Depending on the type of the site and the way you visualize the design, you may end up installing different plugins for different websites. It vastly depends upon the idea you are putting behind. On the other side, the quality a plugin brings with its functionalities.

People who have multiple numbers of websites tend to stick with some selected plugins over a long period because of those plugins work fine in a combination. Once you can find that collection or package of plugins. You can use them for multiple sites rather than looking for random plugins. Which always not seems to be as great as your personal favorites.

Regardless of which WordPress plugin you are using in your site. It is certain that plugins are a crucial part of WordPress. Since WordPress is an open-source CMS, you can use any plugin to craft your dream site.

When you look at the key elements that a site requires you to think of doing site SEO, social sharing, increasing the site performance, adding a table of content inside your article, widgets, pop-ups, info blocks.

There are so many things that your plain WordPress installation and theme can’t always provide. So the only alternative to bring all these features and optimize your site for user experience is you use plugins. And at the end of the day, thanks to these plugins, you can avoid core codings and complicated configurations.

With a few mouse clicks, you can install and activate a plugin. However, there should be a limit to using these plugins on your website. You should not load your site with a bunch of plugins to make the site super functional. But end up making it lazy, SEO unfriendly, and sometimes you may have to deal with plugin conflicts as well.

Installing a lot of plugins on your site increases the load on the web-server from where the site is hosted. Because, for every request, the visitors send to the server, it has to respond with a big packet of data. The more configuration you will put on the website greater will be the generated data. The size of the data packets will eventually increase.

As a result, the server will take more time to respond. Ultimately your website will take longer to load. The site bounce rate will automatically increase because of the bad user experience. You certainly do not want to do that. Hence, it’s good practice to lower the limit of your plugins. Lesser the plugins on your site better will be the site performance.

While discussing the plugins. You should also know how many plugins are too many so that you can set a limit of using plugins.

How Many Plugins Are Too Many?

We can’t define it just by telling the exact number, but your installed plugins count should not cross 15. Typically in the case of a regular website, the essential plugins will count up to the range of 9 to 12, and if your theme covers some of the visual or functional features, then the plugin count maybe even less.

In my opinion (considering your theme does not contain necessary features). You should try to limit the installation of plugins from at least 6. Keep the maximum level at 10 plugins depending on your website requirements. Remember, the theme which does not contain a lot of features are mostly light and fast (not always the case) + [6-10] plugins will be a better condition in terms of performance and usability.

While testing your websites on tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom, you can test that when your site cross 15 installed plugins loading time will start to increase and the page size gradually increases. It is because of the increasing load on the server that I have mentioned earlier due to increasing codes per plugin.

Site performance is one of the main reasons why website designers and developers get frustrated with the installed plugin count and always look for solving the issues in multiple ways.

As of now, you have figured out why reducing plugins is a necessary task; the following step will be to find out ways how you can reduce the number of plugins. I have been through this kind of situation. So I will try to share my ideas with you that works for me.

Note: These steps worked well for me doesn’t make sense that will work for you in the same way. There are a lot more dependencies like server speed, server Nodes, or you can say CDN, etc. All I hope these ideas will help you find out what could be the best possible solution to maintain your plugin counter.

1. Try Using SEO Plugins Comes With Complete Set Of Features

A plugin that is installed on your website should be supposed to cover all sorts of functionalities in that category. There are various kinds of plugins.

Some plugins are the result of an amazing project where the developers regularly update the plugin and try to include essential features as well as sub-features to make it all in one package. Such plugins are often well optimized and work perfectly with your website (Rare case is minimal).

On the other hand, you will see plugins that have some particular features of that category. For other features of that category, you will need to install one or two separate plugins.

A practical example would be if you are using an SEO plugin, you will want it to do all kinds of jobs related to SEO on your site. You must be familiar with Yoast SEO, which is no doubt a great SEO plugin for WordPress. But the free version, even though it provides quite a lot of essential features, you will need to go for the premium version for the full set of features to be experienced.

But there is another plugin called Rank Math (free), which includes almost all essential + secondary features an SEO plugin must have, including external link controls, 404 trackings, role management, which are not available in Yoast free version.

Moreover, Rank Math is a well-reviewed plugin by the users. It is an entirely free plugin that has more features compared to Yoast free version and a few lesser features than the Yoast premium. Rank Math’s content analysis and individual site analysis tools can help you get rid of the site analysis plugin as well.

So, when it comes to a free SEO plugin that can provide you all in one support, you should choose Rank Math over Yoast. However, if you have the premium version of Yoast. You can stick with it because Yoast premium gives you the best tools you would really like to experience while doing SEO. Still, there’s the condition, FREE or PREMIUM that based on your budget and planning.

2. Install an All in One Caching Plugin

A caching plugin is the second most important plugin of your website. There are various caching plugins which are capable of improving your site performance.

You can follow this guide on how you can implement the autoptimize plugin + async javascript to increase the performance of your site.

However, while choosing the caching plugin for your site. You should consider whether the caching plugin contains all kind configurations such as compressing HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Lazy load, deferring or async processing, automatic cache clearing, font configurations, and lot more.

At the same time, you must check whether the plugin has a specific tool to fix the possible conflicts that may appear during the site compression.

Your caching tools should contain settings for leverage settings for the website resources rather than installing a separate plugin for that. Image optimization is another feature you will want to have in your caching tool.

We usually install image optimization plugins separately, but some caching plugins like Lightspeed Cache, autoptimize contains powerful tools that can optimize images automatically.

CDN configuration is a part of site optimization as well. It’s a better choice to configure CDN on your site with the help of your caching plugin rather than installing a separate plugin. Most of the caching plugin provides CDN settings, so that won’t be an issue for you.

There is a popular database optimizer plugin for WordPress called “WP optimize,” which keeps your database clean, optimized, and helps the website to load faster with delay on database response.

However, the lightspeed cache plugin itself contains a database optimizer tool that does pretty much the same job as WP optimize plugin. So if you use lightspeed’s database optimizer you can reduce one more plugin to increase the site performance by a little… and that little is precious.

3. Try To Use A theme With Important Features Available In It

Your WordPress theme plays an important rule when it comes to installing plugins. Depending on the features available on the theme, you will need to install separate plugins. If your theme consists of basic and advanced features, you wouldn’t have to look for the respective plugins.

For example, if the theme has an option for social sharing, you should not install another plugin to add sharing buttons on your site. If your theme already has options for using custom codes in the header and footer, then you should not have to go for an external “header & footer” plugin at all.

Some themes also support Google analytics tracking id. It’s a better way to use tracking code. Because the Analytics API is already connected with your theme there is no need to include extra code block (analytics tracker code) to your website. It is a win-win method of using the inbuilt function and reducing additional script.

The only task you need to do is getting the tracking ID instead of the tracking code and use it where the theme asks for the ID. Placing the tracking ID instead of full tracking code is useful and recommended for site performance. You can find such themes for free inside the WordPress theme repository itself, and most of the premium themes include this feature as well.

4. Place Ad Codes Manually

It may not sound like a great trip. But it will help you to uninstall Ads management plugins in case you don’t bother to assign ads on your favorite spots of the website manually.

Placing the ad codes in your article and widgets areas is not a big deal. It becomes way more comfortable, especially when you are using the Gutenberg editor. You can easily place ads using the custom HTML block and let it appear in an appropriate position that you want.

To maintain the center position of square size ads, you can use <center>[ad codes here ]</center> to make it look cleaner and well optimized with the page look.

Similarly, Ads for the sidebar. Below the header or above the footer can be manually added with the help of a custom HTML widget.

5. You Can Use .htaccess File To Avoid Some Other Plugins

The .htaccess file is a semi core file of your WordPress site, which works as a bridge between your settings and core configurations. You can complete some of the tasks. Such as defining the expiry duration of caching of the static files inside WordPress by adding code to the htaccess file instead of using a plugin for that. The plugin will do the same thing; they will add those codes into your htaccess file.

The development codes inside the plugins and integration codes with WordPress can be avoided by not installing it. Just placing the important script inside the .htaccess file. Remember that the .htaccess file is a crucial core file. So placing wrong codes into it can also break your website.

So before using it, you need to learn how to use the file properly. For being more protective. You can always make a backup copy of the file and do the rest of the work on the live version of it. If anything goes wrong, replace it with the backup, and you will be OK.

But it’s a way you can reduce the number of plugins on the website. It would give you a glimpse of the example mentioned above. You can avoid the “leverage browser caching” plugin by mentioning the lifetime of the cache for website resource files such as javascript, CSS, images, etc.

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On

# Images
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/webp “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/svg+xml “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access plus 1 year”

# Video
ExpiresByType video/mp4 “access plus 1 year”
ExpiresByType video/mpeg “access plus 1 year”

# CSS, JavaScript
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/javascript “access plus 1 month”

# Others
ExpiresByType application/pdf “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access plus 1 month”
</IfModule>

This code will set caching parameters to inform the visitor’s browser what types of files to it need to cache.

6. Try To Marge Security Plugin With Website Backup Plugin

When you are running a WordPress site, a security plugin is a must. You never know who is spying on your website. You probably never dive deeper to track if your site contains some kind of malware in it. These threats can come with plugins and themes or by means of direct injection.

That’s why you should always avoid resources from untrustworthy sources + add a layer of protection. The most used security plugins for WordPress is WordFence followed Sucuri, iThemes Security, All in one WP security, etc.

Similarly, keeping your daily site backup is another mandatory thing for us, a website owner. Without backup, if the site goes down, we will never be able to regain it. So backing up your site on a daily basis is precious as well as it should be an automatic process to save your time.

Security plugins like WordFence come with site backup options that will help you avoid a separate backup plugin on your site. Moreover, you have another great option to use your WebHost’s automatic site backup tool. Only to prevent installing a plugin for doing the job for you.

I understand you might look for an automated way. But sometimes for website performance is more important than being autonomous in a non-frequent task like site backup. Moreover, nowadays, most of the web hosts provide the automatic backup tool, so that should fix the burden.

In case your hosting doesn’t provide a site backup tool, you can always contact the support team for a solution or use WordFence itself on your WordPress.

Wrapping Up

The lesser the number of plugins you will use, the less will be your responsibility. Things will be straightforward to handle with a lower number of plugins installed.

Above I have mentioned a few tips which I believe will help you reduce the number of plugins on your site. Moreover, as soon as the plugin count decreases, you will notice a decent growth in the site loading speed too.

If you have any suggestions/ideas regarding this topic on how to reduce the number of plugins! Please mention it in the comment tab below.

The post How To Reduce The Number Of Plugins For WordPress Sites? appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Transferring a website takes a couple of tasks to be done carefully. But it’s easy if you are used to it and on the other hand, it can be panic if you do not know how to do it manually.

Assuming you are at that particular moment when you need to migrate your online business. It can be by means of domain or hosting. While being in that pole position to migrate a website, these are the usual reasons which might trigger in your case too:

1. Somewhere in the middle of the progress, you may realize that the current domain is not the exact right domain for your website.
2. You could be facing some issues with your branding.
3. You might want to use a more professional extension (.com).
4. Some social media sites might block your domain to share contents.
5. Your domain might end up getting some SEO heat as well to prevent further progress.
6. Or you could just want to give yourself a fresh start.

In such situations, most people find it difficult to migrate their website under a new domain name. Of course, it is a little bit of a complicated task to migrate a site to a new domain + handling the substantial SEO Impact on the site. Moreover, you need to be really careful because a little mistake in migration may wipe out all the hard work you have done for your website.

Most of the webmasters or businesses use WordPress nowadays. It’s an efficient CMS, easy to use, and powerful as well. So in this article, I will go through step by step tutorial “how you can migrate your domain easily without harming the SEO by much.”

