Are you wondering whether you should use the TLS or SSL security protocol in WordPress?
Installing a security certificate makes your website secure so that you can accept payments in your online store and protect your users. However, terms like SSL and TLS can confuse beginners.
In this article, we will talk about TLS vs. SSL certificates and show you which protocol you should use on your WordPress website.
What Are SSL/TLS Certificates? How Do They Work?
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and TLS stands for Transport Layer Security. They are both internet security protocols that you install on a website in the form of a certificate.
SSL/TLS certificates are like a security lock for your WordPress website. When a user visits your website, the security certificate will encrypt the data before sending it to the user’s browser. Similarly, they also allow the user’s browser to encrypt data before sending it back to your WordPress website.
All websites on the internet must use a security certificate. It allows you to securely accept payments online, protect passwords, and safely transfer personal data online.
Security certificates like SSL or TLS work with security keys. When data is transferred from your website to the user’s browser, it is locked behind encryption. In order to read the data, the user’s browser will need the security key to unlock it.
Similarly, when users send data back, they use the same security key to encrypt the data. Your WordPress website will then use its private key to decrypt the data.
Once you have installed a security certificate on your website, the beginning of your site’s address (URL) will change from http:// to https://.
This shows that you are now using the HTTPS (Secure HTTP) protocol to securely transfer information over the internet.
You will need to update the URL in your WordPress settings and set up redirects so that visitors will be taken to the correct URL when using an old link. You can learn how in our guide on how to properly move from HTTP to HTTPS.
What Is the Difference Between SSL and TLS Certificates?
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) was the original technology behind security certificates used by websites. SSL certificates were first used in 1995.
Unfortunately, security flaws were found with the original SSL protocol that left it vulnerable to hackers. These vulnerabilities allowed hackers to intercept and modify data as it traveled between the website and the user’s browser.
Over the years, several improvements were made to SSL to make it more secure. Here is a quick timeline of the changes as security vulnerabilities were discovered:
SSL 1.0 (unpublished) was never publicly released due to security issues.
SSL 2.0 (1995) was deprecated in 2011 due to security issues.
SSL 3.0 (1996) was deprecated in 2015 due to security issues.
TLS 1.0 (1999) was deprecated in 2021 due to security issues.
TLS 1.1 (2006) was deprecated in 2021 due to security issues.
TLS 1.2 (2008) is still in use.
TLS 1.3 (2018) is still in use.
The SSL protocol is no longer used, but the term SSL certificate stuck, and it is still commonly used as a synonym for TLS certificates.
To summarize, TLS is the evolved form of SSL certificates. Most websites on the internet use TLS certificates. However, they are still commonly referred to as SSL certificates.
How to Get an SSL Certificate for Your WordPress Website
There are a number of ways you can get an SSL certificate for your WordPress website. The price usually varies between $50-200/year. However, you may be able to get one for free.
The best option is to pick a WordPress hosting provider that includes a free SSL certificate with your hosting plan. That way, you can easily turn on your security certificate from your hosting dashboard.
Here are some of our recommendations for the best WordPress hosting providers that offer free SSL certificates:
If you prefer to buy an SSL certificate, then we recommend using Domain.com. They are one of the largest domain name registration services in the world, and they offer the best deal on SSL certificates.
They provide simple SSL certificate plans starting from $35.99/year, which comes with a $10,000 security warranty along with the TrustLogo site seal.
At WPBeginner, our readers often ask us questions about SSL vs. TLS certificates. Here are the answers to the most commonly asked questions about these security protocols.
How are TLS and SSL different?
TLS (Transport Layer Security) and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) are encryption-based protocols used to secure communication over the internet.
While they serve the same purpose, TLS is the newer and more secure replacement for SSL.
Most modern browsers no longer support SSL, so if you want to make sure that your website is accessible to all users, then you should use TLS.
What is the latest version of TLS?
The latest version of TLS is TLS 1.3. It was released in 2018, and it is the most secure version of TLS to date. However, TLS 1.2 is still often used.
TLS 1.2 and 1.3 are supported by most modern browsers and devices.
Earlier versions should not be used due to known security issues.
How can I discover which version of SSL or TLS my website is running?
The easiest way to check which SSL or TLS protocol your website is using is with an online tool like the Qualys SSL Labs SSL Server Test.
Simply type in the website’s domain name and then click the ‘Submit’ button. The tool will show which versions are supported and also look for common SSL issues.
What should I do if my website is still using SSL?
If your website is still using SSL, then you should upgrade to TLS. You will also need to upgrade if you are using the older, less secure TLS versions 1.0 or 1.1.
Upgrading to TLS 1.2 and/or 1.3 will improve the security of your website and make it more accessible. Plus, this is a relatively simple process that can be done by your web hosting provider.
Simplify the deployment of your WordPress website with our easy-to-follow guide. Use Docker Compose, Nginx, Apache, and SSL for a seamless installation process.
We will also create volumes so the changes or updates will be preserved while the container restarts.
Are you wondering what is HTTP/2 and how you can use it in WordPress?
HTTP/2 is the major revision of the HTTP technology used by all websites.
In this article, we’ll explain HTTP/2 and how to enable it on your WordPress site.
What is HTTP/2?
HTTP/2 is the revised version of the original HTTP protocol. It was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and is based on an experimental SPDY protocol developed by Google.
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is like a language that allows computers to talk to each other on the internet. It’s how information gets sent back and forth when you use websites or apps.
When you visit a WordPress website, your web browser sends a message called a request to the server that stores the website. The request asks for specific information, like the page’s text, images, or videos.
The server receives the user’s request and sends back a response. This response is like a package containing the information you asked for. It includes things like the text you see, the pictures you look at, or even the videos you watch on the website.
HTTP 0.9 was first launched in 1991. A significant revision to that, HTTP 1.1, was published in 1999 and most websites ran on that until 2015, when the HTTP/2 protocol launched.
HTTP/2 is supported by all modern web server software and browsers, though many websites still run on HTTP 1.1 if they do not have an SSL certificate installed.
The IETF currently proposes the upcoming version of HTTP/3. It will use QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) instead of TCP and is expected to be much faster than HTTP/2.
What is the Difference Between HTTP2 and HTTP?
The HTTP 1.1 protocol sent data requests without prioritization. This means if a website has a reference to a JavaScript file in the head, it will load before any other content.
This makes a website appear slower to the users who could not see the content they were expecting to see.
HTTP/2 protocol uses a binary single stream to send and receive requests with prioritization support. This means developers can tell the server which data to send first.
The HTTP/2 protocol also uses compression for HTTP headers and multiplexing. Both of them further improve the page load performance.
The newer protocol also comes with HTTP/2 Server Push support. This allows developers to push data to the users’ browsers without them requesting it.
To summarize, HTTP/2 is faster than HTTP 1.1 and significantly improves your WordPress speed and performance.
What Do You Need to Use HTTP/2 in WordPress?
First, you need a hosting company offering the latest server software with HTTP/2 support. You’ll also need to install an SSL certificate on your WordPress website.
Most of the top WordPress hosting companies already use cutting-edge web server software.
We recommend using Bluehost, which uses the latest Apache web server software with HTTP/2 support enabled by default.
Luckily, the folks at Bluehost are offering WPBeginner users an exclusive discount with a free domain name and SSL certificate.
Other hosting companies we recommend include SiteGround,Hostinger, and WP Engine. They all offer free SSL certificates and the latest server software with HTTP/2 support.
How to Enable HTTP/2 in WordPress?
The only requirement to enable HTTP/2 support in WordPress is installing an SSL certificate.
It is not an official requirement. However, major browsers like Google Chrome don’t support HTTP/2 on non-secure URLs.
If your website uses SSL, your URLs will have the https:// prefix like this:
https://wpbeginner.com
Visiting your website will also show a padlock icon in the browser’s address bar.
If your website does not use an SSL certificate, you can ask your WordPress hosting provider to install it for you.
Once you have enabled SSL, your WordPress website will almost certainly be served via HTTP/2 protocol.
Testing HTTP/2 Support for Your Website
If you want to see if your WordPress website is serving pages via HTTP/2, then there are two ways you can test it.
First, you can visit HTTP2.Pro and enter your website’s URL. This free online tool will then tell you whether your website supports HTTP/2.
Another more effective way to check if your website serves pages on HTTP/2 is using the Chrome developer tools.
Simply open a new browser window in Google Chrome and visit your website. After that, open a new browser tab and enter the chrome://net-export URL in the address bar.
Chrome will then ask you to save a JSON file to your computer.
After saving the file, visit the netlog viewer app and click on the ‘Choose File’ button.
Select the netlog file you downloaded earlier to continue.
The app will then present the file in a readable format. Click on the HTTP/2 tab in the left column, and it will show you all the websites you visited that were using the HTTP/2 protocol as h2.
Is the ‘ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH’ error stopping you from accessing a WordPress website?
This error is only seen when visiting a website that uses an SSL certificate. It is caused by out-of-date or misconfigured software on either the website or the user’s computer.
In this article, we will show you how to fix the ‘ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH’ error in WordPress.
What Is the ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH Error?
We recommend that everyone with a WordPress website install an SSL certificate. This can help keep your website data secure.
An SSL certificate is required if you want to accept payments in your online store, and it also protects your users in other ways.
SSL stands for ‘Secure Sockets Layer’, and TLS stands for ‘Transport Layer Security’ protocol. These protocols rely on certificates that tell the user the identity of the website they are communicating with.
When visiting a secure website, your browser will automatically check for an SSL certificate to see if it is valid and up to date. It also checks the version of the protocols being used.
If there’s an issue, then you’ll see an SSL error like ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH.
This error message appears when your browser doesn’t recognize the version of the SSL protocol being used or when the SSL certificate is not configured correctly.
This can happen when the user is using an out-of-date web browser that doesn’t recognize the latest TLS protocols. It can also be caused if the website’s SSL certificate or software is out of date or mismatched.
With that being said, let’s take a look at some steps you can take to fix the ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH error in WordPress:
The first thing you need to do is scan your WordPress website for SSL errors. This will help you identify problems that can cause the ‘ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH’ error.
The easiest way to check is by using an online tool like the Qualys SSL Labs SSL Server Test. Simply type in the website’s domain name and then click the ‘Submit’ button.
This will perform a thorough test on the website that takes a few minutes to finish. After that, you will see a very detailed report about the site’s SSL certificate.
In the screenshot below, you will find the results of a scan on wpbeginner.com. You can see that the WPBeginner SSL certificate is valid and trusted and supports the latest TLS protocol, which is TLS 1.3. This is an example of a great SSL test result.
You can scroll down to the Configuration section of the report.
This will show you which versions of the TLS protocol are supported. In this case, both currently used versions are supported, which are TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3.
It’s also important that the other protocols are not being used because they have known security issues.
If your test result looks similar to this, then the ‘ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH’ error is not being caused by the website. You can scroll down to the last section of this tutorial to learn how to troubleshoot the software on your computer.
On the other hand, here is a screenshot from a scan that found SSL errors. The errors are summarized at the top of the report, and more details are given below.
You can go to a page with detailed notes about an error by clicking the ‘MORE INFO »’ link.
If the SSL test report for your website lists some SSL errors, then you can follow these guidelines to fix them.
Your Site Uses Outdated TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, or RC4 Cipher Suite
Old TLS protocols like TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 should never be run because they have security issues, and modern web browsers have stopped supporting them.
The same goes for the RC4 cipher suite. A cipher suite is a set of algorithms used to secure your website with TLS. However, the RC4 version has been found to be insecure and should never be used.
Reputable WordPress hosting companies never use insecure versions of the TLS protocol or cipher suite.
However, if your website is using any of these outdated versions, then you should contact your hosting provider and get them to enable TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3. You will also need to switch to AEAD cipher suites (AES-GCM).
Because an SSL certificate proves that your website is what it claims to be, the domain name on your certificate must match your site’s domain name. When they are not the same, this is called an ‘SSL certificate name mismatch’.
When you see this error in your SSL report, it will list the potential reasons:
The website does not use SSL but shares an IP address with some other site that does.
The website no longer exists, yet the domain name still points to the old IP address, where some other site is now hosted.
The website uses a content delivery network (CDN) that does not support SSL.
The domain name is an alias for a website whose main name is different, but the alias was not included in the certificate by mistake.
This error is likely caused by a problem with your SSL setup.
In particular, make sure you have set up your SSL certificate to work with all of the variations (or aliases) of your domain name that will be used, including www and non-www URLs.
Another solution is to redirect your website visitors to the correct variation of your domain name.
For example, if your SSL certificate has the URL ‘https://www.example.com’, then you can redirect ‘https://example.com’ to that address. See our article on how to set up redirects in WordPress for more details.
This error could also appear if you have recently moved your website to a new domain name or server. You will need to update your SSL certificate with the new details.
If you are using a CDN service, then you should also make sure that it supports SSL. If you need to upgrade, then you can see our expert picks of the best WordPress CDN services for recommendations.
If you need help with any of these issues, then don’t hesitate to reach out to your hosting provider’s technical support team.
When the Website Is Not the Problem
If the website is not the problem, then the error is caused by software on your computer. Most likely, you have an out-of-date web browser, or your antivirus software is causing the error.
You can follow these steps to troubleshoot the problem.
Update Your Web Browser to the Latest Version
If you are using an outdated web browser such as Internet Explorer or an old version of a modern web browser, then you may see this error. This happens because the old software was written before the latest versions of the TLS protocols and doesn’t recognize them.
In that case, all you need to do is switch to the latest version of a modern web browser like Google Chrome.
If, for some reason, you can’t update to a later version of your browser, like if you are stuck using Microsoft Windows XP, then you may be able to enable a later version of TLS in your browser.
For example, on Google Chrome, you can type chrome://flags in the address bar, search for ‘TLS 1.3’ and enable the option.
Or if you are using Firefox, then you should type about:config in the address bar, search for TLS, and then set the security.tls.version.max value to 4.
Clear Your Browser Cache and SSL Cache
If you still see the error message after doing this, then there are a few more troubleshooting steps you can take. The first thing is to delete your browser cache and cookies.
On Windows, you can also clear the SSL cache. This may be storing out-of-date SSL information about the website you are trying to access.
