If you look at when the idea of blogging started and where it is now – the difference is quite stark. In the early days, blog posts consisted mostly of text and an occasional image. Maybe, just maybe there was a custom-styled button or a submission form, but for the most part – blog pages were plain and bland.

These days things are a bit different. With the evolution of browser features and the rise of technical CSS and JavaScript capabilities – the average blogger can go to great lengths at making their blog, and blog posts, feel both unique and authentic.

It’s arguably one of the reasons why WordPress has remained so popular.

Being able to browse a directory of hundreds of custom block plugins gives bloggers plenty of opportunities to make their blog post designs stand out from the rest. But before we got into the nitty-gritty parts of the article, let’s answer the following question first.

What determines a blog post is creative?

Typically, creativity is achieved when you start adding a personal touch to your blog posts. It could be something as simple as a background color for headings. But, it could also be more complex – such as custom table designs, interactive images, galleries, and much more.

But, there is another aspect of content creation, which is the type of things you write and blog about. The traditional approach to blogging is to write informative blog posts, with numerous headlines either explaining a topic or answering questions related to that topic. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but as a blogger – this will sooner or later start to become boring and tedious.

The image above is a good example of how colors and other layouts elements can be used to add a little bit of life to your blog content. And thanks to WordPress Blocks – we can achieve similar results without needing to write any code ourselves.

How important is it to use creative design elements?

If we look at the current data, there are millions of blog posts being published daily. In fact, the exact number is right around 5 million blog posts – published every single day.

And because blogging is so popular, it takes a little creative touch to stand out.

If all the blogs looked the same, it would be quite difficult to weed out information that is of low quality. So, to summarize, creative design elements play a significant role in ensuring that readers feel like they can trust the information you provide. Because, unless you have an established following – one of the main ways of attracting readership is specifically through design that you apply to your content.

How to get started with WordPress blocks

Chances are, you’re already familiar with the WordPress Gutenberg editor.

It is, after all, the default editor for all WordPress blogs. So, it’s safe to assume that you already know how to use the basic blocks that WordPress provides by default.

By default, there are probably around 20 usable blocks that WordPress provides out of the box. I would imagine that some of these you’re using on a daily basis, already.

You can do things like line breaks (see above) to divide different sections of your article.

You can also do things like creating a list:

• Lists are typically used to highlight a lot of features at once.
• But, they can also be used to highlight important talking points.
• Some bloggers use lists to summarize their talking points at the end of a blog post.

Recently, WordPress has also added the option to create buttons, like so:

Last but not least, you can also do full-scale text overlays for images:

An example of the WP Media Text Block.

– FameThemes

Just with these aforementioned elements alone, you can start making your blog posts feel more authentic. But, unfortunately, as for the default blocks provided by WordPress – this is also just about as far as it goes. It’s enough to get you started, but not exactly sufficient to give you total creative freedom.

So, what is the solution? In this case, the solution is to use WordPress block plugins. There are dozens of fantastic choices available in the WordPress plugin repository. And each one is built to provide unique concepts of design elements that you can insert into your blogs using the Blocks interface.

WordPress Block Plugins: The Best Picks for Creative Elements

So, this next section is dedicated entirely to highlighting the best WordPress block plugins. We’ll do a brief introduction and a review for each one, but ultimately you can browse each of the plugins on your own to see the full repertoire of elements that they provide.

#1: CoBlocks

CoBlocks was one of the first WordPress blocks plugins once Gutenberg was released. And, since then the plugin has amassed a whopping half a million users, which speaks volumes for the quality of blocks the plugin provides. It is also my personal recommendation, and I use it on all WordPress sites I manage.

Here are some of the creative design elements this plugin provides:

• A compact “click to tweet” button to help you engage your readers.
• Notification blocks (alerts, notices, warnings, etc.).
• Text highlight – wrap a text around a specific color to highlight it.
• Shape Divider – a custom block to help you create creative dividers. E.g. A full-width divider that looks like a shape pattern. Very popular in modern design.

And a lot more! One interesting note about CoBlocks is that it is also possible to use it to design full-scale pages and not just blog posts. Since GoDaddy acquired the plugin, the developers have been pushing out more features to integrate the plugin with what WordPress calls Full Site Editing.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/coblocks/

#2: Qubely

The Qubely plugin features more than 30 unique blocks – each with a custom design and a variety of customization options. Getting started is as simple as grabbing the plugin and going to your post editor. From there, you can start adding blocks like creative buttons, timeline events, a Table of Contents widget, social media icons, and various card-based elements.

In terms of improving blog posts, Qubely stands out with features to style your headings, but also its integrated grid features. A custom grid can help you rearrange the way that certain content appears inside your blog posts. Think of the “media text” example we saw earlier, but with a lot more flexibility.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/qubely/

#3: Essential Blocks

Is it necessary to have more than one or two blocks plugins? Well, it depends. In my opinion, it is nice to have alternatives. And as is the case with these types of plugins – each one is based on a completely different design structure. And, where Essential Blocks is concerned – it is also a lightweight plugin.

As such, adding it to your site on top of other plugins won’t take up so many resources. In terms of the block variety, the Essential Blocks plugin includes elements like flip boxes, image comparison, informative blocks, notices, and advanced headings.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/essential-blocks/

#4: GutenBee

And finally, we have the GutenBee – a refined toolkit of WordPress blocks that will leave a lasting impression on your readers. Not to be confused with the Antispam Bee plugin we discussed in our WordPress spam prevention article. I guess both developers just happened to like bees!

One of the things that GutenBee provides is blocks specific to creating presentable blog posts. So, blocks like tabbed content, food menu, accordions, galleries, and reviews will help you emphasize the things you love to write about the most.

Once you add any of the blocks to a blog post – you’ll gain access to a fully-featured customization panel. From there, you can adjust colors, fonts, positioning, and many other presentation options.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/gutenbee/

Closing words

It’s safe to say there is no “one for all” recipe when it comes to creativity. In the context of blocks, you have to consider a number of things. First of which is the type of WordPress theme you’re using.

The initial web design of your site is going to play a significant role in which blocks integrate the best in your articles and blog posts. And second, you need to consider what it is that you’re writing about on a daily basis. If it is news posts – then having a way to highlight text is going to be useful.

And if it is articles with a lot of discussion points, in that case, you’re going to need a Table of Contents at the very least. My recommendation is to also explore what other bloggers are doing with their sites. You don’t have to copy everything “word by word” – but yielding some inspiration can go a long way.

The post How to Use WordPress Blocks for Creative Blog Posts appeared first on FameThemes.

Fortunately, it only takes a few steps to configure your WordPress site so that it becomes resilient against comments of unnatural nature. And this article will discuss in detail how to prevent spam comments, which plugins to use, and whether you should consider alternative comment systems.

Let’s answer the following question first, though.

Why do blogs get spam comments?

We live in 2022, and yet blog spam is as present as it ever has been. Sometimes I think to myself that someone simply forgot to turn off their automated tools many years ago. Because, in reality, the benefits of bombarding sites with poorly written comments are practically non-existent.

Still, here are the two main reasons blogs get spammed:

• Spammers want to increase the number of websites pointing (backlinks) to their site, hoping that it will increase their SEO rankings.
• Shady marketers use spamming techniques to try and attract customers to their products.

