• Studies show that slow-loading websites tend to have higher bounce rates.
• Nearly 40% of shoppers visiting a website with a longer loading time will take their business to competitors.
• Ecommerce sites with product pages or shopping carts that take forever to load run the risk of customers leaving the site before purchasing.

Moreover, Google now factors user experience (UX) when ranking websites in searches. This means that slow sites won’t rank and will have less chance of being found online. Even websites that don’t sell products can lose revenue if they don’t offer a good enough user experience to help them stay visible.

Fortunately, there are ways to keep your clients’ WordPress sites in tip-top shape to prevent bad UX. This blog looks at a few of the leading causes of slow websites and recommends seven performance tools you can use to optimize your clients’ websites.

What Impacts a Website’s Performance?

From the server on which your clients host their WordPress sites to the browsers that visitors use to access them, there are several potential points of failure that need regular monitoring to ensure an optimally performing website.

We have a more detailed article on the performance factors to consider when optimizing a WordPress site, which you can read by clicking here or on the image below.

Alternatively, for a simple refresher, let’s look at the impact your hosting provider can have on a website’s performance.

• Hosting:
  All websites are stored (or hosted) on special computers that can directly access the internet, called servers. Web hosting service providers offer server space to house a site’s databases, code, images, and other files and make the site available on the internet. Different types of web hosting services can impact a website’s performance. For example, shared hosting can slow your site down, as several businesses simultaneously relying on the same server resources (e.g., storage space and software applications) can lead to slower performance.
  
  This blog explains web hosting in more detail and reviews some of the top hosting service providers available for WordPress sites, including FlyWheel, SiteGround, and WP Engine.

• Server location:
  A server’s physical location can also affect a website’s performance. The image files, CSS, JavaScript code, and other data that make up each web page all have to travel from the server’s address, across the network, to the device or PC used to access the website. Depending on the distance, this can slow down a site’s speed and provide a poor user experience.
  
• Caching:
  A web cache lets site visitors experience fast-loading pages by storing parts of the website in their browsers or within different software layers running on the webserver. Caching speeds up loading and improves a website’s performance as less of the site’s data needs to be delivered through a browser to a users’ device. Caching is managed by how your clients’ sites have been configured and with plugins. If caching hasn’t been implemented correctly on your clients’ websites, this may well be why they are underperforming.
  
• Images:
  Despite a growing expectation among online users that a website will have engaging visual content to help them find the services and products they are searching for, oversized media files can negatively affect web performance. Large image files can overload browsers and cache, leading to a slow website, increased bounce rates, and less time spent on your clients’ webpages. This is especially true if website visitors live in regions where high-speed broadband isn’t readily available. Optimizing each image for loading speed can significantly enhance a website’s performance.
  
• Front-end code:
  Unlike traditional websites that use HTML, modern sites use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript to style each web page. Unlike HTML, JavaScript requires the server or visitor’s computer to process the code to display the website on the page. This increases the need for more resources to deliver a fast experience.
  
• WordPress database:
  Websites built on WordPress have an integrated database for storing data, like usernames, passwords, comments, pages, and posts. Overloading the database can impact your website’s performance. Furthermore, an unchecked WordPress database will accumulate unnecessary and obsolete data, making it challenging to retrieve other information as quickly as needed.

How to Optimize a WordPress Site

A good web host and ongoing site testing, WordPress maintenance, and monitoring are essential for staying on top of any issues that may impact a website’s performance.

A WordPress performance plugin and other tools are also used to improve site speed. With the top six potential points of failure in mind, let’s look at some of the tools commonly used to keep a site in optimal condition and the best WordPress plugins to speed up website performances.

1. Content Delivery Networks

A Content Delivery/Distribution Network (CDN) involves a collection of geographically distributed and interconnected third-party servers used to house cached copies of internet content, such as videos, images, and web pages, to speed up its delivery.

Since the location of host servers impacts a WordPress site’s performance, CDNs store and deliver copies of static web content from a server nearest to the user accessing the site. This way, data doesn’t have to travel as far to reach a user’s device. CDNs also help reduce network congestion, especially in shared hosting environments, and provide an additional layer of security.

Click here for a more in-depth look into how CDNs work and how to choose one for your WordPress site.

Among the most popular of CDNs is Cloudflare. Cloudflare helps optimize outbound content, static cache content and accelerate dynamic content (such as on-demand or live videos) for faster loading times on your site.

Other popular CDN options for WordPress include:

• StackPath
• Amazon CloudFront
• Fastly
• KeyCDN
• Image CDN from WordPress.com
  

2. Redis Object Cache

Object caching is server-side caching that stores database query results for when they are next needed to speed up your WordPress page load times. Here’s how it works.

When a visitor accesses a site using a browser (i.e., Chrome, Firefox, Safari), the browser sends a request to the server to retrieve the information it needs. This query goes all the way to the website’s database, where it is processed to deliver back the requested information – or ‘object.’

Object caching makes a copy of the requested information for future use. When a new user is looking for the same information, it can be retrieved directly from the cache rather than the server database to increase efficiency and minimize unnecessary loads on the server.

The Redis Object Cache provides a caching mechanism that acts as a substitute for the MySQL database. When a user visits your WordPress page, MySQL queries (commands used to retrieve data from the web database) are served through Redis, which caches the results rather than the database itself. This process helps achieve faster load times, promoting your WordPress site’s performance.

Like any WordPress plugin, using Redis Object Caching starts with installing and configuring the tool, then installing a PHP extension and the Redis Object Cache plugin. Most managed WordPress hosting services offer Redis Object Caching; you can check with your host to verify if they have an option to activate the plugin.

3. Imagify

WordPress Imagify plugin is an advanced image compression tool used to auto-optimize images on your website – without compromising image quality – to help speed up a site’s delivery. Image compression doesn’t reduce the physical dimensions of an image; instead, it compresses the data required to store the image to disk, giving it a smaller overall file size.

Imagify offers three compression tools: Normal (which only removes redundant data for zero image quality loss), Aggressive (which eliminates expendable data and can reduce image quality), and Ultra (which can lead to a significant loss in image quality).

4. Perfmatters

Perfmatters is a premium WordPress performance plugin used to speed up a site by stripping unnecessary CSS and JavaScript code, disabling unneeded plugins that are slowing down a site, and keeping the site’s database clean and optimized.

• Disabling plugins. Some plugins load on each web page whether needed or not, impacting site speed. Perfmatters allows you to disable unnecessary plugins on a page-by-page basis, to enhance performance.
• Removing unnecessary code. Over time, most sites and web pages tend to accumulate unused or excess code that can lead to ‘bloat.’ This means that web pages are unnecessarily big and take longer for browsers to retrieve and display. A tool like Perfmatters focuses on minor HTTP, CSS, and JavaScript optimizations. A website with fewer HTTP requests (i.e., requests to the webserver that can slow a site down) and leaner code helps enhance and streamline the user experience.
• Optimizing the database. Perfmatters also allows you to optimize and clean up your WordPress database, including deleting old auto-drafts, spam comments, trash, and tidying up database tables.
• Implementing lazy loading. Web images and videos can significantly slow down a web page as it loads. As the name implies, lazy loading delays loading these web elements until they are needed – i.e., at the point when users scroll to that section of the page to view the content.

5. Minify Plugins

A WordPress Minify plugin is among the most common tools to enhance a WordPress site’s performance. Minify plugins speed up page loads by compressing the HTML source, inline JavaScript, and CSS to reduce file sizes. Minify tools help remove all unnecessary characters from your website’s source code – a process known as ‘minification.’ Combining, minifying, and caching inline CSS and JavaScript files helps increase site loading times.

Autoptimize is an all-in-one Minify plugin that aggregates, minifies, and caches scripts and style, including injecting CSS into page headers, inline key CSS, and deferring the aggregated full CSS. The plugin also helps optimize images and remove WordPress core emoji cruft (jargon for badly-designed or redundant code or software).

6. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is another powerful WordPress site speed optimization plugin designed to ensure websites achieve blazing-fast load times, essential for improving SEO rankings and maintaining visibility. The plugin handles page caching, cache preloading, browser caching, code minification, lazy loading, database, and image optimizations.

WP Rocket is the recommended plugin for controlling browser caching headers on a website. If it fails for some reason, WP Super Cache or Comet Cache can be used as an alternative to controlling cache headers.

7. WP Sweep

Old auto drafts, revisions, comments, user data, and other content stored in your WordPress database tend to slow your servers. The WP Sweep plugin cleans up your site’s unused, orphaned, and duplicated data and optimizes database tables to achieve faster load times.

While this sounds relatively harmless, bulk optimization tools like WP Sweep can considerably alter a database. You run the risk of losing every stored content piece on your website – so, before running a database optimization tool like this, be sure to back up your database so you can restore it should anything go wrong.

As you install and configure optimization plugins for your clients’ WordPress sites, remember that many solutions have overlapping functionality. Combining plugins won’t necessarily result in better performance and can even decrease the performance of your website. Always be mindful of each optimization plugin’s intended purpose and function, and avoid giving the same job to more than one plugin.

If you feel unsure which WordPress performance plugin and tools will work best for your clients’ WordPress sites and need additional assistance getting them into optimal shape, please don’t hesitate to contact SiteCare. We’ll be happy to lend a hand!

The post Top 7 WordPress Performance Plugins for 2022 appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

While the move of global consumers to shopping online is not that surprising, the global Covid-19 pandemic undoubtedly accelerated retailers’ decisions to use their websites for sales. International lockdowns, curfews, and trading restrictions meant businesses and stores previously dragging their feet on stepping into the online space could no longer depend on foot traffic into their physical retail spaces to make sales.

Many brands had to fast-track their e-commerce offerings to present customers with alternative shopping solutions – just to keep the lights on.

Fortunately, several tried-and-tested ecommerce platforms and plugins (including Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Kibo) have been available for some time now to facilitate businesses’ moves to selling online.

This blog takes a closer look at one of these ecommerce solutions for WordPress sites: WooCommerce

Table of Contents

• What is WooCommerce?
• What functionality does an ecommerce site need?
• What does WooCommerce provide?
  • Online payments
  • Accounting
  • Marketing
  • Reporting
  • Customer support
  • Shipping
  • WordPress security
  • Other extensions
  • Mobile App
• Is WooCommerce SEO-friendly?

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a plugin offered by WordPress for adding ecommerce functionality to your website. If you have a standard WordPress site, but you now wish to sell products on it, you can integrate the WooCommerce plugin to convert your site into an online store.

Free to install and super easy to use, WooCommerce is a great e-commerce solution for WordPress. What’s more, it enables you to optimize your products and product categories easily whilst tracking metrics and gauging search engine optimization (SEO) results.

What functionality does an ecommerce site need?

There are many considerations for taking your products online: from choosing a payment gateway that can safely manage online payments, figuring out how to manage online inventory, how to sync accounting data from your website into your accounting platform, and managing order fulfillment with third-party service providers – it’s no wonder many retailers haven’t known where to begin.

Fortunately, WooCommerce was developed to make ecommerce for WordPress easy. Let’s take a look at how.

What does WooCommerce provide?

WooCommerce “out the box” enables you to sell and market your online products relatively quickly.

Setting up a WooCommerce store involves:

• Installing the plugin.
• Choosing a homepage design (The WooCommerce themes market offers a variety of design themes for your online store).
• Setting up your site structure, menus, and navigation.
• Installing and configuring the payment gateway, checkout, carrier plugin, and other extensions to handle your online orders, payments, and deliveries.

Product information management – activities like uploading product images, adding descriptions, and additional product attributes to the products you are looking to sell – can happen directly on the WooCommerce dashboard.

At the same time, WooCommerce has already set up relationships with major banks for accepting online credit card payments, online bank transfers, and even cash on delivery.

Like most open-source WordPress plugins, WooCommerce also facilitates the use of a variety of additional extensions to enhance the functionality and features of your WooCommerce store.