You can open ‘Internet Options’ by searching for it in the Start menu. Now switch to the Content tab and click on the ‘Clear SSL state’ button.
Temporarily Disable Your Antivirus Software
Finally, it’s possible that your antivirus software or firewall software may be configured incorrectly. This can sometimes cause the ‘ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH’ error to appear when it shouldn’t.
If your software has an automatic SSL scanning feature, then you can try turning it off. Otherwise, you will need to temporarily disable your antivirus software. Once you have done that, you can try accessing the website again.
If you can access the software with your antivirus software disabled, then you can contact the antivirus company’s technical support team about the error or switch to a more reputable application.
Are you looking for the best WordPress themes for SEO experts?
As an SEO expert, you want to choose a theme that showcases your search engine optimization and marketing skills while helping you convert potential visitors into customers.
In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress themes for SEO experts that you can use on your website.
We recommend using WordPress.org. It instantly gives you access to all WordPress features out of the box.
You will need to purchase a domain name and web hosting to build a self-hosted WordPress website.
We recommend using Bluehost as your web host. It is one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.
For WPBeginner users, Bluehost also offers a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and a big discount on web hosting.
Divi is a popular WordPress theme (WP theme) with a multipurpose approach. It’s suitable for any type of website. It has built-in SEO optimization making it a perfect choice for search engine experts.
With hundreds of layouts, it’s easy to set up your professional website in just a few clicks. Divi adds extra options to your WordPress admin panel and also provides a built-in visual website builder so you can get your site looking just how you want.
SeedProd is the most popular WordPress theme and website builder. It lets you design a fully custom theme for your site from scratch and meets all SEO standards without any extra effort.
Moreover, you can import a ready-made website template in 1-click and then customize it using the SeedProd drag and drop builder. It also comes with hundreds of landing page templates to add to your site.
SeedProd is a complete package and a one-stop solution to launch your business website easily.
Astra is a powerful WordPress all-purpose theme and one of the best SEO expert themes. It comes with several starter sites for different business niches, making it easy to find a template for your website.
You can also use the WordPress theme customizer to edit your theme settings for Astra. This lets you see a live preview of your site as you make changes to things like your header styles, fonts, colors, and more.
Astra works perfectly with SEO plugins like All in One SEO and Yoast SEO for the optimization of your website. You can easily add shortcodes to your posts and pages as well as widget-enabled areas.
OceanWP is a WordPress SEO theme designed for any kind of website. It comes with free and paid demo sites that you can import in 1-click to launch your website.
OceanWP is SEO friendly and offers a great user experience. It has multiple addons for social media icons, a sticky navigation menu, user registration, and more. OceanWP is translation ready to create a multilingual website easily.
Ultra is a retina ready multipurpose WordPress theme with ready-made layouts suitable for SEO experts. You can install the templates in 1-click, including the demo content. Then, go ahead and replace the content with your own.
Ultra includes the Themify builder, which lets you edit any page layout with a simple point and click interface. Inside, you will find multiple header designs, blog layouts, page templates, and sidebars. You can even use Ultra’s addons to include pricing tables, countdown timers, and more on your site.
Hestia Pro is a classic WordPress theme for SEO experts and marketers. It comes with a one-page and multi-page template, so you can select the right design for your site.
It’s easy to edit and manage using the WordPress customizer. The theme fully supports WooCommerce to start an online store and rank well in search engines. It also uses responsive design to look great on all devices, and works with all popular WordPress plugins.
Infinity Pro is a WordPress business theme that lets you easily optimize for SEO. It has an elegant black and white design, the perfect set of colors, and a full-width header template. It’s also fully mobile responsive.
With over 10 widget areas, you can easily customize the theme to add your text, images, and other media content. It has a powerful theme options panel to make changes to your site.
Spencer is an elegant WordPress theme for SEO businesses, online marketing agencies, and entrepreneurs. It has a modern business homepage which is easy to set up with simple drag and drop widgets.
It comes with ready-to-use templates to add a landing page, contact form, about page, and a separate blog page to your site.
Corporate is an online business theme that’s suitable for any type of SEO company website. It’s a great choice for SEO agencies and SEO experts. It ships with several ready-made landing page designs and a built-in drag and drop builder to edit them easily.
Corporate has multiple layout choices for different page templates, a smooth background color effect, CSS animations, testimonials, and more. It comes with a beginner-friendly theme options panel and a 1-click demo installer.
Dixie is a WordPress podcast theme built specifically for podcasters and content producers. It lets you share your SEO podcast and rank highly in search engines to get more audiences online.
When it comes to theme features and functionality, Dixie offers masonry layout options, an episode slider, audio, and video players, infinite scrolling, pagination, and more. It makes it easy to change the entire color scheme, too.
Neve is a stylish WordPress theme built for SEO, social media, and digital marketing websites. It lets you focus on the content by providing dozens of ready-made layouts. You can use these to show your expertise and share case studies.
Neve makes it super easy to set up your site with a widgetized homepage, custom widgets, and a theme options page. Neve is eCommerce ready with full support for WooCommerce.
Indigo is a multipurpose WordPress theme suitable for SEO experts, agencies, and businesses. It takes a modular approach to design and lets you drag and drop modules to create page layouts quickly.
Other notable features include custom widgets, social media icons, a contact form, Google fonts, and more. The theme settings are quite straightforward and easy to follow, even for beginners.
Authority Pro is another powerful SEO WordPress theme or marketing theme to build your online presence as an SEO expert. Built on top of the Genesis framework, it features a fresh and modern design with a large header image, welcome message, and an email newsletter subscription form.
It includes 4 widget-ready areas, 2 navigation menus, and a unique vertical navigation menu. It has a theme options panel and a live customizer to set up your website.
Roxima is a fantastic WordPress business theme. It’s perfect for SEO consultants or web design companies and also makes a good marketing WordPress theme. The homepage features a large background image with a call-to-action button and beautiful parallax background effects.
It comes with custom widgets, several widget-ready areas, unlimited color choices, and more. Along with the homepage template, there are templates you can use for other pages (inner pages) on your site. Roxima is easy to use, with tons of options in the live theme customizer.
Presence is a stunning WordPress theme suitable for all kinds of business websites, including digital agency and SEO expert websites. It comes with 10 ready-to-use demos, including a perfect layout for SEO service providers.
It includes a portfolio section, team members section, testimonials, and custom widgets, with flexible layouts and 6 color schemes. It’s designed to work out of the box for beginners while offering plenty of choices for advanced users.
Corner is a great minimalist and distraction-free design. It has a clean and simple WordPress business theme that comes with a simple 2 column layout.
Corner features a narrow left sidebar and a wider content area with lots of white space. It’s powerful enough to be extended with any page builder plugin. You can even add an online store with WooCommerce.
Struct is a uniquely designed WordPress theme suitable for SEO experts, marketing agencies, small businesses, and freelancers specializing in SEO. The homepage features a fullscreen background image, followed by a custom logo, navigation menu, call-to-action buttons, and welcome text.
Struct also includes a services section, team members, testimonials, custom widgets, and content discovery features. It has built-in SEO optimization and helps you rank your website easily.
Breakthrough Pro is a reliable WordPress theme built on the Genesis Framework. It comes with a beautiful fullscreen header image and a prominent call-to-action button in the top section to make a great SEO agency website.
Breakthrough Pro uses large images and elegant typography to make your content stand out. Other features include a customizable header, widget areas, theme options panel, and live customization support. You could even add a mega menu to your site.
Nayma is a great WordPress multipurpose theme suitable for SEO experts, affiliate marketers, and agencies. It uses modules to build page layouts that let you drag and drop elements. This makes it easy to get the design just right.
Nayma includes several modules for sliders, testimonials, portfolios, contact forms, and more. It comes with full WooCommerce support, and you can also use it for multilingual websites.
Integral is a free WordPress business theme that you can also use as a one-page template. It features a modern homepage design with a large background image, welcome message, and call-to-action buttons.
Integral comes with beautiful parallax background effects, multiple sidebars, a projects and features section, and more. You can change things like the theme colors, fonts, and widget sections using the live WordPress customizer.
Potenza is a great option if you want a more formal design. It makes a great SEO agency WordPress theme or could be used for a digital marketing agency website. It’s a WordPress SEO theme with a professional and corporate feel. It has vertical navigation with links to different sections on the page.
The homepage is made up of widget-ready areas, which means you can easily add content widgets. Potenza includes a contact form, multiple colors, social media icons, Google Maps, and support for popular page builders.
Float is a very versatile WordPress theme that could be a great choice for your SEO business. This multipurpose WordPress theme is packed with built-in designs, layout choices, header, and navigation styles.
Float integrates easily with page builders. It also has templates for single pages, including blog and shop pages and posts. It has multiple sidebars, call-to-action buttons, and several custom widgets.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress themes for SEO experts. You may also want to see our ultimate guide on how to improve WordPress speed and performance for a fast loading website.
Are you looking for the best WordPress themes for your recipe blog?
A food recipe blog should display tempting photos with complete recipes. It also needs to look attractive. Traditional WordPress blog themes may not make your recipes stand out.
In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress themes for recipe blogs that you can use right away.
Making a Recipe Blog With WordPress
WordPress is the best website builder on the market. It is perfect for sharing recipes and creating engaging, food-related websites.
There are two different types of WordPress. These are WordPress.com, which is a hosted platform, and WordPress.org, also known as self-hosted WordPress.
We recommend using Bluehost for your hosting and domain name. They are one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended hosting provider.
For WPBeginner users, Bluehost offers a free domain, a free SSL certificate, and a BIG discount on web hosting. It’s a deal that you won’t get elsewhere.
Astra is a great theme for building a recipe, food, or restaurant blog. It comes with dozens of templates you can use, including the food and drinks blog template.
You can easily add your images, use any Google fonts, and pick from unlimited colors in the live theme customizer. There are lots of other customization options too.
The Astra theme is suitable for absolute beginners, but it also offers lots of power and flexibility. Astra has built-in speed and performance optimization.
You can easily add extra elements to your site, such as a contact form. You could even sell or give away a downloadable cookbook using Astra’s Easy Digital Downloads addon.
SeedProd is the best WordPress website and theme builder. It lets you make your recipe blog from scratch with a custom header, including a navigation menu, background image, call-to-action button, and more.
It has a drag-and-drop builder to make a recipe blog theme. The theme builder is easy-to-use for beginners and has simple options like color schemes, font selection, backgrounds, and layouts.
SeedProd also provides ready-made and fully-functional theme templates for different types of WordPress blogs, websites, and online stores. You can import a template and replace the content and images to launch your food recipe blog.
Thrive Themes is a popular WordPress theme-builder with a powerful toolset. It has built-in templates you can import and customize to launch your food recipe blog in just a few minutes.
In the Thrive Suite, you get an A/B testing plugin to help you find which landing page gives you more traffic. Thrive Themes is super flexible and easy to integrate with your favorite marketing tools.
When it comes to design and layout, Thrive Themes has smart color schemes, global website settings, and more. It supports block patterns that you can use to create fully custom landing pages without writing code.
Divi is one of the best WordPress multipurpose themes on the market. It comes with hundreds of built-in layouts for different business niches, including food and recipe templates.
With the Divi theme, you also get a powerful page builder for easy customization. It has point-and-click tools, elements, and modules that let you start blogging without editing any code.
Divi comes with hundreds of layout packs, making it easy to create a WordPress website quickly. Even better, Divi uses responsive design to make your website mobile-friendly.
Ultra is a popular WordPress theme built to create any type of website or blog. It is fully compatible with the WordPress block editor.
It comes with a few starter sites for food, chef, recipe, and cafe sites. These let you get your site up and running quickly. They include the site’s settings, content, navigation menu, widgets, and so on.
Ultra includes Themify Builder, which makes it easier for you to set up a blog and add your recipes. Ultra also offers multiple addons to add more features to your website.
Hestia Pro is a one-page WordPress multipurpose theme well-suited for any type of professional blog or website. It supports video content to add your recipe videos easily.
It has homepage sections for the chef or owner of the blog to create an ‘About Me’ or a portfolio section. The theme also works great with your favorite page builders like Beaver Builder for customization.
Foodie Pro is a great theme from StudioPress. It is a well-crafted WordPress theme for recipe blogs, food websites, and health and nutrition businesses. It features a fully widgetized modern layout and lets you drag and drop items to set up your website.
Foodie Pro includes a theme options panel, live customizer support, custom headers, multiple page layouts, and more. It is highly optimized for speed and performance.
Restaurant is an excellent WordPress theme built specifically for cafes, restaurants, and food recipe blogs. It comes with several tools to add a food menu, categories, chef details, and more.
It has a grid layout on the homepage to showcase your recipes with images. You can also create multiple landing pages for user testimonials, single recipes, and contact information.
Kale comes with a special front page that showcases featured posts. It also has the option to show a banner or a posts slider in the header and includes full eCommerce and RTL language support.
Cookely is a WordPress recipe theme made specifically for food and cooking blogs. This beautiful theme comes with a recipe card and a built-in recipe index that you can display and sort by category.
The homepage has different sections with a featured content area at the top. It is available in 4 color schemes, and you can also choose your colors easily.
Elara is an elegantly-designed WordPress food and recipe blog theme. It features a clean and modern design that makes your content and images more engaging.
It comes with a recipe builder, plus a recipe template, recipe index, and filtering features. Elara also has built-in support to display ads and promote your content.
Florentine is an elegant WordPress theme designed specifically for recipe blogs. It includes a dedicated recipe section that lets you add properly formatted recipes to your website. Your users will also be able to switch to distraction-free cooking mode instantly.
It has built-in social sharing, different styles, and layout choices. The theme options are easy to manage using the WordPress customizer with live preview.
Pulppy is one of the best food blog themes. It comes with a unique design that uses fun color schemes and a modern layout for presentation.
It includes drag-and-drop elements to set up your homepage. Inside, you will find sections to add portfolio items, featured products, sliders, and a call-to-action button. You can also use it to add an online store to your blog.
Neve is a stylish WordPress all-purpose theme built to create any type of website. It ships with multiple food and recipe blog templates that you can use on the site. It is easy to replace the content with your own images and text.