The first reason, despite its popularity, is quite laughable. Google has long devalued links that are tagged with tags such as “ugc” and “nofollow”. And, as we know, WordPress by default marks all links as nofollow when they are shared in a comment.

The example screenshot above shows a small variety of comments you might get from spammers. The pattern is immediately visible. The comments are mostly pointing back to malicious software websites, casino platforms, or otherwise services that are not to be trusted.

Above all, letting such comments slip through leaves a bad impression on your site visitors.

This brings me to my next point.

Is it worth having a comment section?

If you have been actively involved with websites over the last 10 years, you’ll know that blog comments are slowly fading away. Platforms like Twitter and Reddit have become the go-to platforms for having conversations, and fewer people are leaving comments on published blog content.

It used to be that blogs were written specifically for readers. And those blogs would naturally attract comments and engaging discussions. And while such blogs are still out there, it is worth asking yourself if you need a comment section at all.

You could very well move your entire discussion environment to a site like Twitter. And, in turn, encourage your site visitors to join a discussion there. Which would also help you grow your social media following.

It’s just a thought, of course, but one worth considering.

How to prevent spam in WordPress comments

The following section is dedicated entirely to various methods you can apply to start dealing with spam effectively. We’re going to focus on 3 different techniques: using in-built tools from WordPress, activating a plugin, and lastly – exploring the option of using 3rd-party comment systems.

Setting up the correct Discussion Settings

The very first thing you can do is go to your WordPress dashboard. From there, navigate to Settings and select Discussion Settings. This will open up a panel where you can customize a variety of options for how you wish comments to be managed on your site.

The setting of interest here is under the “Before a comment appears” option. Here you want to tick the checkbox that says, “Comment author must have a previously approved comment”. It will do exactly what it says. Once you save the settings, any new comments on your site will be held for moderation.

You can go a step further and also tick the box that says that comments must be manually approved. In fact, the latter option is quite popular among reputable publisher platforms. It is a good alternative to having a plugin that automatically detects spam, however – you will need to check each comment manually, including all the spammy ones. It can turn into quite a lot of work!

So, it is highly recommended to use a plugin. And for this purpose, we have two solid choices.

Using plugins to prevent spam

The advantage of using a plugin is that you can automate the entire spam detection process. But, what are the best plugins for the job? Over the years, things have changed slightly in the WordPress plugin ecosystem. A lot of the plugins that once were “free” are now crippled with freemium and pro plans that have a limited number of features unless you pay up.

So, our goal is to highlight the plugins that can help protect you against spam for free.

Here are the picks.

#1: Akismet

The one and only Akismet Spam Protection plugin. Brought to you by the same lovely people who built WordPress in the first place. Now, Akismet is a fantastic solution. There is no question. However, in recent years they have shifted their model a little bit. It is free to use the plugin only on non-commercial sites!

So, if you show advertisements or promote affiliate links on your site – you (technically) have to become a paid customer. However, it’s worth noting that Akismet does not enforce this overly strictly. As long as your site doesn’t get millions of spam requests every day – you should be in the clear.

Once you download and activate the plugin, you’ll need to obtain a unique API key from Akismet. This process is automated inside your WordPress dashboard. Follow along the steps to create an Akismet account, get your API key, and then activate it inside the plugin. That’s it. Your comments will now be automatically moderated, and of course, protected against spam!

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/

#2: Antispam Bee

Our second recommendation is the Antispam Bee plugin. Because the plugin is completely open-source, it means you will never need to worry about any licenses. Use it on both commercial and non-commercial sites as you please.

Let’s look at some of the features that Antispam Bee provides in the fight against spam:

• You can disable comments in any language other than the one you prefer to use.
• You can create a pre-approved database of trusted commenters.
• Add custom indicators that can automatically judge whether a comment is spam.

And other custom features. Overall, the goal of Antispam Bee is to help you customize a list of settings and regulations that will determine whether a comment is spam or not.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/antispam-bee/

Comment systems with in-built spam protection

It’s unlikely that the concept of “spamming” websites is going to go away any time soon. For people who do it, even a 0.01% success rate can be considered “worth the effort”. But, as a website owner – you’re the one having to deal with all that noise directly. So, an alternative is to use a comment system that does a lot of the heavy lifting on your behalf. Here are some of our recommendations.

Jetpack

Jetpack is yet another plugin built by the original WordPress team. And, the plugin comes with its own custom comment system which is based on the type that is used on WordPress.com websites.

The nice thing about Jetpack is that it provides a lot more than just an alternative commenting solution. The plugin covers areas like website security, backup management, migration, and other useful features.

And since Akismet is also part of Jetpack – you can rest assured that spam will be dealt with the right way.

Disqus

Disqus is one of the more refined commenting systems. It is completely separate from WordPress and requires you to create an account on their platform. It is nonetheless an incredibly popular system that is used by both publishers, bloggers, and everyday writers.

The WordPress plugin lets you embed Disqus comments directly as a replacement for the native WordPress commenting system. The advantage of Disqus is that it supports a variety of login methods, including a Disqus account but also social media profiles.

In fact, adding Disqus to your site can have some great benefits in regard to discussions. Because people already have an account, they might feel more inclined to comment on your site since it won’t require them to write out their personal details.

And, as is outlined in their documentation – Disqus implements a custom-made spam protection software. All in all, it’s not a commenting system known for being invaded by spammers.

Conclusion

All in all, this article covered all there is to know about fighting back against spammers. The in-built tools from WordPress are decent, but certainly not exhaustive. And, we also looked at some other options that you can consider if you feel like the default comments system is too plain, or simply too easy to attack.

In fact, if you use something like the Wordfence security plugin – you’ll get frequent alerts when your blog starts attracting unsavory commenters. In other words, spammers. At the very least, you can block out the most commonly known IP addresses and then let the plugins mentioned in this article do the rest.

The post How to Stop Spam Comments in WordPress appeared first on FameThemes.

And, in this article, we are going to cover multiple use cases on how to add or remove code from a WordPress site.

One of the reasons people love WordPress so much is because it requires little to no technical expertise. In fact, with the addition of blocks and full-site editing, website builders, and custom themes – you can go about using WordPress without ever worrying about needing to know how to program.

However, there are those few pesky use cases where you might need to know it. Take for example a custom button design. It’s very rare for WordPress themes to offer the ability to change details of a button element unless you go ahead and do it yourself. And, in this case, the solution would be to use the in-built Customizer feature and add Additional CSS.

You can access the Additional CSS code editor by first going to your WordPress homepage. You need to be logged in. Then, from the admin toolbar select Customise, and on the bottom-left of the sidebar, select Additional CSS. This will open a new panel where you can type in custom CSS snippets that will change the appearance of your site.

If you're looking for a theme that lets you customize your WordPress site without writing any code - check out our theme collection. All of FameThemes designs include robust and comprehensive tools to help you style and design site elements through in-built site editing features.

But, ultimately, where CSS is concerned – it is only useful to modify the visual appearance of your site. So, the question is – what other options are there to edit code? One of the more efficient ways is to use the official Theme File Editor. This option is available from the admin dashboard by going to the Appearance -> Theme File Editor tab.

