Posts Tagged ‘wordpress development’

Best Plugins of 2017 for WordPress SEO Optimization

October 14th, 2017

Search engine optimization is essential today for boosting the traffic of your website and gaining organic leads. The principles of SEO have been around for a long time and SEO professionals have spent their entire careers trying to crack the magic code of Google to increase their keyword rankings. But, you do not need to make everything about SEO complicated. WordPress SEO optimization can be simplified for your website if you use some Plugins that have been created with the very intention of helping users optimize their website as per SEO guidelines.

In this post, I will let you know about the best SEO Plugins of 2021 that users like yourselves have used this year to help their on-page SEO efforts. Here is the list –

  • SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate is a plugin that covers all the basics of SEO. It lets you add the title as well as the meta-description of the content and it highlights the author’s Google+ profile as well. This tool also has some deep linking features that allow you to save a link in the draft which gets activated when it gets published.

Check it out here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-ultimate/

  • SEOPressor

This plugin helps you optimize your blog posts and improve organic traffic. What sets this plugin apart is its keyword analysis feature. Its built-in keyword research tool helps you find long tail keywords that you can use in your blog creation. Once you are done creating your blog post, this plugin will give you a score on how SEO friendly your content is. This plugin also helps you optimize the images by checking whether all images have the proper ALT tags or not.

Check it out here: https://seopressor.com/

  • Squirrly SEO

This plugin not only optimizes your website for the search engines but also for the visitors. This is perfect plugin for those users that have very little SEO knowledge. While creating blog posts, you will get real-time SEO coverage with a green light indicating that your content is as per SEO guidelines. You also get weekly analytics report of your pages.

Check it out here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/squirrly-seo/

  • WP Meta SEO

This plugin offers a dashboard that keeps you updated about the status of your website and all its pages. The user interface and settings of this plugin are extremely user-friendly. WP Meta SEO has bulk SEO processing features which what attracts most users to it. Instead of the time taking the procedure of editing each data of every post and optimizing every image manually, you can simply select the content and the image size, the rest is done by this plugin.

Check it out here: https://www.joomunited.com/wordpress-products/wp-meta-seo?atid=101

  • Smart Crawl

This premium WordPress plugin offers four main features to the users. These are – MOZ integrations, Sitemaps, Meta-tag customization and automatic links. This extremely user-friendly plugin has caught the attention of many WordPress users and they integrate it with their site at the time of WordPress development and WordPress web design process.

Check it out here: https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/smartcrawl-wordpress-seo/

Honorary mention:

Here I would like to give a special mention to the evergreen WordPress SEO plugin – Yoast. Yoast plugin remains the first choice of all WordPress users and I do not know any website that does not have this plugin integrated with their site. Its features and simplicity are the reasons it is one of our favorites.

 

Conclusion: Good on-page SEO is the key to boosting traffic and keyword rankings. These Plugins and tools make it easier for you to take care of all on-page activities and help you get the results that are wanted.

How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

December 16th, 2014

Site loading speed now plays a huge role in online success. Major search engines take site loading speed into their algorithms in order to determine rankings. That’s not it! High speed websites are also reported to have a higher conversion rate as well. This is especially true in case of e-commerce websites. Users too appreciate pages that load faster and enjoy surfing on them longer.

If you have a website powered by WordPress, here’s something that will help you speed up your WP website in no time.

  1. Reduce HTTP requests

In simple words, the number of files necessary to display your website should be reduced. When a visitor lands on your website, many files including CSS, images and JavaScript library references have to be loaded on to the visitor’s browser. More the number of files, more time it will take to load them.

Certain WordPress plugins load extraneous CSS in your website code. This can further increase the size of your page without you actually knowing it. Eliminate unnecessary things especially code. Have a manual check if possible on the plugin codes.

  1. Optimize Images

Images can take forever to load especially when the user connection is slow. So, reduce the size of images before uploading them onto the website. Many image formats contain metadata that can significantly increase the size of images. Designers many times fail to compress the images before they are uploaded on to the website. On certain image intensive pages, example portfolio, this can result in excessively slow page speed times. Another designer side mistake is to upload extremely large size images for banners or logos. Pictures extracted from digital cameras are uploaded directly. This can seriously dent your webpage’s speed credentials. There are numerous free applications including image optimizer and Picnic that help you compress the image before uploading.

