Tag Archives: wordpress

The Best Managed WordPress Hosting (Learn Why)

[ad_1] If you’re searching for the best managed WordPress hosting, Kinsta is probably a name you’ve come across. There’s a reason for that – Kinsta is one of, if not the, best managed WordPress hosts in 2021. The objective data backs that up, with Kinsta consistently leading the pack in data from review aggregators and third-party surveys. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves – to help you decide whether Kinsta is the best host for you, we’ll take you through some of its pros and cons and make some recommendations for how to pick the best host for your needs. By the end, you should have a better idea of the best hosting solution for your site, whether that’s Kinsta or another option. Quick Summary of Our 2021 Kinsta Review If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick rundown on how Kinsta is doing in 2021… Simply put, Kinsta is one of the best options for managed WordPress hosting. Kinsta hits all the important things you need in a host with fast performance, rock-solid reliability, excellent 24/7 support, and convenient features. This is why, when we aggregated data from third-party sources like TrustPilot, WhoIsHostingThis, CodeinWP’s survey, and Review Signal, Kinsta was #1 out of all the hosts we looked at with an impressive 96% satisfaction rating across all those sources. Here’s the aggregated data for popular hosts: You can see that Kinsta leads the pack, even beating out similarly-priced hosts like WP Engine and Flywheel. So – to learn why Kinsta has such satisfied customers, let’s dig into the pros and cons. Five Things Kinsta Does Really Well Let’s start with the best parts of hosting with Kinsta.. Objectively Great Performance One of Kinsta’s biggest advantages is that it offers excellent performance, which is the most important consideration in any WordPress host. To objectively assess a host’s performance, we rely on Review Signal’s exhaustive performance benchmarks, which challenge hosts in a variety of ways including some pretty heavy-duty load testing. Though Kinsta didn’t participate in the most recent 2020 Review Signal benchmarks, Kinsta was a regular participant in the prior years. In the 2019 benchmarks, Kinsta participated in five different pricing tiers: $25-$50 per month $51-$100 per month $101-$200 per month $201-$500 per month $500 per month (enterprise) Kinsta earned Top Tier status (the highest designation) in every single tier. That means Kinsta earned Top Tier from its $30 per month starter plan all the way up to its enterprise plans, which is pretty impressive.  So what’s behind that Top Tier performance? Kinsta runs the following stack: Google Cloud infrastructure with your choice of 25+ data centers spread around the world. Pure Nginx. MariaDB. Server-level caching with Nginx Fast_CGI cache, along with a custom companion plugin to purge the cache from your WordPress dashboard. Built-in CDN powered by KeyCDN. Automatic database optimization once per week. For advanced users, Kinsta also offers free Application Performance Monitoring to really dig into your site’s performance at a more technical level. This tool aims to fill the same role as premium monitoring services like New Relic without forcing you to pay an extra fee or integrate a third-party service. Kinsta also offers some useful guides on how you can use these features to improve performance for WooCommerce stores and membership sites. Top-Notch Live Chat Support Kinsta offers excellent live chat support that’s available 24/7 via the user-friendly Intercom widget. You can get help from anywhere in your dashboard just by opening the widget, and all of your chat histories are automatically saved. You can also click around to different areas of your dashboard without losing your chat, which is surprisingly useful: As for support quality – it really is good and the support team knows their way around WordPress. For example, in CodeinWP’s 2018 hosting survey, CodeinWP asked users to rate their hosts’ overall support and WordPress-specific support (out of five). Kinsta scored 4.9 on both metrics, which was good for first place out of all the hosts that respondents were using. If you’re wondering, WP Engine was second at 4.7 for both, while Flywheel had 4.6 for overall support and 4.8 for WordPress-specific support. Convenient Managed WordPress Features Kinsta is a true managed WordPress host, so you get all those convenient managed WordPress features to make your life easier. Basically, you’ll have a partner that works to make your site more reliable, secure, and quick-loading. I already covered what Kinsta does on the performance front – you won’t have to worry about configuring caching or a CDN because Kinsta handles all that for you. On the security front, Kinsta implements: A WAF (web application firewall) to proactively stop threats. Daily malware scans. Uptime monitoring to automatically detect issues on your site. Free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt. If something does happen to your site, Kinsta also offers a free hack fix guarantee to get your site working again. To keep your site’s data safe, Kinsta offers automatic daily backups with 14 days of storage. If you want more frequent backups, you can pay $50/month/site for backups every six hours or $100/month/site for backups every hour. There’s also an external backup add-on to send your backups to your own Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage account, which costs $2/month/site + $1/GB bandwidth. Finally, you also get staging sites to safely test changes to your site and then push them live with a single click. Well-Designed Custom Dashboard and Useful Tools Like many other managed WordPress hosts, Kinsta uses its own custom hosting dashboard rather than a pre-built dashboard like cPanel or Plesk. What stands out about Kinsta’s dashboard, though, is that it’s really well-designed and user-friendly. You’ll be able to easily manage things like backups, staging sites, etc. You also get some useful tools, such as dedicated tools to enable WordPress debug mode with a single click or run a search/replace on your site’s database without the need for a plugin: If you’re working as part of a team, you’ll also get different