Here are some of the extra ecommerce functions on offer:

Online Payments

WooCommerce Payments allows you to manage and track your online store’s transactions without any setup costs or monthly fees. It supports multiple currencies and major credit and debit cards.

Additional WooCommerce extensions enable merchants to offer their customers online product subscriptions, pre-orders (via Amazon Pay, PayFast, Stripe, Sage Payments, and more), and secure online payments through their preferred provider.

Accounting

One of the major headaches of selling online products is consolidating business and accounting processes across retail and online stores. WooCommerce offers integrations with accounting software platforms such as Quickbooks, Zapier, and Xero to manage invoices, reconciliations, reporting, and inventory tracking.

Additionally, available accounting extensions enable you to sync your online store and accounting software so that orders, payments, products, invoices, and balances automatically update and balance the books.

Marketing

Online stores need online marketing. Once you’ve set up your WooCommerce store, integrations with third-party marketplaces, like Google Shopping, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Pinterest, Amazon, and eBay are relatively easy.

Additional extensions for WooCommerce assist with connecting your online store with your social media accounts (Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook, etc.), so you can share product catalogs and create shopping experiences on these platforms directly from your site.

WooCommerce also supports integrations with email marketing tools like Mail Poet, Mailchimp, and MarketingWoo. Mailchimp and Mail Poet are free to use, while you’ll pay a minimal annual subscription fee for MarketingWoo.

These tools help merchants set up several automated emails to send to online users based on their interaction with products on their sites. These automations include abandoned cart emails, follow-up emails, emails targeting inactive customers, and the like.

Zapier’s integration with WooCommerce also facilitates connections with other cloud-based apps so you can use existing email platforms, such as Gmail and Office 365, for your customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing.

Reporting

The only way to confirm how effective your marketing efforts are is to integrate web analytics and reporting tools into your WooCommerce store to track traffic to the site and conversions. Fortunately, WooCommerce supports Google Analytics, Google Analytics Pro, and Google Tag Manager; it can also integrate with CRM platforms like Hubspot and WooCommerce CRM to generate reports on additional outreach activities.

Customer Support

A positive customer experience is more than critical for the success of any online store. There are multiple touchpoints and events on an ecommerce site that need regular monitoring to ensure an optimal user experience. This includes site speed, your store’s mobile responsiveness, how easy products are to find on your store, and how useful your content is when customers search for product information or answers to questions about returns, refunds, and delivery policies.

Quick access for customers to customer support services when things do go wrong – with product inventory, payments, checkouts, and deliveries, for example – can also make a huge difference in whether customers will walk away from a negative experience with your store still happy to promote your products and brand.

WooCommerce customer service extensions include integrations with Live Chat services and Help Desks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Intercom, where all customer complaints and queries can be handled in one place.

Shipping

How do products bought on an ecommerce site get to the people who actually buy them? This is where WooCommerce Shipping and other third-party logistics (3PL) software integrations come into play. WooCommerce Shipping can access local and international live shipping rates from carriers like FedEx, Aramex, USPS, DHL, UPS, so online users can know what will pay for delivery before placing their online order.

Once an order is placed and paid for online, various shipping API integrations enable everything from generating ready-to-print shipping labels for carriers, customers tracking their online orders, and merchants managing and syncing inventory from multiple locations.

WordPress Security

Site hacks, security breaches, and extended periods of downtime can do serious damage to any brand’s online reputation. However, more at stake for an online store is a direct loss of revenue from users unable to access a site to make a purchase. This means lost sales!

Fortunately, WooCommerce offers online merchants an efficient security and data backup option, Jetpack. Jetpack’s free version includes automated malware scanning, brute force attack prevention, one-click restores for sales data, and more.

Other extensions

A WooCommerce store can be optimized using several WooCommerce extensions. For example, the default checkout page can be customized using extensions for editing and removing form fields or for making certain fields conditional for populating.

There are extensions for adding product recommendations to product pages, enabling currency conversions to confirm prices, facilitating online orders via Whatsapp, and even allowing customers to create wishlists from your online inventory.

Making it easy for online users to type in keywords to find products on your site is essential. Fortunately, there are even extensions for search and navigation you can try and test to see which offers the best user experience. We recommend browsing the WooCommerce site to explore all the extensions available for your ecommerce needs.

Mobile App

WooCommerce has developed its own mobile app for you to download and install on your mobile device, making it that much easier to make changes, update inventory, or check to see that everything is still working on your online store.

This is on-the-go business management like never before and especially useful if you are a small team running an online store and juggling numerous responsibilities. Among other things, the app notifies you of real-time purchases, allows you to kick off order fulfillment from your mobile device, and even helps you manage multiple online stores at once.

Is WooCommerce SEO-friendly?

WooCommerce leverages WordPress’s built-in SEO features and enables integrations with WooCommerce extensions to enhance these SEO capabilities. RankMath is one such SEO plugin that integrates with WooCommerce and comes highly recommended for its built-in SEO audit module, image optimizer module, assistance with schema markup, and integrations with Google Analytics. You can read more about the RankMath plugin in Beginner’s Guide to Rank Math.

If you’re thinking of taking the plunge to start selling your products online, WooCommerce as a one-stop-shop for all things ecommerce is a great option.

Sign up for our Newsletter and let us start sharing our in-depth knowledge of everything related to WordPress.

The post SiteCare’s Guide to WooCommerce appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

While Google’s new update is definitely causing a stir, its purpose is to improve the quality of everyone’s online experience, and that’s a good thing. At SiteCare, we are doing a few things to get our client’s sites ready, including implementing lazy loading and optimizing images and other digital web assets to prevent them from slowing sites down.

Another way to optimize your site speed in preparation for Google’s algorithm update is by installing a plugin designed for this very thing.

In this article, we take a closer look at Google’s new search ranking update, its implications, and a WordPress offering for meeting Google’s updates head-on: Jetpack Boost.

Table of contents

• What are Core Web Vitals?
• What is Jetpack Boost?
• How do I install Jetpack Boost?
• Will Jetpack Boost help my SEO?
• Free Core Web Vitals assessment

What are Core Web Vitals?

Google introduced its Core Web Vitals report in 2020 to give site owners insights into how users experience their websites. The idea was to make it easy to understand where their user experience (UX) needed improvement.

The Core Web Vitals report analyzes certain website elements (related to loading time, interactivity, and visual stability) to determine if a website offers a positive user journey. In addition, a site’s Core Web Vitals report analyzes a site’s overall performance to offer insights on what can be optimized for improved UX.

Google’s Core Web Vitals report measure your site health and page experience in three ways:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This metric relates to perceived site speed and loading performance. It measures when the largest content element on a web page becomes visible on a user’s device screen. 2.0 seconds or less is an excellent score, while four seconds or more means your site needs improvement.
• First Input Delay (FID). FID measures your site’s interactivity and responsiveness, specifically how long it takes your browser to respond to a user’s first interaction on your site. FID looks at the delay time between a user’s click on a button or link to the time your browser acts. For your site to be rated as offering a good user experience, it needs to have an FID of 100 ms or less; Anything below 300 ms means your FID rating is poor.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). CLS measures the page stability of your site as it loads. A CLS ranking of 0.1 or less is excellent, while a ranking of 0.25 or more needs improvement)

Google recently announced that it will now include page experience scores as a metric in its ranking algorithm. This is because high-level user experience (UX) is directly linked to the health and quality of a website, so Google wants to include those factors in determining search rankings.

For WordPress site owners, this means that your pages’ design, speed, and performance will affect your search rankings.

It’s now important to build and construct a website that can leverage Core Web Vitals signals for SEO. Metrics such as load times will connect and inform your page’s ability to deliver high-quality engagement. Slow uptimes for pages and bad site function are bad for customers, and fixing these elements now needs to become an important part of your SEO strategy.

The better your Core Web Vitals and overall page experience score, the more favorable Google will rank you. Plus, it appears that you need to met minimum thresholds for your Core Web Vitals to feature in Google’s top stories. Therefore, if your WordPress site relies on SEO for its organic traffic, it is crucial that you test, measure, and improve any current page experience scores.

Improving your CLS scores or lowering your LCP times by an entire second might be a confusing task for you. Luckily, to help you increase your page experience scores without the need for technical know-how, WordPress has integrated Jetpack Boost.

What is Jetpack Boost?

Jetpack Boost is a plugin that can be added for free to your admin interface from the WordPress Repository (a library of add-ons made by other developers). The plugin was created by Automattic, a group of engineers that build open source web applications (and the developers of WordPress.com itself.) They designed Jetpack Boost to address the speed and site function issues of WordPress.

Since a one-second delay in load times can reduce conversion rates by 20%, JetPack boost uses several methods to improve site speed, helping satisfy any core web vital requirements. Best of all, it is easy to install and simple to execute (you do not have to manipulate any CSS or HTML documents).

Once installed and activated, Jetpack Boost automatically measures your load speeds and lets you optimize your website through three performance modules:

1. Optimize CSS Loading. The plugin extracts Critical CSS to present static elements from above the fold at a higher rate. Content that is immediately visible to your user will load before any other page details, helping increase the perceived load speed. The rest of the CSS information will load later as they scroll. As a result, page experience and performance scores can increase.
2. Defer Non-essential Javascript. The plugin prioritizes visual information and loads it, deferring all other non-essential javascript for later. This gives the user the feeling of fast site function, while other elements load in the background as they move through the website. In addition, this can facilitate longer page sessions, helping your SEO metrics yet again.
3. Lazy Image Loading. The plugin ensures that only the images visible to the user load. As the customer scrolls, then any additional images will appear. This performance module decreases bandwidth and increases site speed.

Each performance module is executed on the JetPack Boost plugin interface with single clicks, and they will measure the performance of each module as you reconfigure your website.

How do I install Jetpack Boost?

There are two ways that you can install Jetpack Boost on your WordPress website: A backend installation or an automatic installation with a Jetpack plugin plan purchase.

WordPress Admin installation

• Step 1: Search for Jetpack in the WordPress Plugins Tab
• Step 2: Click Download beside the Jetpack Boost Title
• Step 3: After the plugin downloads onto your computer, either run the program or click Activate. In both instances, you will be prompted to Set Up Jetpack.
• Step 4: A tab will automatically ask for you to connect your WordPress site. If required, sign in with your WordPress login credentials.
• Step 5: Choose a Jetpack plan if desired, or select the Start With Free button located at the bottom of the page.
• Step 6: A setup checklist will populate, and you can select any additional features you would like. You can always manage these features later as well.
• Step 7: Once your WordPress account is connected to the plugin, most Jetpack performance modules will be activated by default. You can always adjust these configurations in your WordPress site Admin Settings.

Congrats, you loaded the Jetpack Boost plugin to your backend and are already optimizing your core web vitals!

Automatic installation with a Jetpack Plan purchase

• Step 1: Go to the Jetpack Plugin shop webpage: https://wordpress.com/jetpack/connect/store
• Step 2: Select a plan with the necessary features.
• Step 3: Enter your WordPress Administrator credentials. Note: these are not your site login credentials but your admin username and password. This ensures that Jetpack installs securely while also connecting to the right site.
• Step 4: Once Jetpack is installed, complete the checkout and billing process to initiate payment.
• Step 5: A setup checklist will populate, and you can select any additional features to include with your plugin. You can always manage these features later as well.
• Step 6: click Return To Admin to go to your WordPress dashboard and view the Jetpack performance modules.

Remember, WordPress and Jetpack Boost are free, open-source applications. The purchase plans are for additional premium features such as increased security or daily backups.

Will Jetpack Boost help my SEO?

The Jetpack Boost plugin can speed up your WordPress site and do the heavy lifting regarding your Core Web Vitals. Speed increases should help your page experience score as you provide your users with a more seamless and frictionless path around your website. Any advantage in that area could give you a boost in your SEO rankings.

What’s next for Jetpack Boost?

Automattic has stated that they wanted to release version 1.0 the minute it was stable so that WordPress site owners could easily improve their page performance before the Google core web vitals update. Advanced techniques are expected to be developed for the plugin at a later date, and Automattic will include those performance modules in future versions.