Wordpress reduces the size of the image by default and resizes them accordingly but sometimes that might not give you the best results, so it is always better to upload high resolution optimized images.

  1. Minify CSS, HTML and Javascript

Make sure that all the white space is removed from the code before serving to visitors. Spacing and tabs are entered into the code to ensure that it is read easily by humans. Browsers and servers don’t have to consider readability of the code. They just have to execute it. As long as it is error-free, they don’t care how it looks like.

For faster page load times, you should simply remove this white space before code is implemented. W3 Total Cache and WP-Minify are the best wordpress plugins to make it happen.

  1. Content Delivery Network

Want to reduce the load times on your server? A content delivery network is the perfect alternative. A content delivery network replicates the static assets of your pages and delivers them to the visitors from their nearest POP.

  1. Gzip components

Many files can be reduced in size by compressing them at server level well before they are uploaded on to the browsers.

  1. Put Style sheets at Top

The <head> of your document should contain all the style sheet references. Unstyled content is not to be displayed to the visitors at any cost. Files that determine the appearance of our website should be loaded first.

  1. Plugins

There are many wordpress plugins that will help you increase the speed of your WP site. The popular ones include P3 Profiler, WP Smush.it, W3 Total Cache, Digg and more. Besides the paid ones, there is an arsenal of plugins that promise high performance without costing an arm and a leg.

For any wordpress website development and customization in Los Angeles, please contact us today.

Best Security plugins for your WordPress website

December 9th, 2014

WordPress is the most widely used content management system in the world today. This crowning feature unfortunately also makes it one of the most widely attacked CMS in the world. No wonder there is a slew of security plugins available to protect your website from hackers. Some would argue that WordPress is a secure system offering many built-in security features. But a little extra help won’t hurt especially when you have so many custom plugins installed.

Here are 5 Best Security Plugins for your WordPress website.

  1. iThemes Security | ClapCreativeiThemes Security – This is a popular WP plugin for security. Offering more than 30 ways to protect your website against various types of attacks, this plugin is the highly trusted by many webmasters. Common loop holes are plugged in thereby strengthening user credentials. Paid version offers Geo ID banning, 2-factor authentication and more security features. It is highly effective against brute-force attacks. This plugin automatically creates a full backup of your database files. Malicious codes are also blocked effectively by allowing only admin access.
  1. All in one WP Security and Firewall | ClapCreativeAll in one WP Security and Firewall – It offers advance level security in single plugin. This is the most updated plugin with latest security measures. It has 3 protection levels including basic, intermediate and advanced. Basic level does not interfere with the website. However, advanced usage does interfere with the website’s functionality and setup. It allows you to view which user has run a brute force attack against you. If there are changes to any WP file, it can be blocked immediately.
  1. Wordfence | ClapCreativeWordfence is a renowned high-performance WP security plugin. It monitors the visitor access and also sorts out the hacked files. This plugin features a virus scanner, firewall and cache engines to secure against attacks. Core files of your WP website can be more easily recovered. Premium paid version offers much more improved features and high performance updates.
  1. BulletProof Security | ClapCreativeBulletProof Security makes use of .htaccess security protection that features php.ini, wp-cofig.php etc. Its 1-click security is most popular feature that immediately protects the WP-Admin folder. Users can definitely look forward to protection against CRLF, XSS, RFI and SQL Injection attacks. Number of login attempts are tracked and if signs of brute force are detected, the system locks down the user attempting abnormal login attempts.
  1. Sucuri Authenticator | ClapCreativeSucuri Authenticator is a good choice for those looking to protect against multiple attacks. It offers malware removal, blacklisting, spam control and website monitoring. WordPress website files are scanned and if any changes are detected, the files can be located and scanned. Post hack options allow you to change the relevant passwords and usernames and secure your website.

Most of these plugins offer a free version to try. If you like the features, you can upgrade to premium version to fully unlock the potential of these security plugins for WordPress. Some investment into the security of your website. Or better be prepared to learn the hard way when your website is compromised. Choose any of these and ensure that such a situation never comes up again.

For any wordpress website development and customization in Los Angeles, please contact us today.