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How to Create WordPress Custom Page Templates (& Why) • WPShout

[ad_1] There are many many ways you can change the look of a specific page on your WordPress site. You can change the content inside the WordPress content editor. You can change the CSS rules that affect the site. Or create a new file in your WordPress theme’s template hierarchy to correspond to the specific page. Or you can use a theme page template designed specifically for that page. The last one is what we’re talking about here. In this tutorial we’ll cover both how to create a WordPress custom page template, and why you might want to do that. We’ll start with the why. When you say “WordPress Theme Custom Page Template”, what do you mean? There’s a huge terminology problem with this topic. As I hinted at above, there are a lot of things with the vague notion of “page” and “template” in the WordPress world that aren’t what we’re talking about here. The first thing I *don’t* mean when saying “WordPress custom page template” is “a WordPress theme.” (Many people new to WordPress say “templates” when they mean “a WordPress theme.”) So what do I mean by “custom page template”? I mean what is shown at right. For example, you’re editing the Page content type in WordPress (although, as we’ll see later, it can now include other WordPress content types). And while editing your page, you notice the “Page Attributes” box, And within that, you might (dependent on if your theme already has these templates) see this “Template” dropdown. This selection box is illustrated on the right (it’s also on the right side of your “page editing” screen). If you see this dropdown, it’s because your theme provides some of these “custom page templates.” They’re actually files in your currently active theme’s folder (or its parent), and have a single distinguishing feature we’ll come to later. But this selectable dropdown of named page templates is what we’re talking about here today. How Does This Fit Into the Template Hierarchy? I’ve written before, and I’ll likely do so again, about how the template — there’s that word again — hierarchy is really the key concept you need to understand to build or modify a WordPress theme. (Here’s our quick intro to it.) Almost everything else is a detail you can work out once you’ve understood the basic dynamic of the template hierarchy. The specific thing we’re meaning today, though, sits outside of the template hierarchy. This “selected template” essentially replaces the whole selection process of the template hierarchy. If a Custom Page Template was selected in the dropdown we showed above, that “template” file will be used. Full stop, no exception. To restate that, if a custom page template is selected, that “template” file will be used. Full stop, no exception. If not, then the WordPress template hierarchy will look for a somewhat different way that someone might have tried to style a specific page — with a page-123.php or page-custom-template-utilizer.php file. (The difference between the Custom template, and one with this page-$id or page-$slug structure is really only in interaction and interface.) If neither of those is found, WordPress will fall back to page.php, if it exists, and if not we’d end up at the ultimate fallback, index.php. If you’re wondering why you’d use this method as opposed to the numeric or slug one — in either case you’re creating a custom file in your theme, after all — the reason is that using custom templates gives you more flexibility and independence between your theme and your site’s database and content. For that reason, I’d recommend it in just about every situation when you’re unsure which to go with. With the numeric or slug-based page-*.php structure, you’re forced to make your theme know about the specific way your WordPress database data is right now. (So if you reuse the theme on a different WordPress site, for example, that file is useless.) How Do I Make a WordPress Custom Page Template? OK, so we know that custom page templates will supercede the WordPress template hierarchy. And that we’ll make use of them on actual pages of our WordPress site by selecting them from a “Template” dropdown menu on the right-bar of the relevant piece of content. So it’s time to get to the process for creating a WordPress custom page template. What you’ll do is, add to your theme (and it really should be a child theme unless there’s a very strong constraint making that impossible for you) a file with a name like my-template.php or really-cool-awesome.php. It doesn’t really matter, as long as you don’t actually use a name that’s part of the template hierarchy, you’re golden. (Which means: do not use a name like page-whatever.php. As we touched on above, WordPress’s template hierarchy thinks it owns a file named with that pattern.) Once you’ve got the file (cool-page-template.php, of whatever you prefer), you should start it like this: <?php /* Template Name: Name To Appear In The Dropdown */ ?> This is my custom template. And you’re basically done. As you can probably guess, the name that will appear in the “Template” drop down is what I cleverly called “Name To Appear In The Dropdown.” Just like your theme’s style.css file, or a plugin’s main file, WordPress uses the information inside this code comment to provide it with context to work. Then the content of our pages will, in this case be the very basic HTML text “This is my custom template”. As you might guess, here is where you’re much more likely to put the HTML contents you want to appear on the page. So your <h1> tags, <p> tags, and perhaps (if you’re fancy 🤪) some PHP to do custom behavior you want to show off. Why Your WordPress Custom Page Template Doesn’t Show Up I’ve (more than once) had the experience that my new WordPress page template doesn’t show up. By far the most common cause is that I’ve typoed (or misremembed) what

