Latest WordPress Plugins For Stronger Your Project

We can’t deny that WordPress is the biggest open source content management system. It empowers a number of newly developed websites. Today there are billions of users that take their business online with the help of WordPress websites. To keep growing with this pace, WordPress keep launching new techniques that the developers need to learn. One of the launches of WordPress Plugins that plays an important role in customization.

Why WordPress Plugins need attention?

From the quick upload of a website to boosting the server’s performance and securing the website to tracking the performance, Plugins help to optimize your website. Some plugins can help you save time in complex coding while some help you to back up your site now and then to avoid any malfunctioning.

Plugins are as important as an internet connection to a website. Recently, WordPress has launched the following plugins that can help you to create the epitome of a website:

1) OpenId Connect Single Sign On(SSO) By Gluu: This Plugin helps you to authenticate users against any OpenID connect. Once the user has login to the server, the module starts a chain that visits the Single Sign On script of each website. The plugin then sends notification via cookie to the parent site so that if the user visit the site again, the cookie gets notified by the real site and user shall be automatically logged out.

2) MMWD Custom Login Error: It is mainly for the hackers. Whenever a user logs in with the incorrect information, the error doesn’t display whether it was password or the user-name that went wrong.

3) Taxonomy Admin Filter: It really gets hectic to scroll down the tags and look for the desired information. With Taxonomy filter, it gets easier to select, choose and search the tags.

4) WP Suite: Worker: With this plugin, one can check the events and actions on the website with an ease, increases security of the website and create a backup. Also, it helps in Instancing, Automation, Updation, Benchmarking and logging the events.

5) User Menus by Jungle Plugins: This particular plugin shows the username, first name, last name, and email in a menu item to enable you to adress your customers with pleasantries.

6) MWP Viral Sign-up: This plugin lets you to create an easy sign-up process with limited spaces filled by the customers. It enables the viral sharing through referrals and with a promise of an incentive.

7) Stomp: This plugin prevents the gap between bottom of a visible page and the footer element. It fixes the footer to the base of page.

8) Login Watchdog: It records every time a user fails to attempt the login and after severalz of attempts, Login Watchdog blocks the IP address of that particular system.

9) Chat2: Allows you to add a chat option in your website to interact with customers on real-time basis.

10) Darwin Backup: Finally a plugin that relieves you from the tensions of data loss or any severity. You no more need the special team of developers to fix the loss. Just click on Darwin Backup and the information is restored. Currently, it’s unsupportive of timely backups but still extremely useful.

11) Twitter feeds and Pins, Insta, Facebook Widget: These widgets lets you add the fun of social networking on your website. Every time you post anything about your product or blog, it gets notified by your followers and you will also receive notifications you are following to.

12) Windsor Strava: Helps to showcase information like your profile, followers, statistics and many more with a simple shortcode.

13) SerwerSMS.pl: This plugin allows you to store the contact number in its database so that you can send information via messages when needed.

How To Install These Plugins!

Adding these plugins into your website is like plain sailing. Some of the plugins are already stored with WordPress. You just need to go to the dashboard, click on plugin, search for the plugin you need and install it. You are ready with your new plugin. Other few plugins you need to upload in your plugin directory and then install it.

Every day, or sometimes in every hour, one or more than one plugin is developed. Just keep a track if you are a WordPress user and need your website to out-compete the rest of website in your niche!

Author Bio :

Sophia is a renowned WordPress developer by profession and likes to share here experience through blogging. She can be a great resource for those who are looking to WordPress Developer for hire in USA , then you can get in touch with her.

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Optimize WordPress – Seven Ways to Optimization your WordPress Site for Speedup

Having a website is no laughing matter. It requires knowledge, hard work, efforts and of course, patience. In order to convert your website into an online business, you need to improve your website’s visitor count. However, the ever-growing competition in the market makes it quite hard for websites to keep up with the latest trend of the web industry and soon fall out.

There are various things that play an important role in optimizing your website for search engine and thus, drive traffic to your website including on-page SEO, easy user navigation, SEO-friendly URLs and much more. However, speed is one of the most important things that determine the success of your online business. As a matter of fact, a web user tends to navigate away from a website if it does not load in less than 5 seconds.

