done – it’s a bit of a roundabout method just to transfer some images across with specific posts.
Of course, there are still catches with this: if you only want to migrate some of the images, you need to go through and pick out the folders (hopefully you want them by date or it would take forever) more carefully when uploading. You could also run into trouble with duplicate primary keys transferring wp_posts if you already had posts on the new installation.
Clearly, to make the Import/Export process more intuitive – rather than requiring such creative thinking with the databases behind the CMS – some work will need to be completed for a future WordPress release. While we wait, however, if you do need to move some of your content, this should work for you – it’s well worth the time!
If you’ve got any more ideas and methods for moving across parts of a WordPress installation with all the content in tow, we’d love you to share it with us in the comments. Likewise, let us know if you’re having any issues with these methods and we can try to give you a hand.
Optimizing conversion rates is the number one priority for most digital marketers. Attracting and ‘hooking’ a future loyal follower can be an art form – one that baffles the best of us. Fortunately, there are a vast amount of tools to help you achieve your goals; especially within the WordPress community. In this article we’re going to explore the […]
The post 10+ Best WordPress Popup Plugins appeared first on WPExplorer.
Why make create an app for your WordPress site in the first place, you ask? Apps might not be very useful for marketing anymore, but they’re quite convenient for your customers – giving them more of a choice as to how they interact with your site. With the continued rise of mobile internet (more people […]
The post How to Turn Your WordPress Site Into an App appeared first on WPExplorer.
We’ve covered how to change permalinks without breaking your website, but why would you want to change them to begin with? Well, today we are going to spend some time going over WordPress permalinks structure. And of course – why and how you might want to optimize your permalink structure for SEO. What Are Permalinks? […]
The post WordPress Permalinks Guide to Improve Site Structure appeared first on WPExplorer.
When was the last time you examined the way users share your posts and pages to their social media accounts? It might initially seem strange to worry about how many people tweeted your last blog post. But such counts and trends give you insight into how popular your site is and which pages or posts work. […]
The post How to Track Social Metrics for WordPress Sites appeared first on WPExplorer.
We’ve all seen a quality slider when shopping online, but what is it that makes sliders appealing? To start with, a great slider is responsive and works well on just about any tablet or smartphone. Other must-have features include: Smooth animated effects Parallax layers Quick image uploading Stylish fonts and buttons Some of these features […]
The post 10+ Best Slider Plugins for WordPress appeared first on WPExplorer.
Is it possible to build a successful business around WordPress today? The short answer is yes. In 2020 there are millions of freelancers earning a living online – and many of them have businesses they created around WordPress. There are solid reasons for this: WordPress continues to grow as a simple and versatile publishing platform […]
The post How to Start a WordPress Business appeared first on WPExplorer.
In this post I’m going to show you why it is so important to make your WordPress website more accessible, and introduce simple tools that anyone can use to increase accessibility for everyone. Why? Because your ultimate goal is to get as many people as possible to visit your website. How can you expect to do that if you’re not […]
The post Breaking Down Barriers: Why WordPress Website Accessibility Is Key appeared first on WPExplorer.
Take a look at your website(s) and think about how many blog posts are available for easy access on the homepage. I’m sure you can see maybe four or five, or maybe even up to ten or a few more, but once your blog posts leave the homepage they become similar to a link moving to the […]
The post Recycle Old Blog Posts to Drive Traffic appeared first on WPExplorer.
Everybody loves eBay. Getting involved in auctions for products and possibly finding a bargain are a huge draw for most people and it’s one of the reasons eBay has been so successful. However, not everyone likes the commissions you have to pay to sell on the site. What if you love the idea of eBay but […]
The post Create An eBay-Style Auction Website With WordPress appeared first on WPExplorer.
While WordPress offers a ton of features and flexibility, there is still a lot of functionality missing from the core software. The best way to fill in the missing pieces, of course, is to get yourself the right plugins.
WordPress plugins offer all kinds of customization for site admins; however, with over 55,000 options to choose from in the WordPress Plugin Directory, not to mention all the premium products available, it can be difficult sorting the good from the, well, not so good.
So here’s a collection of free and premium must-haves, the WordPress plugins that can help take your site from good to great. I’ve included options for everything from caching the image optimization to security and more.
The average visitor to your site won’t wait even eight seconds for your site to load and Google recommends that your site loads within about two seconds.
If your site takes longer than that, then your visitors are likely going to leave before they even have a chance to check out one element on your site. Plus, Google won’t be keen on ranking you higher in search results.
Caching is one of the best ways you can speed up your site since it saves a fast-loading version that gets served up in browsers lickety-split. This is where Hummingbird swoops in for the rescue to take care of this for you. Plus, it’s easy to use.
Hummingbird scans your site, then gives you an analysis of your site. You can see the overall score for your site’s speed, then fix any issues in a couple clicks.
This plugin also goes above and beyond the clouds because it doesn’t just do page caching. Hummingbird also minifies, compresses and merges.
This plugin is like the little birdie that tells your site how to fly as fast as a hummingbird. It’s also included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can try Hummingbird for free with a 30-day trial.
W3 Total Cache is designed to increase the page load speed for WordPress sites, which will improve your visitors’ overall experience.
The plugin helps to increase server performance by reducing download times. By reducing page load times, overall site performance improves which helps your site’s rank in search engines.
W3 Total Cache can also help to improve web server performance during high traffic periods, which is crucial for larger websites.