It is flexible and easy to set up with elegant layout designs that attract more users to your blog. The theme has full WooCommerce integration to sell your recipes online.
OceanWP is a modern WordPress multipurpose theme. It comes with a 1-click demo content importer and a few paid and free templates for recipe blogs.
When it comes to features, the theme has a fast page load time, multilingual support, and eCommerce compatibility. It also provides useful addons to extend the functionality of your site.
Osteria is an outstanding WordPress recipe theme built specifically for food bloggers, cafe owners, and restaurants. The top feature of the theme is its 3D scrolling effect, which makes it unique and grabs users’ attention.
It gives you a custom editor to add your food recipes, favorite food menus, and food descriptions. The theme also offers a style manager to customize colors, fonts, and backgrounds. You can also set up a food-ordering system for your users to place online orders for your delicious recipes.
Foodica is a beautiful, magazine-style WordPress theme for food lovers. It features a modern design and comes in 6 color schemes to choose from.
It includes shortcodes to add recipe ingredients to your blog posts. It also has dedicated sections to display ad zones and banners to make money online.
Foodie is a WordPress theme built for chefs, food bloggers, and recipe bloggers. It includes a recipe post section to add ingredients, instructions, and videos.
Foodie uses a traditional blog layout with support for a custom background and a custom logo. You can use the WordPress live customizer to make changes to how your site looks.
Food Recipes is a free WordPress theme suitable for chefs, restaurants, and food businesses, as well as for recipe blogging. Its content area is responsive, so it is divided into a 2-column grid on the desktop screen and a single-column layout on small screens.
Food Recipes includes support for custom logo upload, a social media menu, a fullscreen background image, and more. It is easy to set up, too.
Pepper+ is an all-purpose WordPress theme with several turnkey designs, including one for a food/recipe website. It takes a modular approach and comes with different modules that you can drag and drop to create custom layouts.
It is ready for WooCommerce and supports WPML to create multilingual websites. It is easy for beginners to use because it has a 1-click content import and quick setup.
Gourmand is an elegantly-designed WordPress theme for food and recipe websites. It has a beautiful recipes section, which allows you to add recipes on the homepage.
It is compatible with popular drag and drop page builders like Visual Composer for easy customization. With built-in SEO optimization, your recipes should automatically rank well in Google and other search engines.
Food Blog is a powerful WordPress recipe and food blog theme that ships with a premium recipe plugin. It lets you add, manage, and share recipes on your website. You can also allow users to share their recipes on your blog.
It provides homepage sections to display food photos and recipes professionally. It ships with Beaver Builder to create custom page layouts using drag-and-drop tools.
Foody Pro is a beautifully-designed WordPress theme for food blogging and recipe websites. This elegant theme features gorgeous typography and a clean, spacious layout.
On the homepage, it offers a featured content slider with call to action buttons. It is WooCommerce-ready, comes with an Instagram widget, and includes an automatically generated recipe index.
Igloo is a flexible WordPress theme for a recipe blog, restaurant, or cafe. It comes with a beautiful modern design, elegant photo galleries, and built-in social media integration.
For restaurant websites, it has a menu management system and testimonial sections. It comes in multiple color schemes, and you can change colors for individual pages as well.
Rosa is a beautiful WordPress food blog and recipe theme. It has eye-catching colors and a fullscreen background layout with mouth-watering photos to quickly catch the attention of your visitors.
The theme comes with built-in tools to add recipes with images, video recipes, and more. You can also create custom landing pages to showcase your featured food recipes.
Security changes constantly. There’s a never-ending barrage of new threats and things to worry about, and you can’t keep up with it all. It feels like every new feature creates expanding opportunities for hackers and bad guys.
Threat model documents give you a framework to think about the security of your application and make threats manageable. Building a threat model shows you where to look for threats, what to do about them, and how to prevent them in the future. It provides a tool to stay safe so you can focus on delivering a killer application, knowing that your security is taken care of.
This article will show you how to create a threat model document. We’ll review JSONDiff.com and build a threat model for it, and we’ll show how small architectural changes can have a gigantic impact on the security of your application.
Who Do You Trust?
Every time you use a computer, you trust many people. When you make an application, you’re asking other people to trust you, but you’re also asking them to trust everything you depend on.
Your threat model makes it clear who you’re trusting, what you’re trusting them with, and why you should trust them.
What Is A Threat Model?
A threat model is a document where you write down three things:
The architecture of your application,
The potential threats to your application,
The steps you’re taking to mitigate those threats.
It’s really that simple. You don’t need complex tools or a degree in security engineering. All you need is an understanding of your application and a framework for where to look for threats.
This article will show how to build your own threat model using JSONDiff as a sample. You can also take a look at the complete threat model for JSONDiff to see the finished document.
Threat Models Start With Architecture
All threat models start with a deep understanding of your architecture. You need to understand the full stack of your application and everything it depends on. Documenting your architecture is always a good idea; you can start anytime. You’re architecting from the moment you start picking the tools you’ll use.
Here are some basic questions to answer for your architecture:
Where does my application run?
Where is my application hosted?
What dependencies does my application have?
Who has access to my application?
Where does my application store data?
Where does my application send data?
How does my application manage users and credentials?
Give a brief overview of your application and then document how it works. Start by drawing a picture of your application. Keep it simple. Show the major pieces that make your application run and how they interact.
Let’s start by looking at the overall architecture of JSONDiff.
JSONDiff is a simple application that runs in a browser. The source code is stored on GitHub.com, and it’s open source. It can run in two modes:
A private version users can run in a Docker container.
We’ll draw the architecture in relation to what runs in the client and what runs on the server. For this drawing, we won’t worry about where the server is running and will just focus on the public version.
Drawing your architecture can be one of the trickiest steps because you’re starting with a blank page and have to choose a representation that makes sense for your application. Sometimes you’ll want to talk about larger pieces; other times, you’ll want to focus on smaller chunks and user actions. Ask yourself what someone would need to know to understand your security, and write that.
JSONDiff is a single-page web application using jQuery. In this case, it makes sense to focus on the pieces that run on the server, the pieces that run in the browser, and how they work.
The first step to any architecture is a brief description of what the application is. You need to set the stage and let anyone reading the architecture know some basic information:
What does the application do?
Who’s using it?
Why are they using it?
JSONDiff is a browser-based application that compares JSON data. It takes two JSON documents, compares them semantically, and shows the differences. JSONDiff is free for anyone and anywhere. It’s used by developers to find differences in their JSON documents that are difficult to find with a standard text-editor diff tool or in GitHub.
The architecture diagram looks like this:
The architecture is simple: Nginx hosts the site, and most of the code is in the jdd.js file. But it brings up many good questions:
How does JSONDiff load JSON data?
Does it ever send the data it loads anywhere?
Does it store the data?
Where do the ads come from?
Write down all of the questions your architecture diagram brings up, and answer them in your threat model. Having those questions written down gives you a place to start understanding the threats.
Let’s focus on the first question and show how to dig into it with a security mindset.
There are two ways to load the JSON data you want to compare. You can load it in the browser by copying and pasting it or by choosing a file. That interaction is very well understood, and there isn’t much of a threat there. You can also load the JSON data by specifying an URL, which opens a big can of worms.
Specifying a URL to load the data is a very useful feature. It makes comparing large documents easier, and you can send someone else a URL with the JSON documents already loaded. It also brings up a lot of issues.
The same-origin policy prevents JavaScript applications running in browsers from loading random URLs. There are very good reasons that this policy exists. JSONDiff is subverting the policy, and that should make your security spidey-sense tingle.
JSONDiff uses a proxy to enable this feature. The proxy.php file is a simple proxy that will load JSON data from anywhere.
Loading random data sounds like a recipe for a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack. That’s a risk.
All applications have risks; we manage those risks with mitigations. In this case, the proxy risk has two mitigations:
The proxy can only load data that are already publicly available on the Internet.
The file that’s loaded by the proxy is never executed.
Our threat model will include this risk and show how we mitigated it. In fact, each threat needs to show how much risk there is and what we did to mitigate each risk.
Let’s take a look at where threats appear in your application.
Threats
There are many categories of threats through the development and deployment lifecycles. It’s helpful to split threats into different categories and document those potential threats for our application, while we’re starting to plan, design, implement, deploy, and test that software or service.
For every threat we identify, we need to describe two pieces:
The threat What is the specific threat we’re worried about here? How could it be exploited in our application? How serious could that exploit be?
Mitigation How are we going to mitigate that threat?
Code Threats
Many threats start with the code you write. Here are a few categories of coding issues to think about:
Weak Cryptography
“Does your application use SSL or TLS for secure network connections?”
If you are, make sure that you’re using the latest recommended versions.
“Does your application encrypt data or passwords?”
Make sure you’re using the latest hashing algorithms and not the older ones like MD5 or SHA-1.
“Did you implement your own encryption algorithm?”
Don’t. Just don’t. There’s almost never a good reason to implement your own encryption.
SQL Injection
SQL injection attacks happen when a user enters values in an application that are sent directly to a database without being sanitized (like Bobby Tables). This can inject malicious code that alters the original SQL query to retrieve, change, or delete data inside the SQL database.
Avoid injection attacks by not trusting any inputs coming from users. Your threat model should address any place you’re taking user input and saving it anywhere.
JSONDiff never saves any of the JSON data it compares. If we added that feature, we’d be open to many types of injection attacks. It doesn’t matter if we saved the JSON to a SQL database like PostgreSQL, a NoSQL database like MongoDB, or a file system. We’d mitigate that threat by making sure to sanitize our inputs and never trusting data from users.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Malicious scripts can be injected into web applications, making browsers run those scripts in a trusted context; that allows them to steal user tokens, passwords, cookies, and session data. This injection attack happens when a user saves or references code from somewhere else and gets that code to run in the application security context.
JSONDiff doesn’t let users save anything, but you can build URLs to preload the documents to compare like this:
This is a clear threat to address in the threat model. If someone referenced malicious code in an URL like this and sent it to someone, they could run it without realizing the risk. JSONDiff mitigates this threat by using a custom parser for the inputs and making sure that none of them get executed. We can test that with ‘evil’ JSON and JavaScript files like this:
Consider all of the inputs to your application and how you’re making sure they can’t cause problems.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CSRF attacks wait for you to log in and then use your credentials to steal data and make changes. Session-based unique CSRF tokens can be used to prevent such an attack. Examine everywhere your application uses sessions. What are you doing to make sure sessions can’t be shared or stolen?
JSONDiff doesn’t have sessions, so there’s nothing to steal. Adding the ability to manage sessions and login would create a large set of new threats. The threat model would need to address protecting the session token, making sure that sessions can’t be reused, and ensuring that sessions can’t be stolen, among other things.
Logging Sensitive Information
Your logs aren’t secure, so don’t put any sensitive information there. Logging passwords or other sensitive customer information is the most common security issue in building an application: developers log some activity or error, and that contains the token or password information or personal information about the user.
What are you doing to make sure that developers don’t log sensitive information? Make sure your code review includes looking at logging output. There are also password scanners you can run over your log files to find likely passwords.
Code Review And Separation Of Duties
Trust, but verify, as some people on your team will be malicious. Everyone on your team makes mistakes — trust your team, but verify.
The best way to verify this is to separate the roles within your team. Allowing one person to change code, test it, and push it to production without any oversight presents a risk. Separation of duties splits the stages of your pipeline to production into multiple stages. There are four clear stages in every application that you should separate as much as possible:
Writing the code,
Reviewing the changes,
Testing the functionality,
Deploying the application.
For small projects, these roles may overlap or be part of an automated process. Even when the pipeline is fully automatic, you can still separate the functions. For example, making sure that the owner of a given area didn’t write all the tests for that area ensures that someone else is verifying the functionality. In well-run projects, these roles can switch so everyone gets a turn to write code as well as review it or write tests as well as do deployments.
JSONDiff is an open-source application that makes review much easier. For closed-source applications, you can use the Pull Request mechanism in Git to ensure all code is reviewed for the issues mentioned above. Spend time with your team and teach them what they should look for during code review.
Static code analysis tools also help detect security threats and other issues. These tools include linters and code checkers like JSHint, along with more comprehensive security scanners. These tools look at your source code and find problems based on the specific programming language you’re using. OWASP maintains a list of static analysis tools.
Many security scanners use common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) databases to know what issues to look for. Integrating these tools into your build process ensures that all your changes will be scanned.
The code for JSONDiff was scanned by JSHint, and all issues were fixed, or so I thought. It turned out that I scanned the JavaScript, but I missed the server side. My co-author Terry ran the SonarQube lint scanner and found an error in the PHP proxy:
This small fix is a great example of how a second pair of eyes can help you find problems.
Third-Party Threats
Your application has dependencies and probably a lot of them. They may be from other groups or open-source projects. The list of all these dependencies and the versions they use makes up a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM).
When the teams who maintain the projects you depend on find security issues, they report them in a CVE database. Other security professionals report CVEs as well. Third-party scanners look at those databases and make sure you aren’t using dependencies with known security issues.
Static application security testing (SAST) tools like Snyk can also scan third-party threats and report vulnerabilities in the libraries you’re using. Those vulnerabilities are then scored by severity, so you know how seriously to take each threat.
Tools like NPM have built-in vulnerability checking for dependencies. Integrating vulnerability checks in your build process mitigates that threat.
Data Security Threats
Protecting your application means protecting the application data. Always make sure your data is transmitted and stored with confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Here are some of the risks to data security:
Accidental data loss or destruction,
Malicious access to confidential data like financial data,
Unauthorized access from various partners or employees,
Natural disasters or uncontrollable hazards like earthquakes, floods, fire, or war.
To mitigate those risks, we can implement these actions:
Protect the data with strong passwords, and define the policy for password expiration.
Categorize the data with different classes and usage, and define the different roles that can access different levels of data.
Always do an authorization check to make sure only a permitted user with the corresponding role can access that level of data.
Deploy various security tools like firewalls and antivirus software.
Encrypt your data at rest (when it’s stored somewhere).
Encrypt your data in transit (when it’s moving between two points).