Once you go to this page, you will see a screen just like the one shown above. So, this is also where you can do more in-depth optimization of your site by either adding or removing code snippets. And, to be fair – a lot of the tutorials online provide plenty of copy & paste solutions, so even if you’re not familiar with PHP or HTML – editing and adding pre-written code should be easy enough.

Let’s look at a specific example.

How to change the footer copyright text

Every single WordPress theme has an in-built copyright text, which says either “Powered by WordPress” or “Powered by {the theme you’re using}”.

For some people, it’s not a problem to leave that text there while others want to remove it to add a custom message at the footer. So, how exactly can you edit the code to change it yourself?

If you go back to the Theme File Editor, on this page you will see a list of files on the right-hand side. These are all the files that are included in your WordPress theme. And the specific file we want to edit is footer.php – the file that contains the footer copyright information.

In our case, when we open the file we are looking for a line that looks something like this:

<div class="site-info">
<p>
<?php printf( esc_html__( 'Copyright &copy; %1$s %2$s. All Rights Reserved.', 'boston' ), date('Y'), get_bloginfo( 'name' ) ); ?>
</p>
</div><!-- .site-info -->

This code is what shows the copyright text while also displaying the name of your blog. You have two options here:

1. You can remove it completely.
2. You can change it to display something else.

For the sake of the demo, we are going to change the snippet to a basic HTML footer that links back to our website.

<div class="site-info">
<p>
Copyright &copy; <a href="https://famethemes.com/">FameThemes</a>
</p>
</div><!-- .site-info -->

You can then copy and paste this back inside the footer.php file and click Update File. That’s it. Now your WordPress footer text will be what you specified for it to be. Worth noting is that this is a rather primitive example because most modern WordPress themes let you edit the footer text directly from the Customizer panel. (The same one where you can also customize the CSS as we saw earlier.)

Last but not least, we don’t recommend leaving your Update File function enabled at all times. It is a well-known WordPress security risk, and you can read our article on the topic to learn how to mitigate it.

Add HTML code with Gutenberg Blocks

The Gutenberg Editor uses a Blocks-based interface for writing and editing blog posts. And, one of the Gutenberg blocks is specific to adding HTML code to your pages. This HTML can be anything from a custom layout you saw on another website or a snippet that adds a creative style element you copy and pasted from a tutorial.

From your WordPress post editor dashboard, you can click on the + sign to open the available Blocks. Then select Custom HTML – and if the option isn’t there, you can search for “HTML” to find it.

This will add a new block that lets you type raw HTML inside of it. If it is a “creative” element, remember that you will need to specify the custom CSS for it, as well. And this can be done with the method we showed earlier.

How to add code snippets with a plugin

Understandably, for beginners, it might seem daunting to try and understand how code editing works in WordPress. So, if you want to avoid the risk of breaking something, an alternative solution is to use a plugin. And for adding code snippets to your WordPress blog, there is none better than the Code Snippets plugin.

The basic premise of the plugin is that it lets you add PHP code snippets without needing to edit the functions.php file manually. So, if you have been reading a tutorial about customizing WordPress but are not sure how to add the code yourself, this plugin will help to mitigate the issue.

Conclusion

Just from a few examples, you now know how to edit CSS, HTML, and PHP code in your WordPress site. What you wish to add or remove is dependent on your particular needs. As we mentioned earlier, popular website builders like Elementor and Visual Composer provide extensive tools to help you customize your site without needing to write any code.

But, there are definitely quite a few specific cases where knowing how to do it is going to come in handy. Even for simple things like applying verification snippets for various services, or adding the Google Analytics code to your website.

The post How to Edit Code in WordPress appeared first on FameThemes.

In late 2021, a group of Vietnamese security researchers reported an SQL injection attack in the WordPress WP_Query function. This left millions of blogs and websites exposed to potential attacks that could lead to customer data being stolen and worse. The WordPress 5.8.3 version rectified this attack, which is why it is so important to keep your site up-to-date at all times.

The fact of the matter is, that there could be dozens of similar vulnerabilities out in the wild. So, in a sense, the goal is not to achieve an impenetrable website. Rather, you should aim to implement certain security features and precautions to ensure that hackers have a hard time accessing sensitive data, for example – your admin dashboard.

Is WordPress a Secure Blogging Platform?

On a fundamental level, WordPress can be considered a secure platform. Even though it has had certain vulnerabilities found in its core system, it doesn’t have a bad track record of security issues. The bigger problem is that WordPress users themselves don’t follow even the most practical security precautions.

Here are some of the things to look out for:

• Pirated themes and plugins tend to be riddled with scripts and other hidden code that can hijack your website.
• Using outdated plugins which haven’t been updated in 3+ years.
• Adding plugins or themes to your site from untrustworthy sources.
• Leave features like “Site Editing” enabled which can lead to instant hijack with only your WordPress login information alone.

So, ultimately, to keep WordPress secure you have to be mindful of the choices you make in regard to using external features.

What Are the Most Common Types of Website Attacks?

If you look at the most common vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, that list is too long to even begin talking about. So, rather than assuming your website is vulnerable to everything, we need to look at vulnerabilities that are most commonly exploited on WordPress sites.

• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) – This allows attackers to hijack your cookie data and in turn give them access to your admin dashboard.
• SQL Injection – A more sophisticated attack that can be exploited to steal user data directly from the database. Furthermore, this attack can be used to alter data (such as changing the password or email).
• Bruteforce (Login) – A common type of attack on WordPress sites is when bad actors try to brute-force the password of the admin account. This alone makes it important to use secure passwords!
• Outdated Software (Themes & Plugins) – The first two attacks will have a much higher success rate unless you frequently update your WordPress version and that of your plugins and themes.

A lot of these attacks can be circumvented by applying the security tips outlined in this article. Keep reading to learn more.

Is Your Website at Risk of Being Hacked?

If you implement the tips below, you should significantly reduce the risk of having your WordPress website hacked. The way in which modern attacks work is that hackers will typically mass target a large number of sites at once. Using tools and software to scan the site for potential vulnerabilities.

So, if you’re more technically savvy – you might see things like unusual requests in your Apache2 access logs. In fact, there are numerous WordPress plugins that provide detailed logs about the requests being made to your site. And, while this may look alarming at first – it’s really just hackers looking for cheap ways to try and break into your site.

More often than not, such requests are harmless. Especially if you use the correct combination of tools and plugins to mitigate all risks.

How to Optimize WordPress Security

The following tips can be implemented in less than a minute each. And, what is a few minutes of your time in exchange for peace of mind, anyway?

#1: Change the Default Login URL

All new WordPress websites have the same Login Page URL for the admin dashboard, and it is located at /wp-admin/. So, it comes as no surprise that hackers can easily launch brute-force attacks on any given WordPress site.

One way to fix this would be to limit login attempts. However, the best solution for avoiding brute-force attacks is to change the login URL entirely. And this can be done with a plugin such as WPS Hide Login.

Once you have the plugin installed and activated:

• Go to the admin dashboard on your WordPress site.
• Navigate to Settings -> General.
• Scroll down to the bottom of the settings and find the Login URL input form.
• Type in a secret word or phrase to use as your new Login URL.

What this means is that the next time you log in to your dashboard, you will need to use the new secret word you specified instead of the default wp-admin page. So, make sure to save that word somewhere safe!