We tested the top caching plugins to find out which was best at improving pagespeed.
WordPress is a popular choice for creating websites and this makes it a perfect target for hackers because they can create a bot to infect millions of sites without lifting a finger. It’s not a matter of if your site may be targeted, but when.
That’s why staying on top of your security game is so important. If you can set up a good defense, you can protect your site from hackers and the Defender plugin helps you do this and more.
Defender searches your site for vulnerabilities and lets you know if any were found so you can patch them up in a single click. This means installing it can also help you clean up your site if you have been hacked. It also works to harden your site’s security to save you from future disasters in one click. Now that’s a superhero.
The best part is, you can set it and forget it when you enable scheduled scans. On second thought, the best part may actually be that this plugin is included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can also try Defender for free with a 30-day trial.
Jetpack offers a suite of powerful features for your WordPress site. Enhanced security, improved site performance, plenty of content tools, and visitor engagement features are all part of this plugin.
Additional features include spam-free Comments, Social Sharing, Related Posts, Post by Email, and much more.
Jetpack even offers a mobile theme option that is lightweight and responsive, designed for phones and tablets.
Akismet helps to filter out any comments on your blog that look like spam. The plugin automatically checks comments against the Akismet Web service.
All comments will have a history for users to view that shows which comments were flagged or cleared by Akismet. In addition, those comments that were marked as spam or unmarked by a moderator will be highlighted in the history.
Tracking how and when users visit your site is important if you want your site to gain popularity since it gives you the opportunity to see where you can make improvements to your site. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for this purpose and the Google Analytics + plugin brings this information right to your admin dashboard.
Not only can you track visits, page views, bounce rate, average visit duration and referrers, but you can also enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest for advertising as well as analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’ performance.
Also, you can easily track statistics for your entire site or network with the quick setup and easy to understand display.
This must-have plugin will automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site. Having an XML sitemap is crucial in helping search engines better index your blog.
With a sitemap, web crawlers can see the structure of your site and retrieve the results more efficiently.
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo will be notified every time you create a post about your new content.
iThemes Security helps to fix common holes in your WordPress site from potential automated attacks. Many WordPress administrators generally don’t know they have these holes or vulnerabilities, but iThemes Security can help.
Because of unknown vulnerabilities from other installed plugins, your site can be an easy target for attacks. iThemes Security works to identify and protect these holes in your site.
Multiple contact forms can be created and managed through this plugin. No need for extra coding with the Contact Form 7 plugin, as the form and mail contents can be easily customized through the settings.
The Contact Form 7 also supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet filtering to help with spam.
Check out our post where we compared the top form plugins to each other.
Backing up your site can save you from a lot of future grief. Did your site just go down? Was your site just hacked? No problem – just restore your site from a backup and it’s as good as new.
But what if your backup was lost, compromised, corrupted or accidentally deleted? Do you have a backup of your backup? Most people don’t, but you don’t have to worry about that with Snapshot Pro.
This plugin can backup your site, but you can also save your backups to multiple locations such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, your computer and more. Backups can also be scheduled so you don’t have to lift a finger to help save your site the next time disaster strikes.
When you’re running a WordPress site and a business at the same time, you know looking professional is important and just as crucial as your content and products. That’s why being able to turn WordPress into a white labeling machine is a great idea.
You could replace the WordPress logo for your own, customize the admin bar and add your own company name to achieve consistent branding across your site. This plugin can do all this and more.
You can completely customize the admin bar, login page, footer, dashboard and everywhere else WordPress logos and branding appears. You can even add your branding to even more places than that. Plus, you don’t have to touch any code.
It’s easy to set up and use and it works across your entire Multisite network or your single install of WordPress.
Branda is the only branding plugin you need to turn a WordPress site into your company’s site.
You work hard creating phenomenal content to draw visitors to your site, but are you really drawing in all the users you could be? Good SEO practices can help, but you can go much further with SmartCrawl.
This plugin makes your site more visible to search engines by informing web crawlers when your site has important content that needs registering instead of waiting for web crawlers to find you.
On top of that, SmartCrawl can create a sitemap, customize how your titles and descriptions appear on search engines, add automated keyword linking and you can also view industry leading reports by Moz.
On top of all that, setting up and using SmartCrawl is quick and easy with the setup wizard. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can do it for free with a 30-day trial or with a WPMU DEV membership.
The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) can display a list of posts or pages that relate to the current post. This feature provides a great opportunity for your readers to see other relevant content from your site.
Users have the option of displaying only content found on their site or can make extra money by displaying sponsored content.
Uploading images to use on your site and in posts is an excellent way to grab your visitors’ attention, but they do weigh down your site. They take up a lot of storage space, but most importantly, they slow down your site. Fortunately, you can compress your images to take care of that problem.
Smush Pro has been benchmarked as the best image compression and image optimization plugin. Not only that, but it works in a way that saves storage space and helps your site load faster without reducing the quality of your images.
You can compress and optimize images automatically, manually or in bulk and also Super Smush for 10 times the compression power while still not losing out on image quality. It also integrates with NextGEN and WP Retina 2x so photographers need not worry about displaying crisp, stunning images. We’ve also recently added lazy loading to Smush.
You can try the free version of WP Smush on WordPress.org or try out the premium version for free with a 30-day trial. If you’re already a WPMU DEV member, you already have access to WP Smush Pro so you can check it out and see how easy it is to use and maybe even boast that your site has superpowers.
