“Speed, Security, Support: The Three S’s of Selecting Superior WordPress hosting“

Introduction

When choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress website, several key factors are important to consider to ensure optimal performance, security, and support for your site. These factors include:

1. Uptime Reliability: The hosting provider should offer high uptime guarantees, ensuring that your website is available to visitors without frequent downtimes.

2. Speed and Performance: Fast loading times are crucial for user experience and SEO. Look for providers with high-performance hardware and optimized configurations for WordPress.

3. Security Measures: The provider should offer robust security features to protect your website from malware, hacking attempts, and other vulnerabilities.

4. Customer Support: Access to knowledgeable and responsive support is essential for resolving technical issues and getting assistance with your hosting account.

5. Scalability: As your website grows, your hosting plan should be able to scale with your needs, offering easy upgrades to resources like bandwidth and storage.

6. WordPress-Specific Services: Some hosts offer WordPress-specific features such as one-click installs, automatic updates, and specialized WordPress support.

7. Backup and Restore Options: Regular backups and easy restore options are important to safeguard your website’s data.

8. Pricing and Value: The hosting provider should offer competitive pricing without compromising on the quality of service and features.

9. Compatibility: Ensure that the hosting environment meets WordPress’s minimum requirements and supports the latest PHP, MySQL, and HTTPS protocols.

10. Reputation and Reviews: Research the hosting provider’s reputation and read user reviews to gauge the reliability and customer satisfaction.

Considering these factors will help you choose a hosting provider that aligns with your website’s needs and contributes to a successful online presence.

Evaluating WordPress Hosting Providers: Key Considerations for Optimal Performance

When embarking on the journey of creating a WordPress website, one of the most critical decisions you will make is selecting the right hosting provider. This choice can have a profound impact on the performance, security, and reliability of your site. As such, it is essential to evaluate potential hosting providers based on several key considerations to ensure that your website operates optimally.

First and foremost, performance is a paramount concern. The speed at which your website loads not only affects user experience but also influences search engine rankings. A good hosting provider should offer robust server performance with high uptime guarantees. Look for providers that utilize the latest technologies such as solid-state drives (SSDs), which can significantly enhance loading times compared to traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). Additionally, consider the location of the hosting company’s data centers. Proximity to your target audience can reduce latency and further improve load times.

Another critical factor is scalability. As your website grows, your hosting needs will evolve. A hosting provider that offers flexible plans makes it easier to upgrade your resources without experiencing downtime or service interruptions. This flexibility ensures that your hosting solution can keep pace with your website’s growth, whether you’re experiencing a gradual increase in traffic or a sudden surge in visitors.

Security is also a top priority when choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress website. With cyber threats on the rise, it’s imperative to select a host that provides robust security measures. Look for features such as regular backups, malware scanning, and the availability of SSL certificates to safeguard your site’s data and your users’ privacy. Additionally, a hosting provider that offers specialized WordPress security enhancements can provide an extra layer of protection against potential vulnerabilities unique to the platform.

Customer support is another essential aspect to consider. Even the most experienced website owners can encounter technical issues or have questions about their hosting service. A provider with a knowledgeable and responsive support team can be invaluable. Look for companies that offer multiple channels of support, such as live chat, phone, and email, and prioritize those with a reputation for quick and helpful responses.

Lastly, pricing should be evaluated, but it should not be the sole determining factor. While it’s important to find a hosting solution that fits within your budget, the cheapest option may not always be the best choice. Low-cost plans can sometimes lead to compromised performance or inadequate support. Instead, focus on finding a provider that offers a good balance between cost and the features you need. Consider the total value of the package, including any additional services or performance guarantees that may justify a higher price point.

In conclusion, when choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress website, it is crucial to consider performance, scalability, security, customer support, and pricing. By carefully evaluating each of these aspects, you can select a hosting solution that not only meets your current needs but also supports the future growth and success of your online presence. Remember, your hosting provider is a partner in your website’s journey, and making an informed choice will lay a strong foundation for a robust and thriving website.

The Essential Checklist for Selecting the Right WordPress Hosting Service

When embarking on the journey of creating a WordPress website, one of the most critical decisions you will make is selecting the right hosting provider. This choice can have a profound impact on the performance, security, and overall success of your site. Therefore, it is essential to consider several key factors to ensure that your hosting service aligns with your needs and goals.

First and foremost, performance is a cornerstone of a successful WordPress website. A hosting provider that offers fast loading times is crucial, as speed is not only a ranking factor for search engines but also significantly affects user experience. Slow websites tend to have higher bounce rates and lower engagement, which can be detrimental to your online presence. Look for hosting services that use the latest technologies such as solid-state drives (SSDs), advanced caching mechanisms, and a robust content delivery network (CDN) to ensure your website operates at peak performance.

Equally important is the reliability of the hosting service. Uptime guarantees are a standard measure of a host’s reliability, with the industry standard being 99.9%. This means that your website should be operational and accessible to visitors nearly all the time. Downtime can result in lost traffic and revenue, so it’s imperative to choose a provider with a proven track record of stability.

Security is another critical aspect to consider when choosing a WordPress hosting provider. With cyber threats on the rise, your hosting service must offer robust security features to protect your website from malware, brute force attacks, and other vulnerabilities. Look for providers that offer regular backups, security monitoring, and support for secure protocols like HTTPS/SSL, which not only safeguard your site but also reassure your visitors that their data is secure.

Customer support is an often-overlooked but vital component of a hosting service. Even the most experienced website owners can encounter issues that require professional assistance. A hosting provider with a knowledgeable and responsive support team can be invaluable. Ensure that the provider offers multiple channels for support, such as live chat, phone, and email, and that help is available 24/7.

Scalability is another factor to keep in mind. As your website grows, your hosting needs will evolve. Your chosen hosting provider should offer plans that can accommodate this growth without causing disruptions or requiring a complete migration to another service. This could include options for upgrading to more powerful servers, increasing storage capacity, or enhancing bandwidth limits.

Lastly, pricing and value for money should be considered. While it may be tempting to opt for the cheapest option available, it’s important to assess what you’re getting for your investment. A low-cost plan might save you money in the short term but could lead to higher costs down the line if it lacks essential features or results in poor website performance. Conversely, the most expensive plans might offer more than you actually need. Striking the right balance between cost and features is key to finding the best value for your specific requirements.

In conclusion, choosing the right WordPress hosting provider is a multifaceted decision that requires careful consideration of performance, reliability, security, customer support, scalability, and pricing. By thoroughly evaluating each of these aspects, you can select a hosting service that not only meets your current needs but also supports the future growth and success of your WordPress website. Remember, the foundation you lay with your hosting provider will influence every aspect of your online presence, so choose wisely to ensure a robust and thriving website.

Frequently asked Questions & Answers for Selecting Superior WordPress hosting provider

1. Performance and Uptime: It’s crucial to choose a hosting provider that offers high performance and consistent uptime to ensure your website loads quickly and is always accessible to visitors.

2. Security and Support: Look for a provider that offers robust security features to protect your website from threats, and provides reliable customer support to assist with any issues that may arise.

Conclusion

When choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress website, it is important to consider the following factors:

1. Performance: Look for a provider that offers fast loading times and optimized servers for WordPress.
2. Uptime: Choose a provider with a high uptime guarantee to ensure your site is always accessible.
3. Security: Ensure the provider has strong security measures in place to protect your website from attacks.
4. Customer Support: Select a provider with knowledgeable and responsive support for troubleshooting issues.
5. Scalability: Consider whether the provider can accommodate your site’s growth.
6. Backup and Restore: Check if the provider offers regular backups and easy restoration options.
7. Compatibility: Ensure the hosting environment meets WordPress’s technical requirements.
8. Pricing: Evaluate the cost relative to the features and services provided.
9. User Reviews: Research user experiences and reviews to gauge reliability and customer satisfaction.
10. Additional Services: Look for value-added services such as free SSL certificates, email hosting, and website migration assistance.

In conclusion, the most important aspects when choosing a WordPress hosting provider are performance, uptime, security, customer support, scalability, backup and restore options, compatibility with WordPress, fair pricing, positive user reviews, and additional services that enhance value.

The post 10 Factors for Selecting Superior WordPress hosting provider appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.

How many People Shop online?

“Online shopping is growing so fast that the global online shopping market size is predicted to hit 4 trillion in 2020. And in the US alone, we’re expecting to have 300 million online shoppers in 2023. That’s 91% of the entire country’s population!” say the marketing experts from OptinMonster. These numbers are massive and NOONE took the Coronavirus under consideration when people are urged to stay home, minimize social contacts and online shopping seems to be not only vital but seems to one of the very few leisure activities you can do and image what you will do the products purchased after the pandemic is over.