JSONDiff doesn’t store any data. Let’s think about the in-transit threat:
The threat JSONDiff loads data from any URL to compare. How are we protecting that data?
Mitigation JSON uses SSL encryption when loading data if it’s available and always uses SSL to encrypt data sent to the browser.
Runtime Threats
After the application is deployed and running, we need to consider the runtime threats.
The best way to find runtime threats is a penetration test from a team of experts. Pen-test teams pretend they’re hackers and attack your application. They attack your external interfaces and look for SQL injection, cross-site scripting, denial of service (DDOS) attacks, privilege escalation attacks, and many more problems.
If you can afford an external pen-test team, then use one, but you can also do this yourself. Pen-test tools like the OWASP ZAP proxy perform dynamic scanning on your application endpoints and report common threats.
Threats To Stability
Availability attacks try to disrupt your application instead of hacking it. High availability and redundant designs mitigate the threat of these attacks.
There are several things we can consider to build up plans for those threats:
High-availability infrastructure, including the network and server. If we deploy the application via the cloud, we can consider using multiple regions or zones and set up a load balancer.
Redundancy for the system and data. This will improve stability and availability, but the cost will be high. You can balance stability and cost: Only make your most critical components redundant.
Monitoring of system and setup alerts if the system might be running at capacity in various components. There could be a malicious activity that will destroy your infrastructure, and monitoring the health of your system availability will be critical.
Backup and restore plans. If security threats take the system down, how can we quickly bring it back up? We need to build a plan for backing up and restoring.
Handling outages of dependent services. We need to build up some fallback plans, design and implement circuit breakers, and keep dependent services from breaking the entire application.
Building A Data Recovery Plan
What can disrupt your application or system? Think about human error, hardware failure, data center power outages, natural disasters, and cybersecurity attacks.
Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) design will be critical to ensure that your organization, users or customers, and employees can do business with minimal disruption.
For an organization like a company, you’ll need to create a business continuity plan. That means first assessing your people, IT infrastructure, and application. Identify people’s roles and responsibilities for your business continuity plan and recovery solutions.
If you’re deploying your application in a cloud-based environment, you need to deploy it across multiple regions or multiple cloud providers. The critical part is the data storage for the system and application: All data should have point-in-time replication, allowing your application or service to be restored soon from a secondary data center or a different country or continent.
Your BCDR solution should be regularly tested every year (or even more often), and your plan should be frequently reviewed and improved by the people in your organization.
The Worst-Case Scenario
Threat models provide a framework to imagine the worst-case scenario, which helps you think outside the box and come up with novel threats.
So what’s the worst-case scenario for JSONDiff? It probably involves the proxy.php script. We already know to focus on the proxy, and there have been some severe PHP exploits in the past. The proxy.php file is also the only part that runs on the server side. That makes it the weakest link.
If I was able to hack the proxy, I could change the way it works. Maybe I could fool it into returning different content. I can’t run malicious code with that content, but I could trick someone into thinking two JSON documents were the same when they weren’t; I might be able to do something malicious with that.
I could go even further and think about what would happen if someone hacked into the server and changed the contents of the code, but now I’m just back to credential management, which is already covered in the threat model.
This reminds us to keep up to date with PHP versions, so we get the latest security fixes.
Thinking of the worst-case scenario sends you in different directions and improves your threat model.
The most important takeaway is that you should think about all the ways people interact with your application and all the ways your application interacts with other systems. Any time you can simplify those interactions, you’re reducing your vulnerability to threats.
For more complex threat models, making a threat diagram is also useful. Tools like draw.io have specific shapes for threat modeling diagrams:
What If I Can’t Mitigate A Threat?
You can’t mitigate every threat. For JSONDiff, a threat I have no control over is Google AdSense, which adds dynamic content to JSONDiff.com. I don’t get to check that content first. I can’t verify every ad that Google might show. I also can’t force Google to go through a security review process for my site. In the end, I just have to trust Google.
In the rare cases when you have a threat you can’t mitigate or minimize, the best you can do is settle for transparency. Be as open and honest about that threat as possible. Document it. Let your users or customers know, so they can make their own choices about whether the risk is worth it.
Build Your Threat Model Early
Threat models help the most when begun early in the process. Start putting your threat model together as soon as you pick technologies. Decisions about how you’ll manage users, where you’ll store data, and where your application runs all have a major impact on the threat model of your application.
Working on the threat model early, when it’s easier to make architectural changes, makes it easier to fend off threats.
Communicating Your Threat Model
The previous section showed you how to start creating your threat model. What should you do with it once you’re done?
There are a few potential audiences for your threat model:
Security reviewers If you create an application for any security-conscious company, it will want to do a security review. Your threat model will be a requirement for that process. Having a threat model ahead of time will give you a giant head start.
Auditors Security auditors will always look for a threat model. They want to make sure you’ve thought through the threats to your application.
Yourself Use your own threat model to manage your threats. Have the team keep it up to date while you’re adding new features. Making sure that team members update the threat model will force them to think of any potential threats they’re adding when they make changes.
Everyone If your project allows it, then share your threat model with everyone. Show the people who trust your application the potential threats and how you’re handling them. Openness reassures them and helps them appreciate all the work you’ve done to make your application secure.
Keep Improving Your Threat Model
We talked about the most important steps in constructing a threat model, but threats are a constantly moving target. We need to build up a management plan for security incidents, defining how to respond to any threats we learn about from internal or external sources.
Every incident you find should end up in your threat model. Document how you found it, how you fixed it, and what you did to make sure it never happens again. Every application has security issues; what matters is how well you handle them. This is a continuous process of improvement:
Build the architecture to understand what the application is for.
Identify the application threats.
Think about how to mitigate the identified vulnerabilities.
Validate the threat model with other experts in your area.
Review the threat model, and make updates every time you find a new threat.
Threat Models Let Me Sleep At Night
I make threat models for myself. I want to sleep at night instead of staring at the ceiling and wondering what security holes I’ve missed. I want to focus on delighting my users without constantly worrying about security. Threat models give me a framework to do that.
I make threat models for my customers. I want them to know that I take their security seriously, and I’m thinking about keeping them secure. I want to show them what I’m doing and help them understand so they can judge for themselves.
Threat models are flexible and grow or shrink as much as you need. They provide a tool for you to reassure your users about security and allow you to sleep at night. Now you know why you need one for your application, too.
OpenSSL is an open-source-based implementation of the SSL protocol, with versions available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It is a highly versatile tool used to create CSRs (Certificate Signing Requests) and Private Keys as well as compare an MD5 hash of different certificates or private keys; verify installed certificates on any website; and convert certificates into other formats. The most common OpenSSL commands are generating Certificate Signing Requests, verifying that a certificate is installed correctly on a website, comparing the MD5 hash of a certificate or private key with other versions, and converting certificates from one format to another.
The Most Common OpenSSL Commands
In this blog, we have mentioned some common OpenSSL commands used for different SSL management purposes. OpenSSL provides a wide range of options and parameters for each command, allowing users to manage their SSL infrastructure and fix their queries in no time.
Formerly 3dcart, Shift4Shop offers free, enterprise-grade ecommerce functionality to help you build your online store and start selling. You get nearly all the features to start and grow your online business, including powerful tools like a robust website builder, product and order management functionalities, customer marketing tools, and round-the-clock technical support.
The biggest catch is that the free end-to-end ecommerce plan is only available to US merchants. Moreover, you have to use the in-house payment processor, Shift4 Payment, to get paid, which isn’t too bad as it’s one of the leading payment processing providers. Plus Shift4Shop doesn’t charge you any monthly fees to use its ecommerce platform.
Shift4Shop Compared
Shift4Shop made it on my top list for the best value. While it’s a great option, the best ecommerce website builder is Shopify because of its robust features and tools that provide you with everything to build an online store. Get started with a three-day free trial today.
Shopify — Best all-around ecommerce website builder
Wix — Best for launching an online store in minutes
Shift4Shop is a comprehensive ecommerce website builder that caters to businesses of all sizes and industries. Using its innovative turnkey solution, you can easily build a secure website and leverage various customer marketing tools to boost sales. The company also offers a range of top-notch features, including social media marketing, SEO, and an extensive marketplace with third-party devs, affiliates, and experts.
A global leader in financial technology, Shift4 acquired 3dcart and rebranded it as Shift4Shop. Along with the powerful ecommerce solution, Shift4 also offers Shift4Shop users a seamless online payments platform that makes it easier for them to get paid.
Shift4Shop Health and Stability
Shift4Shop is a private company with hundreds of employees and a stable customer base. And while it may be less popular than its counterparts like Shopify and Wix, you can be sure this company isn’t going anywhere.
One of the main reasons behind this is its parent company, Shift4 Payments. A publicly listed company with over $13.7 million in funding, Shift4 Payments has been doing consistently well in the market.
Keeping all this in mind, I firmly believe Shift4Shop is an ecommerce website builder you can trust.
Shift4Shop Pricing
Shift4Shop’s unlimited, enterprise-grade plan costs an impressive $0. It includes the feature-packed ecommerce platform, an SSL certificate, a domain name, and a huge selection of customizable themes. However, you need to process a minimum of $500 per month with Shift4 Payments through your Shift4Shop store to waive the SaaS fee.
Shift4Shop has conditional pricing, under which you won’t need to pay any charges if you meet their monthly minimum of ecommerce sales ($500 with Shift4 Payments). Otherwise, you need to pay a monthly SaaS fee. Shift4Shop hasn’t published information on its website about how much this costs, so you’ll have to contact its sales team for more information.
Shift4Shop Pricing Comparison
Compared to Shopify, Shift4Shop can be free (if you meet the stated requirements), but you must be based in the United States and agree to use Shift4 Payments to process payments. On the other hand, Shopify has no free plan, and you have to pay monthly or yearly to continue using it.
Wix is another popular ecommerce web builder that offers a free plan and incredibly affordable paid plans. The biggest advantage of Wix over Shift4Shop is its predictability and affordability. Sure, Shift4Shop is free upfront, but if you don’t process at least $500 through Shift4 Payments, you’ll have to pay a monthly SaaS fee.
Shift4Shop Trials and Guarantees
Being a free ecommerce website builder, it makes sense that Shift4Shop doesn’t offer any free trial or refund guarantee.
Shift4Shop Ecommerce Website Builder Review
Shift4Shop’s biggest advantage as an ecommerce website builder is the generous feature offering despite being free. You get an enterprise-level website builder, over hundred themes, tons of SEO tools, unlimited product listings, and more.
The software is also customizable, where you can add products to your store, choose themes, and select payment methods. Even from the buyer’s perspective, the Shift4Shop storefront is easy to navigate, right from product browsing to checking out.
As for the caveats, you should know the zero-cost version of Shift4Shop is only available to US customers, and you’ll need many add-ons to run your store effectively, among a few others.
Large selection of features: Shift4Shop has one of the most generous feature selections, despite the affordable price tag. Ecommerce tools include single-page checkouts, digital downloads, two-factor authentication, recurring orders, and unlimited product variations.
You can also leverage the built-in marketing and SEO tools, discount codes and coupons, affiliate programs, loyalty reward programs, and back-in-stock alerts to drive sales. While the reporting and analytics aren’t as advanced as that of Shift4Shop’s competitors, they get the job done.
Higher level of customization: Shift4Shop makes creating a fully customizable and responsive website easier than ever. Thanks to its design software, you get access to its core template engine, where you can create your own themes, plus all Shift4Shop themes have Google AMP-enabled product pages, deferred JavaScript and CSS, and a conversion-optimized checkout, among other benefits, which is another plus.
Let’s also not forget the flexible drag-and-drop HTML editor and the core theme editor that lets you customize your theme design to your needs, from colors to topography to buttons. Moreover, you can preview every change in real-time, which won’t be visible to your shoppers until you ‘Save’ them, confirming the changes.
Excellent management functionalities: Another benefit of Shift4Shop is its comprehensive management software that allows you to manage orders and products from a centralized place. You get a complete toolset comprising a convenient dashboard, new order notifications, status updates for customers, and advanced automation rules to better manage orders. Further, you can see your new inventory catalog by organizing each product into a list format. Other tools include bulk import and export, videos and dynamic zoom, detailed project reports, and unlimited categorization.
Reliable ecommerce hosting: Shift4Shop’s web hosting is an excellent addition to its ecommerce website builder platform, thanks to a 99.9% uptime guarantee and PCI certification and security. Other features include a free domain name with yearly renewals, monthly transparent upgrades, FTP access to files, daily backups, and a 256 Bit SSL certificate.
Currently, Cloudflare powers all Shift4Shop online stores, which gives you the benefits of its global content delivery network, DDOS attack protection and mitigation, and faster loading speeds by extension.
Mobile-friendly: Shift4Shop makes your online stores mobile-responsive, meaning your website can adapt and adjust to different screen sizes and resolutions. This is necessary to provide shoppers with a seamless shopping experience, regardless of the device they use to visit your site. With an increasing number of people using mobiles for shopping, having a mobile-optimized store can work wonders to secure more sales.
Where Shift4Shop Ecommerce Website Builder Falls Short
Unpredictable pricing: Shift4Shop markets itself as a free ecommerce website builder, but this can change quickly if you don’t meet the $500 monthly payment requirement. Moreover, its modules are expensive, and the free themes are limited. To design a stunning and optimized website, you may find yourself investing in paid themes. Additionally, the zero-cost version of the platform is only available to US users.
Poor customer support: Several customer reviews have found Shift4Shop’s customer support severely lacking, especially for users outside the United States. One user pointed out they didn’t receive a response for days, while another expressed disappointment with a customer service representative’s unhelpful and rude behavior.
Minimal reporting capabilities: Shift4Shop’s reporting capabilities are lacking. While it offers detailed profit reports, specialty customers and inventory reports, and rewards use, you’ll likely need additional reporting tools for more strategic operations reviews and decision-making.
Requires multiple add-ons: When building your online stores through Shift4Shop, be prepared to install multiple add-ons (similar to WordPress plugins) to maximize functionality. For example, if you want to add a shopping cart to your online store, you must install software to make this happen. Similarly, you’ll need to install a ‘Buy’ button on your website’s backend to allow shoppers to check out more conveniently.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s great that Shift4Shop offers these capabilities, but installing too many add-ons can cause your website to run slower than usual or even crash entirely.