Forminator gives away valuable time-saving and money-making features for nothing. Nada.
You get full access to 24 advanced fields so you can get your data validation on. With Forminator’s form preview button, you can view your form as you’re building it and designing it, without having to embed it on a page first to see if it looks right.
Forminator is also the only free form plugin that allows you to create forms AND polls, submissions, quizzes, and submit blog posts from a form. And it has a powerful API that you can access for free and use to build your own custom extensions.
Something that’s really important for our European friends is advanced features to help you stay compliant with GDPR. You can adjust how long data is retained, set how long to keep an IP before it is anonymized and there’s even a field for a GDPR checkbox. You’re welcome.
Have you ever needed to backup or move an entire WordPress site from one location to another? The Duplicator plugin can duplicate, backup, move, and transfer a site.
The plugin can also serve as an easy utility for those administrators looking to backup their sites.
Need to make a clone of your production site for testing purposes? Yep, the Duplicator plugin is perfect for making a backup of a WordPress site for testing and validation.
Relevanssi can replace the default search option on your site where results are sorted in order of relevance, instead of by date.
The plugin is customizable so that it can be setup to do fuzzy matching on partial words. Content can be found by matching on just one search term or it can be required that all words be found.
There is a free version of Relevanssi that supports a single site, while the premium version offers multi-site support along with other features.
Broken Link Checker monitors the links found in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and more. The plugin identifies any broken links that no longer work, missing images, or any redirects.
Once broken links are identified on your site, links can be edited directly from the plugin page to avoid manually updating each post.
The Disable Comments plugin enables administrators to globally control comments on their site. Comments can be disabled according to post type, on pages, attachments, etc.
This plugin works well if you want to disable comments on certain post types or on your entire site. However, if you plan to selectively disable comments on individual posts, then this function is better handled directly through WordPress.
The Regenerate Thumbnails plugin enables you to regenerate thumbnails for image attachments. You have the option to regenerate the thumbnails for all image uploads, individual images, or specific multiple image uploads.
This plugin is very helpful if you have altered any of your thumbnail dimensions or have changed to a new theme that features different image dimensions.
See Default WordPress Image Sizes and How to add Custom Sizes for more.
Easy Updates Manager enables you to manage all of your WordPress updates for a single site or Multisite install. There are tons of settings included within the plugin making it highly customizable.
Features include options to automatically update WordPress major and minor releases. Site administrators can also opt to automatically update plugins, themes, and much more.
Redirection can help manage 301 redirects and keep track of 404 errors without digging into .htaccess files. This plugin can be very useful if you are migrating pages from a different website and changing the directory structures of your WordPress installation.
A redirection can be setup to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website. Any URL can be redirected, not just those that no longer exist.
With TablePress, you can easily create tables that can be embedded into posts, pages, or text widgets by using a Shortcode. No special coding is necessary as table data can be entered directly into a spreadsheet interface.
Tables can contain any type of data, including formulas. Sorting, pagination, and filtering add additional functionality for TablePress. Tables can also be imported and/or exported from/to Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON formats.
Edit Flow makes it easy to communicate with your team members directly within WordPress. It can be customized to fit your specific workflow needs.
Features include a calendar that offers a view of your scheduled content. Custom statuses can be created to define specific stages of your editorial workflow. Writers and editors can have private discussions through editorial comments all from within WordPress.
The Advanced Custom Fields plugin gives WordPress users the flexibility to visually create custom fields for their site.
Custom field input types include: text, textarea, wysiwyg, image, file, page link, post object, relationship, select, checkbox, radio buttons, date picker, true/false, repeater, flexible content, and gallery.
The WP Mail SMTP plugin reconfigures the WordPress delivered mail function to use SMTP. It offers a setup page that enables you to configure various email options. These options include specifying an SMTP host and SMTP port, specifying the from name and email address for outgoing mail, setting SMTP username and password, and more.
For more on how to use WP Mail SMTP to send emails, see our guide How to Use Gmail to Send WordPress Emails
Gallery offers tools that will assist in adding and editing images for different views on your site that are 100% responsive. Photo galleries and albums can be easily added to posts and pages within WordPress as well as to multiple widgets.
The plugin can also make it easy to rename, upload, remove, and copy images in just a few steps. Image descriptions and tags can also be added through this tool.
The All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin can help give search engines a useful summary of your content to display. These useful snippets of information for your content can help you stand out from your competition.
The plugin supports the following content types: review, event, people, product, recipe, software application, video, and articles.
Our ultimate guide to image SEO can tell you more about image schema.
Black Studio TinyMCE Widget enables you to insert rich text and/or media objects directly into your sidebars without any HTML coding through a visual editor.
As a default, WordPress text widgets lack the editor capabilities that are offered in posts and pages. The Black Studio TinyMCE Widget overcomes these limitations by providing a clean visual interface to add media and text.
Those that prefer to switch from a visual editor to HTML (like posts and pages) also have that option.
By default, WordPress keeps all your deleted posts, pages, comments and all your post revisions, spam comments, unused tags and the like. Until you manually flush your site from all of these excess items, they stick around, bloating and slowing down your site.
The free Optimize Database plugin purges your database from all the extra table data you don’t need including other stray data such as orphan postmeta items and expired transients. You can choose exactly what you want removed so you don’t accidentally delete items you want to keep.
Once your database is all cleaned up, it gets to work optimizing your database for an even smoother running site.