The primary aim in this article is that we neither want to lose our search engine rankings + traffic while performing a migration & any of our website’s files.

Before You Get Started Migrate Your Domain

Before proceeding to the tutorial part. Let me inform you of a few things that you should expect and follow during this migration process.

• Do not change your site URL structure “permalink” so frequently. Changing your site URL structure will have a harmful impact on your SEO. Since once you change the address, people will no longer find the page from a search engine or any backlink. It will ultimately return a 404 error.

• You can expect a sudden drop in your current traffic for the first few days or maybe a week after the migration. The reason is that all your new posts and pages will be crawled under a different domain name, which will initially have low domain authority, of course.
• Make sure you do not delete the previous domain and keep the full website live on that domain too. (prefer to use a separate hosting for the new domain).
• Verify all versions of the new domain in Google Search Console (GSC) to track the status of the new domain and the essential messages from Google.

These are some of the essential points that you should take care of while migrating your domain name.

Now I am assuming that you have already bought a new domain name and assigned it with hosting nameserver. Make sure to choose good hosting that is fast and reliable. Make sure it provides excellent technical support and bandwidth is another crucial aspect to keep your eye on.

The locations of the server do matter because it makes a significant impact on the location-based user experience. You should know from which server your website is hosted to optimize the site for locals. Having more than one server location gives you a great boost to serve the site all over the globe while producing similar performance.

From here, you will start the process of migration so keep tracking your progress step by step. Every step is essential for successful migration and maintains your SEO quality.

Start the Process of Migration

1. Backup Your Website’s Content

Backing up your site contents before migration is a very crucial point. It will save you while migrating the website into a new domain. In case anything goes wrong, you can immediately fix it by replacing it with the backup files.

There are various ways to backup your site. You can use the hosting default “quick site backup” option, or you can use a WordPress plugin like “All-in-One WP Migration” or “UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin,” etc.

While using a third-party backup plugin, then you need to look after the settings because a backup under false settings can take you into big trouble. It will eventually help to mitigate the tough situation of website breakdown too.

I personally prefer to back up the “public_html” folder directly from the host and the database of the website. You can literally apply any method whichever option feels more comfortable to you. All it matters to have a backup of the site to prevent any data loss during the domain migration process.

For example, while backing up your site with a web hosting default backup tool. You should see the options like in the image below

* * Depending on the hosting, these options may appear differently however the work function is the same.

2. Upload the Backup Contents Into Your New Hosting

Once you have completed the downloading part of the backup file, now you can go ahead and install WordPress in the new hosting. After installing WordPress, open the file manager inside your hosting where the files related to WordPress can be located. You can use the default file manager or any FTP client.

Now you have to find the “wp-content” folder from the backed up file, go ahead and extract it, followed by making a separate ZIP file.

The next step will be uploading that zip file into your new site. While uploading, you will see a confirmation popup to replace the existing contents. Make sure you have clicked on “replace,” and this will finish site content uploading into the new site in a couple of minutes.

In the next step, you will need to upload and assign your previous database into the new website only by following the “import” technique. Read this guide to know how to do it.

Once your database is updated, you can access your WordPress dashboard on the new domain also will be able to see and once you perform the later part of this tutorial.

Note: Uploading your archive files on the new hosting is an essential step after setting up your new site. While migrating the file you need to keep hold of the files on the old site as well. This step may be a revert plan if anything goes wrong with the new one. You will have original content as back up on the previous hosting so that you can tackle some tough situations like the loss of files or data.

3. Update Your Site’s New Address

After the installation process and database, file update it’s time to update your website URL. Before updating your URL, you will need to make sure that the nameservers of the hosting are pointed to the new domain name.

If you are transferring your website files to the new host with the help of migration plugin like All-in-One WP Migration, you must change the URL address after the migration. The reason behind this is just because you are assigning the same database into the new domain. The new website will still point to the old address.

To change the URL first, go to your WordPress Settings and then go to General.

Replace your previous URL with the new URL in both the “WordPress address” and “Site Address.”

After changing the URLs in general settings, click on “save,” and this will ensure your old site now can be accessed on the new domain.

Depending on the nameserver pinging response, you may expect to wait for 1/2 hours so for domain name connected with the hosting (only if you are not purchasing both from the same company). After 1 or 2 hours, your domain nameservers will propagate worldwide and people from all over the world can visit your site.

4. Update the Links in the Website

Until now, you have updated the domain name in your new WordPress site and assigned the previous contents into the new domain. But there are more links in a website which start with the domain name but never have any direct relation with the primary address.

The reason is those are links either generated by users or by the published pages that just follow the domain name part along with unique some new URL. So the next step is to update all kinds of internal links your site has that are actually pointing to the previous domain name.

Mentioning about internal links. You need to update all kinds of links including CSS, Javascript, and the links of your content. It is a difficult task to update all short links manually. So you can take the help of a reliable WordPress plugin or WordPress command line.

One such plugin that you can use is Better Search and Replace. You can find this plugin for free the WordPress repository.

• Install the Better Search and Replace plugin.
• Go to Tools > better search and replace settings
• Type your old site URL address in the “search for” box.
• Type your new site URL in the “Replace with” box.

• Select all kinds of available tables.
• Check Replace GUIDs.
• Check Run as a dry run.
• Run search/replace.

Since it sounds tedious to point all the links manually in the new domain name. What this plugin simply does is scan for the specific keywords (your domain name) and then replace that domain name with the current name keyword.

This is a simple and effective step to update the primary part of the URL while making sure that the rest of the links remain unaffected. You can make changes to tables in the database as well as the links of the image URL.

5. Applying 301 Redirects to the Links

After updating the internal links on the website, the next step you are recommended to follow is an essential step in the process migrate the domain name of your WordPress website. Implementing a 301 redirect mechanism means directing the website traffic one address to another permanently (directing visitors from your previous domain name to your new domain name)

Note: This is the reason why you should not delete the old website while setting up the new website. It’s a part of holding your SEO properties of the previous website and gradually traversing them to the new site.

If you skip this step. You will ultimately lose all the backlinks pointing to your website and end up providing a chance to impact the SEO of your website negatively.

Furthermore, if visitors come from another website or any search engine, they will be redirected to a 404 error page. That link which leads the visitors to the 404 pages will be converted to a broken link. Remember that the link was previously working fine and you had it as a backlink.

You need to know that Google takes 404 Errors very seriously. If they encounter too many 404 errors – Google will penalize your site rankings. So from both expect of ranking and backlink, you should redirect your previous links to the new domain.

You can find multiple ways to redirect your website links, Either you can use a plugin such as Simple 301 Redirects to do the job for you or do it manually, but remember that doing this manually is very painful. One way to assign 301 redirect links by adding them at the server level via htaccess.

Another effective and easy way to add 301 redirect links is with the help of Cloudflare. If you have never done this before following the steps in the image below.

Make sure you have created a “Page Rule” where each URL that matches “yourolddomain.com” is 301-redirected to “yournewdomain.com” in the Cloudflare panel.

Also, remember that it will only work if you have connected your site with Cloudflare earlier. If not, you can do this in a couple of minutes since it’s easy and a well-guided process.

6. Update Your Website in Google Webmasters Tools

This is a crucial step and only related to the site SEO part. I would like to say the SEO recovery part. When you have completed the redirection part. It’s time to inform Google that you are migrating the website to a new address.

You have to use the Google webmaster tool which is currently known as the Google Search Console and let them know about the new site and the previous site as well.

You will need to send a request to Google regarding the change in the address of your previous domain. Upon receiving a request from your end, Google will recognize that you have migrated to a new domain. They will ask for the redirects to help you protect your site authority and exposure.

People often get confused that you should have verified the new site to the webmaster tool (search console) earlier. In order to let Google know that you are migrating from the old domain to a new domain. If you have not verified yet, make sure you do it.

First of all, you will need to verify your new website as a property. Once your site is verified go to change of address tool and select your previous website.

Once you have selected, in the next step. You will need to pick your new site from the drop-down menu and then scan whether all the 301 redirects are working correctly or not.

After that, the tool will confirm both the sites as verified and allow you to submit your new domain as a replacement to the previous domain.

While doing so, if you have used Google Analytics for tracking your previous site traffic. Then you should also create a new property in the analytics tool and connect the new domain with analytics. You can also add an annotation to Google analytics which will help you to mitigate the troubleshoot issues.

7. Do Not Forget to Submit the Sitemap

After submitting your domain change of address request. You are recommended to submit your new domain’s sitemap to the webmaster tool. It’s important because you have to set up a new website, and to index the pages of this site Google requires the sitemap. Once the domain is verified in the webmaster tool, you can easily submit your sitemap.

Submission of sitemap will also benefit you in terms of additional SEO bonus. You should keep updating the sitemap of your site as well to maintain the site’s frequency and standard. The sitemap will simply support your website to get crawled quicker by the crawler bots of different search engines.

After the change of your domain name, it’s time to pay attention to minor details. Update the primary information present in all the plugins associated with your site. And, make sure to track the number of pages with 404 errors and fix them as soon as possible.

Basically, it gives the direction to search engines and enhances your site’s SEO on SERP. Make sure you have optimized the images and designing part of the website before submitting the site to any search engine. It’s not mandatory. But it’s good practice to submit your site or a page to search engine once the design, SEO optimization, and other small details have been double-checked.

As soon as you have submitted the recently added pages successfully. The fetching information will be sent to Google Database to place them in the content queue and allow the users to access the pages from the search engine.

8. Let the Users Know About the Migration

After you migrate your domain. You need to ensure that your users are updated about the change of the new domain. As it makes a significant impact on traffic if the users are not redirected to the new domain.

The simplest way to let users know about change is email marketing and social shares. You can share the post on social media and also update them by sending the email. Another great way to inform your readers is by placing a pop-up notification on the previous blog. Notifying you are migrating to a new domain. You can take advantage of the previous domain in such a way.

Wrapping Up

The above steps fulfill three significant aspects discussed above – Search Equity, Ranking, and Traffic. However, you might observe a slight fluctuation in traffic. But you can update your users about the change in site address by redirecting them from old domain to new domain or by sharing it on social media.

By following the above-mentioned steps, you can effortlessly migrate the domain name of your website without hurting site SEO. Although we would recommend not changing the domain name unless it’s utterly essential.

Furthermore, another option is something called ranking and renting, which means you rank and boost your websites to the top of Google search engine results and then rent out these properties to, for example, local business owners.

I hope this guide will help you migrate your domain in a step by step process to avoid the hurdles in migrating to a new domain. Make sure you don’t miss any of these steps, which may later bring some sort of difficult situation.

The post How to Migrate Your Domain Without Losing Google Ranking? appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Besides, the comments on a blog reflect how popular the blog is, how people trust the contents inside the blog, and, most importantly, how engaging the topic is! The more quality content you can provide, the better comments will attain to give you the courage to do more.

If you have a WordPress site that gets a good chunk of traffic week in and week out, it’s the most obvious case that you will get plenty of comments on your posts regardless of them being spam or real comments.

These comments are the frontend part, being the most popular CMS WordPress needs to have a backend system which manages the blog comments very well as well as provide you all the essential settings.

It’s not to be excited to know that WordPress has its default comment system (certainly, everybody who uses WordPress knows that). There are a bunch of different commenting systems available for WordPress too. All of them have their unique advantages and disadvantages, along with various features. Moreover, there are factors like being SEO friendly and competent in terms of appearance to be one of the best comment systems.

It’s challenging to identify which among all the comment systems available for WordPress is the best. However, in this article, we will look upon the WordPress default comment system of WordPress. Also, compare it to other comment systems. To get an idea of whether you should stick with the default comment system or go for others.

