Backup remains at the heart of your WordPress site. Good plugins can help you keep your website safe and updated. Kinsta contributor Brian Jackson has shared a list of four useful incremental WordPress backup plugins. Jackson says, “As a reminder, incremental backups are the preferred way to obtain backups without losing disk space and site performance. You’ll find many positively reviewed plugins on the market, but we’re only recommending four of them, since they are the primary options that offer that coveted incremental backup feature. VaultPress WP Time Capsule ManageWP BlogVault Now... [...]

The Copyblogger team has published a guide to the best WordPress tools. The guide also covers information on WordPress hosting, themes, plugins, SEO, security, and more. Talking about the guide, the Copyblogger team says, “With this foundational expertise, Copyblogger knows WordPress as well as anyone. We know which hosts, themes, and plugins you should trust to power your website — and which ones you shouldn’t. This Buyer’s Guide answers questions like: What are the best options for WordPress hosting? Which WordPress themes can you trust? What kind of security tools will protect... [...]

WordPress has become a widely adopted environment and supports thousands of websites today. Your WordPress needs optimization to adjust with the changing search engine algorithms. Yoast contributor Michiel Heijmans  has shared a short guide on optimizing WordPress after using a page speed test. Heijmans says, “After running a page speed test, I am pretty sure that most website owners feel they should invest some time into optimizing that speed for their website. You will have a dozen recommendations. These recommendations differ from things you can do yourselves and some things that you... [...]

GoDaddy’s Maddy Osman has shared an useful article on connecting a WordPress blog to a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. The article offers in-depth information with a step-by-step procedure to connect the two. Osman says, “Before initiating any new points of contact, members of your team can consult your CRM to look at past interactions and determine the appropriate next step. The alternative is manually copying/pasting contact form information sent from your WordPress website to your CRM. This manual process can be fraught with errors and inefficiencies! As a busy business... [...]

It’s sad that we all are so rushed in our ives, but it’s a fact, and we can’t turn back the clock. Visitors to your website are under a lot of time-pressure every day, and if your site doesn’t meet their need for quick satisfaction, they will go elsewhere. How long does it take for your home page to load? That matters to your visitors and to your bottom line. Programmers have developed software that speeds up loading your site into a browser; it’s called cache software. It’s essential for building fast-loading sites. A Cache creates a browser-ready version of... [...]

HubSpot’s Alex Birkett has shared fifteen of the best WordPress contact form plugins for 2018. Birkett says, “There are tons of options out there, though. To demystify the selection process and help you select a tool, here are 15 WordPress form plugins. 1. HubSpot – Free Marketing Plugin for WordPress When it comes to WordPress form plugins, HubSpot’s very own pluginoffers some special advantages. First, it’s more than just your traditional form builder. It includes tools to help you convert visitors on your site, tool that help you in building an email list, generating and... [...]

Speed is critical for website success. Users won’t put up with slow sites, and search engines downgrade them. Savvy webmasters use a cache to store a “predigested” version of the most important data on their site, so that data can be delivered with minimal processing when a visitor clicks on it. The data is processed in advance, so that less processing needed while the visitor is waiting for results. There are several well-known caches for WordPress sites, The two best-known are Total Cache and Super Cache. Viper Cache was just released and may prove the be the fastest cache ever.... [...]

Being careless about your security can cause your downfall. Unfortunately, according to the Ponemon Institute, 73%+ of website owners are doing the same to their business, with little or no security in place. The door is wide open to hackers. Is your site one of them? The sad truth is that you’re never too small to get hacked. But there are answers to the hacking epidemic. Since 2012, Matt Garrett has been developing and refining his BlogDefender software that protects WordPress blogs from hacks and malware. Each year or so, he presents a refined version with new sophistication and adaptations... [...]

There’s a new piece of software that we just learned about. Check it out today because the price will rise at midnight EST Wednesday. Anywhere on your WP website, in your text, as a link for a graphic or in a sidebar, footer or header (literally, anywhere), you can make your advertisements specific to the country or city of your site visitor. It’s all done by the power of Covert Geo Targeter. This plug-in is very clever but super simple. It does one thing only, but it does it well. Covert Geo Targeter lets you insert your visitor’s location (country, city, state/area and country... [...]

It’s a fact that slow loading pages turn away impatient visitors and increase bounce rate for those who stay. The result is that you don’t get the benefit from the traffic you get: ► Your conversions are lower, ► Your bounce rates are higher, ► Your advertising costs are higher. This has been proven over and over in real life. According to Kissmetrics.com if your site takes 3 or more seconds to load you are losing 50% or more of your traffic due to visitor impatience. The problem is especially great for your mobile users since their phones usually have slower connections than... [...]