It’s Multisite compatible so you can network activate the plugin and lets you clean and optimize your database in one click each. You can even schedule your database to be automatically optimized on a regular basis so you can keep your database running like a well-oiled machine without having to worry about it.
While WordPress offers a ton of features and flexibility, there is still a lot of functionality missing from the core software. The best way to fill in the missing pieces, of course, is to get yourself the right plugins.
WordPress plugins offer all kinds of customization for site admins; however, with over 55,000 options to choose from in the WordPress Plugin Directory, not to mention all the premium products available, it can be difficult sorting the good from the, well, not so good.
So here’s a collection of free and premium must-haves, the WordPress plugins that can help take your site from good to great. I’ve included options for everything from caching the image optimization to security and more.
The average visitor to your site won’t wait even eight seconds for your site to load and Google recommends that your site loads within about two seconds.
If your site takes longer than that, then your visitors are likely going to leave before they even have a chance to check out one element on your site. Plus, Google won’t be keen on ranking you higher in search results.
Caching is one of the best ways you can speed up your site since it saves a fast-loading version that gets served up in browsers lickety-split. This is where Hummingbird swoops in for the rescue to take care of this for you. Plus, it’s easy to use.
Hummingbird scans your site, then gives you an analysis of your site. You can see the overall score for your site’s speed, then fix any issues in a couple of clicks.
This plugin also goes above and beyond the clouds because it doesn’t just do page caching. Hummingbird also minifies, compresses and merges.
This plugin is like the little birdie that tells your site how to fly as fast as a hummingbird. It’s also included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can try Hummingbird for free with a 30-day trial.
Details: Hummingbird
HubSpot’s WordPress plugin offers a form and pop-up builder with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface so you can capture your visitors’ information, but it does so much more than that.
HubSpot will collect submissions off any form you have on your WordPress website (even if you’ve built them with our free Forminator or Hustle plugins) and automatically add those new leads into your CRM. You can segment your contact database into lists and personalize your emails using any CRM property. And all of this for free! You can report on your email’s overall success and see how each contact interacted with your email campaigns thanks to the built-in analytics.
The plugin also includes a live chat and bot builder so you can begin engaging with visitors and generate leads. You can set up chatbots to answer simple questions that your site visitors have so you can continue engaging your visitors even when you are offline.
Once someone submits their information via a form, popup, or the live chat, you can automate a kickback email to get in touch with that lead and share your content with them.
Details: HubSpot
W3 Total Cache is designed to increase the page load speed for WordPress sites, which will improve your visitors’ overall experience.
The plugin helps to increase server performance by reducing download times. By reducing page load times, overall site performance improves which helps your site’s rank in search engines.
W3 Total Cache can also help to improve web server performance during high traffic periods, which is crucial for larger websites.
We tested the top caching plugins to find out which was best at improving pagespeed.
Details: W3 Total Cache
WordPress is a popular choice for creating websites and this makes it a perfect target for hackers because they can create a bot to infect millions of sites without lifting a finger. It’s not a matter of if your site may be targeted, but when.
That’s why staying on top of your security game is so important. If you can set up a good defense, you can protect your site from hackers and the Defender plugin helps you do this and more.
Defender searches your site for vulnerabilities and lets you know if any were found so you can patch them up in a single click. This means installing it can also help you clean up your site if you have been hacked. It also works to harden your site’s security to save you from future disasters in one click. Now that’s a superhero.
The best part is, you can set it and forget it when you enable scheduled scans. On second thought, the best part may actually be that this plugin is included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can also try Defender for free with a 30-day trial.
Details: Defender
Jetpack offers a suite of powerful features for your WordPress site. Enhanced security, improved site performance, plenty of content tools, and visitor engagement features are all part of this plugin.
Additional features include spam-free Comments, Social Sharing, Related Posts, Post by Email, and much more.
Jetpack even offers a mobile theme option that is lightweight and responsive, designed for phones and tablets.
Details: Jetpack
Akismet helps to filter out any comments on your blog that look like spam. The plugin automatically checks comments against the Akismet Web service.
All comments will have a history for users to view that shows which comments were flagged or cleared by Akismet. In addition, those comments that were marked as spam or unmarked by a moderator will be highlighted in the history.
Details: Akismet
Tracking how and when users visit your site is important if you want your site to gain popularity since it gives you the opportunity to see where you can make improvements to your site. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for this purpose and the Beehive plugin brings this information right to your admin dashboard.
Not only can you track visits, page views, bounce rate, average visit duration, and referrers, but you can also enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest for advertising as well as analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’ performance.
Also, you can easily track statistics for your entire site or network with the quick setup and easy to understand display.
Details: Beehive
This must-have plugin will automatically generate an XML sitemap for your site. Having an XML sitemap is crucial in helping search engines better index your blog.
With a sitemap, web crawlers can see the structure of your site and retrieve the results more efficiently.
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo will be notified every time you create a post about your new content.
Details: Google XML Sitemaps
iThemes Security helps to fix common holes in your WordPress site from potential automated attacks. Many WordPress administrators generally don’t know they have these holes or vulnerabilities, but iThemes Security can help.
Because of unknown vulnerabilities from other installed plugins, your site can be an easy target for attacks. iThemes Security works to identify and protect these holes in your site.
Details: iThemes Security
Forminator gives away valuable time-saving and money-making features for nothing. Nada.
You get full access to 24 advanced fields so you can get your data validation on. With Forminator’s form preview button, you can view your form as you’re building it and designing it, without having to embed it on a page first to see if it looks right.