#2: Enable Auto Updates for WordPress & Plugins

There is hardly ever a scenario in which you would disable automatic updates to the latest WordPress version. In your admin dashboard, you should be able to see the status of this by going to Dashboard -> Updates.

Now, things get a little bit trickier when it comes to auto-updating themes and plugins. First off, a theme update can potentially break the design of your site unless you are using a child theme.

A child theme means that whatever changes you make to your site design will remain within the child theme itself, so whenever you update your theme – the child theme will remain intact. At the very least, you should have a backup of your theme (see below for recommendations) if you do plan to apply an update.

In order to auto-update WordPress plugins, you have to do enable it manually for each plugin. So, head over to Plugins -> Installed Plugins from your dashboard. On this page, on the right-hand side, you will see the option to “Enable auto-updates” which are turned off by default.

Auto-updates are particularly important for plugins with millions of active users (Yoast, Elementor, Akismet, etc.) because if one of them is exposed to an attack – it means millions of sites are once are vulnerable.

#3: Enable Backups

Backups don’t just provide a layer of security against your site being hijacked. A backup can be a life-saver in situations where you accidentally lose data and have no means to recover it.

Besides, not having a backup and losing access to your content can mean days of hard work to try and salvage it through external channels.

Our recommendation for a WordPress backup solution is UpdraftPlus Backups.

The plugin has over 3 million active users. And it makes it effortless to set up automated backups which can also be sent to a remote location, such as your email, once complete. It also includes the option to upload your backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, and other services, too.

#4: Disable File Editing

Let’s imagine a hypothetical scenario where a hacker has gained access to your WordPress admin account. Other than tarnishing your blog posts, what else could they potentially do?

1. Insert malicious scripts in the header or footer section of the site using the WordPress Customizer feature.
2. Modify your theme and plugin files by inserting scripts that can give them file system access.
3. Upload plugins or themes and activate them to execute an attack.

Now, number 1 and 3 can be rectified by using a security plugin (see below) but number 2 is up to you to manage. In other words, to avoid hackers from tampering with your files – disable the file editor feature.

You can disable file editing in WordPress by adding the following snippet to your wp-config.php file (located in the root directory of your WordPress site):

 define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);

You can further improve this security aspect by modifying the file permissions on your hosting account.

The official WordPress documentation site has already provided a detailed explanation on how to do it: read here.

#5: Install a Security Plugin

For additional peace of mind, getting a security plugin is going to go a long way. We recommend the Wordfence Security plugin which has over 5 million users and is an absolute household name in the website security sphere. But more than that, Wordfence does a really good job at automatic certain security checks, such as malware scanning and potential exploit detection.

One of the things that make Wordfence unique is that the brand behind the plugin is an actual security company. Their business model is to help protect website owners from attackers, and they do it through a variety of unique features, only available through the plugin.

• Custom firewall based on a database of well-known attackers.
• Automated malware scanner which checks for common attacks like malware, code manipulation, content editing, and spam.
• Checks your themes and plugins against the official code found on the WordPress.org website!
• Gives you the option to enable Two-factor authentication (2FA).

And a lot more! To get started, you can activate the plugin and run your first scan. This should give you plenty of starting points to start adding some serious security features to your WordPress site.

Conclusion

So, to conclude – improving WordPress security is a matter of choice. And why shouldn’t you? It’s bad enough if attackers are able to steal your sensitive information, then imagine having to deal with your site users and customers who also had their data stolen! It’s a nightmare scenario.

And, as we learned throughout the various tips – it’s not even that hard to add hardened security measures. The thing about a lot of the “hacker” type people is that they rely on automated tools which often contain outdated and poorly structured attacks.

As such, by doing things like changing your admin URL or blocking file editing – you practically solve 99% of your security problems with those steps alone.

The post 5 Tips to Help You Improve WordPress Security appeared first on FameThemes.

Though, it’s no secret that WordPress doesn’t do this out of the box. As such, if you’re a WordPress user – you will have to find an alternative solution to add website analytics to your blog.

And in this article, we will explain why analytics are important, but also talk about GDPR, cookie notices, and our recommendations for the best analytics platforms out there.

Why are website analytics important?

Website analytics provides you with the means to understand why visitors come to your site. But, also, where do they come from (referral sources), and which pages are being visited the most. Just by knowing which specific content on your site is performing the best, you can adjust your strategy to produce similar content in the future.

Likewise, analytics can provide data such as how long a visitor is staying on your pages. If you see that the bounce rate is extremely high, you can make adjustments and improve the page so that visitors don’t immediately leave your site.

In this example, we have a website that has gotten 23,000 unique visitors in the last 28 days. Out of those, around 20,000 bounced (left the website without visiting other pages). And, on top of that, session duration was also relatively low – only 40ish seconds. This report alone can inspire you to take a hard look at why this is happening.

Another important reason to use website analytics is the ability to monitor acquisition channels. In other words, be able to see which websites, social platforms, and search engines that send you website traffic.

This is useful information because it gives you an overview of who is talking about the content that you’re publishing. And, in the long run, it gives you an opportunity to build relationships with other bloggers and content producers who have shared your content.

Additionally, website analytics can shed light on things like:

• What is the primary device users use to come to your website? E.g. Desktop or Mobile.
• Conversion goals. E.g. Does a user check your product page after visiting a blog post?
• From which countries do people visit your website the most? This can give you insight into whether you should add localization to translate your content into other languages.

And last but not least, website analytics is important if you ever plan to do advertising on your site. The only way to prove the legitimacy of your traffic and site popularity is directly through analytics.

Analytics & GDPR

So, now that we know why analytics are important, let’s talk about another equally as important topic, and that’s GDPR. The General Data Protection Regulation is an EU law specification that aims to protect the privacy of visitors coming to your website. The sole purpose of GDPR is to ensure that users have the choice to opt-out of being tracked.

This law can be quite confusing, even for law experts! So, let me break it down in simple language.

If you use an analytics platform such as Google Analytics on your website, you must provide a cookie notice which implicates that you’re tracking user data. You have to do this because Google Analytics is a US-based service, and according to GDPR – for any sensitive data about EU citizens to be stored in the US, the EU citizen has to give permission for it.

That’s the general gist of it.

At the very least, you will need to use a cookie notice plugin and generate a privacy policy page. In WordPress, you can go to Settings -> Privacy from the admin dashboard to generate a Privacy Policy template.

Do you need to show a cookie notice?

You can’t go further than a handful of websites to see that every single one has a “cookie notice” popular or modal box added to it. The goal of this notice is to ensure that users give consent to be tracked as required by GDPR.

Now, for some websites, the notice is quite small and doesn’t provide any checkboxes to tick. But for larger publications, such as news sites, you’re often asked to consent to specific tracking methods. This is because that data is then used to serve you advertisements and other promotional media.

But, the real question is – can you avoid adding a cookie notice to a website? Well, the short answer is yes, you can. However, this is only possible by using privacy-friendly analytics platforms. Or, as an alternative, you use a platform that is hosted inside the EU, and all the data you track is hosted on EU-based servers. Sounds a little bit complicated, right?

It’s no secret that Google Analytics has come under a lot of scrutiny in recent times. The French data protection authority deemed Google Analytics illegal, as did the Austrian data protection authority. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you cannot use Google Analytics. All it means is that it is 100% mandatory to add a cookie notice which lets your site visitors provide consent for their data to be tracked and stored.