Top 5 Free Online Store Applications

With an industry growing so fast, there are virtually limitless opportunities to start creating and building your online store. Most applications are free and come with templates that can be easily changed or modified so they meet your expectations. In this article, we will cover the top 5 free online store applications based on our own experience as one of the leading web hosting companies in USA

WordPress + WooCommerce

WordPress is powering more than 35 of all websites over the internet and thus seems to be the ultimate website building machine. Also, it comes with a variety of modules, plugins, and themes that can be easily customized. Most themes come with color switchers that allow you to change colors with 1 mouse click. Also, the best will be to find a theme that suits your needs and simply upload your own pictures, pictures of your products and change the settings. Selling with WordPress and WooCommerce can be done in a matter of minutes. A single product set up takes less than 5 minutes! If you spare 3 hours a day, you can make at least 10 product uploads with images, descriptions and all necessary details to start selling. On a monthly basis, you can easily hit 300 products to be uploaded only by one person!

How much does it cost to start an online store with WordPress and WooCommerce?

WordPress can be easily hosted on shared hosting servers, meaning the costs will be greatly discounted and definitely way below $5 per month. For example our Starter Pack – Face Standard comes as $2.94 per month. This investment comes as low as a coffee a month and can make the difference from being broke to being a successful online entrepreneur in a matter of a few mouse clicks. Start your online store with WordPress and WebHostFace NOW.

WordPress Online store Rating:

Easy of use: 5 stars
Monthly costs: 5 stars
Easy to scale as you grow: 5 stars

PrestaShop

Another great application to start your online store is called PrestaShop. PrestaShop e-Commerce Solution was built to take advantage of essential Web 2.0 innovations such as dynamic AJAX-powered features and next-generation ergonomy. PrestaShop guides users through your product catalog intelligently and effortlessly, turning intrigued visitors into paying customers. Most importantly from a customer point of view, it comes with almost everything prepackaged in terms of creating an online store. Building a store with PrestaShop might be a little bit unintuitive at the beginning, but this is only until you get used to this application. After this adding products will be an easy task.

The only real disadvantage of PrestaShop is the price of the themes and additional plugins you may need. If you need to implement a new payment gateway, this might come at $199 or even more, depending on the developer of the plugin. With WordPress on the other hand, most of the features come for free or at a very affordable price way below the price of the plugins for PrestaShop.

Start your Dream online store with PrestaShop and WebHostFace for only $2.94 per month!

Easy of use: 4 stars
Monthly costs: 4 stars
Easy to scale as you grow: 5 stars

AbanteCart

Abante Cart is a free PHP based eCommerce solution for merchants to provide the ability to create an online business and sell products online quickly and efficiently. AbanteCart’s application is built and supported by experienced enthusiasts that are passionate about their work and contribution to the rapidly evolving eCommerce industry. AbanteCart is more than just a shopping cart, it is a rapidly growing eCommerce platform with many benefits.

Easy of use: 4 stars
Monthly costs: 5 stars
Easy to scale as you grow: 5 stars

Start your AbanteCart online store with us for only $2.94 per month!

OpenCart

OpenCart is an open-source PHP-based online shopping cart system. A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost. OpenCart is designed feature-rich, easy to use, search engine friendly and with a visually appealing interface.

Easy of use: 4 stars
Monthly costs: 5 stars
Easy to scale as you grow: 5 stars

Start your online shop with OpenCart in a matter of minutes for only $2.94 per month.

Magento

Magento is a state of the art online store building application with thousands of inbuilt options. it is built for creating small to very large online stores, it has search engine friendly URLs to help you optimize your products and your whole shop for Google. Also, it is customizable as you have access to your files. Customizing a Magento site might not be the easiest part of your project, but you can definitely rely on a developer to help you out.

Easy of use: 4 stars
Monthly costs: 3 stars
Easy to scale as you grow: 5 stars

Magento`s new versions require more computing power and RAM, thus making this application not suitable for shared hosting. Using a Virtual Private Server, VPS might be the better choice price-wise.

Start your online store with Magento in a matter of minutes, now from $9.95 per month.

To SUM UP

Starting an online store is as easy as creating a few pages, putting attractive products with images and pricing and start making your online sales. If you already had a physical store, starting to sell online might be as cheap as $2.94 per month. Do to miss this opportunity and find new alternatives for your business during the Coronavirus pandemic outbreak now.

The post Top 5 Free Online Store Applications to Save your Business during Coronavirus! appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.

Is there a website platform that is most vulnerable some may ask?

Based on statistics of 40,000+ WordPress Websites in Alexa Top 1 Million, the result is that more than 70% of WordPress installations are vulnerable to hacker attacks. All of us have wondered why WordPress is such a popular target for malicious hackers. The answer is simple – WordPress is the most widely used website building tool powering more than 32% of the Internet. In numbers, the results are massive as the number of total active websites is estimated at over 1.3 billion according to a survey published by Netcraft, which means that around 455,000,000 websites are using WordPress right now.

Having these numbers in fact and getting back to the 70% hacked websites in the beginning plus adding our own experience as one of the leading web hosting companies in the world we believe that security is a major problem of all websites hosted nowadays.

No matter if you have a website built with WordPress or any PHP application you might be at risk as technologies are constantly evolving, thus making you and your website`s developers hard to follow every single exploit that appears. Having this in mind, we put together our years of experience hosting and fixing vulnerable websites into a good cause and we created a state-of-the-art inhouse built Premium malware scanning tool.

WebHostFace Protection and Detection – Premium malware scanning tool

As a hosting provider, we’re aware that many sites are being exploited globaly on daily basis. Thus we decided to implement a security scanner that actually works and is updated with the newest vulnerabilities.

There are other scanners available, like the cPanel default scanner or some plugins for WordPress sites. So – what’s different here?

Our Protection and Detection tool will run with customized malware databases. We’ve tested the tool with over 1000 infected sites, ranging from WordPress to Laravel and custom written in PHP ones, to make sure that any malware present in the account will be detected.

The tool that you can have does NOT use your cPanel account’s resources – it uses server resources to run and scan your account. If you use a plugin like WordFence to scan your account you might find your cPanel account hitting its limits in regards to CPU or I/O. This can cause downtime to your site or other sites that you host in your account. The tool ensures NO downtime experienced due to resource limits.

Our team will be automatically notified if there are infected files present in your cPanel account. In this case, we can provide further guidance on what can be done and insight about how your site was exploited. This will help to fix the issue permanently.

In summary:

• Custom Malware Database – Guaranteed Malware Detection
• Does not use your cPanel account’s resources
• Automatic Notifications once per week
• Reputation Loss Prevention

We will cover all benefits one by one as the devil hides in the details.

Custom Malware Databases

All scanning tools require large databases with virus definitions, vulnerabilities and all kinds of website exploits listed. In order for a malware scanner to work successfully, all these databases should be updated on a regular basis and to be monitored by expert staff that knows what they do. Once the databases are accurate our scanning tool performs scans of your websites and detects and protects your files. The scanning tool relies solely on the newest available malware databases over the internet thus ensuring superb results, speed and scanning results.

Server Resources Usage

All websites are hosted on some kind of server environment. Especially new website or websites that are starting from scratch or even small to medium business websites may rely on shared hosting account where the resources are limited. Most of the malware scanners that are available online use the resources allocated to your web hosting account and this might cause you trouble with your hosting provider. You may be contacted that your site takes too many resources and you need to upgrade to a higher hosting solution, however, the real reason is that some third-party applications may be eating up your resources.

Our state of the art tool uses more allocated resources from the main server, not your own account thus ensures speed, performance and fast results for the scan. Also, your website will not experience any downtime due to account limitations.

Automatic notifications – Instant action and reaction

The WebHostFace Protection and Detection – Premium malware scanning tool runs on a schedule every single week and ensures your site gets covered even when you sleep. Our system checks your files in the most convenient time – when the server is not loaded and it has enough power to fulfill the requests brilliantly. After this we receive notifications that tell us if the websites hosted on our servers are vulnerable. If the tool has found malicious files, we notify our customers with easy to follow step by step guidance on how to have the issues fixed. This will allow immediate reaction against the threat and to “nip it in the bud” before it develops into a more serious issue. This tool is implemented and customized so that it provides both the users and us, as a hosting provider, with an additional layer of safety.

Prevention

The biggest problem when the client has malware is the loss of reputation with visitors and Google. Google can flag the website and domain, delist it, and deindex it. Hackers can penetrate and deface the website. If infected or hacked, your site will get demoted. This tool catches the malware before it can cause such damage and prevents visitors and Google from even knowing that there was malware on the account. Moreover, the PD also helps detect the origin of the malware – a file uploaded through a plugin or a form submission on the site – which makes it possible to permanently remove the vulnerability and solve the problem.