Forminator is also the only free form plugin that allows you to create forms AND polls, submissions, quizzes, and submit blog posts from a form. And it has a powerful API that you can access for free and use to build your own custom extensions.
Something that’s really important for our European friends is advanced features to help you stay compliant with GDPR. You can adjust how long data is retained, set how long to keep an IP before it is anonymized and there’s even a field for a GDPR checkbox. You’re welcome.
Details: Forminator
Backing up your site can save you from a lot of future grief. Did your site just go down? Was your site just hacked? No problem – just restore your site from a backup and it’s as good as new.
But what if your backup was lost, compromised, corrupted or accidentally deleted? Do you have a backup of your backup? Most people don’t, but you don’t have to worry about that with Snapshot Pro.
This plugin can backup your site, but you can also save your backups to multiple locations such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, your computer and more. Backups can also be scheduled so you don’t have to lift a finger to help save your site the next time disaster strikes.
Try out Snapshot Pro free for 30 days.
Details: Snapshot
When you’re running a WordPress site and a business at the same time, you know looking professional is important and just as crucial as your content and products. That’s why being able to turn WordPress into a white labeling machine is a great idea.
You could replace the WordPress logo for your own, customize the admin bar and add your own company name to achieve consistent branding across your site. This plugin can do all this and more.
You can completely customize the admin bar, login page, footer, dashboard and everywhere else WordPress logos and branding appear. You can even add your branding to even more places than that. Plus, you don’t have to touch any code.
It’s easy to set up and use and it works across your entire Multisite network or your single install of WordPress.
Branda is the only branding plugin you need to turn a WordPress site into your company’s site.
Details: Branda
You work hard creating phenomenal content to draw visitors to your site, but are you really drawing in all the users you could be? Good SEO practices can help, but you can go much further with SmartCrawl.
This plugin makes your site more visible to search engines by informing web crawlers when your site has important content that needs registering instead of waiting for web crawlers to find you.
On top of that, SmartCrawl can create a sitemap, customize how your titles and descriptions appear on search engines, add automated keyword linking and you can also view industry-leading reports by Moz.
On top of all that, setting up and using SmartCrawl is quick and easy with the setup wizard. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can do it for free with a 30-day trial or with a WPMU DEV membership.
Details: SmartCrawl
The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) can display a list of posts or pages that relate to the current post. This feature provides a great opportunity for your readers to see other relevant content from your site.
Users have the option of displaying only content found on their site or can make extra money by displaying sponsored content.
Details: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Uploading images to use on your site and in posts is an excellent way to grab your visitors’ attention, but they do weigh down your site. They take up a lot of storage space, but most importantly, they slow down your site. Fortunately, you can compress your images to take care of that problem.
Smush Pro has been benchmarked as the best image compression and image optimization plugin. Not only that, but it works in a way that saves storage space and helps your site load faster without reducing the quality of your images.
You can compress and optimize images automatically, manually or in bulk and also Super Smush for 10 times the compression power while still not losing out on image quality. It also integrates with NextGEN and WP Retina 2x so photographers need not worry about displaying crisp, stunning images. We’ve also recently added lazy loading to Smush.
You can try the free version of WP Smush on WordPress.org or try out the premium version for free with a 30-day trial. If you’re already a WPMU DEV member, you already have access to WP Smush Pro so you can check it out and see how easy it is to use and maybe even boast that your site has superpowers.
Details: Smush Pro
Multiple contact forms can be created and managed through this plugin. No need for extra coding with the Contact Form 7 plugin, as the form and mail contents can be easily customized through the settings.
The Contact Form 7 also supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet filtering to help with spam.
Check out our post where we compared the top form plugins to each other.
Details: Contact Form 7
Have you ever needed to backup or move an entire WordPress site from one location to another? The Duplicator plugin can duplicate, backup, move, and transfer a site.
The plugin can also serve as an easy utility for those administrators looking to back up their sites.
Need to make a clone of your production site for testing purposes? Yep, the Duplicator plugin is perfect for making a backup of a WordPress site for testing and validation.
Details: Duplicator
Relevanssi can replace the default search option on your site where results are sorted in order of relevance, instead of by date.
The plugin is customizable so that it can be set up to do fuzzy matching on partial words. Content can be found by matching on just one search term or it can be required that all words be found.
There is a free version of Relevanssi that supports a single site, while the premium version offers multi-site support along with other features.
Details: Relevanssi
Broken Link Checker monitors the links found in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and more. The plugin identifies any broken links that no longer work, missing images, or any redirects.
Once broken links are identified on your site, links can be edited directly from the plugin page to avoid manually updating each post.
Details: Broken Link Checker
The Disable Comments plugin enables administrators to globally control comments on their site. Comments can be disabled according to post type, on pages, attachments, etc.
This plugin works well if you want to disable comments on certain post types or on your entire site. However, if you plan to selectively disable comments on individual posts, then this function is better handled directly through WordPress.
Details: Disable Comments
The Regenerate Thumbnails plugin enables you to regenerate thumbnails for image attachments. You have the option to regenerate the thumbnails for all image uploads, individual images, or specific multiple image uploads.
This plugin is very helpful if you have altered any of your thumbnail dimensions or have changed to a new theme that features different image dimensions.
See Default WordPress Image Sizes and How to add Custom Sizes for more.