Understanding The Two Layers of WordPress Default Comment System

We know how WordPress has been making things easier for us with a couple of options that ultimately reflect the actual configuration we want as a webmaster. Along with other features, they have made the WordPress default comment system so easy to enable (or disable on necessary conditions) with a few mouse clicks.

By default, the comment system of WordPress is enabled regardless of the theme and plugins you are using. Now there is a point to be noted. They have made two layers of configuration in terms of the comment system.

1st one is the root layer, and the second one is the child layer. The root layer holds the global control of the comment system. What I want to say is that if you are enabling or disabling the comments (discussion) from the root layer that will be applied to the whole website.

Precaution: Disabling the discussion in the main settings (root) will entirely hide the comment system for your website. In such a case, adding a plugin or using any third-party API is not likely to bring back the comment system into your site.

On the other hand, the child layer is available for individual pages to handle the comment form. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to allow someone publishing a comment on your page or not. This control will be available under the Gutenberg editor panel. Unlike the general settings, it doesn’t altogether disable comments on the whole site except give you a dynamic control for each page.

The Advantages of Using the WordPress Default Comment System

There is no doubt one of the most substantial advantages of using WordPress is the full range of options available when it comes to giving your website a direction “your way.” You can do almost anything you want with WordPress. It’s packed with a sufficient amount of tools and options to provide you the dynamicity that is required to create an excellent website that everyone loves to be in.

But then it comes to the hype of people trying to overclock the functionality, features, and design of WordPress by using external plugins and 3rd party tools every possible way. I would not prefer to say that plugins are something we do not require; themes are not something we do not need to run a successful website. But, trying to get the best of the best in every possible way is overkill and should not be entertained with WordPress at all.

There are tasks like image SEO to do in WordPress. Why does it manually? Common, install a plugin and set it for automatic insertion of alternate tags, image names. Why use the default sidebar? Add another plugin and make it more elegant with a bunch of different options. And then, finally, why use the default comment system when you can use other comments plugins?

The default system out there works reasonably well. Without going for the other 3rd party applications, the default system comes out to be the best under various circumstances that are certainly there to impress you and improve your website as well.

As an example, you can see many blogs are popular enough yet stick with the default commenting system.

1.1 Loading Speed

It is undoubtedly one of (if not) the most important factors that you should be considering while holding on with your default comment system. You are already aware of the fact that speedy sites tend to perform better than slower websites and also have a lower bounce rate. A fast site can bring much positivity to your online business.

The default comment system is constructed with the core WordPress code and has a better compatibility of execution. It will load faster than other commenting systems. You can try to install additional plugins, but they are going to slow down your website if not built with better performance intention.

However, that doesn’t mean these comment plugins are always slow, but it’s tough to find such plugins designed for speed. In general, those plugins are built for adding more features such as grabbing social accounts, producing awesome hierarchical designs, like-dislike or voting systems, and many more. You can say it’s useful but not performance friendly.

The graph below shows the difference between the loading speed of the commenting system.

(Lesser the required loading time more useful the system is)

The main problem with the other commenting plugins is that they have to load several scripts, authenticate with their server to get a response for the comment system to function correctly.

1.2 Compatibility With Caching Plugins

If you are running a WordPress site, caching plugins is a must. It would be a massive mistake if you ignore the caching plugin and let all things work as it is. The caching plugin will be there to optimize your site, take care of the performance, look after the server load when you are manually not doing so.

The caching plugin should work on all parts of your WordPress site. If your whole site is supporting the caching plugin instead of the commenting system, then there is still room for optimization, and the site could perform better than now.

So it’s recommended to have a commenting system that is compatible with your caching plugin. There is no doubt your default commenting system will work fine with the caching plugin. The logic is simple. These are the same codes that have been used to develop WordPress. So basically, if the caching plugin is supporting the other part of WordPress. Then it has to support the comment system as well.

On the other hand, Facebook and Disqus are not fully compatible with the caching plugins. Both of them (other similar tools too) have their servers; they have their powerful standalone CDNs to help the commenting system work as quickly as possible.

But in reality, they work just fine with their platform. In terms of WordPress, these plugins need to fetch the required data from their server before they reflect them into WordPress comment that certainly increases the time delay.

1.3 SEO Friendly

When you are operating a website, SEO is always essential for you. If any part of the site is harmful to SEO, you should either remove or fix it as soon as possible. Without SEO, you can’t dream about growing a website to its maximum possible level.

One of the crucial benefits of using the default commenting system is it’s SEO friendly. The comments on a page will be counted as extra content, which is a positive sign for SEO. You can see that the blog comments can dramatically increase the volume and quality of content. Some targeted and insightful comments with relevant discussion can increase the words up to 2000 and doubling your page content + improving the quality of the page with more user inputs.

There is no guarantee that the other commenting systems also improve SEO quality and quantity with the comments since they are being hosted from a different server and on a different script. If they do, then it’s better, but there is always a question mark about it.

Again, that vast amount of comments only be a part of your website if you put effort into the comments. You will need an engaged community that will produce those kinds of high-quality comments on your blog. A well as you will need to be involved with your community to respond to them in their blogs and thus carry the discussions forward.

To make it real, you also need to be very effective in managing the comments you get. There are lots of spam comments nowadays that can reduce the quality of your page by injecting hundreds of bad links below your content. You need to be precise enough to remove those spam and poor quality comments. That’s not unique to WordPress comments, though; you are going to need spam protection plugins or software and manual moderation for every comment system you might want to use.

1.4 Spam Protection

Spam protection is not one of the most significant advantages of the default comment system though it does a perfect job along with a powerful anti-spam plugin called Akismet. Installing Akismet is easy, one-two steps, and your site is ready to block the spam comments.

Other commenting systems include spam protection along with it and much capable of protecting your WordPress site from non-relevant spam. In this criterion, the WordPress commenting system needs external software that brings another plugin to your website, which might decrease the balance between the performance and quality of your blog.

Though another plugin is necessary for spam protection. I believe the developers of Akismet focuses on making it light enough to support the site performance also. Additionally, this will provide manual control over the comments, which is not something familiar with other commenting systems.

1.5 Friendly for The Web Crawlers

It would be interesting to know how the comment system can be friendly to the web crawlers while others are not. The most excellent example comes from the loading speed of the commenting system itself. The WordPress comment system loads immediately with the primary page script. Thus a web crawler can easily fetch the content inside the comment.

On the other hand, the 3rd party comment system, such as Facebook and Disqus, needs an extra few seconds to load, and that comes after the initial page load. A web crawler generally avoids the scripts that take longer to load, and hence there is always a chance of those comments never being discovered by the web crawlers, which is, of course, not a good sign both in terms of SEO and site health. A similar thing happens to the Facebook commenting system when integrated into a WordPress site.

There is a plugin, Disqus lazy load. This is developed to fix this problem by ordering the crawlers to take some moments to get the comments. It also supports the performance of the website by deferring the comment script entirely. Yet again, not much effective as the default comment system.

1.6 Local Management

Technically there is another advantage of using the WordPress comment is that it stores the comment on the local database. You can manage them from your dashboard. It’s a significant benefit; you don’t have to open another platform; you don’t have to manage the comment from a 3rd party dashboard, especially when there are lots of comments to manage.

Usually, the other comment plugins require a login to their dashboard to manage the comments or API key to import the comments into your WordPress. In such a case, you would undoubtedly choose the local comment system rather than 3rd party plugins.

1.7 No Problem With Ads

The default commenting system also, as you might have expected, ads-free. It’s quite apparent that being part of the same WordPress system. The default comment doesn’t contain any advertisements in it. You neither have to pay for using it or see the ads in the comment box. In some sense, it’s quite annoying too to watch those ads near your comment.

Other comment plugins such as FB comment, Disqus, LiveFire don’t follow this strategy. Some plugins need to be purchased before using them. Some others don’t, but they are going to display ads on your comment.

When it comes to displaying ads, Disqus is the primary offender, and advertisements on the comment box hurt the user experience of the website. Increasing ads on a page will slow down the page additionally. When your page gets a large amount of traffic, then they can also charge you for using the service.

1.8 Customization Ability

Another significant benefit of the built-in comment system; for me, it is highly customizable. You can squeeze every single color, font, structure, and size of the comment system using your custom CSS or change them into the WordPress files involved. It’s quite easy to do. It means you have to control to match your comment section to your site perfectly according to your choice.

Other comment plugins, unlikely don’t allow this kind of customization. Most of them only have default a light theme or a dark theme. Furthermore, a maximum of two-three free templates that are available for free or allow you to set a few basic color options. Other than that, I doubt you can expect anything more.

Some stuff like a voting system, like or dislike options are only available in the 3rd party plugins. But personally. I prefer when my comments don’t allow disliking or downvoting for not matching other people’s opinions. And for me, that is where you can decide to go for a different comment system if your site needs to have extra curriculum rather than only discussions.

1.9 Free of Code Conflict

It is also worth mentioning that the WordPress comments system since it’s developed for WordPress. Is a part of the WordPress system is not going to create any code conflicts? It’s recommended to stay out of such conflicts because sometimes solving those can kill many hours. Installing a plugin might cause issues (not usually) with other plugins that associate with the same component of your page.

It’s not extremely difficult to get a plugin that doesn’t conflict with others these days. But by using the in-built commenting system. You are going to eliminate the possibility of being annoyed by a plugin conflict.

Disadvantages of Using a Default Commenting System

While discussing the advantages of the inbuilt commenting system, we should forget the downsides of it. By far, there are fewer disadvantages in comparison to the positivity it brings to a WordPress site.

2.1 Comments Are Very Basic

Being the inbuilt system, it only has the basic comment form; once approved, the appearance of the comments is OK but not something appealing. The Gravatar is just some pre-built avatars and can not display the original profile image for individual users unless they have registered account on Gravatar & WordPress.

That leads to no profile images for cross-platform bloggers. If you don’t mind the default avatars, then it should not be an issue. Otherwise, 3rd party comment systems can be a beneficial option for you.

2.2 Does Not Have Analytics

In case you are serious about what’s going on behind the comments and like to analyze it with some statistical data. Then the inbuilt comment system of WordPress is not something that you are looking for. Of course, it does not have comment analytics in it. I would personally prefer not to have analytics for comments, but for different businesses, it could be a requirement.

2.3 No Login Feature

You must already know that some site requires user login to publish a comment on a page. The WordPress default comment system does not have the “log in and comment” feature, and developers of such sites should look for other options.

Our Opinion

We have already breakdown the WordPress comment system based on what it’s useful for and for what it’s not. It not only helps you to choose your comment system wisely while setting up a WordPress website. But allows you to understand what the inbuilt system can bring into your project.

Although we have included almost every point of view to look after the default commenting system, there can be more to discuss. As for me, I would go with the inbuilt system for a blog or a website that shares information with the people. However, integrate Disqus or Facebook comments for a discussion-based website.

I want to encourage you to select your system when it comes to the comment part. I hope you will choose the best one according to your idea.

The post Should You Use the WordPress Default Comment System? appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Sometimes you may forget to complete some critical tasks while constructing your site. The recommendation here is to give more focus on these vital points and try not to miss them.

There are many common mistakes that we do at the beginning of building our sites that ultimately block the road towards growth.

For webmasters, who are familiar with WordPress. It won’t be hard to notice these key points, however, if you are a beginner. It’s going to be beneficial because even if these mistakes don’t return some typical code errors, they hamper the ultimate growth of the site.

So especially for beginners, it will be beneficial to be precise while creating an excellent website.

7 Mistakes to Avoid While Setting Up a WordPress Site

In this article, we bring up some of the mistakes that you should avoid while setting up a WordPress site.