Being a webmaster, you usually install many plugins and widgets in order to make your WordPress website stand out. Although you often forget that these plugins are quite heavy and take a lot of space on your hosting server while making your website slow.

Website speed is a crucial point and thus, should be well taken care of.

Therefore, we have compiled a list of 7 most effective ways to optimize your WordPress website for speed.

WordPress Optimization

1. Use a caching plugin

There is no denying in the fact that WordPress plugins are extremely beneficial. However, the best plugins by far are certainly caching ones. These plugins automatically improve the speed of your website by 90%.

One of the best caching plugins is W3 Total Cache. Simply install and activate and you are all set to run a fast loading website.

2. Optimize images

As a matter of fact, images are quite heavy and they apparently make your website slow. In addition, using more than 3 images per blog posts makes your website heavy to load. Therefore, it becomes all the more important to compress your images to improve the speed of the site. However, compressing each image is definitely one heck of a job, and significantly time-consuming. Fortunately, WordPress offers one free plugin to optimize your images automatically – WP-SmushIt.

3. Optimize your homepage

The homepage is one of the most important pages of any website. This is the first page that a user usually sees. In fact, for a majority of websites, the homepage is usually their landing page which drives a large number of visitors to the website. Therefore, it is important to put all of your efforts in improvising the speed of your homepage. There are a lot of things that you can do to optimize the speed of your homepage including reducing the number of posts on the homepage, showing excerpts instead of full posts, removing unnecessary widgets and uninstalling inactive plugins. The bottom line is that you should keep your homepage as focused and clean as possible.

4. Adding Expires header

The whole concept of expires header is introduced to reduce server load and consequently increase page load time. These headers notify the browser whether they must ask a specific file from the server or they should just load it from the browser’s cache. This also reduces the number of HTTP requests from the server.

The best way to make it work is to copy and paste this below mentioned lines of code in your .htaccess file.

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000

ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

The above code sets the expires header for a month which can be changed according to your preferences and needs.

5. Turn off Trackbacks and Pingbacks:

Trackbacks and pingbacks are a great way to know that a blog or website is linked to your site. Whenever a blog mentions you, it automatically indicates you about the activity with the help of trackback. Since it informs about every backlink related activity, it saves the data on the server which increases a lot of work for your website. Turning trackbacks and pingbacks off reduces the workload and thus improving the load speed of the site.

Note: Turning this off does not devastate your back-linking. It only reduces your website’s workload.

6. Minify JavaScript, CSS and HTML

Minification is basically a process of removing all the unnecessary characters and spaces from the code without making any modification in the functionality. Though tabs and whitespaces usually make code understandable and readable for servers and humans, it increases the page load time. Therefore, minifying your JavaScript, CSS and HTML files can improve the load time significantly. Instead of scanning your files one by one, you can make use of various useful plugins such as W3 Total Cache and WP Minify to make the process of minification easier and convenient.

7. Make use of CloudFlare

CloudFlare is one of the best and free ways to improve the security of your website. It is basically a content delivery network that sits between your hosting server and visitors. You can not only protect your site from unwanted visitors but also improves the speed of your site. The combination of CloudFlare and W3 Total Cache works wonders to a website performance.

Wrapping up:

These are some of the tested and proven ways to effectively speed up your website. If you have any other way to improve WordPress website’s speed, don’t forget to share with us.

How to Use Git for WordPress – WordPress Git

Git is one kind of version control tool. It is also an open source system. It trails files and directories. Using git you can store your project online. As it is an open source system your project will be available to reach publicly. However, it is very useful tool to run your project smoothly involving multiple developers.

The contents are stored in Git in Binary Large Objects which is known as BLOBS. The folders are defined as trees. Every tree has other trees (e.g. subfolders) as well as BLOBS including a general text file which contains the type, mode, name and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA). At the time of transferring repository, though there are various files with the similar content and a diverse name, Git transfers the BLOB one time and eventually spread it out to various files.

Projects’ histories are saved as a commit object. You must have to commit each time you make any modifications in your projects. The commit files record the committer, author, comment and parent commits.
If you intend to make your project successful, then Git is one of the best version control system for you. It obviously makes your project development smoothly. There are other version control systems also.

 

Why Git is the best VCS?