Ongoing testing phases to determine the efficiency of the Jetpack Plugin should help WordPress site owners improve their site performance.

As SEO and WordPress maintenance experts, we can offer you professional service improvements to maximize your WordPress site.

Click on the banner above or the below link for a detailed look at your current Core Web Vitals performance score. The assessment is 100% free!

The post Jetpack Boost – A Core Web Vitals WordPress Plugin appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

Today, however, we’re introducing a newer WordPress SEO plugin: RankMath. In this article, we’ll take a look at what the plugin does, how it compares with other SEO plugins, and explain how to install and set it up for your WordPress website.

Table of Contents

• What is RankMath?
• What are RankMath’s core features?
• Is RankMath better than Yoast?
• How to set up RankMath

What is RankMath?

RankMath is an SEO suite-style plugin packed with features to ensure your website is optimized with search best practices in mind. If you have ever used any other WordPress SEO plugin, you should have a basic understanding of how RankMath might work.

The critical difference between RankMath and other SEO plugins (like Yoast) is that it’s a freemium plugin, which means it offers more features in the free version than other plugins do.

When was RankMath founded?

Understanding a plugin’s history should allow us to determine if it’s safe or not. RankMath (the company) was started in 2018 and is headquartered in India. The RankMath plugin boasts over 850,000 active plugin users and has risen in popularity among WordPress users in just three short years. The team behind the plugin is 27 members strong and remotely located across the world. A global team allows RankMath to create and optimize a plugin that constantly considers search changes and ensures the plugin remains updated.

What are some of RankMath’s features?

What are some of the features that set this SEO plugin apart from the rest? Let’s take a closer look.

Ease of use

Many of our clients don’t have the time to sit and make changes to or set up every little aspect of their WordPress sites. Fair enough – they have businesses to run! This is what makes RankMath great – it’s easy to use, even when installing it with the Setup Wizard. The step-by-step setup process guides you on how to configure settings that are best suited to your website.

Data integration comes standard

SEO is all about understanding data – how users find, visit and interact with your website. RankMath accommodates this by including Google Analytics and Google Search Console modules within the free version; if you opt for the paid version, even better, as you can track weekly rankings and have that much more data at your fingertips.

Schema or rich snippets are included

As search engine algorithms evolve, it becomes more critical to include schema markup in your SEO efforts. Schema is a type of HTML markup that helps search engines, such as Google or Bing, better understand what the page is about and how it should be presented in the search results pages.

An example of how Google displays results on a search results page is the ‘Direct Answer’ and ‘People Also Ask’ boxes, pictured below for the search query, “What are core web vitals?”

Having schema integrated into your site increases your chances of featuring in these or other featured snippets.

To implement schema across your site, you generally need to install a couple of plugins. RankMath, however, includes a rich snippet module within the free version of the plugin. This means that you have access to 14 different types of schema that you can use straight out of the box. This is important to stand a chance of having your content included in Google’s SERP features, which always rank on the first results page of most search queries.

Configurable and modular-based

At SiteCare, we want to have the ability to tweak and personalize the plugins we use to meet our business website’s needs. RankMath’s modular system allows us to do just that, as we can configure and set up which modules we need, and ignore the ones we don’t.

A modular-based system means that you can use some of the features on offer as and when you need them. Unfortunately, several SEO plugins don’t give you the option to decide which features or add-ons you want to use based on your changing needs. RankMath has several modules turned off at installation (such as the schema module, the image optimization module, and the redirects module), which can be turned on when and if you need them.

Built-in SEO audit

Another thing that stands out for this plugin is its one-click SEO audit module. In the freemium version, the plugin’s analysis tool indicates your SEO score and what you need to do to fix and improve it. (Think of it as having your very own SEO auditor on stand-by).

While this feature is excellent, we need to highlight that it only covers the fundamental aspects of SEO and not all fixes you should implement on a website if you want to see great SEO results.

Automated SEO basics

As SEO evolves and content generation and link building require more effort, we rely on tools or features to get SEO basics implemented. One such automation feature is RankMath’s image optimizer module, which allows you to set the plugin to add in image ALT text and the image title automatically.

Alt text in images is important because Google and other search engines don’t know the graphics or elements your image contains. Google cannot “see” as you and I can. We use ALT text to describe the image to search engines. From a web accessibility perspective, it’s imperative to include ALT text for those with visual impairments, relying on screen readers to understand the content on a website.

Is RankMath Better than Yoast?

If you search online for “RankMath,” the search results mostly include blogs comparing Yoast SEO and RankMath as SEO plugins: “Is RankMath better than Yoast?” Who should win? It’s a tricky question to answer.

The challenge of comparing the two plugins lies in understanding their most significant differences. Yoast is a standard WordPress SEO plugin; it’s not an all-in-one SEO suite, while RankMath is. So is it that realistic to compare the two? As SiteCare’s SEO strategist, I don’t think so.

RankMath includes a host of features and modules that make it an exceptional add-on. As a result, RankMath is a much better-looking alternative to Yoast when it comes to comparisons, as it has everything you need in a single, lightweight plugin.

Let’s take site speed as an example. Google (and your target audience) are looking for fast-loading websites on mobile and desktop. Unfortunately, to access the same features that RankMath offers out-the-box, you need to install multiple plugins alongside Yoast. The irony here is that fewer installed plugins mean a lighter site that loads faster anyway. This alone is one of the most important attractions that RankMath has for me and other SEO specialists.

Additional features that don’t come standard with other SEO plugin offerings, but do with RankMath, include RankMath’s built-in data modules. Yoast needs another plugin like Monster Insights installed with it to provide the same level of data analysis.

Schema markup and implementation is another aspect where Yoast falls short. While Yoast includes the standard web page, organization, article, and other schemas as a standard offering, we often need to install other plugins to have the schema we require for our content pieces. One example is the Frequently Asked Questions schema on our site, facilitated through the Helpie plugin.

How to set up RankMath

Now that we understand the plugin let’s dive into the plugin setup and some of the critical settings required to make this plugin work.

During each stage of the setup wizard, you can skip a particular step or exit back to your WP dashboard at any time.

Step 1: Install the plugin

The first step is to log into your WordPress site’s backend, click on “Plugins” on the left-hand side dashboard, and then on the ‘Add New’ button. A new “Add Plugins” window will open.

Next, click in the ‘Search plugins” search box and type in “RankMath.”

Click “Install Now” and then click “Activate.” The plugin should now be installed.

Step 2: Connect your free account

Once the plugin has been installed and activated, you will be automatically redirected to the RankMath registration window. Here you’ll need to create a free account (for some extra features and articles that RankMath will send to your email inbox).

You can skip this step and move on – you don’t need to have an account to complete the setup – but we recommend that you create an account to get great SEO insights from RankMath’s newsletter that can help move your knowledge about SEO forward.

Step 3: Follow the setup wizard

Once you have created your account, the easy-to-follow setup wizard is loaded. Depending on your knowledge level, there are three different methods that you can use to set up your profile.

For this article, we are going to run you through the advanced setup process.

Step 4: Import SEO data from your SEO plugin

If you have an SEO plugin in place, you can import the settings for the existing plugin. First, select which SEO plugin you need to import the settings from and then click the importer. Once you clicked the “run importer” button, it will run the importing off all settings as shown below.

Step 5: Add your website details

This step has a few requirements for completion, so be sure to have these items mentioned on hand.

You’ll need to:

1. Confirm with RankMath what type of WordPress site you have: Is it a blog, a shop, a small business, or a portfolio? Then, select the setting that is the most accurate for your type of website.
2. Upload your website logo. RankMath prefers a square image, and the minimum size requirement is 160x90px.
3. Add your default social sharing image. This image will be used whenever a link from your website is shared on Facebook or LinkedIn. The recommended dimensions for this image are 1200 x 630 pixels. If your post or page already has an image specified for that page, then it will not use the default image used here.

Once the above has been done, click “Save and Continue.”

Step 6: Connect to analytics

If you already have a Google Analytics account, click on the button to connect to Google services. If you do not have Google analytics, we recommend you pause here and set up the profile to integrate it here.

If you have both Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA) accounts, allow RankMath access to your profile to integrate into the relevant GA and GSC profiles.

Once done, select the profiles that you want to use on your website. You can have RankMath install the analytics code for you if you have not already implemented the relevant tracking code.

Click “Save and Continue.”

Step 7: Set up sitemaps

Sitemaps are essential guides that tell search engines how your site is structured, what content they should be crawling, and the priority of each page.

For this step, you need to decide whether or not you want RankMath to generate the sitemaps automatically for you. Our suggestion is to allow RankMath to do this.

Once you turn this feature on, several additional options open up, as shown below.

We recommend that you turn on all these features to make the most use of the plugin and sitemap setup.

Once done, save and continue.

Step 8. Final SEO tweaks

The final step of the wizard focuses on the minor aspects of SEO. We recommend you use the following settings as per the image below:

• Turn on the Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives.
  If a category is empty and search engines can index it, it would be seen as a low content page, a negative SEO factor. So to help ensure you are following best practices, don’t allow blank pages to be indexed.
• Turn on the Open External Links in New Tab/Window options.
  Opening an external link in a new tab is a standard experience. However, opening another site within the same tab takes the reader away from your website. More often than not, they do not come back to your site. So, the goal is to keep the reader on your site.
• Turn off the Nofollow External Links feature.
  We don’t recommend that this be used for each link that points to an external website. It would be best if apply this setting on a case-by-case basis. We don’t recommend this feature because one aspect of a ranking signal is the number of external links from your site. To a search engine, an external link is interpreted as though you are trying to help the reader find all the information related to their search query. To help you decide if the link should be a follow or nofollow, ask yourself if the link you want to add will help your readers or not. If the answer is no, make sure it is a nofollow link.
• Lastly, hit “Save and Continue.”

Step 9. Set up modules

Once you click to return to your dashboard, you’ll be taken to the modules tab.

We recommend that you turn on the following modules:

1. 404 Monitor – This module allows you to monitor any 404 error pages that may arise over time.
2. SEO Analysis – This is a powerful feature that helps you ensure that the SEO on your site is on the right track.

1. Redirections – If you need to redirect a broken page or delete a page, you need to have a plugin to do that. This RankMath module will assist.
2. Image SEO – As we know, image SEO and accessibility are crucial these days. Turning on this module will ensure that you can optimize and tweak your website images.

You can turn on the remaining modules on a needs-by-needs basis. And if you find that they are relevant to your website type, such as an ecommerce store, we recommend you turn them on.

In closing, RankMath is a powerful tool that takes your WordPress SEO to new heights without having to install multiple plugins to get the job done. There is a strong case to move over to this tool to elevate your WordPress SEO efforts. However, the main factor to consider before changing WordPress plugins is WordPress compatibility.

Contact SiteCare to help you decide whether the move is the right one for you and your company!

The post A Beginner’s Guide to RankMath appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

So, what kind of deals are you offering on your website? If the answer is “not much” or “nothing at all,” then you might be missing potential sales and new customers.

In this article, we’ll explain how businesses benefit from offering coupon codes to customers, and we’ll also share our top picks for the best plugins for WordPress coupon codes, deals, rewards programs, and other customer discounts.

How businesses benefit from offering deals, rewards, and coupons

Don’t believe that offering coupon codes would be an advantageous move for your business? There are four major benefits for businesses that offer coupon codes to the customers:

1. They help build brand loyalty.

Every smart business owner understands the importance of customer retention. Engaging existing customers with targeted marketing efforts and enticing rewards encourage repeat purchases.

2. They encourage first-time customers to give your product or service a try without a full-price commitment.

In fact, 39% of consumers said they have purchased a product from a brand they wouldn’t normally purchase from simply because they had a coupon⁴.

3. They help engage new and returning customers when business is slow.

Trying to get sales up in a slow quarter? A coupon code can be an excellent motivation for customers. In fact, 50% of customers say they’re more likely to patronize a business if they’ve received a promo code or a digital coupon⁵.