Shift4Shop Ecommerce Website Builder Compared
Where Shift4Shop makes a great choice, it does have a few hard-to-ignore caveats. Keeping this in mind, the best ecommerce website builder is Shopify simply because it offers everything you may need to build and run an ecommerce website—all in a single platform.
Shopify — Best all-around ecommerce website builder
Wix — Best for launching an online store in minutes
Shift4Shop has one of the most customizable and flexible shopping cart solutions that lets you optimize your checkout to offer seamless, hassle-free experiences to shoppers. They can view, edit, and save carts to purchase later, helping drive sales.
Create single-page or multi-page checkouts, each personalized to your liking. The fact that you don’t need to pay any transaction fees is another cost-saving advantage. Shift4Shop will also auto-calculate shipping and taxes in your customer’s cart to avoid total surprises.
Aside from these, everything we broke down above for ecommerce website building is also relevant to shopping cart experiences.
Here’s a quick look at how Shift4Shop stacks against other shopping cart software solutions on the market:
Keeping in mind the pros and cons, I believe Shift4Shop is an excellent choice for ecommerce website building and adding a shopping cart—provided you’re a US resident. Thanks to its excellent feature offering, customization capabilities, and management functionalities, it really stands out from its competitors. But if you’re an international user, you may want to check out other solutions like Shopify and Wix.
Do you want to create a restaurant website with WordPress?
A restaurant website can help attract new customers and grow your business. It can also provide a better experience for your existing customers and keep them coming back to your restaurant, cafe, takeaway, or similar business.
In this article, we will show you how to create a restaurant website with WordPress.
Why Create a Restaurant Website?
A website is one of the best ways to market your restaurant to new customers and provide a better experience for your existing clients.
By creating an online presence for your restaurant, you can introduce your business to people who are looking for venues and food just like yours.
After a potential customer discovers your business, a professionally-designed and helpful restaurant website will tell them everything they need to know about your business. They can then decide whether your restaurant is right for them.
Even if you have lots of loyal customers and a positive reputation in the local area, a restaurant website can help you improve the customer experience.
For example, it can allow customers to book a table online, send you questions using a convenient contact form, check out the latest menu, and much more.
In this way, a restaurant website can keep your customers happy, so they carry on visiting you for months, or even years to come.
That said, let’s see how you can easily create a restaurant website with WordPress.
Which Is the Best Website Builder for Your Restaurant?
There are many website builders that can help you create a restaurant website but we recommend using WordPress.
According to our blogging research statistics, WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world. It powers nearly 43% of all websites on the internet including many top restaurant websites.
WordPress is also open-source and free. For more on this topic, see our article on why WordPress is free.
However, it’s important to realize that there are two types of WordPress software, so you don’t choose the wrong one.
First, there is WordPress.com, which is a blog hosting platform. Then, there is WordPress.org which is also known as self-hosted WordPress.
For a restaurant website, we recommend using WordPress.org because it gives you complete ownership of your site and allows you to install third-party plugins, including plenty that are designed specifically for restaurant owners.
To learn more about why we recommend WordPress to all our readers, please see our complete WordPress review with pros and cons.
A domain name is your website’s address on the internet. This is what customers will type into their browsers to reach your website, such as justeat.com or tacobell.com.
Web hosting is where your website lives online. To help you out, we’ve hand-picked some of the best WordPress hosting that you can buy for a restaurant website.
Although the WordPress software is free, hosting and domain names are where the costs can really start to add up.
A domain name typically costs $14.99/year and hosting costs start from $7.99/month. This is a lot for restaurants that already have bills and expenses to pay.
Thankfully, Bluehost has offers a free domain name, and our readers can get 60% off on web hosting. Bluehost is one of the largest hosting companies in the world, and an official WordPress-recommended hosting partner.
They’re also offering our readers a free SSL certificate. If you want to accept payments online, then an SSL certificate will help keep the customer’s credit and debit card information safe.
You can click the button below to get started for as little as $2.75 per month.
Once there, you will need to go to the Bluehost website in a new tab and click on the green ‘Get Started Now’ button.
This will bring you to a pricing page where you can choose a hosting plan for your website.
We recommend choosing a Basic or Plus plan, as they’re the most popular web hosting plans among our readers.
After selecting a plan, click on ‘Continue.’
On the next screen, you’ll need to choose a domain name.
Ideally, the domain name will be easy to pronounce and spell, easy to remember, and related to your business. The name of your restaurant is a great place to start, but sometimes that domain may already be taken by another business.
In that case, you can try extending the domain name by adding your restaurant’s location, your own name, or the type of food you serve.
After choosing a name, click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.
Now you’ll need to provide your account information such as your name and email address. After that, you’ll also see optional extras that you can purchase.
We generally don’t recommend purchasing these extras straight away, as you can always add them later on if you need them.
After that, simply type in your payment information to complete the purchase.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll get an email with instructions on how to login to your web hosting control panel. This is your hosting account dashboard where you can manage your restaurant website, including setting up email notifications and asking for WordPress support.
It’s also where you’ll install the WordPress software.
Step 2. Create a New WordPress Website
When you signup with Bluehost using our link, Bluehost installs WordPress on your domain name automatically.
If you want to create a different WordPress website, then you can simply click on the ‘My Sites’ tab in the Bluehost dashboard.
Next, just click on the ‘Add Site’ button and select ‘Create New Site.’
The Bluehost wizard will now guide you through the setup process.
First, you’ll need to type in a site title and optional tagline.
Click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.
After that, Bluehost will ask you to select a domain name and path for your restaurant website. If you’ve already purchased a domain name, then you can simply select it from the dropdown menu.
If you don’t have a domain name then you can buy one by visiting the ‘Domains’ page inside the Bluehost dashboard.
After choosing a domain name, you can leave the directory path blank and let Bluehost fill it in for you. The installer will also show a few must-have WordPress plugins that you may want to install on your restaurant website including OptinMonster.
After that, click on the ‘Next’ button and the installer will set up your restaurant site.
Once it’s finished, you’ll see a ‘WordPress installed successfully’ message with information about your new website. You can now go ahead and click on the ‘Log into WordPress’ button.
This will take you to your site’s admin area.
You can also log in to the WordPress dashboard by simply going to yoursite.com/wp-admin/ directly from your browser.
Your typical restaurant website needs special features, like the ability to show a menu, photos, location information, business hours, and more.
With that in mind, it makes sense to look for a theme that’s designed for the food or hospitality industry. To help you out, we’ve collected the best WordPress restaurant themes.
You can also use a website and landing page builder plugin such as SeedProd.
After installing your theme, you may want to customize it by going to Appearance » Customize in the WordPress dashboard.
This will launch the theme customizer where you can fine-tune the theme settings and see your changes in the live preview.
If you’re using one of the newer full site editing themes, then you’ll see the option for Appearance »Editor, which uses blocks similar to the content editor to customize your site.
Pro Tip: No matter what theme you’re using, neither the default WordPress customizer nor the full site editing offers a user-friendly drag and drop customization experience. For that reason, we recommend using a page builder like SeedProd to customize your theme.
Just remember that you can always return to this screen and continue customizing your theme. You can even completely change your WordPress theme at any point.
Step 4. Create a Custom Home Page
WordPress has two two default content types called posts and pages.
You’ll typically use posts to create articles and blogs. By default, the home page shows these posts in reverse chronological order, so the newest content appears at the top of the list.
You might use a blog to build a stronger relationship with their customers, improve your WordPress SEO, and get more traffic to your restaurant website. For example, you could write about recipes, share cooking tips, or blog about the latest restaurant industry news.
However, even if you plan to publish blog posts, you typically won’t show these on the home page. Instead, we recommend creating a custom home page that introduces your business to new visitors.
Once you’re happy with the page’s design, it’s time to set it as your home page. To do this, go to Settings » Reading in the WordPress dashboard.
Here, scroll to ‘Your homepage settings’ and select ‘A static page.’
Next, open the ‘Homepage’ dropdown and choose the page that you want to use.
Then, simply scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on ‘Save Changes.’ Now, if you visit your website you’ll see the new home page in action.
If you are going to write blogs, then make sure you create a separate blog page to display your posts. If you don’t, then customers will struggle to find your latest WordPress blogs.
Step 5. Create an Online Restaurant Menu
Even long-term, loyal customers may want to look at your menu from time to time. By publishing your menu online, customers can look at it any time of day or night.
Publishing a menu can also help convince new customers to visit your restaurant.
It is possible to upload PDF files to your WordPress website. However, downloading a PDF menu can be difficult depending on the customer’s data plan and internet connection, and they’re non-responsive so they can be hard to read on some devices.
Plus, if you add new dishes or change your pricing, then you’ll also need to upload a completely new PDF.
For that reason, we recommend using SeedProd to add an online menu to your WordPress website. SeedProd also allows you to create a mobile responsive menu that looks great on every device.
You can also easily update the menu as you add new dishes, change the prices, remove dishes, and more.
SeedProd even comes with a ‘Menu Sales Page’ template that’s perfect for creating a menu.
Many restaurants allow customers to order food online. For example, you might give customers the option to pre-order their meal or place an order for delivery.
It may sound technical, but you can easily add online food ordering to your website using the WPForms plugin.
WPForms is the best WordPress form builder that allows you to create online order forms for all kinds of products and services.
It even comes with a ready-made ‘Takeout Order Form’ that you can customize to suit your restaurant website.
Every time someone completes the form, WPForms will notify you automatically so you can start working on that order straight away.
If you don’t want to accept cash on delivery, then WPForms supports all of the best payment gateways including PayPal and Stripe. This allows you to accept payments securely online, which is quick and convenient for your customers.
Today, most people expect to be able to book appointments through an automated system.
By adding a booking form to your restaurant website, you can accept reservations at any time of the day or night. You’ll never lose another customer just because you weren’t around to answer the phone.
Booking forms can also automate a lot of the booking process. This includes collecting payments and emailing your customers to remind them about their upcoming booking.
You can easily add a restaurant booking form to your website using WPForms. This plugin has a ready-made dinner reservation form template that you can customize for your restaurant.
WPForms also integrates with all of the top email marketing providers. This makes it easy to send reservation confirmation emails to your customers.
As their booking approaches, you can even send the customer a reminder email, ask them to share any dietary requirements, send a pre-order form, and more.
While visitors could ring your phone number or send a message to your business email address, we always recommend adding a contact form to your website.
Most of the best contact form plugins come with built-in spam protection, so you won’t get any contact form spam. A form will also collect consistent information from visitors, so you’ll have all the data you need to write a helpful reply.
The easiest way to add a contact form to your WordPress website is by using the free WPForms plugin.
This free plugin comes with a built-in Simple Contact Form template that you can quickly customize using the drag and drop editor.
Then, simply add the form to any page, post, or widget-ready area using the ready-made WPForms block.
Once you’ve added some content to your restaurant website, you’ll want to help visitors find their way around those pages and posts by adding a navigation menu.
No matter what theme you’re using, WordPress makes it really easy to add menus and sub-menus to your restaurant website.
Step 10. Add Social Proof to Your Restaurant Website
Social proof is one of the best ways to earn customer trust, and convince new people to visit your restaurant. After all, we’re more likely to try things that we see other people buying, using, or recommending.
Using this plugin, you can create a hashtag feed and show photos that customers have tagged your account in. This includes photos of your food, venue, and shots of customers having fun at your restaurant.
Customer reviews and testimonials can provide visitors with more information, and may even solve any question or worries customers have about visiting your restaurant.
If you want to show reviews from other platforms like Yelp or Google My Business, then there’s also plenty of customer review plugins for WordPress that you can use.
These plugins will collect reviews automatically and then organize them into a nice layout on your restaurant website.
We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to create a restaurant website with WordPress. You may also want to see our ultimate WordPress security guide and our expert pick of the must have WordPress plugins that you should install on all business sites.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
PrestaShop is the leading open-source ecommerce solution allowing you to create and manage multiple online stores. It has a highly responsive interface with hundreds of advanced built-in functionalities and tools, from payment processors and inventory management to support for multiple currencies and languages.
PrestaShop helps you create a customized ecommerce site for your business, owned and designed by you, in minutes. Below, you’ll learn all about what this platform does well and where it falls short.
PrestaShop Compared
PrestaShop didn’t make our top list of the best ecommerce platforms, a category crowded with quality options. Instead, our top recommendation is Shopify, which offers merchants the perfect mix of beginner-friendliness and advanced features. Sign up for a three-day free trial of Shopify.
PrestaShop is a free, user-friendly, open-source ecommerce solution that officially launched in August 2007.
Currently used by over 250,000 ecommerce merchants globally, PrestaShop can be used in 65 different languages and provides access to a feature-rich platform for running a digital business, including basics like shopping carts, product information, user management, and shipping and payment systems to advanced features for marketing your new business, international selling and fulfillment, and inventory management.
PrestaShop is a solid choice for business owners who want to develop a customized web store, manage multiple online stores, and sell to visitors in different languages and currencies.
PrestaShop Health and Stability
PrestaShop’s open-source nature speaks a lot to its core philosophy. Not unlike WordPress, this is a solution that naturally improves based on the contributions of users, who can share their expertise and what they develop on the platform with each other.
Thus, the main priority of the PrestaShop team is to develop world-class ecommerce software that enables everyone to have a successful online business. The company was on the 2016 list of Inc.’s 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in Europe and received the 2016 CMS Critic Award for Best Ecommerce Software.
PrestaShop has raised a total of $14.7 million in funding over four rounds and is funded by 13 investors, including renowned companies like Seventure Partners and Serena.
PrestaShop Pricing
Being a free, open-source solution, it costs nothing to download and use PrestaShop to run your online store. That said, expect to run into a few related expenses.
You’ll need to pay separately for website hosting, which will cost you a couple of dollars a month if you can get by with shared or cloud hosting. But if you want to run a large and complex store, you may need to invest in elevated site hosting that’s significantly costlier. Expect to also pay for a custom domain name and security features like SSL certificates.
While most of PrestaShop‘s offerings are free, you’ll have to spend money to utilize add-ons or site themes.