Summary

We have tested thousands of websites for the past few weeks. We performed more than 10 000 security checks on different websites written in PHP and more specifically WordPress and we are proud to present a WORKING premium malware tool that really does its job. We compared our results with the competitors and the WebHostFace Protection and Detection tools had a rate of almost 100% finding all the newest threats for any website created on PHP.

Your online project and you as a website owner deserve a tool that can prevent, detect and protect your hard work!

Contact our 24/7 customer service department to help you activate your Premium malware scanning tool – WebHostFace Protection and Detection.

The post Premium malware scanning tool – WebHostFace Protection and Detection appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.

All you need is a reliable web hosting company (such as WebHostFace) with a good content management system like WordPress, and you’ll have a blog up and running in no time!

Let’s say you’ve already set up a WordPress blog and it looks awesome. How do you actually use it to make you money? It’s possible and there are a lot of ways but it’s important to remember that these are not get-rich schemes.

You’ll need to put in a lot of work and effort into it and once you do, you can start seeing profit from your blog. So, are you ready to start making money? In this article, we will show you how to make money from a WordPress blog based on our users` experience. These hard-learned lessons will save you time, effort and money and will lead you in the right direction.

Using affiliate links in your content

A great tool for monetizing your WordPress blog is to use affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, here’s how affiliate marketing works:

• A company has a product or service that want to sell. They give you a commision from each sale if the purchase comes from your site.
• They give you a unique link to track your affiliate code so that they know when a buyer used your link to purchase their products or services.
• There are a number of ways that you can include the affiliate link to your site. You can either directly add the link to your content or through your banner ads. Whenever a reader clicks on the unique link and buys the product or service, you get a percentage of what was purchased.

Plenty of companies and brands, such as Amazon Associates and WebHostFace affiliate are offering affiliate programs that you can sign up for. You can even create new affiliate partnership yourself by engaging with advertisers and businesses.

Of course, to do all that you need to start a WordPress blog.  You can choose to host your WordPress site using WebhostFace managed WordPress hosting which sets you up with a personal WP assistant that will help you with SEO, security, and performance on your WordPress site. Try not to go for free web hosting service if you are serious about making money from affiliate links. Especially when shared hosting is getting more and more affordable and with great features. Our Shared Hosting plans are now with 80% discount OFF the regular price and prices are starting from $1.38/month only.

Monetizing using CPC or CPM ads

When it comes to monetizing your WordPress blog, another most common ways is to place ads on your website. Currently, the two most popular types of ads are:

• CPC/PPC Ads: The cost per click (or pay per click) ads are the banner ads that you usually see in a content or sidebar of the site. You usually get paid for the number of clicks that you get on the ad itself.
• CPM Ads: Cost per 1,000 impressions or CPM ads is based on the number of people who see your ads and are usually paid a fixed amount of money (think YouTube ads).

Of course, if you’re thinking of trying these methods, you can use the Google AdSense program to get started. The program helps you set up the banner ads without having to deal directly with advertisers. All you have to do is place the banner on your ad and Google will choose the relevant ads to your content.

There are other similar programs available, such as Chitika, Infolinks, and Media.net, that you can use if AdSense is not working for you. The good thing about WordPress is, you can easily integrate these programs and track the numbers from your WordPress site. You can download all of the programs from the WordPress plugin directory.

Create sponsored content

While using ads can be an effective way to monetize your blog, it can be annoying for your readers if the ads become too obnoxious. And given that you don’t have control over the type of content that gets shown on your blog, using advertising networks might do more harm than good.

It’s not so bad if the readers just get irritated by the ads, but it’s going to be costly when they start using ad blockers to get rid of the ads or worse, stop visiting your blog entirely.

That’s why today, you’ll see a number of blogs opting for sponsored content instead of the usual ad networks. You can post sponsored content on your blog and mention a sponsor’s products, services, or just discuss them for a fee. It’s a great alternative to ad networks while still monetizing your blog.

In order to do this, however, you need to increase the credibility and visibility of your website to make it appealing to advertisers and businesses. Doing so will definitely increase your chances of getting a sponsored post.

Provide exclusive content/membership

Selling or providing exclusive content or membership access is also another great option to monetize your WordPress blog.

For example, if you are a travel blog, you can charge users $10 per month for users to gain access to exclusive advise sections or behind-the-scenes content. A blog that focuses on startups can sell memberships to forums where people can get professional and personalized advice on their business.

With WordPress site, it’s even easier to maintain the user rights with WordPress plugin like MemberPress, LearnDash, and S2Member. These are great plugins if you are planning to run a membership site. You can restrict access to any content including posts, pages, categories, tags, files, etc. Some of the plugins can also be integrated with email services and payment gateways.

Just remember that your exclusive membership needs to offer something more valuable than what your visitors can get for free on a different blog or website.

Selling digital products

For some bloggers, they might not want to advertise other people’s product on their site. Or maybe they just want to find another stream of income. If that applies to you, then you might want to consider selling digital products.

Digital products can be a number of things, such as:

• Online courses/workshop
• eBooks
• Applications
• Plugins
• WordPress Themes
• Images
• Videos
• Music

There’s plenty that you can dive into to start selling digital products on your WordPress website. What’s important is that you choose the ones that you can make relevant and useful to your readers and users.

To take a step further, you can build an online shop dedicated to your brand and start selling. We recommend using WooCommerce as they are a perfect choice for an online store if you are using WordPress. Pair it up with WebHostFace, which offers the best hosting solution for WooCommerce, and you’ll have your store ready!

However, one of the biggest mistakes that bloggers often do is assuming that the product they are making is what their readers need; you need to listen to your readers, only then you can create the digital products that will meet their needs.

How to Make Money From a WordPress Blog – Conclusion

Making money from blogging will require a lot of effort and persistence, especially if you’re starting from scratch. But, if you keep at it, it will definitely pay off in the long run.

You don’t have to use all of the methods we’ve listed above at once, just take a look at what the people in your industry are doing and start from there. Over time, you will see what works for your audience, and what doesn’t. We hope this article about how to make money from a WordPress blog will be beneficial for you and your online business.

The post How to Make Money From a WordPress Blog appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.

Starting off

If you intend to start a blog, you first need a blogging platform and there are plenty to choose from: Wix, Weebly and WordPress are just three of them although the latter is one of the most popular worldwide for its functionality and easy to use tools. However, WordPress won’t work on its own; you’ll also need a hosting company to have server space online. Finding the fastest WordPress hosting service can be a pain when you’re new to web hosting but you shouldn’t let that put you off. Once you’ve decided on a hosting provider, you can then choose a domain name and then you’re up and running.

Getting going

When it comes to designing and building a website you’ll find plenty of templates available which will suit the type and style of a website you’re aiming for. You’ll always have the option of getting someone else to design it for you but you might be surprised how easy it is for a beginner to navigate around WordPress. Plan the content and layout of each page using your chosen template builder and what kind of information and images you want to include on the site. When creating the content, you should also keep in mind who your audience is and the ways in which you’ll attract them to your website.

Up and running

Congratulations! You now have a website that is live for people to visit, buy products or read more about the service you’re offering. However, there’ll still be some work to do and additional items you may want to think about. These can include a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan and other analytic tools which you can integrate into your site along with Plugins for social media and ongoing development of your website. Bear in mind that everyone makes mistakes when setting up a website so focus on the key elements before developing it further. You should also seriously consider setting up an email account and designing e-newsletters to further reach more people online.

Over time, your vision of the website will change as will tweaking it until it’s the perfect image you want to portray to your readers, and you’ll also find that your voice will come to shape its direction as it evolves into a successful website.

Ready to start your own Website or a Blog? We have you all covered with our special deal – 80% OFF the regular price for all our shared hosting packages! Start your website now!

The post Tips for Setting up a Blog or Website for First-timers appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.

Is there a general website optimization guide?

As a web hosting company, we have quite a lot of customers who use different website building applications and tools and it is very important for us to know how these applications work, how and what files do they load and what makes them fast and what makes them slow. It’s virtually impossible to know every single application in the details that developers know it but our job has taught us how to find critical components that slow the website, make the site performance bad and influence your Google rankings.

What tools to use to measure your website performance?

We use websites and tools that give suggestions what are the weak points of your website and give simple suggestions what to fix. On top of this, we have optimized thousands of websites and we have gained the needed experience to see the weak points in a matter of minutes. As mentioned before, such websites and tools are Google Insight, GTmetrix, and Chrome browser. Every website owner should know how to fix the main suggestions from these websites, however, if you want to focus on your business and effectively grow, the best way will be to dedicate this work to someone who is more focused in this niche and has the experience. As a web hosting company, WebHostFace has done website optimizations and we can show you what is important to us when we start the process of making a website faster. At the end of this article, you will know how to optimize your website on your own. It might take you some time to check the resources provided and make the needed changes but believe us, the result is worth the time invested. If you are not a tech guy and wish to focus on growing your business, we can do the website speed optimizations for you so you can devote your time to other aspects of your business like writing content, doing SEO for your website, making the website popular with link building or doing some leisure activities with your family and friends.