Details: Regenerate Thumbnails
Easy Updates Manager enables you to manage all of your WordPress updates for a single site or Multisite install. There are tons of settings included within the plugin making it highly customizable.
Features include options to automatically update WordPress major and minor releases. Site administrators can also opt to automatically update plugins, themes, and much more.
Details: Easy Updates Manager
Redirection can help manage 301 redirects and keep track of 404 errors without digging into .htaccess files. This plugin can be very useful if you are migrating pages from a different website and changing the directory structures of your WordPress installation.
A redirection can be set up to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website. Any URL can be redirected, not just those that no longer exist.
Details: Redirection
With TablePress, you can easily create tables that can be embedded into posts, pages, or text widgets by using a Shortcode. No special coding is necessary as table data can be entered directly into a spreadsheet interface.
Tables can contain any type of data, including formulas. Sorting, pagination, and filtering add additional functionality for TablePress. Tables can also be imported and/or exported from/to Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON formats.
Details: TablePress
The Advanced Custom Fields plugin gives WordPress users the flexibility to visually create custom fields for their site.
Custom field input types include: text, textarea, wysiwyg, image, file, page link, post object, relationship, select, checkbox, radio buttons, date picker, true/false, repeater, flexible content, and gallery.
Details: Advanced Custom Fields
The WP Mail SMTP plugin reconfigures the WordPress delivered mail function to use SMTP. It offers a setup page that enables you to configure various email options. These options include specifying an SMTP host and SMTP port, specifying the from name and email address for outgoing mail, setting SMTP username and password, and more.
For more on how to use WP Mail SMTP to send emails, see our guide How to Use Gmail to Send WordPress Emails
Details: WP Mail SMTP
Gallery offers tools that will assist in adding and editing images for different views on your site that are 100% responsive. Photo galleries and albums can be easily added to posts and pages within WordPress as well as to multiple widgets.
The plugin can also make it easy to rename, upload, remove, and copy images in just a few steps. Image descriptions and tags can also be added through this tool.
Details: Photo Gallery
The All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin can help give search engines a useful summary of your content to display. These useful snippets of information for your content can help you stand out from your competition.
The plugin supports the following content types: review, event, people, product, recipe, software application, video, and articles.
Our ultimate guide to image SEO can tell you more about image schema.
Details: All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Black Studio TinyMCE Widget enables you to insert rich text and/or media objects directly into your sidebars without any HTML coding through a visual editor.
As a default, WordPress text widgets lack the editor capabilities that are offered in posts and pages. The Black Studio TinyMCE Widget overcomes these limitations by providing a clean visual interface to add media and text.
Those that prefer to switch from a visual editor to HTML (like posts and pages) also have that option.
Details: Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
By default, WordPress keeps all your deleted posts, pages, comments and all your post revisions, spam comments, unused tags and the like. Until you manually flush your site from all of these excess items, they stick around, bloating and slowing down your site.
The free Optimize Database plugin purges your database from all the extra table data you don’t need including other stray data such as orphan postmeta items and expired transients. You can choose exactly what you want removed so you don’t accidentally delete items you want to keep.
Once your database is all cleaned up, it gets to work optimizing your database for an even smoother running site.
It’s Multisite compatible so you can network activate the plugin and lets you clean and optimize your database in one click each. You can even schedule your database to be automatically optimized on a regular basis so you can keep your database running like a well-oiled machine without having to worry about it.
Details: Optimize Database
While WordPress offers a ton of features and flexibility, there is still a lot of functionality missing from the core software. The best way to fill in the missing pieces, of course, is to get yourself the right plugins.
WordPress plugins offer all kinds of customization for site admins; however, with over 59,000 free plugins to choose from in the WordPress Plugin Directory, not to mention all the premium products available, it can be difficult sorting the good from the, well, not so good.
So here’s a collection of free and premium must-haves, the WordPress plugins that can help take your site from good to great. I’ve included options for everything from caching, to image optimization, to security, and more.
The average visitor to your site won’t wait even eight seconds for your site to load and Google recommends that your site loads within about two seconds.
If your site takes longer than that, then your visitors are likely going to leave before they even have a chance to check out one element on your site. Plus, Google won’t be keen on ranking you higher in search results.
Caching is one of the best ways you can speed up your site since it saves a fast-loading version that gets served up in browsers lickety-split. This is where Hummingbird swoops in for the rescue to take care of this for you. Plus, it’s easy to use.
Hummingbird scans your site, then gives you an analysis of your site. You can see the overall score for your site’s speed, then fix any issues in a couple of clicks.
This plugin also goes above and beyond the clouds because it doesn’t just do page caching. Hummingbird also minifies, compresses and merges.
Note: We tested the top caching plugins to find out which was best at improving pagespeed.
This plugin is like the little birdie that tells your site how to fly as fast as a hummingbird. It’s also included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can try Hummingbird Pro at no cost with a free trial.
Details: Hummingbird
Uploading images to use on your site and in posts is an excellent way to grab your visitors’ attention, but they do weigh down your site. They take up a lot of storage space, but most importantly, they slow down your site. Fortunately, you can compress your images to take care of that problem.
Smush has been benchmarked as the best image compression and image optimization plugin. Not only that, but it works in a way that saves storage space and helps your site load faster without reducing the quality of your images.
You can compress and optimize images automatically, manually or in bulk and also Super Smush for 10 times the compression power while still not losing out on image quality. It also integrates with NextGEN and WP Retina 2x so photographers need not worry about displaying crisp, stunning images. We’ve also recently added lazy loading to Smush.