But, in the light of these regulations – this article on adding website analytics to your site is also going to showcase some privacy-friendly alternatives. In other words, if you don’t want to show a cookie tracking notice, we have something in store for you as well.

The best website analytics platforms

The nice thing about WordPress is that you have a lot of options for analytics tools to use. Just by going to Plugins -> Add New and searching for “analytics” will return hundreds of results!

So, the question is – which of these solutions is the best for you? The following section is dedicated specifically to answering that question. Though, we will also consider everything we have learned so far in this article. Especially the notion of protecting your visitor data.

#1: Google Analytics

At the time of writing this, Google Analytics has a whopping 86% market share in the traffic analytics context. It is undeniably the most popular tracking solution on the web. And, it has been for many years.

As for the reasoning, it’s quite simple. Google Analytics is part of Google services, which makes it easy to integrate everything into one unified dashboard. Additionally, the analytics platform itself provides an extensive list of features to help you analyze the exact data you’re after.

If you’re going to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site, we recommend using the official Site Kit by Google plugin. This kit includes features like access to Search Console, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and also AdSense. So, a large proportion of the most commonly used webmaster services as provided by Google itself.

Here are some of the features of the Site Kit plugin:

• Very simple to set up. Upon activating the plugin, you will be taken through an onboarding process to connect all your Google services.
• Get access to analytics reports directly from the WordPress dashboard.
• Doesn’t require editing any code or modifying files in your theme. Just connect and you’re ready to go.

The only requirement is that you have a Google Analytics account.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/google-site-kit/

How to add Google Analytics without a plugin

It’s understandable if you don’t want to use a plugin for this specific purpose. Not much changes if you add the analytics code to your site manually, it just means you will have to see all the reports from the official dashboard. Either way, this is how you add the tracking code without a plugin.

#1: Create a new account or use an existing one.

Once you have your account ready, you can go to the Google Analytics dashboard and locate the Admin panel. Here you will have the option to “Create a New Property”.

You will have to complete a few steps from this dashboard. Such as adding a property name, and specifying that it is intended for a website. And, finally, you will need to specify the website address which you wish to track. In this case, it is going to be your WordPress site.

Once you’re done, the onboarding process will redirect you to a page that contains the Global Site Tag (gtag.js) information. It looks something like this:

<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-42068213-9"></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('js', new Date());

  gtag('config', 'UA-42068213-9');
</script>

#2: Add the Global Site Tag to your header file.

Once you have the tracking script code copied, you can head over to the WordPress admin dashboard. From there, go to Appearance -> Theme File Editor. This page lets you modify your theme files. The specific file you need to locate is header.php – on the right-hand side.

Once you have it open, you need to find the closing header tag, in this case, it is </head>. Right above this tag, you copy and paste your analytics code. You can see an example of this in the screenshot above. Once copied and pasted, click Update File and you’re done!

You can go back to the Google Analytics dashboard to verify that the tracking script is working. That’s it.

#2: Matomo Analytics

So, because we talked about privacy and data regulations, it is worth mentioning Matomo analytics. It is commonly referred to as the go-to alternative for Google Analytics. Though, the main difference between both platforms is that Matomo puts an emphasis on making sure that your visitor data remains private. Additionally, the data gathered by Matomo is not shared elsewhere, giving you full control over how you use it.

In fact, Matomo provides additional tools to further encrypt the data about your site visitors. This is useful because it eliminates the need to use any cookie notices or other consent-based scripts on your site. The in-built GDPR manager can help you set up your analytics in a way that’s friendly to your visitors, but also give you a reliable means to track site visitors.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/matomo/

#3: Koko Analytics

The last website analytics solution we recommend is Koko. This is the perfect solution for projects where you don’t need in-depth analytics. Koko is a lightweight solution that emphasizes user privacy. You still get data about who is coming to your website, the referring pages, and also total clicks for pages, but none of it is tracked through cookies.

Because the plugin tracks so little data, the script that does the tracking leaves a minuscule footprint on your site. And, it will go a long way to ensure that your WordPress website loads quickly.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/koko-analytics/

Closing words

Finding the right analytics platform for you is largely an independent choice. Because of the way that various regulations enforce their rules, we are seeing a huge influx of new platforms providing such a service. So, in the end, you have to consider how important it is for you to track certain data, and whether a simpler solution is more appropriate for your needs.

I believe this post covers the absolute necessities of getting started with tracking your website visitors. Should you need additional help with setting things up, don’t hesitate to reach out and we will do our best to help.

The post How to Add Website Analytics to WordPress appeared first on FameThemes.

More importantly, unoptimized images can have detrimental effects not just on performance, but also SEO. In recent news, Google has confirmed that it has rolled out the Page Experience update for both Mobile and Desktop websites. What this means for you as a WordPress user is that this is the best time to invest in performance optimization. And images are typically one of the main bottlenecks when it comes to Core Web Vitals metrics.

Let’s start with the basics.

Why should you optimize images in the first place?

It’s rare to see a blog post or an article published without the inclusion of images. Think of featured images, infographics, personal photos, travel photos, informative images, etc. Publishing photos with your blog posts is the modern standard of blogging.

But, unless those images are optimized – they can start slowing down your site substantially.

Let’s take a look at some research.

First off, according to the annual Web Almanac report (2021) – the average page weight for Desktop sites is 8.1MB and 6.9MB for Mobile. And a closer look reveals that Images (almost 1MB on average) and JavaScript (400kb on average) are the main contributors to such large page sizes.

This has been an upwards trend for more than ten years. But, how important is it to optimize your images?

Well, we know that Google considers Page Speed as a ranking factor. In other words, if your site is loading slow – Google will consider your site to be of lower quality than those that do optimize their website for performance.

Also, you have to consider your actual site readers. If they land on your pages or blog posts and the site is loading slow, there’s quite a good chance they will close the tab and go to the next site. I’m sure you have done this yourself in the past, a lot of people do.

By optimizing your images you can shave off as much as 70% of the original file size, depending on the image type. 300kb image compressed into 70kb’s makes a huge impact on site performance.

So, to summarize, here are the benefits of optimizing images:

• A smaller image size means faster website load time.
• Improves user experience.
• Has benefits for SEO (confirmed by Google).
• Less disk space usage on your hosting account.

And, best of all, you get all of these benefits without compromising image quality.

How to test your site performance

Before we dive deeper into image optimization, let’s talk about site performance tests.

There are quite a few tools for the job, including Google’s official PageSpeed Insights, but I also like using GTmetrix because it provides quite a lot of recommendations.

How to use GTmetrix:

1. Open the GTmetrix website.
2. Enter your website URL.
3. Click on the “Test your site” button.
4. Wait for results to render.

Once the results are rendered, you will see a page that looks like this:

On this page, you will get various reports on how well your pages are performing in terms of site speed. But, specifically, you want to check the Structure tab which gives information on specific issues.

I wouldn’t worry about fixing all of the issues listed on this tab, however, do pay attention to ones related to images. Specifically:

• Are your images properly sized?
• Are you deferring images using lazy-load?

Lazy loading is a concept where an image is shown to the visitor only when it comes into the browser view. If you’re using modern WordPress themes, you might have this feature enabled by default.

Otherwise, any popular WordPress caching plugin will do the trick.