Not Setting Up Automated Backup

First thing first, websites are ultimately codes and documents hosted on a cloud server. These files are vulnerable to many prospective. There may be an occurrence of self-made mistakes inside the codes or threat created by 3rd parties.

In such a case, if you lose your data or important files, then those data are forever gone and will ask for a lot of time and energy to recreate again unless you do not have a backup. Most of the time it’s almost impossible to regain lost data or files if you do not keep a backup yourself.

To being prepared for a horrible situation, you should activate an automated backup so that the process automatically backup all your contents and files periodically. Setting up an automatic backup is easier than you think because various numbers of automated plugins are available, as well as the default backup tool available in web hosting.

Updraft, VaultPress, BackupBuddy are the favorites when it comes to WordPress backup plugins. As you might have known, plugins play a vital part when it comes to managing a website. They make your site flexible by assigning more functionality. So a suitable backup plugin will help you to fix this automated backup issue.

A Quick Note: You should not over install unnecessary plugins just to overload your server and slow down the website performance. It’s better to check the performance after installing a plugin, and there is not much negative impact on loading time, then you can go with that plugin.

Generally, the backup plugins store data or files on the hosting storage. It would be better if you can store backups in secure cloud storage rather than a hosting server. There is other cloud storage available such as Cloudinary, Google Drive, Pcloud, Mega, etc.

There is no issue with storing your backups on the WebHost. Though, in any case, if you lose access to your WebHost, then the backup files will be lost as well. Alternatively, you can download the backup to your local computer too.

Not Optimizing Site for SEO

As a blogger, you should know how important SEO is to boost your site content on the search engine. Not only increasing visibility on the search engine but also it helps to drive targeted traffic towards your site.

Some bloggers do not correctly work on the SEO of their site. Search engine optimization drives higher traffic, especially from search engines to your website, if you focus more on enhancing it. The more traffic from search engines comes to your site, the value of your page increases.

Learning SEO may take some time, but it entirely worth acquiring this skill. If you are not doing SEO with your content and pages, then I am not sure how fast you can grow your site, but that not any time soon.

Again, SEO has two sides like a coin: On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. You have to work on both parts to improve overall site growth.

It is easy to optimize SEO nowadays because there are many optimization tools and SEO plugins available for WordPress. All you have to install a useful plugin such as Rankmath or Yoast SEO, and it will guide you to optimize your website, especially the on-page SEO.

You can take advantage of Semrush, Ahref (or any of the other SEO tools available) to work on the off-page SEO and continuously keep an eye on your site growth.

Some other plugins, like “Table of contents,” “Jetpack” can also help you to optimize your site SEO. Some tools also focus on security, which protects your site from malware activities and spam – are part of SEO as well. There are many SEO plugins available, but you should look for all in one tool to normalize the load on-site because of plugins.

Many problems a blogger may face if he doesn’t optimize SEO for a site. Without optimization, it will be quite hard to rank higher on the search engine and ultimately tricky for getting organic traffic. It is one of the common mistakes you should avoid while setting up a WordPress site.

Avoiding WordPress Upgrades

Another mistake webmasters often do by not upgrading WordPress and related themes and plugins. One of the reasons behind this is that they believe upgrading may cause problems to themes or plugins of their site. But the truth is updates are published by the developers to fix previous issues.

If you don’t update the WordPress, then your site may face security issues. Even WordPress themes and plugins also release an updated version to make your site bug free.

Until and unless you are using a self-customized theme or plugin, you can safely update them without worries. It just takes a few seconds to upgrade WordPress and related tools. During the update, your site will be on maintenance mode.

Moreover, if you do not update WordPress, then you may not be able to use a few plugins from the WordPress plugins repository. The reason behind this is, “plugins are created by declaring a particular WordPress version or a limited series.” And if you are not using the latest or up to tested version, then you will be unable to use that plugin.

Once you update your site, then your site will contain some new features as well, with extended functionality and additional features. So whenever you see any updates from WordPress, themes or plugins do go for up-gradation.

Not Selecting Suitable Plugins

You can understand the importance of plugins now. The plugin enhances the functionality of the site. For WordPress users, there are several free WordPress plugins available. You can install any as per your needs.

Plugins are created for providing a specific extension that the default WordPress does not hold. For example, optimization plugin will accelerate the site performance, Akismet will make your site spam free, Yoast SEO plugin will improve your site SEO and so on.

As a blogger, we should be concerned about the overall site, including SEO, site’s performance, design, readability to drive traffic and keep them interested on the site. Depending on all of these matrices, a site builds its growth base, and it reflects how well the site will continue to perform. The better you can optimize your website; the more traffic will come to your site.

That’s why selecting plugins and theme for a website is a crucial step where you need to be determined to choose which plugin you are going to use to give your site a proper direction. There are many plugins available in every category. If you pick up a plugin that doesn’t add all the recommended features of that category, then you should avoid those plugins.

My recommendation is to find all in one plugin for each category that provides excellent support and primary setup. It’s straightforward to find them, just look for other people’s reviews on a plugin and check the features included in it.

Before selecting plugins, you can also ask your friends how they will rate it, does it fulfill your needs and of course the security of using the plugins. WordPress repository is the most reliable plugin source because they verify each the plugins when developers add one to the library.

After installing the plugin, make sure you test site performance by using tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom.

If the site has good page load time without any issues, then you are using the right plugin. You should not avoid these steps while choosing a plugin for your WordPress site.

Not Using Google Analytics

To grow your business, you need to understand how your site is performing in terms of traffic. How many users are visiting your website for a specific period? From where those users are coming to the site. For how long the users are surfing on your site and so on. It’s essential to track these data daily so that you can enhance your website and contents depending on these analyses.

For such tracking and decision making Google Analytics is one of the best tools that can deliver precisely what you need to know. Setting up Google Analytics is very easy as you only have to create a profile for your site and link the tracking code into your site to track site performance. You can do that by using analytics plugins available for WordPress too.

Those plugins will let you use some advanced features of Google Analytics. You can easily monitor and check the status directly from your blog even though some of them can display the traffic on-site and the positions of your content on Google. If you are concerned about not using many plugins, you can track those data on Google analytics directly.

Believe me or not, without Google Analytics, you will never know the exact site traffic, and it’s hard to make winning decisions without analyzing the previous data collection. This is, of course, one of the many mistakes people do while setting up a WordPress site.

Not Having Optimized Images

Images are another essential part of websites. They are descriptive, engaging, and make your site more interesting in terms of design too. On the other hand, images are heavy in size and can lead to slow down your page loading time. If you are using its original size, then your site may face slow loading of pages.

WordPress offers many image optimization plugins that optimize images such as ShortPixel, without compromising quality. Most of them have automatic optimization features so that whenever you upload an image to your site, it gets optimized automatically. Mentioning that I also have to tell you these tools also has the option to compress images on manual instruction.

The image optimization tools will reduce the file sizes of images by applying lossy or lossless compression techniques, which is web-friendly. Some plugins also let you convert your images to WebP format as well.

After using an image optimization plugin, you should not encounter the usual image related issues on web pages that do not make any other problem than slowing down page loading time, which is one of the most concerning issues of modern-day web development.

However, while reducing the image size, remember that images are among the most important things to display inside your content. Rather than plain text, images of content make a better understanding of visitors. So make sure you do not over compress an image and lose its displaying quality, a balanced optimization is required here.

Not Setting Up a Contact Form

Having conversations with your users makes your aim more clear of delivering demanded content. To have conversations, you need to provide your users to send their comments and suggestions via email or contact forms.

Now it is easy to interact because WordPress plugins are available for creating contact forms. The plugins will provide you with the pre-designed contact form. It will allow you to edit the contact form as per requirement.

Make sure to select a plugin for the contact form that doesn’t use cookies and ensure the security of the user’s information. In case you are skilled with codes, you can create a form on your own.

For others who need the help of a plugin, it is effortless to add the contact form on site. You only need to select a few settings and copy the shortcode of the contact form and paste it anywhere you want to display, and your contact form already working.

So, do set up a contact form for the users and avoid missing this step while publishing your site.

Final Words

In this post, I mention some of the common mistakes that people make while setting up a WordPress site. These are quite essential things you should take care because this will outline the performance of your site.

It is easy to overcome these simple mistakes; then you think as there are so many tools and plugins are available. Those tools will take care of your site’s performance and keep you updated.

Just make sure you have configured them all during the first setup, and you are done. Even if you forget to do it previously, you are never too late to do this today.

The post 7 Mistakes That You Should Avoid While Setting Up a WordPress Site appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

The fundamental idea of this editor is to bring a different approach to creating content. Rather than using the Classic editor that had both text and code panel, Gutenberg uses blocks of various pre-constructed modules to design a webpage and the contents more elegantly.

At the time when Gutenberg was first launched, it was difficult for some users to adopt the block approach while others appear to be already liking working the editor. Therefore in this article, we are trying to provide some tips that can help you to get the best outcome with this powerful editor.

Quick note: WordPress has recently released 5.3 updates that insignificantly improved the user experience of the block editor and named it as Kirk as well.

The First Look of Gutenberg Editor

Assuming you are using the latest version of WordPress so the block editor as well. Therefore, it’s essential to understand the elements of the block editor at its first look.

Inside the block editor, you will notice a block with an H1 heading that is used for the title of a page or post by default. The following block is for textual inputs or, you can choose an available block using the “+” symbol.

Under the text and block section, you will mark the plugin settings section where you can find almost all plugin settings that are related to your posts & pages.

On the right sidebar of the editor, you will find the default post meta settings that were available in the previous classic editor. However, in Gutenberg, the options are more user-friendly and dynamic.

It is all about a quick overview of the Gutenberg editor. In the rest of the article, we will focus on how to use the blocks and other related options of this editor to design a beautiful post.

How to Create a Blog Post With the Editor?

It’s pretty simple. All you have to do in the WordPress dashboard, under the post section click on “add new” and you will be redirected to the block editor immediately.

How to Use the Block Editor Properly?

Step 1: Add title

Once you see the editor, the first task is to assign the title of the article. You will see a big textbox with a default hint “add title” where you should type the article name. Make sure you do not add any unnecessary texts in this block so that the title looks clean and definitive.

Step 2: Start Using a Block

As soon as you complete with the title. The text or other elements of the post can be added in the next block. To write from the very beginning of the article, use your mouse to move the cursor below the title. You can also press the tab key on your keyboard to go down.

By default, the next block is a paragraph block. However, it has the option to choose customized blocks in case you want to start the post with a different format or another module.

To apply a custom block, you must click on one of the three “+” symbols available on the editor. One of the “add block” buttons is on the top of the editor that is not as efficient as the other two in terms of block placement. Clicking on the “+” will show an add block menu with a search bar on the top and all the available blocks under child categories.

2.1 Search For a Block

The search bar is there to help you find a block immediately without looking inside the block categories.

For example, if you want to assign a paragraph. You can type “paragraph” on the search bar and the block will appear in the result.

You can use the search bar to find basic blocks like a “paragraph” “heading” or “custom HTML”; however, to discover more advanced blocks check out the categories inside the block menu.

Remember that the block editor was designed to give you the ability to be definitive when you build a page and use the perfect block that can increase the engagement and value of the page.

2.2 Mostly Used Blocks

Inside the block menu, the first category contains the most used blocks. It means you will find all the blocks that are mostly used in the content recently. The blocks in this category may be dynamic because you may change the use of blocks in the content from time to time.

You can use the “/” key on your keyboard to quickly apply recently used blocks inside your content.

Tip: Type the name of the block after “/” and the block will be immediately assigned and save some more seconds on your work. For example, to assign the image block type “/image” and you will see the option to either upload an image or choose from the gallery or a URL.