4. They reduce abandoned carts.

Let’s face it, no one wants to miss out on a great deal. An irresistible discount can often make or break a customer’s purchase.

WordPress plugins for coupon codes, rewards, and deals

If you use WordPress and/or WooCommerce to run your online store, there are many plugin options that allow you to implement and promote coupon codes and other discount types on your site. We’ve narrowed the choices down and put together this list of our top 12 picks for the best WordPress coupon code plugins.

1. Discount Rules for WooCommerce

Discount Rules for WooCommerce is a dynamic pricing and discounts plugin that allows you to set up a wide range of promotion types using a simple, straightforward interface. These discount types include:

• Coupon code discounts
• Store-wide discounts
• Category-wide discounts
• Product-specific discounts
• Bulk discounts
• Tiered discounts
• Bundle set discounts
• Conditional discounts
• First order discounts
• Purchase history-based discounts
• User role-based discounts
• Rules for applying multiple discounts

The plugin also offers a handful of features that help increase conversions, such as discount tables on product pages, “SALE” badges on discounted products, “You Saved $X” notes in line items and cart totals, and more. Promoting this kind of information in the buying experience communicates to the customer the sheer magnitude of the deal they’re getting. This helps motivate the customer to move forward with the purchase or else miss out on a great deal.

Pricing

Discount Rules for WooCommerce offers a free version with basic features, as well as a premium version with three annual license types to choose from — $49 for a single site, $79 for five sites, or $129 for 25 sites.

2. WooCommerce Volume Discount Coupons

If a shopper discovers they only need to add one more item to their cart to qualify their order for a 20% discount, there’s a strong chance they’ll bite the bullet and buy that one last item. Half the battle, however, is making sure a customer even knows there is a deal to be had.

With the WooCommerce Volume Discount Coupons extension for WooCommerce, you can automatically apply quantities-based discounts in your customers’ shopping carts, as well as advertise information about those volume discounts on applicable product categories, product tags, individual product pages. Displaying volume discount information and automatically applying it at checkout not only encourages more product sales — it also prevents your customers from unknowingly missing out on a great deal.

Pricing

WooCommerce Volume Discount is a premium plugin that costs $29 for a regular license or $199 for an extended license.

3. Smart Coupons for WooCommerce

Looking to expand upon WooCommerce’s default coupon features? Smart Coupon for WooCommerce is an extension that provides more advanced features and functionality for configuring, issuing, and managing coupons in your WooCommerce store. These features include:

• Advanced usage restrictions: Implemented more detailed restrictions on how a discounted is applied, based on the quantity, subtotal, or specific products in the cart.
• Product giveaways: Configure coupons to automatically add free products to a customer’s cart based on specific criteria.
• Gift coupons: Create coupons that customers receive after making an eligible purchase as part of a larger promotional event.
• Gift cards: Generate store credit coupons that can be gifted to customers or purchased by customers as gift cards for other people.
• Coupon banners: Promote your coupons with eye-catching banners and widgets.
• Coupon duplication: Save time on configuring coupons from scratch by cloning existing coupons.

Pricing

Smart Coupons for WooCommerce offers three license tiers billed on an annual basis — $69 for a single site, $99 for up to five sites, or $199 for up to 25 sites.

4. Coupon Creator

Coupon Creator is a free plugin that allows you to create simple coupons that you can add to your online store as shortcodes. These coupons come in a variety of coupon designs and templates, which you can customize to fit your exact needs and brand style guidelines.

Here’s a quick look at what features are included in Coupon Creator:

• Expiration dates: Set coupon expiration date based on date range or printing date
• Reveal coupons: Track coupon clicks with coupons that hide the code until clicked
• Dynamic coupon codes: Generate unique coupon codes per print view, per code reveal
• Affiliate code links: Customize coupons with your affiliate code links
• Popup coupons: Display and allow printing for coupon from a popup
• WooCommerce add-on: Create WooCommerce coupon from within the coupon editor
• Coupon borders: Choose from a variety of border styles for easy printing and cutting.

Pricing

Coupon Creator is free to use.

5. Code Shop

Code Shop is a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to sell an unlimited amount of codes for coupons, vouchers, and licenses on your site with just a simple shortcode insertion.

Code Shop accepts all major credit/debit cards and can facilitate transactions through a variety of payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Blockchain, BitPay, Authorize.Net, and more. That also means it accepts any currencies used by these payment gateways, such as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

Pricing

Code Shop is a premium plugin that costs $21 for a regular license or $105 for an extended license.

6. Points and Rewards for WooCommerce

Want to give back to your most loyal customers, retain new customers, and improve your conversion rate? The Points and Rewards for WooCommerce plugin give businesses the power to build a customer loyalty program that rewards customers with points that may be redeemed for store credit or coupons.

Businesses can set up their customer loyalty program to allow customers to earn points after signing up for an account, submitting an order, leaving a review, or referring other customers. In addition to redeeming their points, customers can view their points balance, review their membership benefits, and receive email notifications about point balances and redemptions. The plugin gives you the ability to assign point values for categories and specific products, set expiration periods for points, and track and modify your customers’ points.

Pricing

Points and Rewards for WooCommerce offer three annual license types — $79 for a single site, $189 for five sites, or $259 for 10 sites.

7. YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards

YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards allows you to sell digital or printable gift cards of any amount in your online store. Using the plugin’s gift card management interface, you can control gift card expiration dates, set discounts for gift cards, review gift card delivery status, suspend gift cards, add QR codes, choose where to display the coupon code form at checkout, and more.

This plugin also gives customers the ability to customize the appearance, content, and dollar amount of gift cards with the following features:

• Unlimited card design categories: You can set up categories with gift card images for customers to choose from (Birthday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Graduation, etc)
• Custom image uploader: Customers can upload their own images for an ultra-personalized gift card.
• Gift card value: You can set fixed dollar amounts, or let the customer choose a custom amount.
• Advanced send options: Customers may choose multiple recipients and schedule the gift card’s delivery date.
• Multilingual support: Customers can purchase gift cards in any language with the WordPress Multi-language (WPML) plugin.
• Physical gift cards: You or your customers can send physical gift cards easily by simply downloading the gift card’s printable PDF version.
• Automatic email notifications: Customers receive email notifications that let them know when their gift card has been delivered and redeemed by the recipient.

Pricing

YITH WooCommerce Gift Cards offers a free version with basic features, as well as a premium version with three annual license types to choose from — $119 for a single site, $269 for six sites, or $499 for 30 sites.

8. WP Coupons and Deals

Are you a blogger or marketer who relies on affiliate coupon codes and affiliate deals?  WP Coupons and Deals is a freemium WordPress plugin that allows you to promote affiliate codes and affiliate links in individual pages and posts with a simple shortcode.

The free version offers a lot of useful features, including a “click to copy” functionality, social share buttons, coupon categories, a voting system, an expiration system, and more. Meanwhile, the paid version offers additional advanced features, such as the ability to hide coupons (critical for protecting your affiliate sales), coupon templates, coupon expiration countdown, coupon archive page, and more.

Pricing

Annual billing for the Pro version of WP Coupons and Deals starts at $29.99 for a single site, $99.99 for five sites, or $199.99 for unlimited sites.

9. OptinMonster

Technically, OptinMonster isn’t a dedicated coupon code plugin or eCommerce extension, but we’re including it in this list because this full-service lead generation plugin allows you to use unobtrusive, tastefully designed pop-ups to promote coupon codes and build your email list at the same time. By treating coupon codes as a valuable lead magnet, you can incentivize your site visitors to share their contact information with you in exchange for a sweet discount. With its simple interface, wide variety of premade templates and drag-and-drop builder, OptinMonster makes it super easy to set up a coupon code promotion.

Curious about what else OptinMonster can do beyond promoting coupon codes? Be sure to check out our ultimate OptinMonster review for an in-depth look at the software’s features and interface.

Pricing

OptinMonster offers four plans to choose from ranging from $9/month for Basic, $19/month for Plus, $29/month for Pro, and $49/month for Growth. Enterprise plans are also available.

10. Ninja Popups

Ninja Popups is another good option for creating lead generation popups that encourage visitors to subscribe to your email list in exchange for a coupon code. There are 65+ premade templates to choose from, and the plugin’s Drag & Drop visual editor allows users to customize a template or create a popup from scratch in mere seconds with no coding required.

Other features of Ninja Popups includes:

• Exit intent popup trigger: Set your popup to trigger only when they make page movements that indicate they are leaving the page.
• Inactive user popup trigger: Set your popup to trigger after a certain amount of time has passed with no mouse of keyword activity.
• Scroll percentage popup trigger: Set your popup to trigger after they have scrolled a certain percentage of the page.
• Google Analytics event tracking: Track events triggered by your popups, floating bars, and sliders inside your Google Analytics dashboard.
• A/B testing: Find out which variations on your popups, floating bars, and sliders perform the best.
• Page level targeting: Assign different popups based on the post or page.
• Integrations: Ninja Popups integrates with WooCommerce and all major email marketing and social media platforms.

Pricing

Ninja Popups is a premium plugin that costs $22 for a regular license or $155 for an extended license.

11. Social Offers

Social Offers is another lead generation plugin for WordPress that allows you to attract and reward new email list subscribers with coupons, PDFs, zip files, music, and other valuable digital lead magnets. After uploading a reward to a specific popup campaign, visitors will automatically receive that reward after submitting their emails.

Campaign setup is straightforward and offers a range of customization options for images, copy, offer parameters, popup trigger settings, targeting rules, and social sharing.

Pricing

Social Offers is a premium plugin that offers a 14-day free trial. When billed on an annual basis, pricing starts at $29/month for the Basic plan, $49/month for the Pro plan, $79/month for the Business plan, and $179/month.

The bottom line

If you want to increase sales, reduce abandoned carts, engage new customers, and build a loyal customer base for your business, then it may be time to start offering coupon codes, deals, and rewards to your customers.

The post The Best WordPress Coupon Code Plugins appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

If you don’t have a reliable fix for the problem, then the easiest and quickest way to resolve it is to turn to your WordPress backups. After all, that’s why you have backups in the first place, right? (And if you don’t have backups set up yet, then you should seriously consider doing it right away!)

With the right kind of backups in place, you can simply opt for a single-click restore and get back to business. In this article, learn how to restore your WordPress site from a backup using a nifty plugin called BlogVault.

Reasons Why You Might Need to Restore from a Backup

Having a recent backup of your site can help you in several cases. In situations where you lose crucial data or your website gets hacked, a readily available backup can be your savior.

Here are some reasons why you might need to restore from a backup:

1. To Guard Against Human Error

To err is human, so take a deep breath — it’s okay! Human errors are one of the most common reasons why backups are so necessary. Maybe you deleted an important file from your site or made a change that broke some functionality. There are ways to fix these errors manually, but is that really worth the trouble when the most efficient solution is to simply hit an “undo” button and have your site restored back to its previous, functioning state?

2. To Reverse Problems During WordPress Updates

Updates are essential for any WordPress site, but it’s not unusual to perform an update only to see something unexpectedly go wrong. That’s why it is highly recommended to perform your updates safely. One of the ways to ensure this safety is to have WordPress backups ready before you start tinkering with your website. That way, if you update any key components, you’d have a recent restore point handy — just in case you need it.

3. To Restore Your Website If It’s Been Hacked Or Infected By Malware

Having a malware identifier (such as software like MalCare) will help you discover malware infections and get them removed before they wreak havoc on your site. If your website malfunctions due to a malware infection, or if it is completely hacked, you can use a backup to restore the site quickly — cutting down on downtime that might lose your customers.

4. To Create a Testing Environment

The safest way to make changes to your site is by using a staging site that will act as your testing environment. Having a backup copy of your site will enable you to set up a staging site in minutes. BlogVault, an automatic backup plugin solution, will help you to create backups easily and act as a staging site for you to test any changes.

5. To Handle Compatibility Issues after Installing Add-ons

As someone using WordPress, you are probably relying on a lot of plugins and themes for your site. Yes, they are incredibly handy. However, each time you install any such add-on, you are introducing a component that might be incompatible with your site’s ecosystem.