Should you use the WebP image format?

One of the recommendations you might see on the GTmetrix report is to serve images in next-gen format.

This refers to the usage of image formats like WebP and AVIF.

While it’s true that next-gen image formats provide better compression, there hasn’t been major adoption.

And it’s for two reasons:

• Next-gen formats mean you have to convert images (cameras don’t shoot in WebP).
• Maintenance is a lot harder if you want to export converted images to showcase elsewhere.

The fact of the matter is, you can achieve fairly good compression with traditional JPEG and PNG formats. And, it’s unlikely that things will change in the foreseeable future. One scenario in which you can use only next-gen formats is if you publish only digital photos.

Note: We have heard rumours that the WordPress performance team is going to be adding native WebP support in the near future. This means whenever you upload a JPEG it will be automatically converted to WebP, also. But, for the time being, this feature is yet to be finalized.

Tools for Image Optimization

So, what kind of tools are WordPress bloggers using to compress their images? While there are tons of options out there, the most convenient way of compressing images is by doing it in the browser.

Here are our two recommendations.

TinyJPG (Browser)

TinyJPG is one of the oldest running image compression tools. And, despite its popularity and ease of access – remains free to use. It can be used to compress an unlimited number of JPEG, PNG, and WebP images.

While the interface says there is a 20 image limit, you can bypass this by compressing your initial batch of photos, and then refreshing the page. One thing to note is that the upload limit for each image is 5MB – if your images are too large you can try and resize them to decrease the file size.

Compressor.io

The concept for Compressor.io is exactly the same as TinyJPG. The only difference is that you can upload files up to 10MB in size. But, also, compress image formats such as GIF and SVG.

In all fairness, just these two tools alone can solve the majority of your image compression needs. But, if you’re looking to automate things, then it’s worth looking into plugins.

WordPress Plugins for Image Optimization

Many bloggers will tell you WordPress is popular because it’s simple to use. I beg to differ. WordPress is largely popular because it makes themes and plugins extremely accessible. If you have a specific issue or want to add a unique feature – chances are someone has made a plugin for it.

As is the case for image optimization. Just by searching for the keyword from your WordPress plugins dashboard, you will get more than 100 choices for plugins that can automatically compress images. So, this section is going to be dedicated to a handful of those.

TinyJPG (Plugin)

We already looked at what TinyJPG can do from the browser. This however is their WordPress plugin which does the same exact job.

So, how does this plugin work?

Whenever you add new images to your Media Library (by uploading) the plugin will automatically compress them on the fly. In the settings panel, you can configure whether to compress images during upload or in the background. Additionally, you can select which sizes you wish to compress. Typically, you want to optimize the original image only.

Is this plugin free? Yes. In any given month, you can compress up to 500 images. This is why we recommend that you only compress the original image and not additional size types. However, even for medium-scale blogs – 500 images is a lot.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/tiny-compress-images/

Smush

Smush image optimization plugin has been around for nearly a decade. It works like you would expect, from the Smush dashboard you can bulk-optimize your Media Library, with up to 50 photos at a time. But, specifically, Smush has some unique features that further improve the process of getting your photos optimized.

Features such as:

• Bulk optimization. You can optimize your images in batches of 50 photos per session.
• Image size management. Smush can automatically detect when an image is not appropriately sized. Eg. You’re using image dimensions that are not native to your theme.
• Lazy load. Adds native support for lazy loading photos if your theme doesn’t support it already.

Also, the plugin is free to use. The only limitation is that images cannot exceed 5MB in size. So, if you happen to upload really big photos – it’s probably best to use one of the other tools we mentioned earlier.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/

Lazy Load

Lazy loading is a simple trick to avoid loading resources (such as photos) until they are required by the users viewport. For example, if your blog post has 2 images – one at the top and one at bottom – you can use lazy loading to prevent the browser from loading the bottom image until the user scrolls to the bottom of the page.

The end result for this is direct performance improvement. Since the user hasn’t yet scrolled that far, it is unnecessary to load the document until specifically requested. If you don’t have this feature already, you can use the LazyLoad plugin from WP Rocket. Completely free.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/rocket-lazy-load/

Regenerate Thumbnails

The last plugin we want to highlight is Regenerate Thumbnails. The way that WordPress works is you have a select few thumbnail sizes. However, when you add new themes – those themes can sometimes add additional sizes, and suddenly your Media Library becomes littered with images that you will never use.

To fix this, the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin can check for which thumbnail sizes you have active on your site, and regenerate them accordingly. This is also a good solution to fix any images that aren’t being properly sized.

Download: wordpress.org/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/

Conclusion

Even though WordPress is a very popular blogging platform, optimization is not its strongest point. As such, being mindful about optimizing your site through tools and plugins is essential.

Fortunately, it’s not so difficult to do it yourself. Many plugins can do a lot of the heavy lifting automatically. All you have to do is activate the specific plugin and forget about it. But, even then, it is recommended that from time to time you check your site performance using speed testing tools or similar solutions.

If you haven’t done it yet, you can also add your website to the Google Search Console. From the dashboard in GSC, you can get concrete reports on how well your site is doing in terms of Core Web Vitals metrics.

The post How to Optimize Images in WordPress appeared first on FameThemes.

Website navigation or a menu for short is one of the quintessential design elements.

It is impossible to have a good page layout without navigation. And in the case of mega menus, it is a flexible solution to display a contextual hierarchy of your site’s content.

For starters, a mega menu can help display the larger context of what your website is about.

But, also:

• Show your most popular content categories.
• Display trending articles or blog posts.
• Include information about your brand, such as social links, etc.

Here is an example taken from the IEEE Spectrum magazine:

This one big navigation menu is able to convey practically everything about the sites’ structure. And, one could say that it is also pleasing to the eye. Browsing large contextual navigation through a drop-down menu is quite impractical. Whereas a mega menu efficiently gives the reader quick access to your most important content.

Other notable brands who use mega menus include:

• Amazon, the largest eCommerce platform in the world.
• Asana, one of the leading project management tools.
• Adobe, the leading software company specializing in design.

And many, many more!

Is a mega menu SEO friendly?

One of the first questions people ask about mega menus is whether they are search engine friendly. And the answer is yes. Internal links are extremely important for SEO, and using a large menu you can add dozens of links to your pages without hindering the user experience.

It’s also well-known that Google Crawler can interpret JavaScript, which makes it a non-issue for indexing-related concerns.

If you look at more popular platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and others. All of them implement some kind of a mega menu structure for displaying product information.

Can you add a mega menu without a plugin?

It is possible, yes. But, in a lot of ways – impractical. There are plenty of open-source libraries on GitHub that showcase mega-menu functionality with JavaScript.

But, in terms of adding this to WordPress – it’s way too much work. Needless to say, you might have to add items individually. It is much easier to do this through a plugin.

And this is also going to be the next topic of discussion.

What is the best plugin for adding a mega menu?

On the WordPress plugin repository, there are hundreds of plugins that provide this functionality. However, calling something the best is often a matter of subjective opinion.

In some cases, plugins are locked behind page builders like Elementor and Visual Composer. And, other times – the plugin provides very minimal functionality without pro features.

So, for this guide – we are going to be focusing on the EasyMega plugin. This is our in-house built mega menu solution here at FameThemes.