Here are some reasons for you:

  • World’s top projects such as Jquery, Ruby and Linux Kernel utilize Git as the best choice for VCS (Version Control system). From small team to large team Git is an wonderful VC tool.
  • Sometimes workflow in your project gets violated due to multiple developers in a project. Then it is difficult to trace out the wrong with the project. If you used Git then you could find the culprit from commit history. As a result your project workflow would be increased. Actually developers like to use Git as it assists them to get productive outcomes within a short period of time. And collaboration in a project is done comfortably. Moreover Git is the life saver for a developer at the time of losing something from the projects.
  • One of the important points to utilize Git is that you can use it without having technical expertness. If you have some primary programming knowledge then it’s ok to go ahead with Git. You can smoothly handle Git, because it extreme user friendly.

 

WordPress Git Tips

Is it Good to use Git for WordPress?

If you intend to install some previously built themes and plugins then yes, Git surely would be the best option for your project. It is necessary for a team to utilize VC (Version Control) for editing any codes. Even if you edit the CSS of child themes you must do it using VC. At the first time of using Git it might be difficult for you to understand what is happening. But when you would get used to using Git you will be stuck with it surely and you will suggest others to use Git for their projects.

Using git, you will get the chance of changing each line of codes you coded previously. If there is any mistakes happened then Git will give you the opportunity to undo the change. You will enjoy the real application of Git when you develop any wordpress theme employing multiple web developers in the same project. Imagine that conditions like you are in bad dreams where you have got yourself working with wrong files or somebody has uploaded useless files! Git is there to help you getting back from that kinds of bad situations.

WordPress projects contain thousands of codes in different files. It is surely hard to handle all the codes without using version control. Because, if you lost any files once, then it will damage your projects that you have been developing since last couple of months. Therefore, use Git VC to overcome likely risks. It is also recommended to change child themes using Git.

 

Let’s Start! GUI or Command Line?

There are two ways available for you to work using Git and these are-

  • Command Line Interface
  • Graphical User Interface (GUI) Application

Both of the above are useful. GUI application can you help you more effectively. It has advanced features available for you. On the other hand using command line is comparatively difficult to use normally for using advanced features.

Nevertheless, the true thing is that using Command Line is always better for the new learners. Command line will make it easier to learn GIt for beginner. Beginners will be able to learn Git deeply as well as they will understand the total procedures within a short time. You will get command line in more independent form than GUI in case of some specific applications.

You can handle Git operation entirely using command line. Besides, GUI can make your work easier. It may assist you to imagine the condition of Git tree and merges. GUI is also useful to setup remotes, pushing and pulling from themes. It is also possible the conflict in merging by means of GUI.

There are several useful GUI tools which are free to use. You can try these tools. The most popular GUI tools are- Git Tower, SourceTree, GitHub’s app and Git Cola.
GiHub’s app is the most popular tool and extremely useful for new learners, because it’s very simple to use. There are some latest features associated with GithHub’s app. SourceTree will let you visualize Git tree. SourceTree can work smoothly with both GitHub and BitBucket.

Once you learn the primary applications of Git, you are recommended to utilize GUI. Because GUI makes your project works easier and productive. Tortoise Git is another powerful tool for users who use windows. Mac OS users can use Tower.

 

In Case of WordPress Database

We have learned many things about Git already, but the database section has not been discussed yet. But it is not a matter to worry about, because it is completely different matter. It’s also a difficult section of Version Control. WordPress has a wonderful feature that enables you to revise the posts, for example, VC for content. Perhaps you have to divide VC for your WordPress Database. Practically it is really difficult to execute

WordPress has an effective solution regarding this issue. There is a plugin named Revisr. It is an well known WordPress plugin. Normally it is tool of Git GUI. Using this tool you can handle WordPress dashboard. It has a lot of amazing features and it is one of the suggested options for you to improve Git Workflow.
There is a unique feature in Revisr. This feature enables you to keep backup of database for every commit. So, it is possible to get back the earlier commit. In additions, you will get database in earlier stage also. It is an incredible feature to save your life.
In conclusion, Git is useful in WordPress that is beyond of description.

You can continue experiment with codes using Git. You will get freedom, because you can remove your changes if you want. You need not commit them and it is also not needed to regress commits in next time. VC system has made it possible for the developers to work simultaneously in a project. It is really best tool for team work. Any member of the team can contribute from any parts of the world. This is the best advantage of utilizing VC as a WordPress developer.