The potential for incompatibility is a major reason why it’s important to have your site backed up. If a compatibility issue pops up, all you have to do is revert to a previous backup.

How do WordPress Backups work?

Before we dive into how to restore WordPress from a backup, let’s understand how it works. A standard WordPress backup consists of your website files and MySQL database.

Here are the following ways in which you can back up your site:

WordPress Backups with Hosting Provider

You can also have WordPress backups from your hosting provider. More often, these are snapshots of your site that let you restore your site to a certain point in time with a ‘one-click’ option.

The downside to this method is that it can quickly consume the overall disk space you have, depending on your hosting. This can further result in slower site load speeds. It also doesn’t provide you with adequate protection — every site should have external backups that are captured and stored independent of its web hosting provider.

Manual Backups

You can also manually take backups of your entire website files and database. However, this can be a cumbersome process that can take up a lot of your time. Moreover, you need to ensure you’re keeping timely backups and maintaining individual versions of the same so that you can perform a restore of the version you want to go back to. Another issue is that manual backups tend to be larger in size and take up more of your disk space.

WordPress Backup Plugins

A WordPress Backup plugin solution will typically provide you with an option to store your website files, the database including all your data and images, as well as other important files, like plugins and themes. Most backup plugins offer you the option to save limited data or everything, depending on the size of your site.

So, what’s the best WordPress backup plugin option? Whatever your backup need may be, BlogVault is a great option — it also happens to be #1 on our list of essential WordPress plugins.

BlogVault is a smart backup plugin that takes incremental backups of your site. It backs up your entire site the first time and then going forward, it only backs up any changes made to the site since that initial backup. This dramatically cuts down on disk space without hammering your server and improves the performance of your site.

In addition, BlogVault also goes a step further by taking your backups on its own server. This means you do not have to worry about disk space and storage issues on your own servers.

How Do You Restore a WordPress Site from a Backup?

How you restore a WordPress backup depends on how you initially created the backup of your site. Backups created using BlogVault can be restored with a simple click using the same plugin. We’ll talk more about that later, but first, let’s walk through how to restore from a manual backup.

Restoring WordPress using manual backups

No surprises here — backups must be restored manually. Manually restoring a backup can be a huge ordeal and can take up a lot of your time and effort. First, you would need to delete all your WordPress files and directories. Then, you’d need to start from scratch — install a fresh copy of WordPress, upload your WordPress config file from your backup, and upload the images, themes, and plugins… one by one.

A lot of WordPress users tend to back up only their theme, upload the directory, and the WordPress database. This helps them to reduce the backup size, but restoring from such a backup becomes difficult.

The reason why you back up your site is to quickly restore your site in case something bad happens.

That is why we recommend BlogVault. It not only performs incremental backups of your entire site but also helps you restore with a single click, thereby reducing your burden and downtime during unforeseen events.

Restoring WordPress using BlogVault

When it comes to WordPress backups, there are two simple methods you can use to restore your website using BlogVault:

Method #1: Restore to the Most Recent Backup

Head to BlogVault.net and sign in to your account. Select your website from the list. This will take you to the ‘Site Detail’ page. On this page, you can select the ‘Restore’ option from the ‘Backup’ section.

This will restore the latest version of your WordPress site.

Method #2: Restore by Choosing the Version of the Backup

Within the same site listing page, you can click on ‘Show All Backups’ under the ‘Backup’ session. This will enable you to view every backup version. Then, you can perform an auto-restore.

Once you click on auto-restore, you will be taken to the FTP details form.

Enter the FTP host or server name, type of hosting service – FTP, SFTP, FTPS, and your FTP credentials. This will enable BlogVault to access the details of the location to which your files need to be transferred. Once you are done with this, click on continue.

Next, you need to select where WordPress is installed. If you are using your hosting provider’s cPanel, this would typically be the webroot directory. Another way to identify the location is to look for WordPress files such as wp-admin, wp-content, etc.

Select the folder and continue.

The great part with BlogVault is, even if you were to select a wrong folder, it immediately alerts you of an error and doesn’t continue the process. This ensures you don’t damage your website.

In the next step, you must choose what to restore to your WordPress site. You can select the details of what you would like to restore according to the version history, your WordPress site’s database credentials, files, tables or entire site in Advanced options and HTTP Basic Authentication.

Click continue, and then, auto-restore will run in the background as you sip your cuppa and get on with your busy day. It’s WordPress backups, made easy!

With BlogVault, you are always prepared

If you are a BlogVault user, you know you’re protected and ready for anything! To recap, BlogVault backs up your website automatically by taking incremental backups that record any changes you make to your site. This backup plugin also allows you to test your backups and restore them quickly, so you can avert any unforeseen crisis.

To top it all off, BlogVault users get an option to create a staging site to test out any changes to their WordPress website. Now, that’s what we call a comprehensive solution of digital security for your website!

The post How to Restore WordPress From A BlogVault Backup appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

But with nearly 55,000 plugins to choose from in the WordPress plugin repository, how do you even know where to start? How do you determine if a plugin is truly needed or if it’s just bloat? Which plugins are absolutely essential?

While we’re happy to share tips for choosing a WordPress plugin, we realize you probably just want some straight answers.

That’s why we’ve compiled this list of plugins that we recommend for virtually all WordPress sites.

If you’re getting ready to launch a new site or you’re trying to level up your current one, this list is for you. You may discover later that you require additional plugins based on your unique needs, but consider this curated plugin list to be a good baseline to get you started.

1. An SEO plugin

WordPress is widely considered to be one of the most SEO-friendly CMS options out there thanks to its many built-in SEO features, but what really makes WordPress sites shine in search engines are all the third-party SEO tools and plugins that allow for further optimization. That’s why we think it’s essential for all WordPress sites to include an SEO plugin.

There are several plugins out there devoted to search engine optimization, but the one we recommend to our clients is the Yoast SEO plugin. It is, by far, the most comprehensive solution for maintaining your site’s on-page SEO efforts. And we’re not the only ones who think that — with more than 5 million active installations, Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress plugins, period.

Yoast allows you to optimize individual pieces of content, while also giving you the power to configure sitewide SEO settings. For example, with Yoast, you can easily customize SEO titles and meta descriptions to every page and post on your site, but you can streamline the process even further with title and meta description templating for different post types — which is pretty handy if you working with a lot of content! Yoast also gives you full control over your site’s breadcrumbs and offers advanced functionality for generating and submitting XML sitemaps. Yoast has both free and premium versions, but if you’re serious about your site’s SEO, we definitely think the premium version is a solid investment.

2. A plugin for forms

One of the major reasons you have a website is to connect with your customers or audience. Forms are a standard tool for forging that connection — it’s honestly a little odd to see a professional or commercial site without a contact form of some sort. To add forms to your WordPress site, you’re going to need to choose a form plugin.

There is a lot of form plugins out there, so it can be a challenge trying to narrow down all the options. The plugin that is widely touted as the “best” may not be what’s best for you. For example, while some websites may require a premium, feature-packed form plugin to meet their unique goals, that same “powerhouse” plugin may be a bit overkill (and honestly, a waste of money) for a smaller site that only needs a very basic contact form.

This variation of needs was something we carefully considered when we released our guide to the best WordPress form plugins. In our quest to determine which form plugin was the best for most WordPress users, we actually found that there are A LOT of great options out there. While we personally love the premium Gravity Forms plugin and frequently recommend it to our clients, we were impressed by many of the cheap and free options available, like WPForms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms.

Ultimately, the best form plugin option will vary depending on your specific needs and budget, so we recommend researching the strengths and weaknesses of each one before committing.

3. A plugin for external site backups

Do you rely solely on your web hosting provider for backing up your site? Yikes, we sure hope not! The redundancy provided by your web host’s backups is simply not enough.

It’s critical for every WordPress website to receive regularly scheduled external site backups — administered independently of their hosting provider. And with a wide array of both free and paid WordPress backup options, there’s really no excuse! To piggyback off an ancient Chinese proverb: The best time to implement an external backup of your site was yesterday, and the second-best time is now.

Not sure where to start with picking a backup plugin? Don’t worry, we got you. In our guide to the best backup plugins for WordPress, we evaluated six of the most popular backup plugins — including BlogVault, VaultPress, and Updraft Plus, among others — and determined what we believe to be the best backup plugin for most WordPress site owners.

4. Plugins for optimizing page speed

When it comes to browsing the internet, patience is not a virtue held in high regard.

Paying attention to your site speed is critical for user experience, web accessibility, and SEO. If your website takes more than a few seconds to load, there’s a good chance that you’re losing users — especially mobile device users — before they even have a chance to glimpse your site. And because Google wants to provide the highest quality results to its search engine users, your page speed can make or break your ranking for a competitive keyword.

For these reasons, we think it’s essential to install a plugin that optimizes your WordPress site’s speed and performance.

One of the most highly regarded speed optimization plugins available is WP Rocket. This plugin offers a long list of fantastic features that work together to cache your pages and boost the speed of your site. It’s a plugin we recommend to all of our clients.

To further optimize your page speed, we also recommend installing an image compression plugin. One that we really like is Imagify, which was built by the same folks responsible for WP Rocket. When installed, the Imagify plugin automatically reduces the file weight of any images you upload to your WordPress site — without sacrificing the quality of your images. Gorgeous images and a speedy site? Yes, please!

5. An anti-spam plugin

Spam clogging up your blog comments? Spam is not just annoying to clean up — it puts your site users at risk for phishing and scams and can damage your site’s credibility. Luckily, installing an anti-spam plugin is one of the easiest and most effective ways to prevent malicious content from being published on your WordPress site.

Our anti-spam plugin of choice is Akismet Anti-Spam, which is developed by Automattic. Akismet prevents spammers from disseminating malicious content by running any comments and contact form submissions your site receives through their global spam database and filtering out anything that appears to be spam.

Akismet is “pay what you can” for personal, non-commercial use, and starts at only $100/month for commercial sites.

6. A plugin for tracking analytics

Google Analytics is critical for benchmarking and tracking your digital marketing efforts, which is why it is one of the first things that should be implemented upon launching a website.

Trying to connect your Google Analytics account to your WordPress website? This Simple Google Analytics Tracking plugin is a good (and FREE!) starting point. All you need to do is install the plugin and copy and paste your Tracking ID from Google Analytics into the plugin’s appropriate field. Once the tracking ID is added, the plugin automatically adds the Google Analytics code to your site with your unique tracking ID. Easy peasy!

7. A lead generation plugin

Interested in building up your email list or capturing leads from paid advertising efforts? You may want to look into installing a lead generation plugin. While we wouldn’t say this type of plugin is “essential” to the functioning of your WordPress site, we receive a lot of questions and inquiries from clients regarding lead generation, so we thought we’d address it in this list.

If you just need a simple email capture form on your site (“Fill out this form to sign up for our weekly newsletter!”), you can often accomplish this with a regular form plugin. (For example, Gravity Forms offers integrations with many of the most popular email marketing services.)

But if you’re looking for something a little more elaborate that allows you to create custom landing pages, pop-ups, floating bars, and more, you’ll probably want a lead generation plugin that is specifically designed for those efforts. There are many, many WordPress lead generation plugins out there, but at WP Site Care, our go-to choice is Optinmonster. It’s powerful, easy to use, and offers advanced features that many of its competitors do not have (such as their Exit-Intent® technology that “allows you to convert abandoning visitors into subscribers and customers.”) To top it off, Optinmonster offers multiple pricing tiers, which makes this plugin accessible to a range of budgets and scopes.

8. WordPress customization plugins

When we talk about WordPress customization plugins, we’re talking about plugins that give you deeper control over the way your content is presented on your website. There are two plugins that we think are essential to have right now.

The first plugin we recommend is Advanced Custom Fields plugin, which may already be installed on your site, depending on how it was built. The Advanced Custom Fields plugin simplifies the process of creating custom fields in WordPress, which allows developers (and even non-developers!) to quickly build out custom-tailored WordPress development solutions for presenting content quickly.