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From Blogging to WordPress Communities: A Bolivian tale – De Blogger a comunidades de WordPress: Una historia boliviana

[ad_1] Este ensayo también está disponible en español. I would have never imagined that working with WordPress would be a vital part of my current life and that I would be organizing the first WordCamp of my city Cochabamba, and the first of Bolivia. To start with my story, let me clarify that I don’t have any background in computer science or similar. I actually studied Industrial Engineering and even did a masters degree in Environmental studies. But life has taken me somewhere else and I’m very happy with my current destination. I won’t go into details of how my career changed so much, that would take hours of reading. But my early stages of WordPress started when I decided to start a small business designing and selling cushions and bed clothes. It was tiny and it only lasted a bit more than a year. It was a solo person business, little investment, and very little planning. While I sat in the small store I’d rented to sell these items, begging that people stopping at the shop’s windows would step in to buy something, I decided I needed to create a website for this business. Finding WordPress I had zero budget to hire somebody but I had good confidence in my ability to learn things on my own. I had always been the nerdy type and a close friend with computers in general. Thus, I decided I would figure out how to build a website on my own. I ended up building the most simple website/blog with WordPress.com. I didn’t even have a budget to buy a custom domain and I stayed with the free subdomain from WordPress.com. Unfortunately, soon my entrepreneurship was over. There were no profits and any income went mostly to pay the store’s rent. To add to the decision, a previous company with whom I had worked before, contacted me for a job opening that matched my profile. I needed that income. Therefore, I closed the store and forgot about my entrepreneurship. However, that brief encounter with a simple website had opened a field out there that I wanted to explore better some day. Back to the employee mode, I started my new job as a technical writer for a software development company. Since I had done my masters degree in the UK, I had a decent level of English, and somehow my close affinity with computers and technology made it easy for me to translate complex software jargon into simple tutorial steps. As I got more training in technical writing, I started to improve my writing skills in general. That reconnected me with a long lost passion of mine- writing. I’d forgotten that little girl in me that used to love writing stories and journaling. In all these years of my adult life, I hadn’t reconnected to it. That’s when I realized I had to have a blog. I needed a blog. And when WordPress.com came to my encounter again. Diving Deep This time I wanted to know the platform deeply. Creating my blog helped me become more familiar with WordPress and website building in general. I blogged about writing, my thoughts, book reviews, and everything that could come to my mind. That was in 2015. I don’t remember exactly how I got into the WordPress support forums, probably looking for answers to a specific issue about my blog. That’s when I realized there were other people’s questions that I could actually answer. I began checking the forums a couple of times per week. I did it as a hobby. I liked that I was able to help people and learn more while doing that. Some people at my work checked their Facebook to relax on their break time, I checked the WordPress.com forums. That’s how I found out about the Happiness Engineer position in Automattic. A Happiness Engineer provides customer support to people building their blogs or websites with WordPress.com. When I read the job description, it was like reading a job that was perfect for me. Even more it offered the possibility to work remotely and even travel while still working. My career as a technical writer was stuck after three years and I was also certain that I didn’t want to go back to any job related to Industrial Engineering. My story about applying to Automattic is long. To summarize it, I didn’t get in it the first time I applied. I had to do the trial twice and re-applied three times in total. I had to learn about HTML and CSS. But after almost one year and a half in between the applications and the two trials, I finally got the job. WordPress became my main means of income. Building A Community It was in this job that I learned about the WordPress communities around the world and WordCamps. And when somebody asked, how is the WordPress community where you live? I was speechless. I really didn’t know. Was there a community? Soon after finding there wasn’t any community, I started to dig more information about what was needed to organize one. I talked about the idea with some colleagues and they provided good insights. But I was still debating inside myself, who would start it? Was it me? It couldn’t be. It was true I provided technical support for blogs and websites, but I knew nothing about coding, plugin or theme development. It had to be somebody else, an expert WordPress developer,  not me. But after trying to gauge interest and ask around I realized that the only way to find these community members was to start the community. Therefore, the WordPress community in Cochabamba was born. That was 3 years ago. We’ve had ups and downs, probably similar to any other community. And although Cochabamba is not a big city, we had issues finding a location that would be accessible to everybody and wouldn’t incur a cost. We had people coming from all different levels of knowledge, from

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Jetpack 9.8 Introduces WordPress Stories Block Alongside Forced Security Update – WordPress Tavern