Why and how to optimize your website for Google Insight? Can I achieve 100 out of 100 points?

Let’s start with the developers’ platform Google PageSpeed Insight. Don’t be scared, most of us are not developers too, but we are still using the Google Insight platform because it gives valuable suggestions about the performance and speed optimization of your website and of course, most importantly, they come from Google. As the name states, it’s a product by Google that shows you how your website’s performance is rated on a straight out of 100 points scale. The higher your website rank is on mobile and desktop, the better Google might rank you. It’s not explicitly written that if you score 100 out of 100 on your website Google will rank you on page 1 or in top three results but the fact that Google has made this tool and the fact that it is proactively showing it’s importance, definitely means you should consider it a top priority. It reveals some of their algorithms and best practices to facilitate and help you optimize your website to their best performance website guidelines.

Another fact about Google Insight is that you get the results of your website performance in terms of speed and user experience in the Google Analytics. You know that the Google Analytics is one of the single most important tools to measure the visitors’ metrics of your website. Inside the Google Analytics, you get your own space where you check the behaviour of your website visitors and you can see the loading time of your entire website. Google Analytics also shows the timings of each page on your website pages and the speed suggestions are connected with the Google Insight. This section shows the average page load time, the PageSpeed suggestions and the PageSpeed Score. Based on our experience, PageSpeed scores below 60 need immediate attention especially if the pages associated are important pages of your website. This is a very fast and effective way to see what Google has to tell you about your website and its pages in terms of speed optimization. Also, there is a link directly leading you to the Google Developers platform – Google Insight or also called PageSpeed Insights website where we can check the suggestions. This shows one more time the importance of the user experience and why the website needs and should be optimized for speed.

Google PageSpeed Insights Tips learned the hard way!

Here is a quick tip for you: it’s easy to complete the Google guidelines and get 100 out of 100 on a website that is not very popular and is just starting to grow. If your website is not full of fancy customer oriented plugins, ads, popups, social features and statistics measurements, it is normally easy to achieve 90 and above. If your site is heavy traffic and requires detailed statistics, traffic conversion plugins like popups and chat, don’t always push yourself to get 100 out of 100 from your website. Sometimes it is virtually impossible to get 100 out of 100 and still have the functionality you wish and require for your website to work properly. Our experience shows that anything above 80 is a super result for mobile and desktop in the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

Another tip for you is that you can’t optimize everything.

As we mentioned Google Analytics a while ago, it requires a special code to be implemented on your website so you can track your visitors, where they’re coming from, what are they doing on your website. It also shows how much time they spent and what are their activities on your website as well as the page speed and the opening timings of your pages. If you run tests on several different websites that use Google Analytics, you might see that there is a suggestion that you optimize this resource in the Leverage browser caching section. However, this resource is an external resource to your website and you don’t have a direct access to it nor it’s code.  So you simply get the code from Google Analytics, paste it into your website and you can’t modify the expiry header. Although Google PageSpeed Insight is telling you to Leverage Browser Caching for it, you are with your hands tied.  So don’t always push yourself to optimize everything as it is virtually impossible.

What is the Google Speed Insight suggestion – Leverage browser caching?

Leverage browser caching is a setting to help you declare the expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP headers for static resources. This setting instructs the browser to load previously downloaded resources from local disk rather than over the network. Such a resource is the Google Analytics tracking code and to be specific the – https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js (2 hours). The 2-hour period in the brackets shows the expiry date or the maximum age which as you may see is quite little. Depending on the type of the file, the leverage browser caching differs. The idea is – the lower the chance to change the file, the longer it should be kept. Meaning you do not change the logo of your site every day or every week. Normally, you do it once or if your project gets rebranded, so you can set the expiry for the images .png files for access to 1 year.

Check our case study, how we optimized the websites of our clients following the Google Speed Insight suggestions (coming soon)

Why and how to optimize your website for GTmetrix tests? Can I achieve score A on all tests?

Let’s now check the website called GTmetrix. It is a free web speed test tool that gives you access to different server locations in Europe, North America, South America, Australia. You can use these different server locations to test your site in terms of speed, how fast it loads and what is the number of connections that are made to your website in order to load completely. Also, you get a nice visual score for your Page Speed score and for Yslow. The maximum score in GTmetrix is A so we need to head in this direction and it is pretty possible to be achieved!
If we need to make a differentiation between Google Speed Insight and GTmetrix, the GTmetrix shows you what elements are taking too long for your website to load and how to optimize them, including detailed suggestions and information with tutorials and easy-to-follow articles.

Why do we like GTmetrix?

Well, it’s free, it’s very well written and it gives you quite a handful of suggestions. On top of this, you get different server location so if your visitors are mainly from Europe or North America you select the server that is near the main visitor stream of your website and you get the most accurate analytics for how long they open the website fully, what is displayed first and, of course, what to edit in order for them to get the best possible user experience.

Will you wait 10+ seconds for a website to load?

Based on my personal experience, I don’t like websites that load slowly. There are so many different resources over the Internet and if a website doesn’t load fast in let’s say 2-3 seconds, I simply don’t wait for the website, close it and go to the next resource. With more than several billions of websites, it’s a shame to wait for slow websites to load. Of course, some websites are meant to be slow and their owners know the sites take a little longer to load.

What does this mean and why some sites are intentionally slower?

These websites are heavily dependent on different tracking and analytics tools. We spoke about Google Speed Insight and it is just one of the many visitor activity tracking tools. If your site has lots of visits you will definitely need to know what these people do on your pages and how they interact with your website. Here comes the bad part of implementing important but sometimes heavy and website slowing tracking tools and scripts that give valuable information about your visitors. I personally like Piwik (now Matomo) as a visitors activity tracking tool on top of the must-have Google Analytics, however, Piwik (now Matomo) has some downsides. One of these downsides is exactly the decrease in the fully loaded website speed. This tool can be made to load at the end of the loading of the website when everything else is loaded so virtually your visitor will not see the difference in terms of speed but for machines tracking your website, tools, and search engines like Google monitoring and tracking your website with every visitor, this can make a huge difference.

Check our case study, how we optimized the websites of our clients following the GTmetrix suggestions (coming soon)

Why and how to optimize your website with Chrome browser? What to look for in the Network tab?

Let’s talk a little bit more about Google Chrome browser and how it can help you optimize the speed of your website and see if the website is working as it should be. In order to understand if your website is loading fast enough, we will introduce some terms like DOMContentLoaded and Load times.

As a browser developed by Google, it implements some very important and widely used tools not only for developers but for website owners and webmasters as well. Let’s start with some updates – from the beginning of January 2017 when Chrome introduced some important SSL (secure socket layer) changes. All webmasters who use the Google Search Console got messages stating – Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56. This made the SSL an important and mandatory part of every website that wants to make legitimate online business. The SSL sign or the https and the green lock on top of the browser where you write the URL were introduced as something that you should do right away. The good part was that a lot of the hosting companies who took their business seriously introduced Let’s Encrypt: an option that allows you to install free SSL for your website in a matter of 3 mouse clicks. You simply log into your CPanel, locate the let’s encrypt button and install the SSL for the website you wish.

So following the guidelines that are coming directly from Google is something that every website owner should do. That is why optimizing your website using the Chrome website browser is as important as optimizing the speed and opening time of your site with Google Speed Insight and GTmetrix.

What to look for in terms of website speed optimization in Chrome?

When you open your Chrome browser and hit the F12 (for Windows) or Command+Option+J (for Mac) button on your keyboard a new type of console will open on the right-hand side on your screen. It will make your website a little bit smaller as it will adjust your site in the space left on your screen. Note this is a good way to check if your website breaks on different resolutions i.e. on different devices like laptops, tablets, smartphones – simply drag the new separator that appears on the left and right to make the site smaller or larger and see how it rearranges on different screen resolutions. Note that a 4.7″ Apple iPhone 6 viewer reads your website on a 375 x 667-pixel screen, so you can see what is the visible part of the website for such users using the Chrome browser.

As for the website speed optimization, there are several different buttons in this console but we will stick to the Network button as it will give us some important metrics on how fast your website loads and, as mentioned earlier, the DOMContentLoaded and Load times.

When the console is opened with F12/Command+Option+J, simply type in your website in the browser and hit enter like you normally do to open a website or simply use F5/Command+R to reload it if you have already opened the site. On the right-hand side, you will see the different parts of your website start to load like different files with different file extensions such as: .php, .js, .css, .png, .jpg. These are the components of your website, the code of your website, the styling and the CSS, the pictures and everything the browser needs to display your website to the end visitor. Every single file takes some time to be loaded and to be extracted from the hosting server and displayed by the browser to your visitors. The most important part of this network tab inside Chrome browser console as said is on the bottom of the console where it’s written DOMContentLoaded and Load. The results are in milliseconds or seconds and the less these seconds are the better for your visitors, for the search engines and for you.