It is completely free to download and use. Though, we do also provide a Pro version which is called EasyMega Pro.

Let’s take a look at the core features for EasyMega:

• Native integration with the Customizer design system for WordPress.
• Preview changes in real-time.
• Use Drag & Drop to create the perfect mega menu layout.
• Choose between Full-Width or Boxed.
• Change the alignment of how menu items appear to the reader.
• …and a lot more!
• Pro: Insert custom widgets into your mega menu!
• Pro: Apply custom styling.

And it’s extremely simple to use. Don’t believe me? Let’s see how easy it is to add a mega menu to your site with a simple tutorial.

How to add a mega menu using the EasyMega plugin

First and foremost, you want to grab the plugin by going to Plugins -> Add New from your WordPress dashboard. On this page, simply search for EasyMega and Install the plugin.

Once you are done you will be taken to the plugin introduction page. You can skip this entirely and go to your homepage to open Customizer.

From Customizer, you want to navigate to Menus and select your Primary Navigation. Like this:

Under the Mega Menu Settings, simply click “Activate mega menu features” and save your changes. At this stage, you can click on any of your existing Menu items and select the Mega Menu features. Like so:

By doing this, a new panel will appear at the bottom of the page where you can start doing customizations.

You can also click on the Live Preview button to see changes in real-time. This will help you avoid having to go back and forth between changes.

The next step is to start adding items to your menu. For this tutorial, we are using the Columnize menu type.

This lets us create multiple columns, which we can individually populate with the content we wish to store inside a menu.

You can directly navigate to the “Columnize Mega Menu Content” section to begin work. Like this:

Let’s take a look at what is happening here.

1. In the Columnize tab, you can choose from any number of columns to show inside the mega menu. I have selected 3.
2. The next step is to click the Add menu button on any given column.
3. Once you do that, you will be able to choose from any of your site content to add to that specific menu column.

The content can be anything. Blog posts, custom pages, categories, or any custom fields that you have on your WordPress site.

Alternatively, if you wish to display content with images, you can do so by going back to Settings and changing the Type to Content Grid.

How you wish to present your sites’ navigation is entirely up to you.

Closing statement

This also concludes our tutorial.

As you can see, by using a plugin – adding a mega menu to a WordPress site is extremely easy. How you style it and how you wish to present it to your readers is entirely up to you.

My recommendation is to look at the demo pages of Coupon WP or the EasyMag Pro theme to yield some inspiration on how to design a beautiful navigation menu.

About the Author: This article was written by Alex Ivanovs, a freelance copywriter who specializes in WordPress, Web Development, and Design. His work is featured in some of the largest editorial magazines, and he writes a personal blog at Stack Diary.

The post How to Add a Mega Menu on a WordPress Site appeared first on FameThemes.

Helping to save money for others can help you create some extra income for yourself. The costs of creating a coupon website are generally minimal, and with a dedicated time investment you can quickly become a recognized name in this niche.

In this tutorial on how to create a coupon website, we will outline the basics of a coupon site, what platform is best for starting such a site, which hosting provider to choose, and how to pick the best coupon website design for your new platform.

This post assumes that you don’t have an existing website and/or traffic to monetize, and our goal is that by the end of this post you will know how to create a unique and functional coupons website using the WordPress platform.

Keep an eye out for our other posts that discuss digital marketing, but for now, grab a cup of your favorite brew and start digging into the details of this process.

The Most Important Features of a Coupon Website

If you examine the characteristics of several websites in a particular niche, you will quickly learn about the different features that help to streamline the user experience for that particular niche. And the same philosophy applies to coupon sites. There are features that you cannot live without, and many of such features will make your website browsing experience seamless, pleasant, and highly rewarding.

Here are the most important features that your coupon website needs:

• Membership — Allowing users to become members on your site helps those users to maintain regular interaction with their favorite deals. Furthermore, membership allows your users to submit special deals of their own, helping you to create additional content with no extra cost on your side.
  
• Statistics — The word ‘statistics’ in this context is purely for statistics like coupon success rate, user feedback, and social media data. These statistics are otherwise known as ‘trust signals’ and help users to distinguish good coupon codes from bad ones.
  
• Search — WordPress does have a Search function by default, but oftentimes the default search functionality is not enough to cover an entire site of coupons. You need a Search feature that can dig into different categories, store names, and even specific offers.
  
• Mobile Design — In this time and age, more users browse their favorite websites from handheld devices rather than desktop computers. As a result, it’s critically important that your coupon’s website runs on a smooth base of mobile responsive design. This shouldn’t be an issue if you use a reliable pre-made design with mobile-design features already built into the core.
  
• Promotional Widgets — These types of widgets are generally used across coupon sites to promote special deals and to advertise partner brands with higher visibility. Apart from making money with direct coupon promotion, your other avenue of revenue making is going to be promotions and sponsorships.

Overall, these features act as the base for your site. Any additional customizations you wish to make have to come through your chosen design or through additional plugins.

The WordPress Plugin repository is full of interesting and dynamic plugins to choose from, and you can always inspire yourself by analyzing what other websites in the coupon niche are doing.

Choosing a Platform: WordPress

Not only is WordPress an excellent platform to help you save money in the long term, but it’s also used by more than 30% of all world’s websites. The popularity of WordPress stems from its diverse range of design choices — through themes — and website customization options using community-made plugins.

Anyone who uses WordPress as their platform of choice can easily replicate the design and functionality of established brands like Groupon and RetailMeNot. Most importantly, WordPress is an open-source solution with one of the most diverse communities across any online content creation system.

Here is a rundown of the best WordPress features, especially for coupon websites.

• Freedom — We can’t think of a better platform than WordPress where you will find the freedom to customize and adapt the website design to your needs. Developers create not only standalone niche themes but also thorough frameworks which can act as great core foundations for a growing brand. Once you download WordPress, you have complete and utter freedom over the process of adding new features, elements, and functionality to your site.
• Community Resources — There’s nothing better than being able to quickly find a tutorial or a guide on how to resolve a particular problem. In this area, WordPress is without question one of the best platforms for benefiting from community resources. There is the official WordPress documentation, but also hundreds of highly-revered community sites that focus on writing the best guides for making the most out of WordPress.
• Monetization — Once your site starts to attract a reasonable audience, you will want to plan out the steps to take in order to monetize your website. In essence, you don’t even need to add any additional plugins or themes to enable monetization. However, we do recommend that you study plugins and theme documentation to understand how easy it can be to insert adds/promotions/specials in dynamic locations across your site.

Once you have acquainted yourself with the inner workings of WordPress and understood its basic functionality, you are going to be ready to choose between a hosting provider. A reliable, fast, and secure hosting provider is quintessential to maintaining a stable website and ensuring maximum availability even while you sleep!

A Coupon WordPress Theme: Coupon WP

The next, and in fact, the last step in your journey of creating a coupon website using WordPress is to pick a design that will match your niche. We at FameThemes develop themes for numerous WordPress niches, and so it happens that one of our themes is actually designed specifically for the purpose of serving coupon websites.

This theme is called WP Coupon — a modern directory-based theme for coupon platforms. We have integrated some of the most unique, and some of the most useful features for coupon sites into a single theme. You can see the demo here.