[ad_1] Jetpack 9.8 was released this week, introducing WordPress Stories as the headline feature. The Story block, which allows users to create interactive stories, was previously only available on mobile. It can now be used in the web editor. Stories went into public beta on the Android app in January 2021, and were officially released on the mobile apps in March. Version 9.8 also included a security patch for all sites using the Carousel feature. The vulnerability allowed the comments of non-published pages/posts to be leaked. It was severe enough for the Jetpack team to work with WordPress.org to release 78 patched versions – every version of Jetpack since 2.0. Sites not using the Carousel feature were not vulnerable but could be in the future if it was enabled and left unpatched. In a rare move, WordPress.org pushed a forced update to all vulnerable versions, surprising those who have auto-updates disabled. Several Jetpack users posted in the support forums, asking why the plugin had updated automatically without permission and in some cases not to the newest version. So this update was a forced update on WordPress sites even with auto-updates disabled? We had this go live on a prod site at 2am last night that has auto-updates disabled for very specific reasons. Not cool Jetpack. https://t.co/55upBmyeHp — Brad Williams (@williamsba) June 3, 2021 Jetpack team member Jeremy Herve said the vulnerability was responsibly disclosed via Hackerone, allowing them to work on a patch for the issue. After it was ready to go, the Jetpack team reached out to the WordPress.org security team to inform them of a vulnerability impacting multiple versions of the plugin. “We sent them the patch alongside all the info we had (a PoC for the vulnerability, what features had to be active, what versions of Jetpack were impacted),” Herve said. “They recommended we release point releases for older versions of Jetpack as well. “We created those new releases, and when we were ready to release them, someone from the WordPress.org team made some changes on the WordPress.org side so folks running old, vulnerable versions of the plugin would get auto-updated, just like it works for Core versions of WordPress.” Jetpack team member Brandon Kraft estimated the number of vulnerable sites at 18% of the plugin’s active installs. He said that Jetpack was not part of the discussion about the pushing out a forced update. We weren’t part of the discussion. Provided details and got the response, but I wouldn’t expect a security convo to be public. But, yes. Single feature impacted. A few things need to be all true for it to matter on a site, which looked like qualified about 18% of sites IIRC. — A Guy Called Kraft 😷💉 (@Kraft) June 3, 2021 “What probably adds to the confusion is that WordPress 5.5 added a UI for plugin (and theme) autoupdates,” Herve said. “That UI, while helping one manage plugin autoupdates on their site, is a bit different from Core’s forced update process. Both of those update types can be deactivated by site owners, just like core’s autoupdates can be deactivated, but I don’t believe (and honestly wouldn’t recommend) that many folks deactivate those updates.” Brandon Kraft dug deeper into the topic and published a post that explains the differences between auto-updates and forced updates. It includes how to lock down file modifications if you don’t want to receive any forced updates in the future. Forced updates, however, are exceedingly rare, and Kraft counts only three for Jetpack since 2013. In this instance, the Jetpack team followed the official process for reporting a critical vulnerability to the plugin and security teams who determine the impact for users based on a set criteria. Users who received an email notification about an automatic update from Jetpack, despite having the UI in the dashboard set to disable them, should be aware that these forced updates can come once in a blue moon for security purposes. Tony Perez, founder of NOC and former CEO at Sucuri, contends that forcing a security update like this violates the intent users’ assign when using the auto-updates UI in WordPress. He highlighted the potential for abuse if the system were to become vulnerable to a bad actor. “The platform is making an active decision that is arguably contrary to what the site administrator is intending when they explicitly say they don’t want something done,” Perez said. “Put plainly, it’s an abuse of trust that exists between the WordPress user and the Foundation that helps maintain the project. “My position is not that it shouldn’t exist. That’s a much deeper ideological debate, but it is about respecting an administrators explicit intent.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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7 Best Call-to-Action Plugins For WordPress Compared