The second plugin that we recommend for WordPress customization may be a bit of a controversial pick, but we’re going to go there anyway. We recommend equipping the Classic Editor plugin in your arsenal of plugins. Why? Well, it all goes back to the release of WordPress 5.0 in late 2018. With this new version of WordPress came a fancy new block-based editor called Gutenberg.

Gutenberg represents a bold, exciting step in the history of WordPress, but it hasn’t been without its limitations and challenges. The Classic Editor plugin was originally released by the WordPress Core team to ease the transition to Gutenberg, and gives your organization the ability to enable and disable Gutenberg on a user by user basis. This will help those on your team who aren’t totally comfortable with Gutenberg yet to continue managing the content the way they always have. And it won’t hold back the go-getters who want to embrace the new technology and feature set that Gutenberg has to offer.

What essential WordPress plugins did we miss?

Are there other types of plugins that you think are essential to all WordPress sites? Let us know in the comments!

The post 8 Essential WordPress Plugins All Websites Must Have appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

“Two is One. And One is None.”

What that quote is illustrating is that without at least one backup of critical systems and data, you’re essentially swinging on a trapeze without a net. You have exactly one life in that high-flying circus act and without some kind of backup, a slipped grip means you’re left with zero more lives.

How many lives does your WordPress site have?

We don’t like to talk about it much, but hard drives crash and data gets corrupted literally every single day. Most hosting companies use some kind of redundancy like RAID to help protect your data, but all your data is almost always living on the same server. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen multiple drives in a RAID array fail. RAID is not a backup solution.

Last month, I ran a poll on Twitter to see what people were using for their WordPress backups. The results surprised me:

Almost 40% of the 149 people who took the poll rely 100% on their web host for backups!

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised, though. In my years at WP Site Care, I’ve fielded dozens of emails from (rightfully) panicked website owners who have been informed by their web host that because of some kind of catastrophic failure that’s never supposed to happen, their years of publishing are gone forever. Then we’re left scrambling and relying on the WayBack Machine to try and reassemble artifacts of what was a very popular website only 24 hours previous.

If there’s one takeaway I’d like to leave with today, it’s that those “catastrophic failures that are never supposed to happen” happen.

Every website owner should have a regularly-scheduled external backup of their website independent of their hosting provider.

Please don’t ever take the attitude of “my host does my backups for me”, because remember, one is none.

External (Cloud) vs. Local WordPress Backups

steps off soapbox

Now that we have that covered and you understand the importance of backups, there’s one more critical concept that I see people get confused about all the time that I’d like to clear up. We’ll go over all of the tools for backing up WordPress shortly, but I want to make a clear distinction that not all WordPress backups are created equal.

Lots of WordPress backup plugins have local storage options. This means that the backups of your website are being stored on the same hard drive or array of hard drives as your live website. This is the like putting all of your cash inside your wallet for safe keeping in case your purse gets stolen, and then putting your wallet inside your purse.

That’s not to say there’s never a scenario where local backups make sense, but it’s important to understand that in the case of hard drive failure, your WordPress backup plugin isn’t going to protect you when you’re using local storage. The other big challenge with local backups is that they tend to use up lots of disk space on your hosting account. Especially if the backup solution doesn’t use incremental backups, that means a full copy of your website is being added to your server’s storage every single time it runs. That can add up super quick, especially if you have a media-rich website, resulting in an overloaded server and unnecessary storage costs.

It may make sense to run a local backup occasionally, but generally speaking, you’ll want to store your media and database backups to an external service like Amazon S3, Dropbox, or even your local computer hard drive.

Comparing the Best WordPress Backup Plugins

I’ll admit that being tasked with comparing backup plugins has felt pretty daunting from the start. Much like choosing the best Contact Form plugin, there’s a lot of nuance and many variables that go into deciding who or what to trust with your website backups.

Before I began my evaluation, there were two steps I needed to take:

Step One: Establish Our Criteria for Comparing the Best WordPress Backup Plugins

In order to do a fair comparison, I needed to establish the criteria for what makes a solid WordPress backup plugin. Here’s the list that I came up with:

• External backup option
• Flexible scheduling
• Flexible backups (backing up files outside of standard WordPress directories)
• Ability to backup/restore database and files separately
• Simplicity of restoring data
• GDPR Compliant (or at least privacy conscious)

Step Two: Choose Our 6 WordPress Backup Plugin Contestants

I want to acknowledge that the WordPress backup plugins we compare in this article may not be the right answer for every website owner, but I’ve chosen the following six plugins because they are the most popular and widely-supported backup solutions available for WordPress today:

1. Blogvault
2. Updraft Plus
3. BackupBuddy
4. VaultPress
5. ManageWP
6. BackWPup

Let’s Find the Best WordPress Backup Plugin!

Today, let’s break the trend and get you up and running with your own independent backups, shall we?

1. Blogvault

Blogvault is an off-site backup solution that works with their WordPress plugin.

Blogvault uses a really interesting hook-based listening model which is unique from a lot of providers in the backup plugin space. What that means for you is that although backup tasks can sometimes be pretty resource-intensive and slow down your website, Blogvault won’t.

Their basic tier costs per year and has all of the following features:

• Daily Backups stored to the Amazon S3 cloud
• One-click staging sites
• 90 day backup archive
• One-click restores (they use the term “website recovery”)
• Ability to backup files outside WordPress
• Multisite support for up to 5 subsites
• GDPR Ready
• Full feature list here

I admittedly have more experience with this backup solution than any other on the list since we use Blogvault to manage all of our client backups at WP Site Care. I work with this tool every single day and the addition of the staging site creation tool is very handy for website owners who want to test a quick change without the fear of breaking their website.

Blogvault also has an integration with Dropbox so that site backups can be stored in yet one more location. They have an interesting explanation on their website for how they store data at Amazon S3. They actually maintain two full copies of every website within their datacenters.

They claim to backup over 4,000,000 websites, and I know that they’re the backbone for a very large number of WordPress web hosts to assist with automated migrations using their MigrateGuru product.

Blogvault is battle-tested at scale.

In terms of being battle-tested and holding up to the demands of scale, Blogvault is doing a phenomenal job and I’d definitely recommend them.

Anecdotally, BlogVault is the most reliable backup and restore tool we’ve ever used at WP Site Care. At a higher price point, they also have an offering specific to WooCommerce backups that performs an incremental backup any time that new data is detected on the website using that listening model that I described before. This becomes incredibly useful for ensuring critical information, such as order data, is never lost when waiting for a backup task to run.

My primary criticism for Blogvault is that none of it is particularly attractive. From the plugin to the website to the client dashboard, it all lacks a bit of polish, which can raise some doubts about the overall quality of the product. But as the saying goes, “never judge a book by its cover.” If the tradeoff is better data protection (the most reliable backup for Mac tool I’ve ever used is very ugly), that’s a trade I’m willing to make.

2. Updraft Plus

Updraft Plus is the most popular standalone backup plugin on the WordPress plugin repository with over 2 million installations. I have to add the standalone disclaimer because technically Jetpack is also a backup plugin now since it includes VaultPress (and Jetpack has over 5 million installs), but it’s an optional module. The VaultPress plugin itself only has around 80,000 total installs.

At any rate, Updraft Plus is a very popular WordPress backup solution with incredibly far reach. It operates independent of any offsite services and has direct integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and their own storage solution they call UpdraftVault, including a slew of other cloud providers.

It’s the most full-featured free backup option that we’ve worked with and includes all of the following on their free tier:

• Perform full manual website backups
• Schedule automatic full website backups
• Backup to a huge number of cloud providers
• Restore from backup (not included in other free plugins we tested)

The premium version includes backups for two websites and starts at per year for support. It also includes all of these features:

• Incremental backups
• Free 1GB of storage at UpdraftVault
• Backup files and databases outside WordPress
• Migrate Websites
• Send backups to multiple remote destinations for extra redundancy
• Download individual files from backups
• Run backups with WP-CLI (advanced feature that can be very handy)
• Encrypted backups with premium add-on
• Full feature list here

Updraft Plus is by far the most full-featured free backup solution for WordPress

In our testing, Updraft Plus performed incredibly reliably in a number of different hosting environments. Connecting to different cloud providers could be a bit of a chore, but I didn’t really see a way for that to be simplified on the Updraft Plus side. It’s primarily due to restraints and systems from the different cloud providers. Once initial setup is completed, it’s likely not something that needs to be touched again anyway.

Updraft Plus does introduce a number of relatively intrusive notices into your WordPress dashboard to promote their premium product. Thankfully, that is removed after upgrade but it’s something I wanted to mention. That said, Updraft Plus is the only truly reliable backup solution we tested that has a fully functional free backup and restore model. If the cost of a solid product and peace of mind of automatic restores is some light advertising, that seems like a fair trade to me.

Updraft Plus premium has the ability to encrypt backups which helps with GDPR compliance.

And with all of the features included in the premium offering, it’s a spend I can definitely recommend for the protection of your website.

3. BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy has a lot of similarities to Updraft Plus and several features that really make it stand out as well. First of all, I’d say that BackupBuddy is hands down the most user-friendly and attractive backup plugin of everything that we tested. They’ve clearly invested a lot into the user experience and carefully considered how normal everyday people will interact with their backup solution.

BackupBuddy is a premium plugin that starts at per year for one website and includes 1GB of storage for their proprietary storage solution Stash Live.

Besides the focus on ease-of-use, BackupBuddy has a few other features that make it stand out from the crowd:

• Ability to configure exactly what you want to backup
• Email reporting and notifications for backups
• Option to restore individual files and even view their contents
• Ability to roll back your WP database to a previous version
• Option to restore your entire website in case of catastrophic server failure
• 1GB of Stash Live
• Set data storage thresholds (automatically delete old backups when certain storage limits are met)

BackupBuddy has been around for a very long time. It’s the very first backup plugin that I ever tried when I started with WordPress. Back then (nearly a decade ago), the results could be pretty hit or miss for me, but I was on very cheap shared hosting and they’ve made significant progress in that time.

There’s nothing explicit about GDPR compliance in BackupBuddy’s marketing, though iThemes does have a GDPR policy with some additional information available. BackupBuddy Stash does encrypt backups as well.

BackupBuddy shines with its selective database restore options

BackupBuddy is now a very reliable backup solution and I appreciate the flexibility to sync data across multiple cloud providers. The idea of having backups of my website in 3 locations gives me all sorts of warm fuzzies and BackupBuddy can check that box for me.

Also, being able to roll back to previous versions of the database a la Apple Time Machine is a very welcome feature, especially when lots of managed hosts disable WordPress revisions or autosave for performance reasons.

BackupBuddy is also available at a significant discount with all of LiquidWeb’s managed hosting options since it was acquired by them last year. It’s nice to see a managed host providing tools to website owners to manage their own backups (along with the backups already included in their hosting plans).

4. VaultPress

VaultPress is another hosted WordPress backup solution much like BlogVault. VaultPress is now included in Jetpack plans and is built and maintained by Automattic, which is the company founded by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg.

From a feature set standpoint, VaultPress doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it does its job very well. The architecture of VaultPress is vastly different than Blogvault and in certain hosting environments or with high-volume eCommerce we’ve seen some strange performance issues.

VaultPress and privacy

The VaultPress website has very little information about privacy and how they store backup data. I did find a forum thread from about a year ago that references the Automattic privacy policy and shares some additional details regarding information collected when using Jetpack.

• Automattic Privacy Policy
• Jetpack Cookies and Data Collection
• What data does Jetpack Sync?

While I appreciate the transparency, none of the policies make me feel particularly great about data privacy within the Automattic ecosystem. I’m the first to admit it’s a very big problem to address, especially at their scale, but all of the legal and policy language makes it unclear to me if Jetpack/VaultPress complies with GDPR today.

VaultPress features

The core feature set of VaultPress also hasn’t changed in quite some time. In my experience, what that typically means with Automattic products is that they’ll have a full rewrite of the platform with all new branding released about the same time I hit publish on this post. They have a tendency of doing a lot of work behind-the-scenes and coming out with major product updates just when you think the product is on its last legs.