There are a few different paid extras you can tap into. Professional services provided by PrestaShop include site auditing and optimization, which can be priced by getting a custom quote from their team. Meanwhile, you can also use your PrestaShop account to access their international partner agencies and secure services for migration, SEO, web hosting, and more.
Then, there’s the souped-up version of the core PrestaShop software, the PrestaShop Platform. This turnkey solution gets your web store off on the right foot by ensuring faster load times, attracting more visitors through SEO, and helping you convert more visitors into customers from the moment your site goes live. You also get key extras like managed daily or hourly backups, Git integration, and even managed migration.
Pricing for the PrestaShop Platform ranges from around $470 to $900 per month.
PrestaShop Pricing Comparison
The total price of using PrestaShop depends on your needs and personal preferences.
Web hosting can range wildly, from as little as $2 per month to upwards of $20 per month or more, with basic shared hosting options usually staying in the single digits. Add-ons and themes acquired for your PrestaShop store are more varied, ranging from $35 to over $200 each. The costs become even steeper if you want to customize your website or bolster your online business by hiring a developer or other agency.
Comparatively, Shopify is more expensive to simply start using. Its prices start at around $39 per month but can go all the way up to $399 per month for a more comprehensive set of features and benefits. Further, if you don’t use Shopify Payments, additional fees apply for Shopify apps and their online card payment processing (which runs between 2.4% and 2.9%, plus $.30 per transaction).
Wix offers free and paid options, making it a bit more flexible than PrestaShop. The paid tiers start from $16 per month and go up to $59 per month. If you want a tailor-made plan, a custom-priced Enterprise package is also available with a dedicated account manager.
Overall, PrestaShop is one of the most affordable options on the market. However, if you want 24/7 support, along with included hosting, fraud protection, and other advanced features, you have to pay more—and it’s possible the ecommerce platform may cost more than others in the long run.
PrestaShop Trials and Guarantees
PrestaShop doesn’t offer a free trial or a money-back guarantee since the base version of the platform is accessible for free. Hence, you can start on PrestaShop today for no cost and try it out to your heart’s content.
PrestaShop Ecommerce Platform Review
PrestaShop’s ecommerce platform contains a wide array of features that make it easy to build and customize your own online store, add and market your products, accept payments, manage and complete orders, and even sell internationally.
The fact that PrestaShop is an open-source platform means you have access to its code and can edit and adjust it to suit your exact needs, leading to near-limitless customization options. However, it may be intimidating for users that want a less code-reliant solution with predictable pricing.
What Makes PrestaShop Ecommerce Platform Great
Easy to install and use: Installing PrestaShop is a simple process. All you have to do is download the installation file from its official website and install it on your device. As the file is small, you can finish setting up the ecommerce platform rapidly, even with a sluggish internet connection.
Rich feature set: With over 600 features and more being introduced regularly, PrestaShop guarantees a lot of flexibility when building and running your ecommerce website. If you’re comfortable with coding, the open-source code lets you customize the software to your exact needs. Then there’s also the PrestaShop marketplace with more than 6,000 add-ons to boost your site’s functionality, plus built-in marketing tools like discounts, coupon codes, and email marketing to help you attract more customers.
Higher degree of customization: Use PrestaShop’s wide range of modules, templates, and themes to create the ecommerce website of your dreams. While the modules let you add features to your site to improve functionality and the user experience, the templates and themes can get you started quickly while not sacrificing the flexibility to personalize them to your brand. And that does not even touch on solutions created by the PrestaShop community, enabled by real users who develop one-of-a-kind features and tools through their access to the platform’s source code.
International selling: Implement different languages on your online store with ease on PrestaShop to allow visitors from all over the globe to read your website in their native language. That adaptability opens up entirely new markets to your online business and extends to handling currencies outside of the Euro or US Dollar. PrestaShop currently supports accepting payments from nearly 200 countries in over 20 different currencies.
Payment processors and security: PrestaShop supports all the major payment gateways, including PayPal and Amazon Pay, or you can opt for PrestaShop Checkout, the platform’s dedicated direct payment option. PrestaShop’s payment gateways are all PCI-compliant, ensuring the utmost security to protect your shoppers’ confidential information.
Product listing flexibility: Most free ecommerce platforms limit the number or types of product listings you can place on your web store, so the fact that PrestaShop allows unlimited product listings is a huge advantage. It’s why this platform is a good fit regardless of whether you have a few products or a few hundred products to sell, allowing you to either grow into something larger without stress or spin up your new business with an ambitious product line.
Where PrestaShop Ecommerce Platform Falls Short
Coding knowledge required: To truly take full advantage of the customizations you can make on your PrestaShop site, you need to have some level of comfort and experience with coding. You can certainly take the route of cobbling together a unique enough site from PrestaShop’s available built-in features and community solutions. But, if you’re looking to create a truly one-of-a-kind ecommerce site, you’ll need to be comfortable with digging into the source code (or hire someone that is).
No official support team: One of the main disadvantages of PrestaShop is the lack of a dedicated customer support team to help resolve issues. That said, PrestaShop has a very active user community with over 700,000 members. That user base, along with rich documentation, FAQs, and user guides, is enough to get you by, provided you’re willing to put in the effort to find the solution. But if you’re looking for hands-on or on-demand support, you’ll be disappointed, as there are no options for reaching someone via phone, chat, or email.
Not free at scale: With the depth of features in PrestaShop’s free core platform, you may wonder why anyone pays for it at all. Well, a major issue (that isn’t unique to PrestaShop, mind you) is a serious dip in performance if you have more than 20 visitors on your site at the same time. You can solve this without much trouble, but it will cost you one way or another. You’ll either have to pay for a higher grade of web hosting or opt for the paid PrestaShop Platform, which can support many more simultaneous users (for a pretty steep monthly cost, though).
PrestaShop Ecommerce Platform Compared
While PrestaShop makes a great option for those who like to get their hands dirty customizing and perfecting their online store, our top pick for the best ecommerce platform is Shopify, as it provides the most value and stress-free UX for its price point.
PrestaShop is a great choice to start your online store if you’re looking for an incredibly affordable and customizable ecommerce platform. It offers a robust set of features and functionalities and near limitless potential to make a truly unique web store, but the lack of formal customer support and the reliance on coding means it isn’t a fantastic choice for first-time ecommerce platform users or folks who just don’t want to deal with the issues that can arise on an open source platform.
Some users may need to create a website anonymously to protect their privacy and additional security.
In this step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how to easily create a truly anonymous website. We’ll also talk about protecting your identity online.
Why Create an Anonymous Website?
An anonymous website conceals the identity of who runs or owns a particular website.
Some users may want to remain anonymous for a number of reasons.
Whistleblowers trying to expose corruption.
Journalists under authoritarian regimes
Citizen watchdog groups
Or users who just want to remain anonymous for privacy reasons
Creating an anonymous website makes it difficult to find out who created and runs the website.
Important: Please keep in mind that there is no guaranteed way to remain completely anonymous. While you can make it difficult to trace, there is still a chance that it can be tracked.
Hostinger is one of the best WordPress hosting companies on the market and allows you to pay using Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to keep your purchase as anonymous as possible.
Buying Hosting and Domain Name Anonymously
First, you need to make sure you have VPN turned on whenever you are working on your anonymous website.
After that, you need to visit the Hostinger website and click on the ‘Start Now’ button.
This will bring you to the pricing and plans selection page.
We recommend choosing a 48-month plan which gives you the best discount. Plus, you wouldn’t need to worry about future payments for a long time.
Click to select the plan you want to buy, and then go to the payment section.
From here, first, you need to provide the anonymous email account you created earlier.
After that, you need to select ‘Coingate’ as the payment method and then click on the ‘Submit Secure Payment’ button.
This will take you to the payment wizard.
First, you need to select a cryptocurrency that you want to pay with and click Continue.
Next, you need to enter your anonymous email address and click on the ‘Continue’ button.
Note that you don’t need to create a Coingate account to pay using this method.
On the next screen, you’ll see the QR code to make the payment through your Bitcoin wallet app.
You can also pay manually, by sending the amount to the Bitcoin wallet address mentioned on the screen.
Upon completion of the transaction, you will be redirected back to the Hostinger website.
You will receive an email from Hostinger with a link to log in to the hosting control panel.
Once you log in to your hosting account control panel, you’ll see a notification to claim your free domain name.
During domain registration, ICANN requires website owners to provide their personal information such as name, address, email, and phone number.
You need to provide at least the email address you created earlier so that you can be reached for verification.
During the registration, you may also see an option to turn on Domain Privacy.
This feature hides any information you provide during domain registration from WHOIS searches. Anyone who checks will see Hostinger’s proxy info.
After domain registration, you may receive an email to verify your registration.
Installing WordPress to Make Your Anonymous Website
Now that you have completed the domain name and hosting setup, it is time to install WordPress.
Hostinger allows you to easily create a WordPress website. Click on the ‘Manage’ button next to your URL under the hosting panel.
This will bring you to your back-end dashboard.
From here, you need to visit the Website » Auto Installer page and then click on the ‘Select’ button under WordPress.
This will launch the auto-installer wizard.
Simply follow the on-screen instructions to finish the setup.
After that, you will see your new website options under the Hostinger control panel.
From here, first, you need to click on the ‘Install’ button next to the ‘SSL Certificate’ option.
After that, you need to click on the toggle next to ‘Force HTTPs’ option.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) allows your website to use secure HTTPs. Using it improves your WordPress security by encrypting all traffic to and from your website.
Having an SSL certificate is also a factor in ranking well in search engines and a part of a solid website SEO plan.
Finally, click on the ‘Edit Website’ button to launch and start editing your new WordPress website.
Working on Your WordPress Website Anonymously
By design, WordPress is privacy-conscious software to the extent that you can choose what information you want to share on your website.
First, you may want to visit the Users » Profile page and choose a pseudonym for the default admin or author of your website.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Update Profile’ button to save your changes.
Next, you need to decide whether you want to allow users to comment on posts and pages across your website.
Simply go to Settings » Discussion page to configure comments. Uncheck all options under the ‘Default Post Settings’ section to disable comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Adding Content to Your WordPress Site
WordPress comes with two default content types called posts and pages. Posts are part of a blog and are displayed in reverse chronological order, meaning that newer posts appear first.
Pages are standalone pages that are not part of a blog. They are used to create a website structure and layout. See our list of must-have WordPress pages for all types of websites.
To add a page, simply visit the Pages » Add New to create one.
WordPress comes with a powerful editor called the Block Editor. See our complete WordPress block editor tutorial to familiarize yourself with the interface.
Similarly, to create a post you will need to visit Posts » Add New page.
Choosing a Theme (Template) For Your Website
WordPress comes with a powerful templating engine that allows you to change the appearance of your website by installing themes.
There are thousands of free and paid WordPress themes available. You can choose one that looks closer to what you have in mind for your website.
You can look for themes under the Appearance » Themes page. It will show you a bunch of default themes that come with your WordPress install.
For more themes, click on the ‘Add New’ button at the top to find more free themes.
Plugins are like apps for your WordPress website. They allow you to add new features and extend the functionality of WordPress.
There are more than 60,000 free plugins available in the WordPress.org plugin directory alone. Plus, there are premium WordPress plugins sold by third-party developers with priority support and guaranteed updates.
However, you also need to consider which plugins you need to use to keep your WordPress website secure, private, and anonymous.
Following are our top picks for the best WordPress plugins to install on your anonymous website.
WPForms – It is the best WordPress contact form plugin and allows you to easily create forms for your website.
All in One SEO for WordPress – It is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market and helps your anonymous website get more traffic from search engines.
SeedProd – It is a powerful WordPress page builder that allows you to use a drag-and-drop interface to create any type of page for your website.
OptinMonster – It is a conversion optimization software, which helps you convert website visitors into email subscribers and customers.
MonsterInsights – The best WordPress Google Analytics plugin which helps you see where your visitors and coming from and what they see on your website.
Following are some of the most commonly asked questions about creating an anonymous website.
1. Is it possible to create a fully anonymous website?
Yes, it is possible to create a fully anonymous website. However, you’ll need to be very vigilant about it. Each internet activity creates an information trail leading back to the person who initiated the activity. This trail can be traced by hackers, government agencies, and ISPs. As an anonymous website owner, it will be your job to anonymize all activities.
You can do this by minimizing the activities around your website and using a VPN to hide your IP address. Be careful about any social interactions as they may reveal personally identifiable information.
2. What is anonymous offshore hosting?
Anonymous offshore hosting is a website hosting service that allows users to purchase hosting and domain name without providing real name or credit card information.
Some of these lesser-known companies host their servers in countries with stricter privacy laws. These companies also promise to not store user logs or share them with third-country agencies.
However, these anonymous offshore hosting companies often have very bad customer service and outdated technology.
3. Can a website owner be traced?
Yes, a website owner can be traced even if they are trying to remain anonymous. However, an anonymous website owner can use privacy tools to make it harder to be traced.
Even then if someone is determined to figure out and has the technology, tools, and resources, then they may be able to find out who is running an anonymous website.
4. Can I buy a domain name anonymously?
Yes, you can buy a domain name anonymously from a domain name registrar that accepts cryptocurrencies as a payment method.
Hostinger, also allows you to register additional domain names using cryptocurrencies. During the registration, you can use a separate anonymous email account as the contact address for your domain name.
We hope this article helped you learn how to create a truly anonymous website. You may also want to see our guide on how to create a private blog or take a look at our complete WordPress security guide to keep your anonymous website secure.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Are you looking for the best sales page WordPress themes for your marketing campaign?
Sales page or landing page WordPress themes help marketers convert visitors into paying customers. Choosing the right theme means you can highlight specific brands or products to avoid distractions and increase sales.
In this article, we will share some of the best sales page WordPress themes for marketers.
Creating a Sales Page Website with WordPress
A good sales page prominently displays call-to-action buttons, along with a breakdown of your product or service’s features and unique selling points.
A domain name is your website’s address on the internet, like google.com or wpbeginner.com. Web hosting is the storage space for your website files. Your web host makes your site available all across the world, 24/7.
We recommend using Bluehost. It’s one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress hosting partner.