[ad_1] Whether you run a personal or business site, there is no doubt that calls to action play an important role in your website. They help readers and visitors follow the path you want them to take and take a desired action. Depending on the purpose of your website, you might want to add a call to action to have people sign up for your email list or you might want them to schedule a consultation session with you. You might use them to drive traffic to a specific product on your site that’s currently on sale. Whatever the case may be, a well-placed and attractive call to action can significantly boost your conversion rate. There are a number of WordPress plugins that you can use to create effective calls to action. In this roundup, we’ll take a look at seven of the best WordPress plugins currently available so you can determine the best one for you. 7 Best Call-to-Action WordPress Plugins The plugins on our list range from free to paid. Some of them have basic features while some are slightly more advanced, but one thing is certain: they will help you boost your conversion rate. 1. Thrive Ultimatum Thrive Ultimatum allows you to create calls to action by using the principle of scarcity marketing. The main idea behind the plugin is that if you make your offer available for a limited time only, your calls to action will convert better. You can use the plugin in several places on your site: As a top bar In your sidebar Across specific category pages And more You can run unlimited campaigns, create recurring campaigns, and create an unlimited number of calls to action. The CTAs can be customized using a visual editor. Thrive Ultimate is available as part of the premium Thrive Suite package, which includes all of the plugins and themes that Thrive Themes offers. Pros: Visual Editor Plenty of customization options The ability to set multiple calls to action on the same page Uses conversion-boosting scarcity strategies Cons: Compared to other plugins on this list, Thrive Ultimatum is expensive if you’re not planning to use other plugins from Thrive Themes. Price: Thrive Ultimatum is only available as part of the Thrive Suite of plugins, which also gets you access to other useful call to action plugins like Thrive Leads (our review) and Thrive Architect (our review). You also get access to all of the other Thrive Themes products. You can pay $228 annually ($19 per month) or $90 quarterly ($30 per month). Overall, if you think you’ll use the other Thrive Themes products, you get a lot of value for creating CTAs on your WordPress website. Get Thrive Ultimatum 2. Convert Pro Convert Pro is a flexible WordPress list building plugin that helps you create a variety of popups including modal popups, notification bars, slide-ins, and more. You can start from pre-built templates and customize everything using a visual, drag-and-drop builder interface. Then, you can connect directly to a variety of email marketing services and optimize your CTAs using built-in analytics and A/B testing. You’ll also get lots of targeting and trigger rules to make sure the right visitors see your CTAs at the right time. For example, you can target by content, referring URLs, user device, past behavior, and lots more. Pros: Visual, drag-and-drop builder Supports multiple popup types Built-in