2.3 Common Blocks

Below the most used modules, you will find the common block category that includes blocks that are used very often. It includes paragraph, image, heading, gallery, quote block, etc.

2.4 Formatting Blocks

Sometimes it’s essential to add some statistical charts or codes or pull quotes inside your content to make it more engaging. You can apply any of these modules easily by using the blocks available under the formatting section and give your post a new direction as well as some authority too.

2.5 Custom Layout Blocks

To design your post, you can take advantage of the layout blocks that include elements like a separator, bottom, columns, grouping, spacer, etc.

2.6 Widget Blocks

Widget blocks are one of the most significant changes in the block editor from the old classic editor. With the block editor, you can use your widgets inside your article and make it more interesting. You can use the widgets for displaying some statistics, a list of recent posts. Or it can be any widget on your list.

2.7 Embed Blocks

A vast collection of embeds can be assigned to your post by using the block editor. There are a total of 33 embed options from different websites that can be added to your site with URL pasting.

Step 3: Managing The Blocks

Since we have introduced the types of blocks available in Gutenberg editor. It’s time to understand how to manage the block well to create a good post.

Every block will have its toolbar once you start creating something in it. The buttons in the toolbar will vary according to the block type. For example, if I take a paragraph block and write something in it, the toolbar will be available for further modification.

Apart from the customization options, the toolbar also has the block settings and transformation options in it. For some advanced modification, you can use the sidebar options in the editor screen.

To move your blocks up and down, there are two buttons available on the left side of each block. You can move the blocks as much as you want according to need.

You can also save a block format for reuse. This option is particularly helpful for bloggers who frequently need to add a specific type of block into the content.

For example, I have created the paragraph block with a purple color, which I would like to reuse in the future. So to save the block for reuse, you should click on “more options” in the toolbar and add it as a reusable block.

After that, you will be asked to give it a name that you are going to save for future use. The block you just saved for reuse will be available under the “reusable” category in the block menu.

In case you want to edit or delete a reusable block, click on the “manage all reusable blocks” under the reusable section.

Step 4: Adding Some Common Block In the Editor

As we already know, the Gutenberg editor has ready to use blocks that we can implement in our content straight in. One can add these blocks and do some optional changes to get the best possible outcome with it.

Being said that, let’s see how the editor simplifies the ability to customize your content with some common ready to use blocks.

Adding an Image Block

The WordPress editor has a ready to use image block. You can add the block, upload or select an image from the media library and customize it easily.

You can also drag and drop an image from your computer, and the editor will automatically create an image block once it identifies the dragged file as an image.

Once you add an image, you will be able to see the advanced settings on the right part of the screen where image related metadata, size, and shape of the image can be customized.

For more settings such as inserting links and changing the alignment of the image, you can take the help of the block toolbar.

Adding an Image Gallery

The gallery block of the editor is pretty much similar to the image block. You can either add the block first and then images, or you can select multiple images from the PC and drag them all to the editor to form a gallery itself.

Adding Links in Your Content

It’s easy to add and manage links in the block editor. Some of the blocks have the option where you can add custom links. The paragraph block is the most common, as you might have guessed already. However, the image block, list block, button blocks and some more have the linking option.

Let’s see how you can assign a link to a specific phase inside the paragraph editor. To insert a link you have to have text content in the paragraph block.

Now select any word or phrase where you would like to assign a link and then click on the “link” icon on the toolbar. Immediately, a box will appear under the selected words or phase where you can type the URL or search for any keyword if you want to create an internal link.

Press enter to complete the linking process.

Adding Custom HTML

Custom HTML plays a vital role in content creation. When we need to display an advertisement, banner, or any kind of statistical charts we use custom HTML.

The block editor makes it simple to add custom HTML inside your page without breaking anything inside your page. Just add the block and add the HTML, and you are done.

Adding a Quote

Quote inside the content is a trend nowadays, effective as well to make the content more attractive. The WordPress editor will help you add a quote with a matter of seconds.

Stylishly adding a quote has never been easier with the classic editor, however, that day is long gone now. To assign a quote inside your content, simply add the “pull quote” block from the block menu and type the quote.

Once the quote is ready, do not forget to mention the author-name below.

Assign a Shortcode

As I have mentioned earlier, widget blocks are one of the best implementations in the block editor, it’s time to know how you can take advantage of a widget block to add a form in your content.

Nowadays, we use plugins to create beautiful forms for our site. Most often, these plugins provide us a shortcode using which we can display the form anywhere we want.

In the classic editor, we had to switch to the code editor and paste the shortcode, which sometimes does break the page. However, with the block editor, it has a pre-defined shortcode block which is designed to display shortcodes without hampering the other blocks of the page.

Step 5: Exploring Some Advanced Blocks In Gutenberg

Gutenberg doesn’t only value the common way to create content but also focuses on some of the most significant shortage that was previously encountered by the users with the classic editor.

Hence it comes with some advanced blocks that we can say are the combination of two or more blocks. Either way, it’s a great approach and improves the page quality in terms of providing information and attracting the readers.

With that being said, let’s dive into the editor to find out some of the advanced blocks.

Adding a Button Inside a Page or Post

It has never been much more comfortable to add a button earlier but now you can do it with three or four mouse clicks. To add a button inside your page or post, find the button block under the “layout element.”

It will let you enter the button text and link, as well. On the right sidebar, you can change the button style, colors, and border-radius as well.

Adding Text Next to an Image

To assign text inline to an image or vice-versa, you can use the “media & text” block where you will have both options to upload or select images and add text or paragraph.

It’s simple and effective. You can resize the image by dragging the border and set to crop the image automatically for proper resizing. Image alternate text can be set from the right sidebar as well.

Like other blocks, the toolbar provides you to customize the order of image and text and shape of the block.

Add a Table Inside Your Content

Sometimes we may need to insert a table inside our content. In such a situation, thanks to the Gutenberg editor, you can take the help of the default table block without using a separate plugin for it.

Here how to create a table using the table block of the Gutenberg editor.

Creating a Beautiful Cover Pic for Your Content

I am not sure how many people use this idea, but the “cover block” in block editor is an amazing integration and straightforward as possible as it can be. You can create an amazing cover picture by simply adding a clear image and using the text editor that appears over the image.

Later, you can change the style of the cover image by adding some waverly layouts and resizing it as suitable.

Adding an Audio File

If you are going to add a podcast, music file, or any other audio file into your content, then you can use the audio block in the editor. It’s very straightforward to add and similar to adding images.

Step 6: Plugin Options in the Gutenberg Editor

The installed plugins that are related to the creation of content, able to integrate their options inside the editor with the help of the Gutenberg API system.

Plugins option such as SEO, table of contents, automatic internal links will be available in the editor as soon as it activated. For example, one of the most precious plugin to create content is the SEO plugin. Let’s say we installed the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress, then all the content related options of Yoast SEO plugin will appear just below the editor.

You can mention the focus keyword, track the SEO score, edit a content snippet. Overlap metadata, design the social appearance of the content as well.

For other plugins, you can find all the options once you look in the bottom section of the editor.

Step 7: Exploring the Editor Settings

The Gutenberg editor itself has some impressive settings which you can apply to feel something different than the usual setup. It helps to emphasis your needs and provides you more focus, easiness as well as the ability to do more.

The settings of the editor are divided into three different parts.

1. View
2. Editor &
3. Toolbar

1.1 Top Toolbar

Under the hood of view, you can enable “top toolbar,” which adds a toolbar at the top of the editor that access all the blocks and document tools in a single space.

1.2 Spotlight Mood

This mode is applicable when you don’t want to focus on the other blocks while working on a particular block. This mood blurs the other blocks and helps you keep working on the current one.

1.3 Full-Screen Mode

This mode is nothing but fits the editor into your whole screen so that other unnecessary parts don’t appear while editing content.

2.1 Visual Editor

This is activated by default as you are working on the editor.

2.2 Code Editor

Enabling the code editor will convert all your blocks into codes where you can edge it little more with advanced coding. (Make sure to use it only and only if you are comfortable with coding).

3.1 Block Manager

It let you enable or disable blocks of the editor according to your need.

3.2 Manage All Reusable Block

It helps you to manage the reusable blocks if you have saved any.

3.3 Keyboard Shortcuts

Gutenberg supports keyboard shortcuts. All the keyboard shortcut combinations are available in this note. You can also use Shift + Alt + H to view all the shortcut information.

Step 8: Publishing and Managing Option in the Gutenberg Editor

There will be a lot of metadata for each post & page that you are going to create in the editor. All those metadata that includes post status, permalink, categories, tags, excerpt, featured images will be available on the right sidebar of the editor screen (under the document section).

Each option contains more child options that let you complete content and make it ready to publish.

Final Words

No doubt, Gutenberg has been the better editor for WordPress since the 5.0 update with all its beneficial ingredients in it. All we have to understand and explore the features and take advantage of the editor to make max out of it.

With this article, I genuinely hope you will get something new about the editor, and even if you are not using it currently. You will get motivated to use the editor soon.

The post How to Get the Best Outcome From the Gutenberg Editor? appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

However, today, I, you, and almost all webmasters know how SEO works with a content strategy and some additional factors. As a content creator focusing on SEO is one of the most important tasks. I can also say you can be a good writer, but if you have not optimized your content for SEO, somebody else is going to outrank you with a less creative but highly optimized article.

So in WordPress, while writing articles, we use a reliable SEO plugin. At this moment, I must say Yoast and RankMath are my two top choices. Thanks to both of these plugins, because they have helped me understand on-page SEO into a more profound level.

… on-page, SEO is powerful. If you have not correctly implemented it yet, you should. It may take time, but once your page picks the right spot, it hard to outrank (just what I believe according to my experience).

In this article, I will try to differentiate two of the most popular SEO plugins, Yoast, and Rank Math. I believe this post will help you to choose the right plugin and do on-page SEO properly.

Before we start, let’s get an idea of what these plugins are:

• Yoast is a popular WordPress SEO plugin with more than 5 million installations. Yoast is reliable and has two versions of it, i.e., it’s a freemium plugin. The free version of Yoast can be downloaded from the WordPress repository.
• Rank Math, on the opposite side, is a new edition from MyThemeShop, which is also available in the WordPress repository. Rank Math does not have as much popularity as Yoast has, but the review on the plugin is positive.

That being said, let’s pin Rank Math against Yoast SEO to get their pros and cons so that you can make a decision in which WordPress SEO plugin is most suitable for you.

#1. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Installation Guide

As you can find both the plugin on the WordPress repository, installing and activation part is similar to other plugins. After activation, you can see both plugins creating a unique section in your WordPress admin sidebar.

To configure Yoast SEO with your site, you will need to click on the installation wizard. It will guide you through all the primary information that the plugin needs to work with the website.

The installation guide in Yoast is simple and easy. It has a total of 8 steps where you will provide information such as company name, environment, search visibility, website type, etc. Once the pre-setup is complete, you can move for more advanced configurations.

Similarly, after the installation of Rank Math will bring a 5-step installation wizard where you will require to provide your site details, search console information, site map configurations, advanced optimizations, and confirmation of the settings. Once the pre-setup is complete, you will be able to go for more advanced settings.

Our Choice: Both the plugins provide installation wizards, but the approach is different. Yoast goes for simple information that anyone can provide where’s RankMath comes with some complex settings, but they have outlined every setting and how they are going to help your site.

RankMath, though, it has some advanced settings it the wizard will guide you through, and that’s pretty much the complete settings of the plugin. That’s why the wizard of RankMath is preferable than that of Yoast.

#2. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — User Interface (Dashboard)

The user interface is a crucial part while you are going to use a tool. A feature-rich but straightforward user interface appears to be more helpful for the users. When the user interface concern comes to Yoast SEO, it does not offer a good interface, but you can perform all the configurations.