For WPBeginner users, Bluehost offers a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and a BIG discount on web hosting.
After signing up for the hosting, just check out our complete guide on how to make a WordPress website. It will take you step by step through the process of creating your site.
Let’s take a look at some of the best sales page WordPress themes for marketers.
Astra is one of the most popular WordPress themes on the market. It lets you create custom landing page designs with over 180+ starter templates.
With fast-loading templates, Astra can be the perfect choice for designing sales pages. It also integrates with WooCommerce to create a full eCommerce website. This lets you collect online payments using Payhip, Stripe, or other payment gateways.
Astra also works seamlessly with tools like OptinMonster if you also plan to use your website for lead generation. This lets you create opt-in popups and forms for your email list and can dramatically boost your conversion rates.
SeedProd is the best WordPress theme and website builder. It’s also the most popular landing page builder on the market, with ready-made sales page templates for marketers and agencies.
With SeedProd, you can create a fully custom website and then add a sales landing page. And you can do everything with a beginner-friendly drag-and-drop builder.
SeedProd seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce and its extensions. This helps set up the best sales page with online payment options and other features without writing code or hiring a professional developer.
Divi is a classic WordPress all-purpose theme and an ultimate page builder plugin. It comes with hundreds of layout templates. If you want to create a sales page from scratch, then it provides a visual editor to add elements, text, and images.
Divi is highly customizable and lets you change colors, fonts, and backgrounds without knowing any CSS code. You have the full range of Google fonts to choose from, plus elements like dividers and call-to-action buttons to help you build the perfect sales page on your website.
Divi is also designed for good WordPress SEO, helping you get search engine traffic to your sales page.
OceanWP is a free WordPress theme designed beautifully to create marketing and sales pages. It offers free and premium ready-made demo templates to set up websites in just a few clicks.
With powerful extensions, you can quickly add fullscreen backgrounds, social media icons, a registration form, sticky navigation, and more. OceanWP supports RTL languages, so you can also create a multilingual website.
Hestia Pro is a fantastic WordPress multipurpose theme for any type of website. It has one-page and multi-page templates for small businesses to provide a great user experience.
It has an attractive layout design that supports video embeds in the background and other widgetized areas. You can use the WordPress live customizer to make changes on the pages easily.
Ultra is a powerful and flexible WordPress theme with a built-in visual drag-and-drop page builder. It also includes several ready-made templates for different niches like agencies, spas, apps, businesses, and so on.
With its easy and powerful page builder, the Ultra theme is ideal for creating beautiful sales pages in just a few minutes. It also comes with portfolios, sliders, image galleries, custom widgets, and more.
Sydney Pro is a stunning sales page WordPress theme that you can easily use on multi-page sites. It’s designed for small businesses, app landing pages, products, or photography websites.
It features a large fullscreen background image on the homepage with a navigation menu and a custom logo at the top. It also comes with homepage layouts, creative header styles, and portfolio templates.
Breakthrough Pro is built on top of the Genesis theme framework and designed to be a single or multiple-page theme. It has a beautiful parallax scrolling effect and a large fullscreen header image with a call-to-action button.
The homepage layout is fully widgetized, so you can drag and drop content blocks to set up your sales page. Other features include full WooCommerce support, custom widgets, page templates, and crisp typography.
Indigo is an elegant WordPress theme that lets you create beautiful sales page layouts. It comes with drag-and-drop modules that let you design unique pages to match your needs.
To make it even easier, Indigo includes demo content and ready-made websites that you can use as a starting point for your projects. It also offers multiple templates, photo galleries, header styles, and unlimited sidebars.
OneEngine is a single-page WordPress theme with a bold and creative design. It has a bright fullscreen header on the top, followed by a navigation menu and then content widgets.
It includes services, team members, a portfolio, and an about section. With the OneEngine theme, it’s easy to create a custom sales page for any product or service.
Angle is an excellent WordPress multipurpose theme with flexible options to create your sales page using drag and drop.
It includes parallax scrolling, image sliders, and a built-in portfolio section. It is easy to set up and customize with multiple homepage layouts and landing page templates.
Struct is designed as a sales page theme for software, apps, and products. It features a clean and modern layout with large header background and prominent call-to-action buttons.
Struct has a fully widgetized homepage layout with several custom widgets to add content and social media features. It also includes services, projects, FAQs, testimonials, and slideshows out of the box.
Digital Download is a premium-like free sales page WordPress theme. As you would expect from its name, you can use this theme to sell digital downloads like PDF documents, tutorials, ebooks, etc.
It integrates with the Easy Digital Downloads plugin to set up an online marketplace in just a few clicks. The theme is fully customizable for colors, font, and layout design.
Balance is a creative WordPress eCommerce sales page theme for online businesses. It includes several user engagement features like a call-to-action button, a subscription form, a contact form, and more.
The theme attractively displays your products on the homepage and other landing pages. It also supports popular page builder plugins that lets you create custom sales page layouts.
Landing is a WordPress sales page theme that comes with a pre-designed layout. It has a drag and drop page builder to edit existing landing pages and create new ones from scratch.
You get multiple header types, so you can design countless sales pages with different styles and layouts. Plus, it includes a portfolio, testimonials, events, and social media integration.
Silk is a WordPress sales page theme for beauty bloggers, cosmetic businesses, fashion agencies, and more. It has a beautifully designed homepage with a layered layout.
Convert is a professional WordPress sales page theme. It has an eye-catching layout with over 30 customizer options for the header section and gives you complete control of the website.
It has multiple global sections that work smoothly with your favorite page builders like Elementor or Visual Composer to build fully custom layouts. You also get built-in templates for one-column and multi-column pages.
The Launcher is a free landing page theme for your upcoming product launch. It’s ideal for a product landing page and can also be used as a regular sales page for your products or services.
The Launcher comes with easy customization options, call-to-action buttons, a sticky navigation menu, a clients section, and a pricing table. Plus, it’s fully responsive so that your website will look great on mobile devices.
Altitude Pro is a WordPress business theme built for sales pages. It comes with a beautiful fullscreen header image and a call-to-action button. If you’re an author, it could make a good book landing page theme for selling ebooks.
Inside, you will find a spacious layout that offers a great user experience. Atmosphere Pro has large featured images and crisp typography. Plus, the theme is optimized for speed and performance.
Beauty Studio is a free WordPress sales page theme for salons, spas, and beauty products. It has a full-width header with dark colors that create a powerful first impression on your users.
Other features include call-to-action buttons, custom sidebar areas, social media integration, an image slider, and more. You also get a featured section to display your top products.
Float is a beautiful WordPress theme optimized for sales and conversion. It ships with a built-in page builder that lets you create or modify page layouts. It includes eye-catching animations to make your sales page more attractive.
It offers parallax scrolling, social media integration, custom backgrounds, unlimited colors, custom widgets, and more.
Screenr is a free one-page WordPress business theme. The homepage has a fullscreen header image, followed by widgetized sections to add your content.
It includes custom widgets, custom page templates, and parallax background effects. It’s easy to change different options about your site using the live WordPress customizer.
Monochrome Pro is a modern WordPress black-and-white theme for apps, digital media, SAAS, and product websites. It features multiple widgetized areas, a large header image, and custom widgets to build your sales page in a few clicks.
It comes with a theme options panel for easy customization. You also get several layout choices, color schemes, and a fully customizable header area.
Monochrome Pro uses a responsive design, so it looks great on all devices and screen sizes. It’s a StudioPress theme, so you can get a great deal on it by signing up for WP Engine’s hosting.
Modules is a well-crafted WordPress theme perfect for creating any kind of sales page. It comes with several ready-to-use elements that you can drag and drop to build custom layouts.
It offers demo websites to set up your sales page quickly. Plus, you get several custom widgets, unlimited sidebars, header styles, video background support, and Google Fonts support.
The Modules theme is also coded with WordPress best practices in mind. This means it’s fully compatible with all popular WordPress plugins to help you build the best landing page.
Solopreneur is a premium WordPress theme to create landing pages that convert and help maximize your revenue. It has a minimalist layout design with a logo, navigation menu, and social icons.
It comes with a widgetized sidebar to add recent posts, a search bar, a comments section, and a newsletter signup form for email marketing. The theme is fully responsive and looks great on all screen sizes and devices.
Do you want to add one-click login with Google to your WordPress site?
When your users can sign in with their Google account, they won’t have to create, remember, or track another username and password just to access your website. This helps save them time and increase your conversion rates.
In this article, we will share how to easily add one-click Google login in WordPress.
Why Add One-Click Google Login in WordPress?
Many internet users stay logged in to their Google accounts. This lets them quickly access Google apps like Gmail, Drive, and Docs without signing in separately for each app.
Having one-click Google login activated on your WordPress login page allows your users to do the same on your website. They can save time by quickly signing in with their Google account. This saves them from having to enter their login credentials each time.
If you run a simple WordPress blog, then you might not find this feature useful.
But if your organization uses Google Workspace for professional business email addresses, then your team members can use your organization’s Google apps accounts for login.
With that being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add one-click login with Google to your WordPress website.
Tip: To add one-click Google Login, your site needs to have secure SSL encryption. To learn how to set up a secure connection, see our beginner’s guide on how to switch from HTTP to HTTPS in WordPress.
For this tutorial, we’ll use the free plugin that supports Google, Twitter, and Facebook login. There is also a paid version of Nextend Social Login that adds social login for lots of different sites including PayPal, Slack, and TikTok.
Upon activation, you need to go to Settings » Nextend Social Login in the WordPress admin area. On this screen, you see the different social login options that are available.
To add a Google login to your WordPress website, you need to click the ‘Getting Started’ button under the Google logo.
Here you will see that your first step will be to create a Google app.
Creating a Google app sounds technical, but don’t worry.
You don’t need to know any code, and we’ll walk you through all the steps.
Creating a Google App
To create this app, you’ll need to switch between your WordPress dashboard and the Google Developers Console. It’s a good idea to leave your WordPress dashboard open in the current tab and open a new browser tab.
Now you can visit the Google Developers Console website. If you are not already logged in, then you will be asked to log in with your Google account.
Next, you need to click on ‘Select a project’ from the top menu. It will open a popup where you would click the ‘New Project’ button to continue.
This will open the New Project page. You will need to add a project name and select the location. The project name can be anything you like, such as ‘Google Login.’
If you logged in using a Google Workspace account, then the location will be filled in with the name of your organization automatically. If not, then you should leave it as ‘No organization.’
Next, click the ‘Create’ button to continue.
You’ll now be redirected to the ‘APIs & Services’ dashboard. On this page, you need to click on ‘OAuth consent screen’ in the left menu.
Here you choose the type of user you’re allowing to log in.
Select ‘Internal’ if only users with your organization’s Google account will be logging in. Alternatively, you should choose ‘External’ if your users have email addresses outside of your organization. For example, anyone with an @gmail.com account versus an @yourcompanyemail.com address.
When you’re ready to continue, click the ‘Create’ button. Now you can start to add information about your app.
First, you should enter your business name in the app name field. This will be shown to the user when logging in, such as, ‘Smith Training Services wants access to your Google account.’
You also need to add the email address you logged into Google with. This will allow your users to ask questions about the Google login screen.
Tip: We recommend that you do not upload a logo for your app. If you do, then your app will need to go through a verification process with the Google Trust and Safety Team. This process is lengthy and can take 4-6 weeks.
Once you’ve done that, scroll down to the ‘App domain’ section. Here you need to add links to your website’s home page, privacy policy page, and terms of service page.
Then you need to click the ‘Add Domain’ button to add your website’s domain name, such as ‘example.com.’
If you want to add one-click Google login to more than one website, then you can click the ‘+ Add Domain’ button to add another domain.
Finally, you need to add one or more email addresses so that Google can notify you about any changes to your project.
When you’re finished, make sure you click the ‘Save and Continue’ button.
Next, you will come to the Scopes and Test Users pages. For both of these pages, simply scroll to the bottom and click the ‘Save and Continue’ button.
The final page for this step will show you a summary of your OAuth consent screen settings.
The next job is to create the keys your plugin will need to connect with Google Cloud.
You should click ‘Credentials’ from the left menu and then click the ‘+ Create Credientials’ button at the top of the screen. You need to select the ‘OAuth client ID’ option.
This will take you to the ‘Create OAuth client ID’ page.
You should select ‘Web application’ from the ‘Application type’ dropdown.
Some settings will be added to the page. You need to scroll down to the ‘Authorized redirect URIs’ section and click the ‘+ Add URI’ button.
Make sure you replace example.com with your own website’s address.
Once you’ve done that, you should click the ‘Create’ button to store the setting. It may take five minutes to a few hours for the setting to take effect.
Your OAuth client has now been created!
You will see a popup containing ‘Your Client ID’ and Your Client Secret.’ You will need to paste these keys into the plugin’s settings page back in your WordPress admin area.
You can just click the ‘copy’ icon to the right to copy the keys one at a time.
Adding Your Google Keys to Your Plugin
Now, simply switch back to your website’s browser tab and click on the ‘Settings’ tab under Settings » Nextend Social Login. Here you will see fields for the Client ID and Client Secret.
You need to copy your keys from the Google Cloud Console and paste them into these fields.
Once you’ve done that, make sure you click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Now you’ll need to test that the settings are working correctly. This is important because you don’t want real users to encounter errors when trying to log in to your website.
Simply click the ‘Verify Settings’ button and the plugin will make sure that the Google app you created is working correctly.
If you followed the steps above correctly, then you should see a notification saying ‘Works Fine – Disabled.’
You can now safely click the ‘Enable’ button to allow users to log in using their Google ID.
You will see a message confirming that Google login is now enabled.
Selecting Your Button Style and Labels
Nextend’s default button style and label are pretty standard and will work for most websites. However, you can customize them by clicking on the ‘Buttons’ tab at the top of the screen.
You will now see all the different styles that you can use for the social login button. To use a different style, simply click to select its radio button.
Once you’ve done that, you can also change the button text by editing the text in the ‘Login label’ field.
If you like, you can apply some basic formatting to the login label using HTML. For example, you can make text bold using <b> and </b> tags.