A/B testing Cons: Mainly focused on opt-ins and lead generation – not as good for other types of CTAs There’s no free version Price: Convert Pro doesn’t have a free version. It starts at $79 for use on unlimited sites and one year of support and updates or $399 for lifetime support and updates. Get Convert Pro 3. Elementor Pro Elementor Pro is a very flexible call to action plugin because it lets you implement all different types of CTAs. If you’re not familiar with Elementor, it’s a visual, drag-and-drop builder plugin. You can build anything, from landing pages to blog posts. You also get lots of elements to include eye-catching buttons and layouts. For CTAs, though, you’ll probably want to purchase the premium version, Elementor Pro, because it gets you access to features like: A form builder that has integrations with Zapier and popular email marketing services A popup builder that lets you use the drag-and-drop interface to design popups, slide-ins, notification bars, and more More content elements and design options 👉 To learn more, you can read our full Elementor review. Pros: Visual, drag-and-drop builder Dedicated content elements for buttons, forms, CTA boxes, and more Flexible popup builder Cons: It might be overkill if you just want a simple, lightweight solution for basic CTAs Price: The core Elementor plugin is available for free at WordPress.org. Elementor Pro starts at $49 for access to all features and use on a single site. Get Elementor Pro 4. HashBar HashBar allows you to create a customizable notification bar or call to action bar that sits at the top or bottom of the screen. Or, you can also place it as a floating box on the side. You can use your own message and call to action, as well as choose a color that works best with your existing brand. It’s a simple and effective plugin that can be downloaded for free from the official repository. It’s worth mentioning that there is a pro version of the plugin, which add extra features such as: Scheduling for CTAs Only display a certain CTA on specific content Support for sticky/transparent header Custom mobile responsive breakpoints Pros: Display a bar at the top or bottom of the screen Also lets you show a sticky sidebar Fully customize the text and colors to create your own custom CTA Cons: You need the premium version to match CTAs to specific content. Price: There’s a free version at WordPress.org. After that, the pro version starts at $29 for one year of support/updates on a single site or $59 for lifetime support/updates. Get HashBar 5.

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Weekly WordPress News: WordPress Celebrates 18th Birthday

[ad_1] Hey, WordPress fans. We are checking in with your latest dose of weekly WordPress news. This week marks the 18th anniversary of WordPress’ launch. The platform has continued to grow over the years and as of this writing, WordPress powers more than 40% of the web. Beyond that, a new Gutenberg version has been released. Gutenberg 10.7 introduces several enhancements, such as responsive navigation menus, additional block design options, and some bug fixes. Let’s get to all of this week’s WordPress news… WORDPRESS NEWS AND ARTICLES TUTORIALS AND HOW-TOS RESOURCES [ad_2] Source link

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