What is DOMContentLoaded and Load times in Chrome Browser?

Both of these metrics are very important and show how Google and especially Chrome browser will load your website and the timing of this process.

The explanation of the DOMContentLoaded is – the event is triggered when the initial HTML document has been fully loaded and parsed. This is without the waiting time for the stylesheets, images, and subframes to finish loading.

The Load time on the other side of the picture is considered to be the fully loaded time for your website.

If your website is optimised it should completely load, which is the red text, in less than 2-3 seconds, and this is your ultimate goal. If the website needs some work and loads above the two-three seconds limit, you will see which component takes the most time to load in milliseconds or seconds in the elements listed above. You’ll see if it’s a .php file, if it’s a picture that is too large and it is taking too much time to fully load or if it is your CSS styling sheets data giving you trouble.

The real question is – Do hosting companies want your site optimized and with perfect speed performance?

Let me reveal a secret to you – the hosting companies don’t wish to have optimized websites on their servers. I’m sure that most of you who have popular sites know the answer but let me tell you what is the real truth behind this. If a website is not well-optimized and it has a decent amount of visitors it will take more and more resources over time.
You know that there are several different types of hosting and the entry level is called SSD shared hosting where a lot of people are sharing one and the same server. Normally this server is a monster machine that has hundreds of GBs of RAM, at least 32 CPU cores and powerful CPU processors with large SSD drives, but still, these resources are limited, although it looks as a hell of a powerful machine. Imagine you have several very popular and poorly optimized websites on the shared hosting server. The work of the hosting company and the system administrators is to monitor the performance of the server if the server gets load it means it is busy and all the customers get poor quality of service and a decent amount of loading time due to the depleted server resources. The server administrators or the automated server monitoring tools will see which account and specifically which website is getting these requests and will limit them so it doesn’t slow the whole server.

Even if you’re not an expert you already know that the work of the system administrator is to simply cut off these requests or temporary block your website so the load of the whole server drops.
In the normal case scenario, these will be real people willing to visit your website, read your articles, get your products, subscribe to your services and hopefully generate some income to you.
The server administrator will not start optimizing your website and they will simply open an abuse case to you and they will tell you that your website is taking way too much resources than the resources allocated to you. The next step will be to show that the shared hosting accounts are not suitable for you anymore and you will be forced to upgrade to a higher hosting solution like a virtual private server hosting (VPS) or even a dedicated server hosting (a private server) only for your website and the needs of your projects.

This is far more profitable to the hosting company as the difference between shared hosting which is the entry level and the virtual private server hosting (VPS) is like 5 to 10 times more and from VPS to a dedicated server it is again 5 to 10 times more depending on the resources you get in these packages. And not to mention that the VPS and dedicated servers are paid monthly so this all means that you become a very very profitable customer to your hosting company.

Well, we at WebHostFace have quite a different strategy!

We know that people love to install different plug-ins that do different fancy things on their websites like something to pop up, some newsletter sign-up forms, contact forms and chats, to have different tracking tools to monitor the activity of the website visitors or simply have plugins that make backups or save some entries to the database of the website. All external plug-ins that are installed on your website take valuable resources and based on our experience, people use hundreds of different plugins and the website finally gets very very slow.

How can WebHostFace help you with your website speed optimization?

Here comes the good part: we have the experience to tell you which plug-ins are good, which are taking too many resources and give you almost nothing for your website performance and growth and we can substitute them with working plug-ins or simply optimize the ones that you use. Optimizing existing plugins by tweaking their settings and making them perform much faster than before is vital for the website speed and performance for your visitors, the search engines, and you as a website owner.

Another good thing is that the website speed optimization process gives very visible results to the end user, the people that you wish to attract and do business with, and to the server resources that your website uses. Pretty much it is a win-win-win situation where everyone is happy. You as a website owner have a website that is working fast, it is optimized and it can still be hosted on a lower-end hosting solution that is not so expensive, your visitors get the best user experience possible as the website loads fast and they get the resources they are looking for in a matter of two or three seconds, and the last but not least your hosting provider doesn’t have to monitor your website and to temporarily suspend or limit it is resource usage. Pretty much it’s a win-win-win situation for three different parties your visitors, your hosting company and you. There is someone else who is also monitoring the performance of your website – the fourth one is Google and the other search engines who care and check your website speed performance regularly.

The post Website speed optimization with Google Insight vs. GTmetrix vs. Chrome appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.

Best WordPress Themes for Photographers 2018

In this blog post we will show WordPress themes that can be used by photographers, but for anyone who want to display products, images or simply make amazing photo albums for friends and relatives. With the fast pace that WordPress and web hosting develop, you can use your hosting account for a back up of your most important and prized pictures and photos.

Illdy

by Silkalns

Illdy is a fully responsive multipurpose theme built on the Bootstrap framework. With its sleek and modern design, this theme is perfect for creative business websites and portfolios. Its extensive documentation makes it very easy to take advantage of all its features and eliminates the time and effort to research online. The high-quality coding makes this theme super fast and lightweight. The many options for gallery and settings make it one of the best WordPress themes for photographers.

Features:

• One-page theme
• Responsive design
• Mobile friendly interface
• Easily  customizable
• Live preview edit
• Parallax visual effects
• Gallery settings
• Translation ready

Active installations: 10 000+

Demo       Download      Support Forum      Get WordPress Hosting

Pixgraphy Free

by themefreesia

If you are looking for a highly customizable photography theme, which will help you create professional-looking portfolio websites, Pixgraphy might just be the thing you’re looking for. With its clean code and pixel-perfect responsive design, this theme is optimized for fast loading on any computer or mobile device and any browser.

Features

• One-click demo import
• Social media integration
• wooCommerce compatibility
• SEO friendly
• Multiple layouts
• Blog layout options
• Cross-browser ready

Active installations: 4000+

Demo   Download    Support     Get WordPress Hosting

Gridsby

by modernthemesnet

If you need a Pinterest-style gallery theme, look no further than Gridsby. Posting photos to your homepage has never been easier than with this modern, retina-ready template. Gridsby is flexible and with a long list of customization options so you can be sure to make every portfolio your own.

Features

• Highly customizable
• Responsive framework
• SEO optimized
• XML Sample content
• Masonry.js-powered grid
• Optional Widget area
• Blog section

Active installations: 7,000+

Demo       Download      Support Forum     Get WordPress Hosting

Fukasawa

by Anders Norén

Named after Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, this theme carries minimalist and sleek vibe reminiscent of his work. It is perfect for photographers, designers or collectors, who want to display their works with no unnecessary distractions. Its Pinterest-style grid makes the images the clear focal point of your website.

Features

• Gallery and video post formats
• Slideshow options
• Gallery slideshow above posts
• Jetpack Tiles Galleries and Jetpack Infinite Scroll support
• Five custom widgets
• Retina ready icons
• Responsive design

Active installations: 10,000+

Demo       Download      Support Forum     Get WordPress Hosting

Photolite

by flythemes

Features

• Multiple Header Versions
• W3C validate code and well-commented code
• Complete localization for easy translation
• Unlimited colour options
• SEO and mobile-friendly
• Cross-browser compatibility
• Unique typography option

Active installations: 2,000+

Demo       Download      Support Forum     Get WordPress Hosting

Freedom

by ThemeGrill

Features

• Optimized for speed
• Primary and multiple colors option
• Boxed and wide layout
• Translation-ready
• Live customizer
• Advanced typography
• Responsive design

Active installations: 2,000+

Demo       Download      Support Forum     Get hosting

Fifteen

By InkHive

Clean, simple and brilliant. This theme does exactly what it is meant for – it displays your pictures in a nicely structured grid where you can choose from different categories and subcategories. Its design will make you love it.

Features

Active installations: 4,000+

Demo       Download      Support Forum     Get WordPress Hosting

Allegiant

by cpothemes

Features

Active installations:

Demo       Download      Support Forum     Get WordPress Hosting

Sixteen

by InkHive

Features

Active installations:

Demo       Download      Support Forum     Get WordPress Hosting

Tracks

by Ben Sibley

Features

Active installations:

Demo       Download      Support Forum     Get WordPress Hosting

Pictorico

by Automattic

Features

Active installations:

Demo       Download      Support Forum    Get WordPress Hosting

Snapshot

by Greg Priday

Features

Active installations:

Demo       Download      Support Forum    Get WordPress Hosting

Unite

By Silkalns

Features

Active installations:

Demo       Download      Support Forum    Get WordPress Hosting

Photo Perfect

by WEN Themes

Features

Active installations: 6000+

Demo       Download      Support Forum    Get WordPress Hosting

The post Best WordPress Themes for Photographers 2018 appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.