Of course, all the necessary settings are available in an organized order; however, a beginner may feel confused with multiple settings on the viewport.

On the other hand, Rank Math represents a clean dashboard where you can enable or disable primary functions with just one click. All the information related to each function is written inside the card, along with its status.

Enabling or disabling will determine whether the advanced configurations of a particular module will be available or not.

Our Choice: Both plugins provide useful configurations for the users in an easy to understand manner, though the Rank Math dashboard user interface is a little cleaner and easy to understand with simple enable/disable options.

#3. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Schema.org Integrations

Schema.org is quite useful when it comes to increasing your article’s click-through rate on the search results. Integrating schema.org will let you enable featured snippets, star ratings, defining post format, and much more. A complete SEO plugin should have the schema.org settings in it.

Yoast SEO plugin is compatible with schema.org, but you will need to install an add-on separately as it entirely skips the schema part. It would be nice to have full schema set up for individual pages, but with Yoast installed, you will end up installing another plugin in your WordPress.

On the flip side, Rank Math comes with full schema.org configuration. After enabling the schema.org, you will have complete control over how you want to set your page or post.

Under your blog post, you can set schema inside the rich snippet tab of the Rank Math tool.

Our Choice: It’s clear that having all the settings inside your SEO plugin is way better than installing a separate plugin for it. Since the schema is an essential part of SEO, having the settings for it inside your primary SEO plugin is recommended. We go for Rank Math’s way in terms of schema.org integration.

#4. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Keyword Assigning

Keyword assigning is an essential part of an SEO tool. Without focus keyword or keyphrase, you can’t just optimize your page or post for random key combinations.

Hence before creating your content, selecting and assigning the keyword with SEO plugin is vital for on-page SEO. Both of our SEO plugins allow you to assign keyword/keyphrase and apply different methods to show you how your content optimization based on that specific keyword is going on.

Yoast free version allows you to assign a maximum one keyword to your content. You will need to buy the premium version for optimizing your content for multiple keywords.

After assigning the keyword, Yoast sensor will guide you through what you will need to add on your page, what’s your readability score, how well the content optimization is going on according to the selected keyword, and much more.

Your content SEO optimization result will be represented with green, orange, and red status as good, average, and critical, respectively.

Rank Math, on the other hand, lets you assign a maximum of 5 keywords for optimization, but you will need to activate the feature with your Mythemeshop account, which is entirely free.

Like Yoast, Rank Math also provide you guidance on how you should write your content to make it entirely targeted and optimized for that specific keyword or keyphrase. The guidance or rules are pretty much the same, but Rank Math shows your optimization score (0-100) digit, which is more satisfying than just a green light.

Moreover, Rank Math can give you keyword suggestions immediately once you start typing the keyword in the “focus keyword” textbox.

Our Choice: In keyword assigning both plugins does an excellent job while the Rank Math score system is a little satisfying than Yoast. Again, with Yoast, you can optimize your article with suggested keywords of the primary key phrase, which you have to do manually in Rank Math.

Both plugins are beneficial in terms of keyword assigning. You can choose the one that you feel more comfortable to use.

#5. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Google Search Console

Search Console is a tool that will help you track data of your site indexing, keywords performance, page performance, full site insight, and much more. Since you are publishing articles for Google ranking, mainly, you should track the record of search console regularly.

If your SEO plugin should do webmaster verification of your site, and after that, you would like to track the webmaster tool’s records directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Yoast SEO does help in webmaster site verification. But it does not provide an interface where you can see your search console records directly.

Rank Math makes it suitable to track search console records right from your SEO dashboard. To enable this ability, you will need to provide your Gmail address and verify it so that Rank Math can fetch that information and display them in WordPress.

Our Choice: Rank Math is the plugin you will want to install if you like to track search console data without visiting your webmaster tools account every day.

#6. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — XML Sitemap

A sitemap is a crucial part when it comes to indexing your website. Without a sitemap, your site can not be fetched by Google’s crawler. It’s mandatory that you have a sitemap generator on your site, and it continuously pings the update of the website to major search engines.

Both Yoast SEO and Rank Math plugins generate the sitemap of your website automatically. The URL of the sitemap is different. But that is just a URL structure that won’t have any positive or negative impact on the search rankings. In both plugins, you can generate custom sitemap once respective post types are available on your site, such as news sitemap.

#7. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Link Management

While creating your content, many times, you will need to add links inside your content. It can be internal links or external links. When its external link, it’s a common practice to assign “no follow” or “dofollow” tags depending on your philosophy.

However, it would be better if you have global control over your external links rather than setting them individually.

Yoast does not provide such control over external links, so you will need to assign link properties manually.

But Rank Math has “SEO tweaks” that let you manage the links and much more straightforward tasks automatically according to your settings. You can decide whether to index empty categories or not, nofollow/dofollow image links, nofollow/dofollow external links, etc.

Our Choice: As you have guessed already, Rank Math is the favorite SEO plugin in terms of link management, which automates so many attributes and saves your time.

#8. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — 404 Errors And Redirect Manager

Your WordPress site may have a“404 – page not found” issue with some links. So you should detect the broken links and apply 301 permanent redirects on them. It will keep your site 404 error-free, and Google likes such websites.

You would certainly like to track all your link errors inside your WordPress dashboard and take care of them as well.

Both Yoast and Rank Math plugins have powerful tools to detect broken links. Once you get the notifications, you can quickly apply 301, 302, or 307 temporary redirections according to your choice.

The redirection tool of Yoast comes with the premium version wheres in Rank Math plugin; it comes as a free integration. Nevertheless, both of them are equally powerful and useful, as well.

#9. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — Woocommerce SEO

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. With this plugin installed, you can convert your website into a proper online store. Creating listings, adding products, configuring payment gateways, tracking your monthly revenues, and much more can be easily managed with WooCommerce plugin.

Yoast and Rank Math supports WooCommerce functionality and easily integrates with the WooCommerce plugin to fetch the metadata of products so that they can appear in the search engine directly.

Yoast plugin’s WooCommerce integration comes with the premium version, while Rank Math provides it for free.

Our Choice: If your budget doesn’t suit the premium version of Yoast, you can get your WooCommerce SEO done with the help of the Rank Math plugin. However, both the plugins are equally useful when we go for the features and functionality related to WooCommerce.

#10. Yoast SEO vs. Rank Math — The Support System

Well, whichever tool we use, there are times when we need support from the developer team. Both Yoast and RankMath are plugins that made of codes that can be broken or do not function well sometimes.

In such a case, you will get premium quality support from Yoast if you have the premium version of Yoast plugin. If you are a free user, you can check their guide. I contain almost all the information that you may need to know or fix your problem.

On the other hand, the developers of Rank Math, Mythemeshop has published well-written documentation about the plugin, which has all the information and tutorials about the plugin. In case you need their direct help dedicated support team is available 24/7.

What Will be Your Choice?

As you can see from the comparison, both plugins are very good with their features. But there is no doubt that Rank Math is providing you more while being free to all plugin. Some useful features in Rank Math are not available on Yoast. Some of them are available in the Yoast premium version.

My idea is if you are already using the Yoast premium version, then you should not switch to Rank Math just for one-two more features, which you can do with some third-party tools as well. The reason I can never doubt Yoast because it’s a great plugin with great ability. It has been proving it’s worth over the years.

However, if you are using the free version of Yoast, you should move to Rank Math because this plugin has many to offer and can full fill your needs without purchasing any premium version.

I hope this comparison is going to help you choose the more suitable SEO plugin for your WordPress site. If you have any questions/recommendations regarding this article, let me know in the comment section below.

Have a good SEO day with your site…

The post Yoast vs. Rank Math Comparison: Which SEO Plugin is the Best? appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

But do you know an image needs optimization? Optimizing images can be helpful for your page SEO in many ways. During content creation, most people still think that image optimization is all about using proper alt text and naming them well.

However, optimizing an image is much more than just naming it and using suitable alt text.

In this article, I will describe some useful steps which you can use to fix your site image issue that appeared on GTmetrix and Pingdom.

Breaking down the image added above:

1. Due to the image optimization problem, the page speed score in GTmetrix is very low.
2. You can see the total page size is 6.78 MB which is significantly high; I would keep in under 3 MB so that the site can be loaded in just 1-2 sec.
3. Serve scaled images are the issue that appears in GTmetrix/Pingdom because of unscaled images according to your template settings.
4. Optimize images is the issue which appears because of the lossless version of those images can save extra data which will improve your page speed score.

* Remember page speed score is another essential metric that can help your page to rank high in search engines.

Learn How Fix Image Optimization Issues That Appears in Pingdom and GTmetrix

To fix these issues, apply the following optimization techniques.

#1. Find Unoptimized Images

After adding the images into your post-scan your URL to find image problem. There are tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom, which can help you identify the problem with image optimization issues. GTmetrix shows the issues in detail so I would recommend you test a particular page with GTmetrix.

As soon as the scanning is finished, it will display all the results into two different tabs, “Page Speed” and “Yslow.”

There are seven types of image-related problems that can occur during page scanning. Here’s what to do to fix those problems:

1. Serve Scaled Image: Resize the recommended images into the correct scale that your theme’s HTML & CSS support.
2. Optimize Images: Compress the images losslessly.
3. Specify Image Dimension: Define the width and height of images in HTML or CSS codes.
4. Make Favicon Small and Scalable: The recommended size of a favicon is 16x 16x.
5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Serve your images from a CDN URL.
6. Minimize Redirect: Serve images with HTTPS.
7. Combine Images Using CSS Sprite: Combine multiple images into one image using CSS sprites.

#2. Serve Scaled Images

If you get this warning to serve scaled images by GTmetrix, it means that the page has some oversized images. GTmetrix will recommend you to resize those images into the correct dimension (will be provided by GTmetrix) that your theme requires.

As soon as you scale the images to the recommended dimension, the serving scaled images warning will disappear. Scaling the images will help you to decrease the page size as well.

Caution: Do not change the image title while scaling the images.

You can either use an online image editor or any offline tool to resize the images as required. I use iLOVEimg, which is a free online editor and allows you to compress, convert, and resize images. Another tool that also works great for compressing both PNG and JPEG images is TinyPNG.

First of all, download the recommended image file from GTmetrix. Open the image editor and upload the image file which was downloaded from the GTmetrix link shown in the warning.

Note down the recommended image size from GTmetrix and set the dimension in the image editor. Resize and download the resized version.

Now upload back the resized image to the same file location using the cPanel file manager or any FTP client. Note that you should see an overwrite confirmation popup while uploading the image then select overwrite and upload option.

Follow this procedure and resize + upload back all the images which appear on GTmetrix recommendation. As soon as you finish the process clear your website cache and rescan the page with GTmetrix and the warnings will disappear.

#3. Optimize Images

The “optimize image” warning usually appears when the page contains some uncompressed images. Losslessly compressing an image will reduce the size of the image and image files will resize themselves instead of via CSS. Most importantly, the page load time will decrease by a little %.

To fix this problem, the open optimized image in a new tab which is recommended by GTmetrix and download it.

Now copy the original filename from GTmetrix (Image URL) and rename the downloaded file by pasting the copied name.

Now with the help of a Cpanel file manager or any FTP plugin and upload back the optimized images into the correct location (wp-content/uploads/date/….).

The location must be the same to solve the problem. While uploading the optimized image, make sure you get a popup to replace the old image file with the new upload. Then select confirm.

Repeat this procedure for all the unoptimized images. Once finished clear cache and re-test the page with GTmetrix/Pingdom and optimize images warning will be solved.