You can also edit the ‘Link label’ and ‘Unlink label’ fields that allow users to link and unlink your website with their Google accounts. Technical users can use HTML code for buttons to create their own Google login button.
Make sure you click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Taking Your Google App Out of Testing Mode
Now there is one last thing you need to do back on the Google Cloud browser tab. You should still see the popup with your client ID and client secret. You can dismiss the popup by clicking ‘OK’ at the bottom of the popup.
Now you need to click ‘OAuth consent screen’ from the left menu.
You can see that your Google app is in ‘Testing’ mode. This allows you to test your app with a limited number of users. Now that you have received a ‘Works Fine’ notification when verifying the settings with the plugin, you can move it to In ‘Production’ mode.
You do this by clicking the ‘Publish App’ button. Next, you will see a popup with the title ‘Push to production?’
Simply click ‘Confirm’ to allow everyone to use a one-step Google login on your site.
If you followed this tutorial carefully, then the Verification Status should now be ‘Verification not required.’
Your app will now work with all Google users.
Now when users are logging in to your website, they will have the option to log in with Google.
However, if they prefer, they can still log in using their standard WordPress username and password.
Keep in mind that users can only log in with the Google account address that they have used on your website. Also, if you have allowed user registration on your WordPress site, then users can quickly register on your site using one-click Google login.
If you wish to add the Google login button anywhere else on your website, then you can do so using a shortcode. You can learn more by clicking on Nextend’s ‘Usage’ tab.
Are you looking for the best WordPress RTL themes?
RTL (Right to Left) themes are designed to work perfectly with languages written in the right to left direction. These include Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi (Persian), Urdu, and more.
In this article, we will show you some of the best RTL WordPress themes that you can try on your website.
Building a WordPress Website in RTL Languages
WordPress is an ideal platform to create a website in any language, including languages written in RTL (right to left) direction.
There are two types of WordPress websites. These are WordPress.com, which is a hosted solution, and WordPress.org, which is a self-hosted platform.
For your website, you need to use self-hosted WordPress.org. It gives you all the flexibility and features you need to set up an RTL website.
To start a WordPress website, you will need a domain name. This is your website’s address on the internet, like wpbeginner.com. You also need a WordPress hosting account.
We recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the largest web hosting companies and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.
Astra is one of the most popular WordPress themes on the market. It comes with dozens of starter sites and supports RTL languages to launch your website quickly.
Divi is a modern multipurpose WordPress theme designed for any type of website. It’s fully compatible with RTL languages and easily lets you create a website in any right-to-left language.
It features a built-in page builder plugin, color choices, parallax effects, a custom header, and more. Divi is easy to set up without editing any code as it comes with hundreds of starter sites, suitable for all sorts of businesses and non-profit organizations.
Using the Divi theme options, you can add a custom logo, social media icons, and a favicon.
OceanWP is a free WordPress theme with premium-like features and options. It’s highly flexible and offers a 1-click demo content importer to get started in just a few clicks.
Inside, you will find RTL language support, eCommerce integration, custom colors, font choices, and powerful extensions.
OceanWP has a fast page load time. This is good for your WordPress site’s SEO (search engine optimization), helping you to rank well in Google and other search engines.
Hestia Pro is a premium WordPress theme for bloggers and businesses. It is RTL-ready out of the box, and you can also use it on multilingual websites.
It comes with a companion plugin to add client testimonials, services, and a custom homepage section.
Hestia is compatible with page builder plugins, giving you lots of customization options. It also works well with bbPress if you want to add a forum to your website.
Ultra is a classic WordPress multipurpose theme. It comes with beautiful typography and color choices that make your content pop out.
The theme is translation ready and supports RTL languages. It has multiple widget areas, template choices, and layout options to design your multilingual website easily. You can also add custom CSS using the WordPress live customizer.
Parallax is a stylish one-page WordPress theme for all business websites. The homepage features a fullscreen background image and stunning parallax effects.
It includes several header styles, a portfolio section, a team members section, animated progress bars, and a separate RTL stylesheet. It has a custom theme options panel to make changes to your website.
eCommerce Fashion is a stunning WordPress theme for business websites and blogs. It comes in dozens of beautiful color schemes and has several navigation menu locations, RTL language support, built-in Google Fonts, and more.
The theme has multiple header and footer layouts to fully customize your theme. It also includes image and carousel sliders to engage your users.
Benson is a beautiful WordPress photography theme. It features a fullscreen homepage layout and works with your favorite translation plugin to create an RTL (right-to-left) website.
Plus, it comes with multiple image layouts, video and slideshow support, custom widgets, and color choices. It integrates with page builders such as Visual Composer for quick setup and customization.
Fargo is a stylish WordPress wedding photography theme with one-page and multi-page layouts. It comes with interactive homepage elements, parallax scrolling, and support for RTL languages.
It has unlimited color choices, a 1-click demo content importer, custom backgrounds, and mega menus. It makes a great WooCommerce theme to start your online store easily.
You can also add WooCommerce plugins to extend your online store options.
Inspiro is an elegant WordPress photography and videography theme. It’s multi-language ready and supports RTL languages to create a website in any language.
The theme features include a sliding sidebar, video embeds, a homepage slideshow, a responsive gallery, and built-in templates. It integrates with Beaver Builder to design your custom page templates without writing any code.
Gumbo is a stunning WordPress podcast theme built specifically for podcasts, audio, and video websites. It’s RTL-ready and lets you display your podcasts in multiple languages.
It supports third-party audio sources, layouts, videos, and featured sliders. Gumbo has dozens of page builder settings to add your content and set up a website.
Agency is a great business WordPress theme for companies, agencies, and designers with complete RTL support. It includes a beautiful portfolio section with each item capable of showing a single image or a gallery carousel.
It also comes with sections for testimonials, team members, and highlights. This makes it easy to offer a great user experience. Agency is easy to set up and includes a demo content importer, page builder, and custom theme options page.
Writee is a free WordPress blogging theme suitable for authors, writers, and bloggers. It features a minimalist layout with a featured content slider on the top of your homepage.
Neve is an excellent WordPress multipurpose theme designed for all kinds of websites, including one-page websites. It comes with dozens of starter sites and is translation ready to create a multilingual and RTL website easily.
Neve offers drag and drop components to customize your header and footer. Plus, it has built-in optimization for speed and performance. This helps make your website fast and SEO friendly.
Noto is a classic WordPress theme for writers and bloggers. It has a black-and-white layout with light colors, making your content highly readable.
The theme is translation ready and supports RTL languages seamlessly. It comes with a few homepage widget areas, landing pages, a custom header, and more.
It has a full-width template, custom logo, color choices, and sidebars. With RTL language support, you can easily make a website in any right-to-left language.
Fullscreen is a gorgeous WordPress theme suitable for photographers, artists, and designers. It comes with fullscreen galleries to showcase your work.
It includes custom widgets for featured posts and recent Tweets, a minimalist navigation menu, a blog section, and a contact form page. You also get multiple theme skins and styling options.
Balance is a flexible WordPress eCommerce theme to start an online store. It has multi-language and localization support to translate your website to any language.
Inside, you’ll find built-in pages and a 1-click demo content importer. You just need to replace the content with your own to create your website or online store.
Balance uses responsive design and is retina ready. This means it will look great on all mobile devices.
Spencer is a beautiful WordPress business theme for startups and entrepreneurs. It comes with a blog page template to start your personal blog quickly.
It has a sticky menu, custom colors, a newsletter signup form, a call-to-action button, and more. The theme integrates with WPML and supports RTL languages out of the box.
Gema can be used as a stylish WordPress magazine theme or personal WordPress blog theme. It has a beautiful layout design with featured content sections on the homepage.
The theme includes an image gallery, custom logo, layout options, color schemes, and crisp typography. It integrates with WordPress translation plugins to let you create an RTL-supported blog easily.
Felt is a WordPress magazine theme built specifically for online publishers, magazine membership sites, and entertainment blogs. It fully supports video embeds to add visual content to your website.
It has a widgetized homepage, a customizable header, and multiple layout options. Felt is fully translation ready and can be used to create RTL websites.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress RTL themes for your website. You may also want to check out our guide on the best WordPress plugins to add extra features to your site.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Recently, one of our readers asked if it was possible to create a subscription box service in WordPress?
Subscription boxes are a popular way of selling physical goods that can be delivered on a regular basis. They work especially well in niche markets.
In this article, we’ll show you how to create a subscription box service in WordPress.
What Is a Subscription Box Service?
A subscription box service is a smart way to bring in regular revenue from your online store with recurring deliveries of physical products.
Subscription boxes are more than just a delivery service. They offer a personalized experience of curated products that bring real value to your customers, such as variety, convenience, and saving money. They work well in niche markets and for boutique products.
For example, HelloFresh is a subscription box service where you can sign up to have meal ingredients delivered to your door every week. Other examples are the Dollar Shave Club and Bean Box, which offer grooming and coffee products in subscription boxes.
Subscription boxes are an effective way to make recurring revenue. They usually have a higher profit margin, and over 2/3s of consumers in the United States have tried them. The market seems to double each year.
With that said, let’s take a look at how to create a subscription box service using WordPress.
What Do You Need to Start a Subscription Box Business?
Starting a subscription box company is easier than you might think. You’ll need the following things:
A theme and target audience for your subscription box
Ecommerce and subscription box plugins to create and manage your products and subscriptions
An hour or two to set it all up.
That’s it!
We’ll walk you through every step of the process in this guide. If you get stuck or have any questions, just leave a comment below or see our guide on how to get WordPress support.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Set Up Your WordPress Website
The best website builder platform to set up and manage your subscription box business is WordPress, because it’s free and gives you maximum control over your site. This is why over 43% of all websites on the internet use WordPress.
Often beginners make the mistake of choosing the wrong type of WordPress. There are actually two different types, which can be confusing.
You don’t want WordPress.com, which is a hosting service that can get expensive and limits the features you have access to.
The one we recommend is WordPress.org, also called self-hosted WordPress. It’s a completely free software that you install on your own hosting and domain. Don’t worry, that’s easier than it sounds.
To get started, you’ll need to get web hosting.
Normally, web hosting costs $7.99 per month, a domain name starts at $14.99 per year, and an SSL certificate costs around $69.99 per year.
This can be a big investment when you’re just starting out.
Luckily, Bluehost has agreed to offer our readers a big 60% discount on web hosting, plus a free domain name and SSL certificate.
Basically, you can get started for as low as $2.75 per month.
Simply click on the Bluehost button below, and the discount will automatically be applied.
Step 2: Create a Subscription Box Service in WordPress
After your WordPress site is set up, there are a few plugins you’ll need to install to create the subscription box service:
WooCommerce, the world’s most popular eCommerce plugin
WooCommerce Subscriptions, a WooCommerce extension for all kinds of paid subscriptions
Subscription Box for WooCommerce, an addon for the Subscriptions extension that lets your customers create their own boxes.
We will walk you through everything, step by step.
If you don’t have an online store yet, then we have a step by step guide on how to start your online store. This will walk you through the first part, installing WooCommerce.
After installing the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, you need to install and activate the Subscription Box for WooCommerce extension.
This extension adds features that make it easy to create a subscription box service, such as allowing your customers to create their own boxes and change their box plan.
After you setup these plugins, you will also need to ensure that you have chosen a website template (also known as a theme). There are dozens of pre-made WooCommerce themes that you can pick from.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to make a custom website design for your store, then you need to use a drag & drop builder like SeedProd. It lets you create completely custom WordPress themes without any code.
Step 3: Add Subscription Box Products
Once your website is setup, the first thing you need to do is add a subscription box product to sell in your online store.
You’ll need to select Products » Add New from your admin menu and type a name for the subscription box.
You should also fill in the normal WooCommerce product settings, such as a description, image, price, and shipping information.
Next, you need to configure the settings for your subscription box. You should scroll down to the ‘Product data’ section and select ‘Box Product’ from the drop down menu.
This will add a new tab to the side menu where you can build a box.
You need to click on the new ‘Build a Box’ tab so you can configure the settings for your subscription box and what it will contain.
First, you need to type a number in the ‘Box Quantity’ field. This is the number of items your customers can place in the box. After that, you need to select how often the items will be delivered, such as daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.
Next, you need to choose a list of products that your customers can select when creating a custom box on your WordPress site. You can select those products individually in the ‘Products’ field, or simply add an entire product category, such as ‘Coffee’ or ‘Fruit’ in the ‘Product categories’ field.
You might like to choose products that have a similar price and weight. This will keep the total cost and weight of the box consistent, which will help when deciding how much to charge for the subscription box and for shipping.
Not everyone will want to take the time to choose products one by one. You can also create a standard box by selecting products in the ‘Default Products’ field.
To add items to the standard box, you need to search for the product you wish to add, type a quantity, then click the ‘Add To Default Product’ button. Simply repeat these steps until your subscription box is complete.
When you’re finished, don’t forget to click the ‘Publish’ button on the right of the screen to add the subscription box to your WooCommerce store.
If you’d like to add more than one subscription box, then simply repeat these steps.
Step 4: Display Subscription Boxes on Your Online Store
Next, you need to display your subscription boxes in your WooCommerce store.
Head over to Pages » Add New on your dashboard to create a new page. Give the page an engaging title, such as ‘Create a Subscription Box’ or ‘Build Your Own Bundle’.
Next, use the Columns block to add enough columns to display your subscription boxes.
For each column, you’ll need to click the ‘+’ button and add a ‘Build a Box’ block.
Using the Block pane on the left, you can choose the subscription box you wish to display from the ‘Selected Box’ drop down menu.
You can also type the other text that will be displayed, including the box heading and name, subscription label, and button label.
Once you’ve added all your subscription boxes, you’ll need to click the ‘Publish’ button at the top of the page to display them on your website.
When a customer clicks on a subscription box, they will be taken to the shop page for that box. Here they will see the list of products that you made available for this subscription box.
They can add individual products to the box by clicking the ‘Add to Box’ button under the product. They can also select how many of those products will be added.
Alternatively, they can click the ‘Add All’ button to create a standard box. Once they do that, all the default products will be added to the box.
Once the customer is happy with the box contents, they can check out.
We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to create a subscription box service in WordPress.