Top 5 Fitness WordPress Themes to Download in 2018

1. JustFit Fitness WordPress Theme

The first theme on our list includes fluid responsiveness to assure that your website will automatically adjust and optimize itself for the best display on all devices, browsers and screen sizes. The theme comes with unlimited colours and backgrounds to find the style which matches your website’s personality. JustFit Fitness WordPress Theme is a very good choice for sellers of supplements and gym equipment as WooCommerce is integrated with the theme and social media buttons are pre-built. Each business realizes the importance of social media in regards to gaining popularity and traffic to the main website. Another great advantage of the theme is the video post section since in the fitness industry advertising depends almost entirely on visual content.

2. GymEdge Fitness WordPress Theme

GymEdge offers a total of 10 mobile friendly Home Pages with great design, 4 different header styles and 21 custom add-ons. The theme comes with different class schedule layouts, Body Max Index calculator, layouts added for class, trainer, testimonial and blog. GymEdge Fitness WordPress Theme is using premium plugins like Visual Composer, Layer Slider and Contact Form 7. The theme is compatible with WordPress version from 4.5 to the latest one and with WooCommerce from version 2.3.x to the latest one.

3. In Shape Fitness WordPress Theme

User-friendly drag and drop design elements will help you to create complex pages in no time. One of the biggest advantages of In Shape is that it is translation ready, the theme developers have done extensive testing and made it compatible with WPML. Using this plugin lets you translate everything: pages, posts, menus, taxonomies, etc. The theme comes with a contact form module, so your customers could contact you right away. With In Shape Fitness WordPress Theme, you can set a backup schedule and have backups created automatically.

4. FitPress Fitness WordPress Theme

Choose from a large set of layout options and experiment with your pages structures, save your favourite layouts in the built-in library, and use them whenever you need to create a new page. With the content modules provided by FitPress, you can add buttons, images, sliders, contact forms and more to your website. Create online schedules for a single or multiple events and customize the appearance of each with the Timetable plugin. Take advantage of the custom widgets that enrich FitPress Fitness WordPress Theme with advanced functionality.

5. FitClub Fitness WordPress Theme

FitClub is one of the most popular Fitness Gym styled WordPress themes at wordpress.org & the numbers of websites it’s empowering is constantly increasing. The combination of the theme’s features such as 4 default layouts, 3 custom menu locations, 13+ widgets and much more will help you create a unique website in no time. The primary colour option, site logo and footer copyright editor will change the theme’s character according to your brand.

The 5 themes on our list will certainly help any professional involved in the fitness industry such as personal trainers, gym owners or fitness products manufacturers to stand out among competition online while keeping a focus on their primary engagement.

Add value to your website, save some time and look professional with our Free health and fitness icons pack – Free website graphics

Have a role model – check these 10 Showcase Celebrity Websites You Won’t Believe Were Built with WordPress

You can benefit from a fast and reliable SSD WordPress Hosting with our shared hosting services. Now with a greatly discounted price! Start your new WordPress project without investing a large amount of money and grow your online presence! And we can help you start and grow your site!

The post Fitness WordPress Themes | Top 5 Premium Themes to Download 2018 appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.

Website Optimization Services

Our long years of experience in the management and optimization of thousands of WordPress websites have provided us with the unique chance of interaction with numerous different WordPress instances, each with its own template, plugins, and content. Thus we have bumped into all sorts of WordPress related problems which sometimes required individual and out-of-the-box solutions. As a team driven by the constant challenge that the contemporary online world represents, we are never satisfied with what we know and achieve and every new WordPress dare represents a strong motivator for all of us. Namely, this philosophy has brought our level of WordPress expertise to a level that allows us to solve complex and unusual WordPress tasks much faster than expected.

In today’s world just having a website is far from sufficient for a successful online business. Since the competition is fierce and everyone is constantly stepping up their game, the requirements for a website to become more popular are multiplying. Search engines are becoming more and more demanding and a good content only is far from sufficient for a good position. Therefore website owners have a handful of new actions that need to be taken in order to succeed in their online endeavors. This task, however, is time-consuming and requires a lot of constant reading as trends are being changed steadily. That is why we have crafted special WordPress Optimization Service packages that will save website owners a lot of time and money.

Performance audit

This service is designed for all types of WordPress websites – from a personal blog, through a business website to a big online store. Nowadays the good speed and performance of a website are as important as the good SEO optimization. People are browsing through a variety of different devices and a website owner should make sure that their site is running equally smooth and fast on each of them. There are many factors that determine the quality of a website including neatness of the source code, the presence of several types of compression and caching, image optimization, succession of scripts etc. Some of the criteria are rather complex and require a deeper understanding of the structure and behavior of a WordPress site. We, however, have tons of experience with WordPress websites and we will make sure that every single factor is carefully checked and described. The analyzed parameters will include:

• Gzip compression
• Minification of HTML
• Minification of JavaScript
• Minification of CSS
• Server Response Time
• Landing page redirects
• Prioritization of visible content
• Optimization of images
• Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS
• Mobile friendliness
• Usage of CDN
• Combination of external JavaScript
• Combination of external CSS
• Downloads across hostnames
• Minimization of DNS lookups
• Browser caching usage
• Minimization of request size
• Minimization of redirects
• Accept-Encoding Header
• Keep-Alive
• Cache validator
• Image dimensions specification
• Expires Headers
• Minimization of HTTP requests
• Configuration of ETags
• and more.

After the Performance Audit is prepared and sent to the website owner, they can choose 2 key components that will be optimized by us as a courtesy. We will also make our suggestions on the particular measured factors that we think will lead to the greatest impact on the performance of the analyzed website.

SEO audit

Every website should meet a number of Search Engine requirements in order to be indexed and considered Search Engine friendly. Apart from the unique and useful/interesting content it offers to its visitors, it should also include a number of onsite optimizations that will make it easier for the Search Engines like Google to recognize and better position its content. An SEO audit demands a deeper look at the technical structure of the website in order for it to be visible and more competitive in its listings. With a good Search Engine Optimization, your website will be higher ranked, will get more traffic and eventually will convert better profit. In our audit, we will provide you with a detailed analysis of the following SEO factors:

• Meta Titles

* Long meta titles
* Duplicate meta titles
* Short meta titles

• Meta Descriptions

* Long meta descriptions
* Duplicate meta descriptions
* Short meta descriptions

• Heading tags

* H1 tags missing
* Too many H1 tags
* Irrelevant H1 tags
* Irrelevant H1 tags
* H2 tags missing
* Too many H2 tags
* Irrelevant H2 tags
* Duplicate H2 tags

• Meta Robots
• Proper Sitemap
• Image Alt tags
• Flash Usage
• Inline Code Usage
• Open graph tags
• Twitter card tags
• Social links
• URL structure
• Canonical URL
• SEF URLs
• Keyword Consistency and Density
• Text to HTML ratio
• Broken Links
• Copied content check
• Duplicate content check
• Server Error pages

After the SEO Audit is prepared and sent to the website owner, they can choose up to two pages that will be optimized by us as a courtesy.

We launch these services at a special price with 30% off discount. See more about our  Website Optimization service or contact us to order!

The post Website Optimization by WebHostFace Performance and SEO Experts! appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.

Although most hosting companies offer automated daily backs, or at least they should, having additional backups and customizing them for your particular needs is something to take in consideration. Extending the functionality of any WordPress installation is done by adding plugins and this also applies to making WordPress website backups as well.

We’ll go through the most-famous and widely used WordPress backup plugins and explain how they operate.

In general, the key benefits of having WP backup plugin for your WordPress are:

1) You can customize the backups just for your needs, like:

Customizing the Automatic process:

– Setting your backups to run at the exact time that you’d like. Some users may prefer to have their websites backed up once or twice per day while others could like to have one backup weekly.

Customizing the WordPress Backup process

– Selecting which part of your WordPress installation you’d like to be backed up. You can specify that you’d like to have just your website’s files backed up or just the database. The most secure way to go is to have a full backup including both – the files along with the database.

Having the option to run the backup at any time

– If you’re working on developing your website on different stages (staging) you can opt to have a previous version of the website backed up just in case you do not like the new one and want to revert.

Another important criterion to mention is that some of the plugins are premium and paid. Those have extended features and often provide more functionality than making backups alone. With that being said let’s take a look at the most commonly used WordPress backup plugins and how you can benefit from them:

Best WordPress Backup Plugins 2017 for Databases & Files Backups

– Duplicator
– BackWPUp
– UpdraftPlus
– BackUpWordPress
– VaultPress – Paid only
– Backup buddy – Paid only
– WP-DB-Backup – just for databases

As listed all of the backup plugins provide the archiving function for either your files, database, or both. They differ mostly from added functionalities and whether they come with a free version or are only premium ones.