#3. Specify Image Dimension

Mentioning the image width and height (In HTML and CSS codes) enables faster rendering. This mention helps the server by rejecting the need for unnecessary repaints.

“Specify Image Dimension” warning appears when GTmetrix finds any image on your website without width/height mentioned inside the HTML or CSS code. These days some of the themes automatically add the image dimension while some others don’t.

Visual editor plugins for WordPress and live page builders such as Divi and Elementor allows you to mention every image dimension. It is the right approach by the developers so that you won’t face this problem + using these plugin you can fix the issue that appeared in GTmetrix too.

But if you don’t use any visual editor in WordPress then adding width/height in HTML code will help you to solve this warning. An excellent example of using dimensions in code is:

Once you have edited all the images and added their respective dimensions then clear the site cache and recheck the page in GTmetrix whether the issue was fixed or not. If you have done it correctly, then the problem won’t appear again.

#4. Make Favicon Small and Scalable

Favicon is the icon connected with a web page. This little image that remains in the “favicon.ico” file is stored in the server’s root. During a page load, the browser requests this .ico file, and hence it needs to be present with the page.

Every single time a browser asks for this favicon file, the cookies along the server’s root is sent. So making the favicon small in size will help to reduce the cookie size for the server, and it will improve the website performance score in testing tools.

You need to make sure that the favicon size is 16x16px, and the file is in favicon.ico format, and is cached using a caching plugin. Making favicon cacheable avoids frequent requests for it.

#5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN (content delivery network) is a set of web servers distributed over multiple locations all around the globe which delivers your content more efficiently to the users. The advantage of using a CDN is that it can provide an equally fast website performance to all your users from different locations around the world.

When you are using a CDN, you need to serve the images from a different URL, which is called your CDN URL.

For example:

• Image URL without CDN: https://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/an-image.png
• Image URL with CDN: https://static-ea7a.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/an-image.png

The CDN URL can be different for different CDN providers. There are many CDN providers available; I prefer to use KeyCDN and Cloudflare. But this can be your personal choice. Most of the CDN providers are good, make sure that you have picked the right one.

Cloudflare – Cloudflare serves the website contents with 150+ data centers while KeyCDN has in total of 34 data centers. Cloudflare is much easier to combine with other CDN providers, which will increase the data centers resulting in faster content delivery.

But Cloudflare doesn’t set separate CDN URLs for the images. Instead, it serves the same image with caching+compression. So to get a different CDN URL you can serve images from KeyCDN.

KeyCDN – Setting up KeyCDN with your WordPress site is easy.

Create an account, verify your email address and you will be ready to serve your site + it contents with CDN. Create a new custom zone URL where you want to pull content from during the browser request.

Go to “zone” from the KeyCDN dashboard and fill-up the form.

Save the zone, and it will lead to a new window where you will see the newly created Zone’s status + your CDN URL and SSL status. You can add more zones if you want and manage your available zones efficiently.

Now on your WordPress install CDN enabler plugin (lightweight) and use the CDN URL from KeyCDN that you have created earlier.

Now clear your website cache and Cloudflare cache (if you use Cloudflare) and re-test your website address in GTmetrix. This time the “Serve Images From CDN” warning should disappear.

#6. Combine Images Using CSS Sprite

Nowadays, themes developers use small icons to create and design a beautiful website.

Moreover, we use icons in our pages, mostly on the homepage. On my website, there are four icons on the home page. But they are one image which has combined using CSS sprite.

It is a good practice because combining four images into one decrease the total number of browser requests to the server and speed up page loading time as well as decrease server load.

Creating CSS sprites can be a little bit technical, or you can use a CSS sprite generator.

Quick note: Don’t apply CSS sprite for your great images on your page such as featured images, images that describe your writings. Because combining these images will lead to loss of individual alt tags. Alt tags are an influential SEO factor for images.

#7. Some Bonus Tips To Optimize WordPress Images

Above mentioned techniques will help you to fix image optimization issues in GTmetrix + optimize WordPress images. However, there are more factors when it comes to image optimization. You can use these tricks to optimize website images, even higher standards. I will mention a few ways which you can apply to the image.

#7.1 Apply Lazy Load

You can halt the image loading while the other parts of a website such as layouts, fonts, CSS are loading. It may or may not affect the visitor’s experience, depending on how fast your web server is! Because as soon as the site starts loading the images will be waiting for other components to be fully downloaded.

Now if your site can load the non-image part real quick then applying lazy load is beneficial.

I use Autoptimize caching plugin for my site, and there is an option to enable lazy load for images. On applying lazy load, the site score has improved from 90 to 93 on GTmetrix along with a slight improvement in loading time. If you consider using a different plugin, then use the lazy load plugin.

(You can see my GTmetrix site report here) [lazy load enabled]

For more Lazy Loading plugins alternatives read our post – 10+ Best Free Lazy Loading Plugins To Speed Up Your WordPress Website.

#7.2 Remove EXIF data

EXIF data contains information such as image shutter speed, image ISO, focal length, the model of the camera, image data, and much more. These pieces of information don’t need to include while using that image on your website. So try to remove them.

Popular WordPress image optimization plugins like Imagify, ShortPixel, and Smush have an option to keep or remove EXIF data. So while configuring these plugins, make sure you have unchecked it.

#7.3 Use Correct Image Format

I prefer to use JPEG, PNG, and WebP format on my website.

PNG is an uncompressed version of an image. So you should use PNG with small images with fewer color effects because a high-resolution image with more color effects can increase the size of a PNG file.

JPEG is concentrated so that it can be used for colorful images. JPEG is lower in size, and hence, they lose their quality. You can see the difference between JPG and PNG from this popular demonstration by Labnol.

WebP is a new web-optimized image format which is a combination of both lossless and lossy compression. Developed by Google and useful for the website as it provides better image quality with less image size.

Final Words

As long as images remain one of the crucial parts of an article and webpage, image optimization is necessary. I tried to mention some key points using which you can optimize WordPress images. However, as I said earlier, there are more tricks that you can apply to speed up the page performance.

Some of them which I have not added in this article (Because it is a performance-related article) are Hotlink Protection, Name + Alt Tag, Image URL Redirect minimization, and leverage browser caching especially for images, etc.

Anyway, make sure to optimize your full website performance since this is a crucial factor in SEO these days. If you have any thoughts or doubts regarding this article mentioned below, I’m always happy to hear from you + help you.

The post How to Fix Image Optimization Issues That Appears in Pingdom and GTmetrix appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

I was using “AMP for WP,” which is still a very popular plugin, and honestly, at first, it was pretty easy to configure just by enabling few options in AMP dashboard. After that mobile version of my website was changed entirely, it was fast, better UX and clean too.

I have never used Adsense on that website so had no idea how it works with ads, does it improve or cut the revenues. The idea was obvious to improve the mobile version of my website.

That was my story. I know you are here to find the proper configuration of AMP plugin, but before starting the tutorial, I do believe that knowing about AMP and its pros and cons are essential.

What Is AMP?

Accelerated Mobile Pages shortly AMP is a free, open-source modern-day framework which allows you to create mobile pages that deliver it’s contents quickly. The reason behind this is the preloaded libraries in AMP  which consist of HTML, JS, and other cache libraries which can accelerate the load speed of mobile pages.

It doesn’t matter whether you have some heavy contents like infographics, videos, pdf files, or some live data charts amp will work on its way. It will display contents that matter to your readers but get rid of all the unnecessary elements that force your website load slowly. Here’s how a mobile page with and without AMP looks like:

Do You Need to Implement AMP?

Well, it depends on your choice and requirements. From the pros and cons I have mentioned below, you can find out whether you need AMP or your usual responsive theme is better. Think twice before making your decision.

AMP Pros

1. Speed up your website load time.
2. It will improve server performance.
3. It will positively influence on mobile ranking due to its faster load time.

AMP Cons

1. Your mobile site cache is on google’s control.
2. Your analytics may suffer sometime.
3. Ads revenue is reduced. (I was not sure previously but after a few months of experiments now I can say your income will be reduced ).

How to Properly Configure AMP With a WordPress Website

To setup amp with your website, first of all, you need to install any amp plugin from WordPress repository. In this tutorial, I am using the AMP for WP plugin, which is very popular with 100,000+ Active Installations.

Go to WordPress plugin – Add New Plugin – and search “AMP for WP.”

Activate the plugin, and you will automatically be redirected to the AMP homepage where you can either use an installation wizard or AMP option pannel. I would recommend using AMP wizard if you are a beginner or you can use the options panel instead.

Assuming you are just beginning with AMP plugin, let’s click on the installation wizard.

This Installation Wizard helps you to set up the necessary options for AMP. The steps are optional & only take only a few minutes. To get started click on “Start.”

First thing first, you have to upload your website logo from your WP gallery or your local storage. If you have not created a logo yet create a logo here for free.

Remember that your logo should be of size 190×36 for proper appeal.

In the next step, you need to define where you are going to apply AMP pages. You usually should use AMP on the whole website like posts, page, homepage, category pages, even with the tags. But some times implementing AMP on categories and tags result in 404 errors.

You can first apply AMP for all the options then if you detect 404 errors in category pages, you can uncheck the option later.

The following step is to configure your Google analytics with AMP. If you do not configure analytics tracking code with AMP plugin, mobile traffic won’t be counted on analytics, which is horrible to see half of the visitor’s count may drop just after configuring AMP plugin. So it’s highly recommended to track your AMP traffics too.

You can find the analytics tracking code from the admin settings of Analytics. Go ahead and select the property on which you are configuring AMP and copy the code from tracking info.

Now paste the code into the AMP settings.

Now select any design from the given four designs. I prefer the SWIFT mode, which offers a beautiful look to the website.

Following the design setting finally, you will see the welcome message and your website is now AMP enabled. However, you have a couple of more things to look inside the advance settings panel.

Advanced Settings for AMP Plugin

To find the advanced settings go to the WordPress dashboard and click on AMP, from there, click on settings.

1. General Settings

The first tab is general settings where you can resize your logo and enable and disable AMP support in some aspects of your website, such as page, post, categories. This is the option for you where you can enable or disable AMP support on tags and categories that I have mentioned earlier.

2. Ads Configuration

If you use AdSense or MGID ads on your website, you can set them globally, and those ads will appear in specific positions in all the posts. To place ads, select any position where you would like to display them and then fill the Data AD Client and Data AD Slots. If you check the responsive ad unit, your ads will be responsive for different screen sizes.

3. Configure SEO Settings

You can configure SEO settings such as enabling meta description, open graph, integrating your SEO plugin in this tab. Moreover, enabling link inspection tool is also available here.

4. Enable a Page Builder

Enabling page builder is an option where you can integrate popular page builders like Elementor, Divi, WPbakery. By default, the AMP builder is enabled, but if you want to use any these, you can simply enable it here for building custom pages.

5. Performance Enhancements

In this tab, you need to enable both the option for minifying and leverage browser caching.

6. Analytics Configuration

If you use other analytics tools like Tag manager, Facebook pixel, or Statcounter, you can enable those service inside the analytics settings.

All you have to enable them and assign their tracking code in it.

7. Structured Data Settings

Structured data settings are available to set up the schema types for your articles, regular posts, and pages. Generally, in your SEO tools, these configurations are available, but in AMP, it’s recommended to re-configure because it uses a different version of your website.

By default, the AMP plugin has some schemas, but you can install the free plugin to improve schema and add new types of it.

8. Notice Bar & GDPR Settings

Notice bar settings are used to display cookie notification. You can show a simple cookie notification to the visitors for the first time. Or you can use a GDPR compliancy design. With a message to the visitors where they can either accept your policy or ignore it according to their choice.

Remember, only one types of notification can be applied at a time.