Here’s an overview of the features as they stand today:

• Automatic one-click backup restores
• Incremental backups with dashboard visuals of recent changes
• Ability to download full backups or individual files
• Backed by Automattic
• Full feature list here

For full transparency, we used VaultPress to manage our client backups for several years before switching to Blogvault. In 99% of use cases, it was super reliable and checked the most important boxes for our needs. However, there was one area where we felt they struggled …

VaultPress struggled on high-activity eCommerce sites.

The edge cases where we commonly found challenges were related to very active eCommerce sites and cheap hosting plans with limited server resources. There was more than one occasion where a busy eCommerce site crashed because of all the backup activity generated by VaultPress.

Certain inexpensive hosting options could also had reliability issues with VaultPress, although that’s a common hiccup among all of the backup solutions in this article. (Here’s my plea for you to buy better hosting!)

We started to separate from VaultPress when prices began to increase and it became a piece of a larger platform. Because WP Site Care manages and supports hundreds of client websites, we weren’t keen on the idea of requiring a separate Jetpack plan for every individual client, and frankly, we felt it was unnecessary for us to introduce the extra code from the Jetpack plugin into most of our client sites.

However, at the per year price point of the Jetpack personal plan, it’s a very hard value to beat for the individual website owner. Especially with the additional benefits like brute force and automated spam protection through Akismet (our favorite spam protection plugin).

5. ManageWP

ManageWP wasn’t designed as a backup tool from the beginning, but enough people mentioned it in my Twitter poll that I wanted to make sure it was included in this post.

To be clear, ManageWP is a website management tool. It can be used for a few WordPress websites but its primary purpose is to bulk manage WordPress updates and security for a large number of sites.

What’s interesting is that ManageWP introduced backups after significant demand from their customer base, and now we’re seeing backup providers like BackupBuddy, Blogvault, and Jetpack introduce website management tools like iThemes Sync, Website Management, and Jetpack Site Management respectively.

At a certain point, we’ll probably have full feature parity in this space, but until then let me point out a few of the things that are unique about ManageWP’s backup offering.

• Ability to choose between multiple storage regions within ManageWP
• Very inexpensive add-on for premium backup feature (starting at per month plus storage)
• All backups are managed through the ManageWP dashboard
• External backups to Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive
• 90 days of backup retention

By default, the free backups included in a ManageWP plan are stored within ManageWP’s data storage facilities, but they can also be stored with other cloud providers if you opt for the premium backup add-on.

If you need a more comprehensive site management tool that also happens to take reliable cloud backups, ManageWP fills that need very nicely.

6. BackWPup

BackWPup is the other freemium option that a lot of people mentioned in my informal Twitter poll. This WordPress plugin has over 600,000 installs, so it is very widely used and tested.

The free version of BackWPUp does not include the ability to automatically restore your WordPress files and database. So unless you’re very comfortable using manual methods to restore like PHPMyAdmin and SFTP, this may not be the right plugin for you unless you go with the premium version.

I didn’t find BackWPup particularly intuitive to use, but they do include some nice video tutorials in their onboarding screen to help people get backups up and running.

Here are the primary features included in the free version of BackWPup:

• Backup WordPress Database (reliant on specific MySQL package on your server)
• Options to store backups to FTP, Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace Cloud, and SugarSync
• Ability to condense entire backup into one individual zip file

The premium version adds the following:

• Automatic restores, even if WordPress is completely wiped out
• Ability to encrypt archives (great for the privacy-conscious)
• Restoration of encrypted backups

BackWPup doesn’t have a lot of unnecessary cruft. It’s designed to backup your WordPress files and database, and in our testing, that’s exactly what it does. The premium version is per year for one website

We didn’t have the premium version to test automatic restores, but the backups we took with the free version were fully intact after our manual restore tests.

This is a great free option for taking regular WordPress backups as long as you have the technical know-how to restore them when things go bad.

Which WordPress Backup Plugin is Best for Most People?

With a comprehensive feature set and an affordable price, we believe Blogvault is the best WordPress backup plugin for most website owners. The setup is extremely straightforward and there is essentially zero-configuration to get it up and running quickly.

For these reasons, Blogvault is our WordPress backup plugin of choice, and it is included in every one of our SiteCare plans.

Of course, as much as we love Blogvault, I want it to be crystal clear that this isn’t the backup solution for everyone. You may decide another backup solution from this list (or something we didn’t mention at all) is the right answer for you, and that’s totally fine.

The important takeaway here is that you need to get backups set up and running right away if you don’t have them in place already. Remember: You’re not relying on our webhost for backups anymore. We’ve graduated past that. Bad things do and will happen and you’ve put in too much work to let a lack of planning stop your online business in its tracks.

Our WP Site Care plans are the perfect holistic solution for not only ensuring your website is regularly backed up, but that it’s updated, secure, and has a full team of WordPress professionals behind it, ready to serve.

Have another suggestion for WordPress backups we didn’t include or aren’t sure which backup solution is right for you?
Leave a comment and we’ll be happy to help out!

The post The Best WordPress Backup Plugin appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

You know how in the movies it’s really easy to pick locks or guess computer passwords? I really could have used some movie magic to work through this massive list in order to crown the best WordPress forms plugin.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a Hollywood budget for this particular article so I put in the work instead. I was tempted to do what a lot of other articles on the internet have done — give you a listicle of the top 800 forms plugins, but I don’t want to waste your time. You’re busy and you need to walk away with a recommendation today. I’m going to deliver. I won’t let you down.

What Do I Need From a WordPress Forms Plugin?

Let’s start at the basics by talking through what exactly we should expect from a forms plugin. While scouring our customer emails here are the primary features that I saw people asking for:

• Quick and easy form creation
• Support for common fields like name, email, phone, address, website
• Support for file uploads
• Protection against spam
• Customizable email notifications
• Reliable email delivery
• Add-ons to extend functionality
• Gutenberg Compatibility

We’ll use this list of eight criteria to create a shortlist of plugins to get us one step closer to crowning a best WordPress plugin for forms.

Quick Sidebar! Why Making Recommendations is Hard

Before we dig in, I’m going to take a quick moment to share some quick facts about recommendations:

• Everybody makes them
• Many of them are uninformed
• Many more are driven by outside influences like affiliate revenue
• It’s almost impossible to rule out some sort of bias
• Recommendation mileage will always vary based on your specific needs

The bottom line is that making recommendations is a tough gig, but I’ve tried my best to craft this list in a way that puts WordPress users first. Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s get down to it!

The Starting Six

Obviously, evaluating 980 plugins is a bit much, so we’ll need to narrow things down a bit.

That’s why I’m going to eliminate 974 potential entries into our competition simply based on my personal experience troubleshooting thousands of WordPress websites over the years. As a WordPress expert, I know which plugins are reliable at scale and have a good track record of regular updates and support.

All of the following are very solid options even if they aren’t crowned “the best” in the end:

1. Caldera Forms (Freemium) – Caldera Forms is an intuitive grid-based form builder with a free option and premium upgrades like their PDF add-on and backend services for more reliable email delivery.
2. Contact Form 7 (Free) – Contact Form 7 may be the original WordPress forms plugin and is extremely popular. It also has a library of add-ons available in the WordPress plugin directory.
3. Formidable Forms (Freemium) – Formidable is a fantastic free form builder with premium add-ons to take on advanced calculations and display beautiful reports based on form submission data.
4. Gravity Forms (Premium) – Gravity Forms is unique in that it’s always been a paid plugin. It has an extensive add-on library that streamlines integrations with third-party services and software.
5. Ninja Forms (Freemium) – Ninja Forms is a simple and streamlined forms builder with powerful options and a paid extension library to take its functionality even further.
6. WPForms (Freemium) – WPForms is touted as a “beginner-friendly” forms plugin that focuses on the user experience. It provides pre-made templates (additional template available with paid upgrade) and has a marketing-focused approach to form creation.

Now that we have our candidates, let’s evaluate each one on the features we outlined earlier.

1. Quick and Easy Forms Creation

How easy is it for users to actually create forms with these plugins? Let’s find out!

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is an extremely popular plugin with over 5 million installs in the WordPress plugin directory, but its janky interface for configuring the plugin and creating forms immediately disqualifies it from contention:

In contrast, the other five forms plugins have drag and drop interfaces for simpler forms creation.

WPForms

Of all of the form builders tested, I found WPForms (above) and Gravity Forms (below) to have the most intuitive interfaces for me.

Gravity Forms

Formidable Forms

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms has a beautiful and innovative interface, but I struggled with some basic interactions.

For example, it wasn’t clear to me that I needed to hit the target area directly below the previous form field and kept dragging fields to the left and didn’t know why they wouldn’t “stick” — see below:

Caldera Forms

Caldera Forms was a bit of a struggle to use, even with the drag and drop interface available. They have included some tooltips for creating forms when first installing the plugin, which is a nice touch. But I still found it difficult to use. I’m sure with more time I’d start to get the hang of it!

Which form plugin offers the quickest and easiest form creation process?

WPForms has a slight edge over the competition when it comes to quickly creating forms for your website

2. Common Field Support

All of these plugins have a plethora of fields available and easily cover the “common fields” requirement.

• Caldera Forms – 32 fields in free plugin (including eCommerce fields)
• Ninja Forms – 30 fields in free plugin
• WPForms – 8 fields (28 after upgrade to premium)
• Formidable – 13 fields in free plugin (33 after upgrade to premium)
• Gravity Forms – 34 fields

If sheer volume of inputs is what you seek, Caldera Forms leads the pack for free variants, and Gravity Forms has the most overall. All of these plugins can have additional field types added through upgrades and add-ons.

The other thing I’d mention is that not all fields are created equal. Formidable, for example, includes a full quiz score module as part of their premium upgrade. So rather than paying attention to how many fields come bundled with each question, ask instead if the fields meet your specific needs.

At any rate, all of these plugins have a whole slew of ways for website visitors to submit their information.

Which form plugin offers the greatest common field support?

Gravity Forms has the most (and most useful) options available, so they’re the winner here.

3. Support for File Uploads

Allowing users to submit files to a website is a very common request but also a problem that’s much more complex to solve than simply adding a field to a form. There are many more considerations to make from both a security and practicality standpoint that many people overlook.

• What if someone tries to upload a malicious file through a form?
• What if the server doesn’t have much disk space?
• Should you limit the size of files that people can upload directly to your storage?

And so on…

Because of this complexity including the ability to upload files typically doesn’t exist as free option for any of these plugins with one exception, and they all have their own unique approaches to solving this problem.

• Formidable – File Uploads field available after upgrade
• Ninja Forms – File uploads available via premium add-on
• Gravity Forms – File uploads available
• WPForms – File uploads available after upgrade
• Caldera Forms – File uploads are included!

Caldera Forms is the only free option that bundles basic upload functionality in their free product.

Both Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms allow for uploading to external services like Dropbox or Amazon S3. Aside: This is the method I would recommend. It helps protect you from malicious attacks.

Which form plugin offers the best support for field uploads?

Caldera Forms wins for including this functionality for free. However, we’d like to acknowledge Ninja Forms as a very close runner up for its third-party upload support.

4. Protection Against Spam

This could be an entirely other article. In fact, we’ve already written an article about how to keep spam out of the inbox when sending an email campaign. But in this case we want to play defense and keep spam from inundating our servers and inboxes.

Forms can be a soft spot in your web defense, and many people choose to bypass them altogether and simply use email. But the pros of using forms far outweigh the cons, especially when we have the technology to protect against spam submissions. Here’s how each of our competitors performs from a spam prevention standpoint:

• WPForms – Out of the box support for an anti-spam honeypot and Google reCAPTCHA [Spam Protection: Form CAPTCHA and Honeypot]
• Caldera Forms – Spam protection available through their Pro Service – Google reCAPTCHA can be added through a third-party plugin.
• Gravity Forms – Anti-spam honeypot and native Akismet integration out of the box. – [RIP CATCHA]
• Formidable – Anti-spam honeypot, Akismet, and Google reCAPTCHA support – [Formidable Forms Spam Protection]
• Ninja Forms – Special Anti-Spam field and support for reCAPTCHA – [Stopping Form Spam]

Which form plugin offers the best protection against spam?