You can try the free version of WP Smush on WordPress.org or try out the premium version on its own for free, or experience the whole suite of premium plugins with a WPMU DEV membership free trial.
If you’re already a WPMU DEV member, you already have access to WP Smush Pro so you can check it out and see how easy it is to use and maybe even boast that your site has superpowers.
Details: Smush
WordPress is a popular choice for creating websites and this makes it a perfect target for hackers because they can create a bot to infect millions of sites without lifting a finger. It’s not a matter of if your site may be targeted, but when.
That’s why staying on top of your security game is so important. If you can set up a good defense, you can protect your site from hackers and the Defender plugin helps you do this and more.
Defender searches your site for vulnerabilities and lets you know if any were found so you can patch them up in a single click. This means installing it can also help you clean up your site if you have been hacked. It also works to harden your site’s security to save you from future disasters in one click. Now that’s a superhero.
The best part is, you can set it and forget it when you enable scheduled scans. On second thought, the best part may actually be that this plugin is included in a WPMU DEV membership and you can try Defender Pro at no cost with a free trial.
Details: Defender
You work hard creating phenomenal content to draw visitors to your site, but are you really drawing in all the users you could be? Good SEO practices can help, but you can go much further with SmartCrawl.
This plugin makes your site more visible to search engines by informing web crawlers when your site has important content that needs registering instead of waiting for web crawlers to find you.
SmartCrawl is like your SEO Swiss knife. It lets you create sitemaps for your site, add schema markup, customize how your titles and descriptions appear on search engines, set up redirections with regex pattern support, add automated keyword linking, and view industry-leading reports by Moz.
On top of all that, setting up and using SmartCrawl is quick and easy with the setup wizard.
If you want to check it out for yourself, you can download the plugin for free, or try the Pro version with automated scanning, reports, automatic linking for specific keywords, broken URL checking, 404s, and multiple redirections, plus 24/7 premium support with a WPMU DEV membership free trial.
Details: SmartCrawl
Forminator gives away valuable time-saving and money-making features for nothing. Nada.
You get full access to 24 advanced fields so you can get your data validation on. With Forminator’s form preview button, you can view your form as you’re building it and designing it, without having to embed it on a page first to see if it looks right.
Forminator is also the only free form plugin that allows you to create forms AND polls, submissions, quizzes, and submit blog posts from a form. And it has a powerful API that you can access for free and use to build your own custom extensions.
Something that’s really important for our European friends is advanced features to help you stay compliant with GDPR. You can adjust how long data is retained, set how long to keep an IP before it is anonymized and there’s even a field for a GDPR checkbox. You’re welcome.
Check out our post where we compared the top form plugins to each other.
Details: Forminator
Backing up your site can save you from a lot of future grief. Did your site just go down? Was your site just hacked? No problem – just restore your site from a backup and it’s as good as new.
But what if your backup was lost, compromised, corrupted, or accidentally deleted? Do you have a backup of your backup? Most people don’t, but you don’t have to worry about that with Snapshot Pro.
This plugin can backup your site, but you can also save your backups to multiple locations such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, your computer and more. Backups can also be scheduled so you don’t have to lift a finger to help save your site the next time disaster strikes.
Try Snapshot Pro at no cost with a free trial.
Details: Snapshot
When you’re running a WordPress site and a business at the same time, you know looking professional is important and just as crucial as your content and products. That’s why being able to turn WordPress into a white labeling machine is a great idea.
You could replace the WordPress logo for your own, customize the admin bar, and add your own company name to achieve consistent branding across your site. This plugin can do all this and more.
You can completely customize the admin bar, login page, footer, dashboard, and everywhere else WordPress logos and branding appear. You can even add your branding to even more places than that. Plus, you don’t have to touch any code.
It’s easy to set up and use and it works across your entire Multisite network or your single install of WordPress.
Branda is the only branding plugin you need to turn a WordPress site into your company’s site.
Details: Branda
Tracking how and when users visit your site is important if you want your site to gain popularity since it gives you the opportunity to see where you can make improvements to your site. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for this purpose and the Beehive plugin brings this information right to your admin dashboard.
Not only can you track visits, page views, bounce rate, average visit duration, and referrers, but you can also enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest for advertising as well as analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’ performance.
Also, you can easily track statistics for your entire site or network with the quick setup and easy to understand display.
Details: Beehive
HubSpot’s WordPress plugin offers a form and pop-up builder with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface so you can capture your visitors’ information, but it does so much more than that.
HubSpot will collect submissions off any form you have on your WordPress website (even if you’ve built them with our free Forminator or Hustle plugins) and automatically add those new leads into your CRM. You can segment your contact database into lists and personalize your emails using any CRM property. And all of this for free! You can report on your email’s overall success and see how each contact interacted with your email campaigns thanks to the built-in analytics.
The plugin also includes a live chat and bot builder so you can begin engaging with visitors and generate leads. You can set up chatbots to answer simple questions that your site visitors have so you can continue engaging your visitors even when you are offline.
Once someone submits their information via a form, popup, or the live chat, you can automate a kickback email to get in touch with that lead and share your content with them.
Details: HubSpot
Akismet helps to filter out any comments on your blog that look like spam. The plugin automatically checks comments against the Akismet Web service.
All comments will have a history for users to view that shows which comments were flagged or cleared by Akismet. In addition, those comments that were marked as spam or unmarked by a moderator will be highlighted in the history.