Building a great site isn’t just about the way your site looks. It’s also about the functionality that sits at the back-end. For example, it’s important that your site has an exceptional structure of responsive design. There are nearly 4 billion connected mobile devices to date, and this number will grow exponentially over the coming years.

With Coupon WP — you can rest assured that the design structure is based on the latest standards in CSS3, HTML5, and Stylesheet Generators such as SASS and Semantic UI.

But design structure isn’t the only area that’s refined in this theme. We also implement a number of unique features to make it as easy and flexible as possible for you to start adding coupons and making money!

Theme Features:

• Coupon Listings — Aesthetic design combined with a listing system gives you all the tools you will ever need to deliver coupons seamlessly. Specify details like an expiration date and have old coupons disappear from the main listings to focus solely on working deals alone.
• Modal Box — Forget about using plugins to promote special deals through modal boxes. WP Coupon gives you a simple method for adding popup boxes that showcase coupon information.
• Optimized Display Options — Each listing has a success meter, coupon usage statistics, and quick-to-access sharing links. Visitors can send a coupon code to an email address instantly from the coupon page. Further, WP Coupon adds a comment section so that community members can leave feedback based on their experience.
• Blogging — If you want to extend your website through blog articles, you’ll be happy to learn that WP Coupon uses a dedicated design for blog posts. Now you can focus on writing interesting content on top of sharing amazing deals!
  

Should you wish to explore more, please refer to our official theme page for further details.

As you can tell, we do have a great deal of unique and authentic features to work with.

Let’s take a closer look at some of them, starting with the listings feature.

Coupon Listings

Fundamentally, the coupon listings pages are what define the feel and style of your website. And with that in mind, we’ve worked extensively to ensure that listings pages feel user-friendly, on-point, and with clear instructions for direction.

The above screenshot showcases what a normal coupon listing is going to look like using the WP Coupon theme from FameThemes.

As you can see, there are filters implemented inside the listings themselves, so that visitors can sort through digitally-based coupons or through specific codes that need to be printed and brought to the store.

Additionally, the design is semantic in its nature, without unnecessary bloat or coloring that often hinders user experience. Each listing covers elements like feedback, social media, and ease of interaction.

Stores, Brands, and Categories

The less amount of time it takes for visitors to find something, the more likely those visitors are going to come back to your site frequently. One of the better design features that can help with visitor retention is specifically content categorization.

With WP Coupon — all promoted stores and brands are indexed on separate pages. Furthermore, there’s clear and easy-to-navigate categorization for specific categories, too. This level of flexibility creates a pleasant and enriching user experience.

You can, for example, add featured stores and insert images to better highlight good deals. Additionally, users can navigate the Stores listings using simple alphabetical order. Not only is it good for user experience, but also for search engines which often use sitemaps to better understand website content structure.

Choosing a Reliable Hosting Provider: Cloudways or Kinsta

So, now that you know a little bit about WordPress and know which features to look out for when building a new coupon website, it’s time to look at some of the best WordPress hosting solutions.

In recent years, many brands have overhauled their business strategy to cater specifically to WordPress users. And this change means that you are guaranteed to have managed hosting services, with a support team that knows everything there is to know about WordPress maintenance.

Our top two choices for managed WordPress hosting are Cloudways and Kinsta. Each is unique in its own way, and both carry a phenomenal track record of client satisfaction, reliability ratings, and modern infrastructure to provide only the best performance possible.

1: Cloudways

Cloudways is a one-stop solution for managed cloud hosting services. Rather than providing its own server infrastructure, Cloudways relies heavily on providers like DigitalOcean, Linode, and AWS (Among other cloud providers) to deliver managed services for the said cloud providers.

What this means for you is that you can avoid the tedious and sometimes uncomfortable process of configuring a virtual cloud server on your own. The Cloudways platform lets you pick from your favorite — or most favorable — cloud provider, and does everything else pretty much automatically.

To give you an example, you start an account with Cloudways by having chosen the DigitalOcean platform. Your next step is to install your WordPress site, configure mandatory details, and have the site up and running. This is fairly straightforward.

But, what if you want to implement analytics or add a powerful caching system to your new site? Doing this manually might take you long hours sitting at the desk, and if you are inexperienced, chances are you might break your site before it’s even launched!

In this area, Cloudways tries to cover every aspect of modern and professional digital entity management. To further illustrate this, here are some of our favorite features that you get as a package once becoming a Cloudways customer.

• 1-Click SSL Activation — Quickly secure your website using the SSL layer provided by Let’s Encrypt. SSL is now a required standard in order to be recognized by Google Search Engine as a reputable source of content.
• Managed Backups — All your site data is backed up on a daily or an hourly basis, each and every day. On top of that, backups are automatic and stored for however long you require.
• Advanced Content Delivery — Choose from more than 50+ data centers to deliver your website data from, meaning, you can deliver data much faster to visitors who are closest to the available data center. This feature provides incredible site-speed benefits, which are a significant factor for SEO optimization.
• 24/7 Support — Whether it’s a bug that is slowing down your site or a site-wide critical error, the Cloudways support team is available to you at any time of the day. If you were to manage a hosting server on your own, any additional support would be a massive expense to you.
  

Lastly, the pricing is based on reasonable standards and feels right in exchange for the features that you get. Most plans start at roughly $10 per month (with all features included) and you can choose from higher-priced plans depending on how many resources your website is going to use.

2: Kinsta

Kinsta combines the Google Cloud platform together with a team of highly-experienced engineers to deliver a world-class WordPress hosting experience. The MyKinsta dashboard is tailored specifically to the needs of WordPress customers and ensures that anyone becoming a Kinsta customer feels that they are able to have a smooth WordPress management experience.

But, it’s understandable that some might express frustration with the idea of using a premium hosting provider, rather than something cheap like HostGator.

Kinsta uses a dedicated infrastructure back-end for each website it hosts, which converts into better load times for pages and content in general. Further, using integrated caching algorithms, Kinsta’s platform can intuitively understand website patterns to deliver content at an incredibly fast rate.

Needless to say, this level of optimization is done at the back-end, so you’re not required to install or configure any plugins to yield the immense benefits of a fast and reliable website.

Perhaps the biggest upside is, as mentioned, the MyKinsta dashboard. Within this dashboard, you gain access to WordPress-specific features to help you manage, create, optimize, and understand your WordPress site better.

The features include:

• Server-based page caching optimized for WordPress.
• Security configurations built for WordPress.
• Tools to quickly create a new site, or to migrate an existing site elsewhere.
• Clear website cache from within the dashboard. Do this on mobile, too!
• Analytical data that displays bandwidth usage, performance ratio, and different stats for file accessibility.
• Unique database tools to help you mass-manage site content. For example, you can change the specific text to have a unique URL added to it.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! We highly recommend checking out the Why Us page and seeing what else Kinsta has to offer. We feel that the entry-level pricing of $30 per month is fully justified because of this diverse set of features.

Conclusion

Getting started with creating your first coupon website using WordPress is simple and easy. By following our recommendations and outlined steps — you should have a fully functional site operating within an hour’s time.

And should you come across problems, have questions, or simply wish to learn more — you can pop down into our comments section below and share your feedback directly.

It’s understandable that someone who is doing this for the first time — making a niche website — would come across some form of complexity. As a result, we’re open to helping out in any way we can.

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