You can tell that all of these plugin authors think a lot about how to prevent spam for their customers. However, I give Formidable Forms the trophy for going the extra mile and integrating with two different third-party spam prevention services to keep their website owners protected.

5. Reliable and Customizable Email Notifications

Form entries are completely useless if we never find out that they were submitted. Email deliverability became such a problem with our customers that we began providing SendGrid email service to ensure reliable delivery no matter where the website is hosted. For free. It was less expensive to pay for SendGrid for our entire client base than it was for the human time and frustration cost of our team.

All of these plugins have somewhat similar methods for adding and configuring email notifications, and many of them can send notifications to lots of external services through extensions and add-ons.

From a simplicity standpoint Ninja Forms really stood out from the pack for me here. Most of the other options required navigating to a separate settings screen to configure “Confirmations and Notifications”. To this day I still have a hard time discerning the different between a confirmation and a notification without a slight pause.

Ninja Forms calls these “Emails & Actions” and integrates them directly into the form setup flow. Not only do I prefer the Emails & Actions labels (it’s a more clear distinction to me), but including it in the initial setup means that these actions aren’t an afterthought. We see these abandoned all the time, and then customers can’t figure out why they aren’t finding out that someone signed up for their newsletter.

Which form plugin offers the most reliable and customizable email notifications?

All of these plugins have solid frameworks for adding and configuring emails and confirmations, but we believe Ninja Forms really shines in this area.

6. Reliable Delivery

This isn’t necessarily something that needs to be handled by the forms plugin itself. It’s likely something that should be implemented site wide, but that hasn’t stopped these plugin authors from coming up with solutions.

• Gravity Forms – Direction integration with SendGrid, Postmark, and Mailgun
• Caldera Forms – More reliable delivery available via upgrade to their Pro Plan
• Formidable – Recommends using a third-party delivery service but doesn’t have a direct integration
• Ninja Forms – Has their own delivery service called SendWP
• WPForms – Recommends a third-party delivery servicebut doesn’t have a direct integration

Which form plugin offers the most reliable delivery?

Ensuring email delivery isn’t the job of the forms plugin, but with three separate email delivery service integrations, Gravity Forms wins this category.

7. Add-ons to Extend Functionality

All of these forms plugins approach the add-on model a little bit differently. Ninja Forms and Caldera both have a library of single-purpose add-ons you can buy in piecemeal as you need them. WPForms has a “get all the goodies or not” model where upgrading to premium unlocks lots of powerful features. Gravity Forms and Formidable Forms both offer different feature sets in distinct premium tiers. For example, Basic, Pro, and Elite from Gravity Forms.

Suffice it to say that with premium upgrades and add-ons, these forms plugins can become extremely powerful software ecosystems.

• Need to take payments for a class you’re offering? Done.
• Need to accept guest posts to your blog but don’t want to give people logins? Done.
• How about getting a Text or Slack notification when someone completes a form on your site? We can do that too.

Your imagination is more or less the limit when it comes to creating full interactive workflows on your website. Gravity Forms even has a commercial ecosystem outside of its ecosystem with products like Gravity PDF and GravityView.

• WPForms – 20+ Premium Features including their Conversational Forms Add-on. That single add-on replaces a + per year service like Typeform.
• Caldera Forms – 27 premium add-ons are available through their add-on library. Interesting add-on includes the ability to sell Easy Digital Downloads products with Caldera Forms.
• Formidable – 30+ premium feature add-ons in their Elite package – As far as I could tell, Formidable was the only plugin with a Hubspot integration.
• Ninja Forms – 42 premium add-ons gives Ninja Forms a huge catalog of single-use forms additions. It also has some really interesting CRM integrations with OnePage, Capsule, and Zoho.
• Gravity Forms – 43 premium add-ons gives Gravity Forms the largest catalogue of premium adding of any forms builder. Its Survey and Poll add-ons are extremely robust and bring entirely new feature sets to a website.

There’s a good deal of overlap across all of the add-ons from one plugin to another. It’s interesting to watch how they differentiate and add new functionality or services to position themselves for success.

Which form plugin offers the best add-ons for extended functionality?

Gravity Forms has the largest add-on library (by a very small margin) and it boasts a surrounding ecosystem of products like GravityPDF and GravityView.

8. Gutenberg Compatibility

I added this criteria not long before publishing this post because it’s 2019 and WordPress 5.0 has been out for over three months now. Even though it’s been released for a while, I still suspected some potential issues with these forms plugins and the new block editor in WordPress.

I have to say that generally speaking I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t know how well-integrated these plugins would be with the new block editor in WordPress, but only one didn’t support Gutenberg by default.

• WPForms – Gutenberg compatible. WPForms includes its own “Widget” block to allow easy insert of forms into your post and pages. How to Use WPForms with Gutenberg
• Caldera Forms – Gutenberg compatible. Caldera Forms also natively supports Gutenberg as a “Common Block”. Add a Contact Form in the WordPress Editor
• Gravity Forms – Mostly Compatible – Gravity Forms requires installing a separate plugin for Gutenberg compatibility. It’s currently a Release Candidate and will likely be included in the main plugin before long. Interestingly Gravity Forms is an “Embed” block. WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg, and Gravity Forms
• Ninja Forms – Ninja Forms has full Gutenberg support out of the box and includes itself as a “Common Block”. Exploring the New Gutenberg Editor
• Formidable Forms – Formidable Forms also has native block editor support. It’s included as a widget block. Introducing the New Form Block

This has to be a four-way tie because all of the implementations are very similar (from a user standpoint) and there aren’t any glaring omissions. Gravity Forms has to be left out of the winner circle here for now because it requires additional setup for compatibility.

Which form plugin offers the greatest compatibility with Gutenberg?

It’s a four-way tie! Formidable Forms, WPForms, Caldera Forms, and Ninja Forms are all natively compatible with the Gutenberg block editor.

And the winner is… Gravity Forms!

Overall, I believe that Gravity Forms is still the best WordPress forms plugin for most people. This plugin came out on top in multiple categories and are highly competitive in every place except for Gutenberg compatibility, which is solved easily.

Reflections on the future of WordPress form plugins

One thing I discovered during this evaluation is that the race is closer than it’s ever been. I’m incredibly encouraged by the progress in this space over the past few years. There’s clearly some heavy competition, and the end result is more powerful and attractive tools for all of us as customers.

Also, I don’t typically like to make predictions, but we need to acknowledge WPForms, which has more or less exploded onto the scene. If they can maintain the trajectory they’re on now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get the crown the next time we revisit this topic.

That said, you really can’t go wrong with any of the options we compared in this post, so when choosing your plugin, start by asking where your values lie:

• Are you looking for something free and easy for a hobby project?
• Do you need a very specific third-party integration?
• How important are forms to the success of your business?
• Where do you see the company behind the plugin in the next 3, 5, 10 years?

What do you value in your WordPress forms plugins? Any that you really love to use that I didn’t mention? Anything else I missed? Let’s have a conversation in the comments!

The post The Best WordPress Plugin for Forms appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.

The WordPress.org repository currently houses 55,288 plugins, and that doesn’t include any premium plugins!

The good news is that we don’t need to stay on top of every single addition and subtraction at WordPress.org to find a solid plugin when the need arises. Here are five easy steps find the best WordPress plugins for your website.

Step 1: Find out when the plugin was last updated

The “freshness” of a WordPress plugin isn’t necessarily an indicator of its quality. In fact, sometimes a plugin that’s updated too frequently can be a sign of an amateur developer trying to keep their head above water by submitting emergency hotfixes.

I also continue to use many WordPress plugins that haven’t been updated in several years. Shout out to Menu Social Icons!

That said, a plugin that’s been updated recently is a good indication that the plugin is being maintained and will be updated in the future. Make sure your plugins are fresh before adding them to your website!

You can easily find the freshness info by looking at the plugins profile page on WordPress.org (see screenshot above). If you want bonus points you can get really nerdy and look at progress in the development log.

Step 2: Check the number of active installations

Directly below the “Last Updated” data, you’ll find a number for active installations. This is how many websites worldwide currently have the plugin activated (ballpark estimate).

When deciding whether or not to use a plugin on your own website, find plugins that have a higher active installation number.

More active installations mean the plugin is popular and probably has a nice feature set. Perhaps even more importantly, it means that the plugin has been tested in lots of strange scenarios and is less likely to break your website or have compatibility issues.

The most popular plugins on the WordPress repository like Jetpack and Yoast SEO have over 5 million installations each!

Step 3: Understand the plugin rating system

A few years ago the WordPress.org team enhanced the plugin ratings system and it’s become incredibly useful. Don’t install anything with 2-stars or below. And proceed with caution when you see 3-star reviews.

But also don’t be frightened by isolated one-star reviews. Sometimes people are bad and leave unsolicited bad reviews for no reason.

This fellow left a one-star review because he disagreed with the premise of the plugin. It didn’t cause problems. It didn’t have bugs. But because he believed it shouldn’t have been created in the first place, he left a 1-star review. Sad.

Context and content matter. If you see a plugin with a few 1-star reviews, and a few hundred 5-star reviews, you can install that plugin with confidence.

Step 4: Is the support forum active?

The WordPress.org support forum is very active. Thousands of topics and replies are posted daily, so I don’t like to see forums that are too quiet, specifically on the plugin author side.

To be clear, if no one is actually posting support requests at all, that’s great! It’s super rare, but it probably means that the plugin “just works”.

Even for the super simple plugins, we’ll often see requests from people wanting the plugin to be extended or to do more than the plugin author intended.

If you see a support forum with lots of requests and zero replies, that’s usually a bad sign and indicates the developer no longer supports the plugin. Or even if support isn’t officially discontinued, they’re simply too busy to give adequate attention to plugin users.

The support area on the Classic Editor plugin is very active with lots of replies to every request. This is the type of pattern you want to see with any plugin you consider adding to your website.

Step 5: Ask a WordPress expert

If you’ve followed the first four steps and you’re still unsure of whether or not a plugin is right for your website, I recommend flipping a coin!

OK, don’t flip a coin. Instead, ask some of the trusted experts around you for advice. If you don’t have a trusted circle to reach out to, our team is happy to help and you can contact us anytime.

But before asking for guidance, spend time figuring out exactly the problem you’re trying to solve. If you can clearly articulate what you need your website to do, and can also present 3 or 4 options that you’ve found in your research, the pros around you will really appreciate the work that you’ve put in and will point you in the right direction.

Bonus Round: What about premium plugins?

Knowing whether or not a premium WordPress plugin is going to be well-built and reliable is a lot more difficult to gauge. We have several included in our list of best WordPress plugins.

And even though the data might not be quite as transparent, I’d give the same guidance when evaluating premium plugins.

1. Is the plugin actively developed? Even if no public changelog is available, you should still see plenty of activity on the company’s blog and social media accounts.
2. While active installation numbers won’t be publicly available, there are still some indicators you can use. For example, a Google Search for Gravity Forms returns 412,000,000 results, where Ninja Forms returns 59,300,000. Those certainly aren’t active install numbers, but it’s at least an indication of popularity.
3. Ratings are going to be tricky. Lots of online reviews for premium plugins are going to be driven by affiliate marketers. Your mileage may vary when seeking out reviews for premium plugins.
4. Most premium plugin providers put their support behind some type of paywall, but there are still plenty of open forums. You can also submit help requests before purchasing the plugin to get a sense of how responsive the company is and their interest level in helping out their customers.

How do you evaluate WordPress plugins? Got any tips or tricks to share for finding the best plugins out there? Hit us up in the comments!

The post How to Choose a WordPress Plugin in 5 Easy Steps appeared first on WordPress Support & Optimization Specialists.