Details: Akismet
The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) can display a list of posts or pages that relate to the current post. This feature provides a great opportunity for your readers to see other relevant content from your site.
Users have the option of displaying only content found on their site or can make extra money by displaying sponsored content.
Details: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Relevanssi can replace the default search option on your site where results are sorted in order of relevance, instead of by date.
The plugin is customizable so that it can be set up to do fuzzy matching on partial words. Content can be found by matching on just one search term or it can be required that all words be found.
There is a free version of Relevanssi that supports a single site, while the premium version offers multi-site support along with other features.
Details: Relevanssi
Broken Link Checker monitors the links found in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and more. The plugin identifies any broken links that no longer work, missing images, or any redirects.
Once broken links are identified on your site, links can be edited directly from the plugin page to avoid manually updating each post.
Details: Broken Link Checker
The Disable Comments plugin enables administrators to globally control comments on their site. Comments can be disabled according to post type, on pages, attachments, etc.
This plugin works well if you want to disable comments on certain post types or on your entire site. However, if you plan to selectively disable comments on individual posts, then this function is better handled directly through WordPress.
Details: Disable Comments
The Regenerate Thumbnails plugin enables you to regenerate thumbnails for image attachments. You have the option to regenerate the thumbnails for all image uploads, individual images, or specific multiple image uploads.
This plugin is very helpful if you have altered any of your thumbnail dimensions or have changed to a new theme that features different image dimensions.
See Default WordPress Image Sizes and How to add Custom Sizes for more.
Details: Regenerate Thumbnails
If you’re not using WPMU DEV’s The Hub to manage all your WordPress sites, then Easy Updates Manager is a plugin that enables you to manage all of your WordPress updates for a single site or Multisite install. There are tons of settings included within the plugin making it highly customizable.
Features include options to automatically update WordPress major and minor releases. Site administrators can also opt to automatically update plugins, themes, and much more.
Details: Easy Updates Manager
With TablePress, you can easily create tables that can be embedded into posts, pages, or text widgets by using a Shortcode. No special coding is necessary as table data can be entered directly into a spreadsheet interface.
Tables can contain any type of data, including formulas. Sorting, pagination, and filtering add additional functionality for TablePress. Tables can also be imported and/or exported from/to Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON formats.
Details: TablePress
The Advanced Custom Fields plugin gives WordPress users the flexibility to visually create custom fields for their site.
Custom field input types include: text, textarea, wysiwyg, image, file, page link, post object, relationship, select, checkbox, radio buttons, date picker, true/false, repeater, flexible content, and gallery.
Details: Advanced Custom Fields
The WP Mail SMTP plugin reconfigures the WordPress delivered mail function to use SMTP. It offers a setup page that enables you to configure various email options. These options include specifying an SMTP host and SMTP port, specifying the from name and email address for outgoing mail, setting SMTP username and password, and more.
For more on how to use WP Mail SMTP to send emails, see our guide How to Use Gmail to Send WordPress Emails
Details: WP Mail SMTP
Gallery offers tools that will assist in adding and editing images for different views on your site that are 100% responsive. Photo galleries and albums can be easily added to posts and pages within WordPress as well as to multiple widgets.
The plugin can also make it easy to rename, upload, remove, and copy images in just a few steps. Image descriptions and tags can also be added through this tool.
Details: Photo Gallery
Black Studio TinyMCE Widget enables you to insert rich text and/or media objects directly into your sidebars without any HTML coding through a visual editor.
As a default, WordPress text widgets lack the editor capabilities that are offered in posts and pages. The Black Studio TinyMCE Widget overcomes these limitations by providing a clean visual interface to add media and text.
Those that prefer to switch from a visual editor to HTML (like posts and pages) also have that option.
Details: Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
By default, WordPress keeps all your deleted posts, pages, comments and all your post revisions, spam comments, unused tags and the like. Until you manually flush your site from all of these excess items, they stick around, bloating and slowing down your site.
The free Optimize Database plugin purges your database from all the extra table data you don’t need including other stray data such as orphan postmeta items and expired transients. You can choose exactly what you want removed so you don’t accidentally delete items you want to keep.
Once your database is all cleaned up, it gets to work optimizing your database for an even smoother running site.
It’s Multisite compatible so you can network activate the plugin and lets you clean and optimize your database in one click each. You can even schedule your database to be automatically optimized on a regular basis so you can keep your database running like a well-oiled machine without having to worry about it.
Details: Optimize Database
As you probably know, an author bio box increases the authenticity of your blog. Although publishing anonymously has its uses, it does not compare to the value of authenticity. An author bio builds trust with your readers. People don’t just want to read the info you publish on your blog, they also want to know who […]
The post How To Add an Author Box to Your WordPress Site appeared first on WPExplorer.
When it comes to creating a WordPress website, you must don many hats. If you choose to everything yourself you must be a website designer, a content strategist, a social media maven, a writer, and even a graphic designer. But let’s be honest; there are very few of us who are talented in all of […]
The post WordPress Website Logo Design for Every Budget appeared first on WPExplorer.
Crowdfunding has exploded in recent years, with the success of sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. If you’ve ever used a crowdfunding site (either as a creator or backer), you’ll know how useful they can be for getting funding. However, you are ultimately competing for attention with thousands of other live projects. Instead of jockeying for position […]
The post CrowdFund Your Projects With WordPress appeared first on WPExplorer.