The Duplicator

WordPress Backup Plugin

Active installs: 1+ Million

Updated: regularly

Works with latest WP version: Yes

Average Rating: 4.9 out of 5 stars from 1,265+ reviews

With more than one million active installations, the Duplicator WordPress backup plugin is considered one of the best in terms of functionality, performance, and ease of use. It has an outstanding reputation of 4.9 stars out of 5 from 1265+ reviews.

Some of the most impressive comments about the Duplication WordPress plugin are:

• “Easier than walking and chewing gum”
• “It saved me a lot of time!”
• “Does what it says. Excellent!”

Having this large community and users can show us nothing else but that this plugin does its work perfectly fine and it can give you peace of mind that your WordPress website is in good hands.

With the Duplicator WordPress backup plugin, you can easily create a fully packed bundle of all your site`s plugins, themes, content, database and WordPress files. All this comes in a zip file called a package. With ease, you can migrate a WordPress site to any location you wish – including your local computer, a flash drive or external backup server. This powerful yet fast and convenient WordPress backup plugin will help you move the content of your site on the same server, across different servers and pretty much any location a WordPress site can be hosted. The best part is that you do not need the WordPress to be installed again as the package contains all the necessary site files.

If you wish to start a WordPress website and want to use the Duplicator WordPress Backup Plugin you can check our Shared Hosting Packages that offer a great bundle of high-end features at an extremely affordable price. Our support team can help you set up your backups so you can get the best possible results.

Features of the Duplicator Pro:

• allows scheduled backups from the settings page of the plugin. All you need to do is to choose your storage location and when exactly you want the Duplicator Backup plugin to run.
• allows you to choose the storage options – Either use Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP or Custom Directory for your backups and the plugin will do the push to this location automatically.

And yes, the Duplicator WordPress backup plugin is tested and it works fine on all our shared hosting solutions

Duplicator WordPress Backup plugin tutorials and screenshots

1. How to create a backup of your WordPress website by using the Duplicator Backup plugin (files & databases)

Once the plugin has been installed you simply need to follow the instructions. The backup creation is pretty straight forward and can be done with just few mouse clicks. The time for the back up depends on the site of your website and the hosting solution you are using. Please note that it can take some time for a relatively large website.

Make sure your hosting provider has all the necessary PHP extensions enabled. We are WebHostFace have tested and made sure that the Duplicator WordPress backup Plugin works just fine.

The Duplicator makes all necessary steps to scan your WordPress website and prepares the backup for you.

Once the backup is completed, you will get the Status report that has two major components – the Installer and the Archive. In the details below, we will show you how to use the Installer and the Archive to restore your entire WordPress website.

Additionally, you can use the Packages tab in the Duplicator WordPress backup Plugin to download the files at any given time.

2. How to restore a WordPress website by using the Duplicator WP Backup plugin

In order to restore an already created backup package using the Duplicator, you need to go to the plugin back-end, locate the installer file (installer.php) and the archive files (ending _archive.zip) and unload them to your public_html folder (normally this is where your website content is).

After the two files are downloaded, you need to type in your browser, yourdomain.com/installer.php and follow the Duplicator WordPress Backup restore steps.

Duplicator WordPress backup restore tips & tricks

If you restore a Duplicator WordPress backup using this plugin for the first time, you might experience some issues like the below mentioned. Here are the suggestions that the plugin developers offer to fix the issue and have your WordPress website restored.

INSTALL ERROR!
A wp-config.php already exists in this location. This error prevents users from accidentally overwriting the wrong directories contents. You have three options:

• Empty this root directory except for the package and installer and try again.
• Delete just the wp-config.php file and try again. This will over-write all other files in the directory.
• Check the “Manual package extraction” checkbox under advanced options to skip extraction

Just to be on the safe side, do not delete the wp-config.php but simply rename it and only after the restore is done and you are sure the site works fine, delete the wp-config.php file.

Duplicator WordPress backup plugin suggestions and downsides:

The free version of this WordPress Backup Plugin is highly popular and used, although it has some downsides on the backup restore process. It involves much manual work and it might not be a very suitable option for a complete WordPress beginner. The backup restore involves downloading two files, then uploading them to your hosting account (or moving the backup itself to the public_html folder) and then restoring by typing yourdomainname.com/installer.php

You will need some specific information that might not be easy to obtain by the beginner WordPress user like the database name, database username and password for the database of your WordPress website.

From our previous Duplicator backup restore tips & tricks, you can use the renamed wp-config.php file to take this info easily. (login to your cPanel and navigate to the public_html folder and click edit on the renamed wp-config.php file to locate the /** The name of the database for WordPress */, /** MySQL database username */ and the /** MySQL database password */)

Additionally, some hosting providers might not have the ZipArchive extension for PHP enabled. This PHP extension is required for the Duplicator backup packages to be created and you might need to contact the host. We are WebHostFace have tested the Duplicator backup plugin and it works like a charm on our shared hosting solutions.

We at WebHostFace have tested this WordPress backup plugin numerous times and find it easy to use and we will recommend it to our hosting users, no matter if they are WordPress beginners or experts. You can rely on our professional help for the plugin setup and any backup creation and restore questions you might have and you can use the already implemented full web hosting account back up (for your files and databases) R1Soft Daily Backup that makes automatic backups of your hosting account for the past 30 days and saves them on a separate server.

BackWPup

WordPress Backup plugin

Active installs: 500,000+

Updated: regularly

Works with latest WP version: Yes

Average Rating: 4 out of 5 stars from 388+ reviews

BackWPUp is one of the most used WordPress backup plugins and it is considered the best by more than 500k website owners. It has a free and paid version. The free version covers all functionalities needed for ensuring your websites’ safety like creating an archive for your entire website data and databases. The BackUPup WordPress back up plugin makes complete file bundle, including the /wp-content folder, where most of the high volume files reside by default. With a single backup archive, you are able to restore a WordPress installation and use a tool like phpMyAdmin to restore your database backup files.

The paid version has additional functionalities added which are most often used by developers rather than the regular blogger.

The main features include:

Download database backup with 1 click

Create jobs which can make the following:

• Database backup (you can also specify to have a specific table backed up)
• File Backup (as with the database you can also have specific folders backed up, includes plugin folders as well)
• WordPress XML export
• Create file showing all installed plugins
• Check database tables

Those jobs can be executed on a specified time span and you can edit the file names created by them. You also have the option to select where the backup files go once done, for example to a folder within your cPanel on your hosting account or sent to your Dropbox. Any time a job is executed you can choose to get reports sent to your email address. You also get a tab with all backups made by the plugin and there are several settings that will allow you to further customize how you use the plugin.

To summarize we’d like to mention that BackWPUp is the baseline backup plugin which will provide you with all the needed functionalities on its free version.

BackWPup WordPress Backup Tutorials

1. How to create a backup of your WordPress website by using the BackWPup Backup plugin (files & databases)

In order to create your first backup, you need to add a job and select the type of the job (depending on whether you need the files backed up, the databases backed up or both you need to tick the options.) After this simply follow the steps and your back up will appear in the Backups section in the BackWPup WordPress plugin.

You can schedule the WordPress backups and this can give you a peace of mind that the jobs will be performed without any further actions needed from on your side.

2. How to restore a WordPress website by using the BackWPup WordPress Backup plugin

The backup creation was the easy part, but we need to be sure what to do when the issue is on hand and you need to restore either your database or your website files or in the general case, restore your full website including the files and the databases.

This plugin has an intuitive and easy to use backend that allows you to download the backups to your local computer. Once this is done you need to upload the files you wish to restore to your hosting account using the cpanel inbuilt upload interface or use an FTP program to upload the WordPress backup files created by the BackWPup.

If you wish to make a complete WordPress website restore, simply extract the files in the folder where your website was (normally in the public_htm folder).

As for the WordPress database restore, you will need to do this manually again, using the PHP My admin. Here we have created a nice tutorial on how to restore your database using the phpMyAdmin.

https://www.webhostface.com/kb/knowledgebase/backup-export-import-mysql-database/

Please note that by default the database backup created using the BackWPup will be called database.sql and it will be part of the archive you need to download the WordPress backup plugin.

The BackWPup WordPress backup plugin has been tested and works great on our shared hosting solutions.

UpdraftPlus

WordPress Backup plugin

Active installs: 1+ million

Updated: regularly

Works with latest WP version: Yes

Average Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars from 2,592+ reviews

One of the main advantages of UpdraftPlus is how it’s setup to make its backups. Unlike other plugins, it will create separate files containing different partitions of your WordPress installation. This is most convenient for bigger websites as backups ran by UpdraftPlus will consume considerably fewer resources.