9. Push Notification Settings

Push notification is a great way to notify your subscribers about a new post. It’s more useful to bring back your readers again and again without email campaigns.

In case you want to integrate push notification with your AMP website, you can easily do it from the settings. Create an account on One Signal and paste the ID in AMP settings. Once you have done that your site will be ready to receive subscribers and send post notifications to them.

10. Contact Form Settings

By default, the contact forms are not supported by AMP plugin. To enable contact form support check the specific form from the list. Available forms are Contact Form 7, Gravity Form, Ninja Form.

11. Custom Comment Settings

Comments are essential parts of a website. To enable comments for AMP version of your site you can check or uncheck the settings inside the comment configuration.

The number of displayable comments also can be set. Moreover, a different commenting platform such as discus and Facebook, can be enabled from here.

12. Advanced Conditions For AMP

This is the last and very important part of the configuration. Some of the settings in this tab can control the conditions of whether a mobile device can detect the amp or not. What types of link style you will use. Your internal links behaviors in terms of AMP, tablet redirections, etc.

Make sure before enabling any settings know about it correctly from the info icon on the right-hand side.

13. Fix Plugin Conflicts

When you are done with the plugin configuration. Download and install the AMP plugin manager plugin. Which will help you avoid some of the plugins like caching plugins, sharing plugins if they create any problem in your AMP pages? Only you have to check those plugins which you want to avoid.

Track AMP Status With Search Console

Since you have configured the plugin successfully and your AMP page is now live, search console will start detecting AMP links automatically. But you should have submitted your website to search console earlier. If you have not submitted yet follow this guide.

As soon as the search console discovers AMP links a new tab will appear under enhancement. Here you can check the status of all the AMP links along with their indexing status.

You can find the AMP errors, warnings, and valid AMP pages. Tracking AMP links is very important. Discovering any fault, errors, and then fixing AMP links is never going to be more comfortable.

Your search console AMP dashboard will appear like this:

In case you have some errors or warnings fix them by following the guidelines provided by search console and then validate them to display them as valid pages.

Final Words

Whether you are implementing AMP or the normal responsive mobile site optimizing the page and its performance is essential. Before publishing your AMP pages, make sure you have configured everything correctly and test the AMP site a few times.

All the required actions to fix the issues should be taken immediately, and tracking your AMP page status on search console is essential. Since you are converting your website to a new mobile version, it’s a good practice to look after every component of it.

Since most of the settings are available in the AMP for WP plugin, I believe you can set up an excellent AMP page without problems and take your mobile site to a better level in terms of readability and performance.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission.

The post How to Properly Set Up Your WordPress Amp Plugin to Reduce Amp Errors appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Well, if you’re still trying to find it out, let me remind you that it is the URL.

What Is a URL?

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator that defines the exact path or location where the website resources such as HTML, js, images, etc. are found of a specific webpage.

So what happens when we try to load an incorrect URL?

Without a correct URL, you are not going to get anything from a webpage, which is also known as 404 error.

This is frustrating, right?

Well, like other solutions, particularly for website-related problems, you can effectively change a URL and fix the 404 error as well. Let’s find out how to do that in this article.

Quick Reminder: Now, if you are simply a reader who likes to browse through web pages and gathering information then the rest of this article is not well optimized for you, because you’re going to see some operations inside the administrative panel of a website.

Why & When We Update a URL?

Updating a URL means bringing some changes to the URL of a specific page. There can be a couple of reasons to update a page/post URL. In my opinion…

• It can be due to late on-page SEO optimization.
• Be due to the proper structuring of your page URL.
• Be due to the mass change in the type of contents.
• And more like these, it completely depends upon the decision of admin & webmaster of a particular website.

Let’s check the screenshot below from “search engine roundtable.” It says that Google recommends you not to change URL even if you change page contents.

Let’s understand this scenario with an example.

Say you have a post ranked at the 1st position on Google. Typically, you will get lots of traffic if your keyword has a decent amount of volume.

Now if you suddenly decide to optimize the post for another keyword, which holds even more volume, then in favor of on-page SEO optimization, you are supposed to update the URL as well.

In this case, when you change your article’s URL, how in this world someone is going to find the original article by clicking on the link which ranked in the first position.

Page not found, 404 error!!! Another bad impression on the website.

Of course, Google is going to index your new page with an updated URL, but that is going to be a completely different page from the previous one.

To a query on the forum ”whether 404 error hampers the site SEO or not?” – Alan Mosley responded,

So…

Should You Update A Page URL?

Why not! Google recommends not to do that because if 404 error arises, people are not going to get what they are looking for. That is not their aim; the algorithm is designed to supply the best piece of information to the users. But guess what we have the solution to get rid of the 404 error.

Moreover, you have to take care of the new keyword (new page) now. This is the more important part because we all know how precious it is to get traffic and so a good rank.

Before we dive into fixing the URL updating issue, let’s find out how to update your URLs in WordPress website.

How To Update URLs In WordPress

Updating URLs in WordPress is not a hard task. The developers have made it simple, effective, and easy to execute. However, there are three different types of URLs changes is possible.

• The root URL (domain).
• Global URL structure (on-site).
• Individual page URLs.

#1. The root URL

In case you want to mask/change/modify the root URL of WordPress go to Settings →  General Settings →  and update URL.

Remember, this type of changes is only required when you want to use “HTTPS” version over HTTP (You should have SSL enabled already) or mask your WordPress address(admin) by a different address for security purposes.

#2. Global URL Structure (Permalink)

This is the global URL setting that will be applied to all posts of your website. You can set plain, day and name, month and name, numeric, post name or a custom-designed URLs structure. The most preferred structures are “post-name” and “/category/post-name” and adopted by many well-known websites.

To update WordPress permalink, go to Settings → Permalink → and configure your preferred link structure.

For example, if I chose the post-name & category/post-name respectively, then the permalinks should look like this,

https://www.example.com/sample-post/

https://www.example.com/sub-category/sample-post/

Once the permalink is updated in WordPress, all the post URL will reflect the change. So after the change, you will notice a decent amount of 404 errors. This can be fixed by applying 301/302 redirects, which we will see at the terminal part of this article.

#3. Single Page/Post URLs

Updating the URL for standalone pages of the website is very simple. It completely depends upon your choice whether you are going to change your post URL after changing the contents or not. If SEO is the primary preference, then updating the URL is a better choice with respect to that page.

To update the URL of a page/post, you need to go → WordPress dashboard → Post → All Posts → , And it can be updated quickly without editing the whole post, or you have the ability to edit the entire post as well.

Quick Edit: In this mode, all you have to change the “slug” and click on update. Once you do that the post URL will be successfully updated.

In-Post Edit: I call it in post mode because you are going to change the contents inside the page and the URL as well. This is the same way you had set up the URL while publishing the post for the first time. The only difference is the new URL will contain different words inside slug than the previous one.

For a principal keyword say “WordPress Cloud Hosting,” the URL should be something meaningful rather than only the focus keyword. For this keyword, you can keep your slug as “best-WordPress-cloud-hosting.”

The complete URL may look something similar to this:

https://www.example.com/blogging/best-WordPress-cloud-hostings-in-2019

The post URL setting can be found right at the top of the editor (Gutenberg) or in the setting sidebar of the editor. For example, have a look at how I am changing the URL of a post in my new travel blog.

→ Click on Edit to change the post URL

→  Add your new URL address and click on Save.

Once saved the post URL will be updated but the reference links from Google, other websites and also internal links to that specific page will return a 404 error. So the next task is to fix the 404 error and maintain the working function of the website.

Measuring The 404 Errors

Measuring this type of errors may sound like a difficult task, but trust me, it’s not. The fact is that 404 errors will be detected by both visitors and search engines. However, measuring 404s in both cases is a little bit different.

You can discover the 404 errors that the search engine spiders find by logging into their corresponding Webmaster Tools. Three webmaster tools are there to give you individual indexation reports, in which you will be notified which 404s they have encountered so far.

These are the steps to find error reports:

1. Bing Webmaster Tools → Reports & Data → Crawl Information
2. Google Search Console → Crawl → Crawl Errors
3. Yandex Webmaster → Indexing → Excluded Pages → HTTP Status: Not Found (404)
4. You can also try  Screaming Frog to detect 404 errors even before search engine encounter them (This is an advanced step towards finding the errors and fix it to prevent detection)

On the other hand, it’s a difficult task to detect which URLs are found 404 by humans since there are no such global tools to gather the information and show you, until and unless you install the RankMath SEO plugin for WordPress.

RankMath is pretty much similar plugin to Yoast, but it can actually track those clicks of people on certain links that return 404 errors. So this plugin makes life easy to track these error links.

Here is a quick look at how it monitors the 404s:

Now whether you already know which URL will display 404 (Since you have changed it by your own) or you get the information from 3rd party tools, the error should be fixed as soon as possible.

Fixing 404 Errors

If you already know whichever caused the 404 error then you can fix the link quickly by applying redirection, it’s a good practice to do that. This will indicate the quality of your website for both search engines and users.

To redirect those incorrect URLs to the right pages, there are several procedures you can apply:

Some may prefer mass redirection to lessen the work but honestly, I don’t prefer that because many times it creates more link errors and ends up extending your work.

#1. Redirect URL Manually Using .htaccess File

While this is not the most straightforward solution you will ever find, it’s often one of the fastest methods used by the developers. The positive side is that it works perfectly well alongside it also reduces the burden of installing a plugin.

To apply redirection find the .htaccess file inside your file manager (Use this guide to find the file). To redirect a single post or page, you have to add the following snippet in .htaccess file for each page/post you want to redirect.

Redirect 301 /old-page-url https://www.example.com/new-page-url

• Where the /old-page-url is the part that comes after www.example.com. For example, “/wordpress-url-settings.”
• In case of the new-page-url, you should set the full URL, though. For example “https://www.example.com/new-way-to-setup-wordpress-url”

#2. Redirect URL Using A WordPress Plugin

A WordPress plugin can make your work a lot easier, but they have the disadvantage of being slower in the processing. This includes the whole process of getting the right URL and sending multiple requests to the server due to redirection. However, it is worth using a plugin because it doesn’t include the manual set up required in terms of the .htaccess file.

Some of the useful redirection plugins are:

• Redirection
• Yoast SEO
• Rank Math
• 404 Solution
• 404 to 301

All these plugins are available in the WordPress repository for free.

The Rank Math Plugin is very useful in case of redirection as it monitors the user clicks on 404s and allows to redirect the URL as well. To redirect a URL, you need to install the plugin and go to Rank Math → Redirection → Click On Add New.

1. → In the new window, you need to enter the source URL (Old URL) and Destination URL (New URL).
2. Keep the redirection type as “301 Permanent Move” and no need to set any maintenance code.
3. Keep the status of the redirection active, so it starts working.

Once the redirection is successfully added all the traffic from search engines, external websites, and internal links will be directed to the new address. As a result, no “404 pages not found” message will be displayed to the visitors, and you can save a massive amount of traffic from going away. Moreover, it will prevent increasing the overall site bounce rate.

Final Words

Having 404s on your website is not a good habit. You should keep checking 404s at least once in a month. On a bigger site, it should be even more frequent, i.e. every week. In reality, it doesn’t depend upon how much visitors you have; instead, it depends much more on how much content you have and how much of them can go wrong because of that.

For the first time when you will start looking into 404 errors and trying to fix it, you might find out even more of them and so fixing can take quite a bit of time… So making it, a habit will help you at least find the important ones quickly.

All I wish, this guide will help you reduce your website’s possible 404 errors and always keep the site fresh.

The post How to Effectively Update a Post URL and Get Rid of 404 Error As Well appeared first on WP Pluginsify.