Once the plugin is installed you can access it by going to your WordPress backend –> Setting –> UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Tutorials

1. How to create a backup of your WordPress website by using the UpdraftPlus Backup plugin (files & databases)

The plugin has a very intuitive and easy to follow backup creation process. You simply need to follow the steps listed below.

Once the back up is created you have the freedom to manually download the backups and to save them locally or simply click the restore button to restore with just few mouse clicks.

The UpdraftPlus gives you the ability to backup your entire WordPress website, including the files and the databases and the restore option, allows you to do the restore without any further actions. In the above-mentioned WordPress backup plugins, you had to manually download the files and the databases and to restore them using cPanel and phpMyAdmin. The ultimate benefit of the UpdraftPlus is that makes the backups in small increments (you will not notice this but it will make a huge difference to the server you are using for hosting) and the one click full WordPress website backup restore.

2. How to restore a backup of your WordPress website by using the UpdraftPlus Backup plugin (files & databases)

The plugin will allow you to specify the time intervals between Files and Database backups and how many of them to keep. By default, the backups made by UpdraftPlus are stored in your cPanel account. You can select to have them sent over to other locations as well, like Google Drive for example. By having their premium version purchased you can also have the backups stored on their servers as well.

Another feature of this plugin will allow you to select which folders you’d like to include

You’ll also have the option to select whether you’d like to receive updates on every backup which will be sent to your administrative e-mail address. Another small and what seems like an unnoticeable feature
will provide you with a simple size counter which you can use to look at the disk space usage for your Plugins, Themes, Uploads folder and others.

While providing the core backup functionalities on its free version Updraft also has a premium paid one as well. There are actually several plans and you can choose which one will suit your needs in the best way and you can take a look at them at their website. You can also get storage to use for backups on their servers from there as well.

The final verdict is that the UpdraftPlus WordPress backup plugin is a must plugin for every website. No matter if small or large, popular or growing – it offers a peace of mind by making easy to download and restore with just 2 mouse clicks complete files and databases WordPress websites backups.

The UpdraftPlus WordPress backup plugin is fully tested and works like a charm on our shared hosting servers.

BackUpWordPress Backup plugin

Active installs: 200,000+

Updated: regularly

Works with latest WP version: Yes

Average Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars from 1005+ reviews

BackUpWordPress is a simple free backup plugin which you can install to your WP website. Upon making the installation you’ll be provided with an additional tab in your dashboard, under the Tools section, called Backups. Navigating to it you’ll open up a window which will allow you to manage the settings. It might be a little confusing where to find the right link in the beginning, but once you are used to it, it will not make any difference to you.

BackUpWordPress Backup Tutorials

1. How to create a backup of your WordPress website by using the BackUpWordPress Backup plugin (files & databases)

The plugin will allow you to select whether you’d like to have your Files, Database or both included in the backup. You will also be able to schedule the backups and how many of them you’d like to store. Additionally, you can also choose to have notifications about the backups sent over to your email.

The plugin also provides functionality for excluding certain folders from the created backups.

As simple and free plugin BackUpWordPress also has extensions which you can add and they all provide you with options to have your backups stored on a third-party service storage like Google Drive or Dropbox. Those extensions are premium extras and are paid for.

2. How to restore a backup of your WordPress website by using the BackUpWordPress Backup plugin (files & databases)

The main downside of the most backup plugins is the restore process. The same goes for this plugin as well. The restore requires a manual download of the backed up files and databases and restore using the cPanel and the phpMyAdmin.

When downloading the backup make sure you find the .sql file that is your database and to import it using the PHPMyAdmin tool from your hosting account`s cPanel. This process might not be so easy to a WordPress beginner so our support team can help you make the restore.

The BackUpWordPress plugin is one of the simplest and easy to use plugins which is its main advantage. You can just install it and setup your automatic backups within a minute or two. Being simplistic is also its main disadvantage as well.

The BackUpWordPress WordPress backup plugin is fully tested and works like a charm on our shared hosting accounts.

VaultPress WP Backup Plugin

Active installs: 60,000+

Updated: regularly

Works with latest WP version: Yes

Average Rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars from 51+ reviews

VaultPress is a premium backup plugin and there is no free version for it. There are three versions and they differentiate by price and scalability. You can look at the exact pricing from their website. As this plugin is developed by Automattic you will also need a WordPress.com account.

The main features of VaultPress include:

You’ll have the option to setup the time interval on which the backup is made, additionally, you’ll be provided with a calendar in your dashboard which contains information about the backups made on specific dates.

When a backup is created you’ll be able to access it from the Calendar. Navigating to a backup you’ll see that it has two options – you can either download it, locally, on your computer or restore it. By opting for the restoration you can choose which portions of the backups to restore – Database, Themes, Plugins or Uploads.

VaultPress also provides a Security section which will look up your code and files. Additionally, you can also monitor the VaultPress activity in real time. The plugin also includes a scan which you can run to see if there are potential malicious files on your installation.

You’ll also have a section which will allow you to look up stats about your website and track its activities logged activities like synchronization processes.

Another thing to mention is that the backups are stored on VaultPress rather than your hosting account and they keep the backups for up to 30 days back.

They have customer support which will help out with the restoration of your website.

To summarize VaultPress is a premium plugin which provides a lot of functionalities in addition to its backups. It’s pricing is fair for what you get and if you opt for a premium plugin instead of a free one VaultPress will be a suitable choice.

For every service, the quality of the product and the way support requests are handled are the two most important success factors. Reading some of the latest VaultPress reviews and comments, make me feel that the quality of the service needs to be upgraded in order to keep up with the numerous and well working WordPress Backup plugins available out there.

BackUp Buddy WordPress Backup plugin

Active installs: unknown

Updated: regularly

Works with latest WP version: Yes

Average Rating: unknown

Backup Buddy is a premium backup plugin. It has only a paid version and differentiates on its plans. You can take a look at them from their website. They provide their clients with 1GB of disk space storage and depending on the plan from 1 up to unlimited WordPress websites backed up.

You’ll have the option to run the backup manually and also make Schedules for automating the process.

You can also customize the backup and select to include Files, Database or have them both in the backup. Any backup could be downloaded locally on your machine and you can have the backups sent over to remote destinations like Google Drive or Dropbox. As with many other backup plugins you can opt to have backup reports sent to your email address.

An additional feature of Backup Buddy is that you can use it for site migrations and change several settings like host or server, change the URL (if you’re having a new domain name for your website) and that will also make sure all links are working correctly with the new one. You can also clone your current WordPress and then have an exact same version of our old website hosted on another domain name with different URL. This feature could also be used for staging as it’s also included along with the plugin.

All in all Backup Buddy is one of the best backup plugins out there. This is why it’s also a premium plugin only and with it, you get what you pay for.

WP DB Backup

Active installs: 400,000+

Updated: 1 year ago

Works with latest WP version: No

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars from 60+ reviews

Another simple and easy to use the plugin is WP-DB-Backup. As reading from its name it’s a simplistic plugin which will allow you to create backups of your WordPress database. By default, the plugin is set to export all of the WordPress core database tables and you can choose any other tables added by other plugins to be included along with the default backup. You’ll also be able to have the backup downloaded to your computer locally or sent over to an email address, however, if the backup itself is big enough the email option may not function properly.

Additionally, you can setup a Schedule to automate the database process and the above-mentioned options are included here as well.

Although this WordPress Database Backup plugin seems to have more than 400k active installs and more than 61 reviews, it has not been updated for the last year. You all know that for one year WordPress has released several major releases and now the latest version 4.8 is completely untested by the author of this plugin.Having these facts in mind, it is not advisable to use this plugin on your production WordPress websites as there are many other free and paid alternatives that can do much more, like complete WordPress website back ups, files and databases backups, plugins backups and more.

Having a WordPress website can give you a lot of benefits in terms of the numerous plugins available out there. While choosing the best WordPress Backup Plugins 2017 for Databases & Files Backups you need to take several different factors into consideration:

1. the active downloads is a pretty self-explanatory figure, you know that 1 million website owners cannot be wrong and use a bad plugin
2. does the backup plugin fulfill your requirements for files and databases automated/ scheduled backups
3. can the plugin restore the files, databases, plugins, themes and virtually all WordPress website parts easy (in the best case scenario with just a mouse click)
4. is the plugin free or paid

In order to write this article and in order to offer a service that provides utmost WordPress website hosting care, we installed and tested all of the above WordPress backup plugins (we installed other as well, but we will not include them in this article will become huge and hard to follow) and we can give a final verdict that the UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup plugin is the winner this WordPress backup plugins challenge.

If you wish to have your backup plugin added or reviewed simply contact us and we will do our best to include it.

The post Best WordPress Backup Plugins 2017 for Databases & Files Backups appeared first on WebHostFace Hosting & Design Blog.