How to get your WordPress site running fast on a $5/month VPS within 10 minutes – Part #2 24 Jun 2015 4:17 PM (9 years ago)
In a previous post, we spoke about different types of hostings, and we’ve created our first droplet (VPS) at DigitalOcean. Now I’ll show you how to install LEMP (Nginx, MySQL, and PHP) stack on VPS within few minutes and fully automatically.
As you may know you can install LEMP stack one by one. You install and configure Nginx, then MySQL, then install php5-fpm and php5-mysql modules and configure Nginx to use them. What if you can do all of this with few commands from your shell? The solution is the automatic install script. There are many automatic install scripts available. Most of them are OS-specific, e.g. for CentOS there is Centmin. For Debian and its clones, there is solution named EasyEngine. EasyEngine (ee) will install all necessary software for you (Nginx, MySQL, PHP as well as HHVM, PageSpeed, postfix, mysqladmin)
EasyEngine is currently compatible with:
- Ubuntu 12.04 & 14.04
- Debian 7 & 8
So move on…
1. Before we start
In the first step, we have to check if there is Apache installed on our VPS. If so, we have to remove it first. I prefer Nginx over Apache because it uses much less RAM as well as it’s noticeable faster especially when it comes to serving static files. If you still want to keep apache (for any reason) you have to either stop it or reconfigure it to use the different port. I suggest you to uninstall it completely with following command:
sudo apt-get remove apache2*2. Install EasyEngine
Now we can start to install EasyEngine.
wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee && sudo bash ee
Sometimes you can experience some common problems because of missing packages. If so, use the command bellow. This will install all necessary packages. BTW: I didn’t experience this issue with the DO Ubuntu 14.04 image, however, you can experience this with some other OS images e.g. minimal installs used by RamNode.
apt-get install curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev git bc
If you installed EE you can start to edit its config file with following command (I just prefer nano over vim 
)
nano /etc/ee/ee.conf
Everything in the config file is well documented and straightforward. I’ll just mention a few things here you may consider changing.
In the “WordPress” section, you can see few parameters your can change. I suggest to change:
- User: this parameter is used to set your administrator account name. If you do not enter anything here EE will create administrator account with name “admin”. This is dangerous. Why ? Because most of the brute force attacks use “admin” for the administrator account name.
- Password: this parameter is used to set your administrator password. If you do not enter anything here EE will create a random password for you. I prefer to set this to my own password as autogenerated one is quite hard to remember. If you use password manager you can leave this blank and use autogenerated one.
3. Install LEMP stack + your first WP site
And now the magic comes in. With the single command, we will install Nginx, MySQL and PHP as well as our new WordPress site. Run the following command:
sudo ee site create example.com --wpThe command above creates WP site with no cache enabled.
[tip color=”lightgreen”]Note: EasyEngine will create a swap file (on KVM based VPS). Its size is based on the size of VPS RAM.[/tip]
EE supports many other types of WP sites. Here they’re:
Standard WordPress Sites
ee site create example.com --wp # install wordpress without any page caching ee site create example.com --w3tc # install wordpress with w3-total-cache plugin ee site create example.com --wpsc # install wordpress with wp-super-cache plugin ee site create example.com --wpfc # install wordpress + nginx fastcgi_cache
It is important to mention here that EE won’t configure cache plugins for you. It’ll just install and activate them.
WordPress Multisite with subdirectory
ee site create example.com --wpsubdir # install wpmu-subdirectory without any page caching ee site create example.com --wpsubdir --w3tc # install wpmu-subdirectory with w3-total-cache plugin ee site create example.com --wpsubdir --wpsc # install wpmu-subdirectory with wp-super-cache plugin ee site create example.com --wpsubdir --wpfc # install wpmu-subdirectory + nginx fastcgi_cache
WordPress Multisite with subdomain
ee site create example.com --wpsubdomin # install wpmu-subdomain without any page caching ee site create example.com --wpsubdomain --w3tc # install wpmu-subdomain with w3-total-cache plugin ee site create example.com --wpsubdomain --wpsc # install wpmu-subdomain with wp-super-cache plugin ee site create example.com --wpsubdomain --wpfc # install wpmu-subdomain + nginx fastcgi_cache
Non-WordPress Sites
ee site create example.com --html # create example.com for static/html sites ee site create example.com --php # create example.com with php support ee site create example.com --mysql # create example.com with php & mysql support
HHVM Enabled Sites
HHVM (HipHop virtual machine) was created by Facebook engineers to save resources on Facebook servers. It’s much faster than any current version of PHP. Seems to be even faster than upcoming PHP version 7.
[tip color=”lightgreen”]Note: HHVM requires 64bit OS to be installed. More information about HHVM you can find here[/tip]
ee site create example.com --wp --hhvm # create example.com WordPress site with HHVM support ee site create example.com --php --hhvm # create example.com php site with HHVM support
PageSpeed Enabled Sites
EE also supports pagespeed module created by Google. It helps you to improve your PageSpeed rank automatically. For more information click here.
[tip color=”lightgreen”]Note: PageSpeed module can be CPU intensive sometimes. I suggest you to test it before you make this change on live server[/tip]
ee site create example.com --wp --pagespeed # create example.com WordPress site with PageSpeed support ee site create example.com --php --pagespeed # create example.com php site with PageSpeed support
In the next post, I’ll show you some useful EE commands you need to know to manage your WP sites and the status of the EE stack.
How to get your WordPress site running on a $5/month VPS within 10 minutes – Part #1 16 Jun 2015 4:36 PM (9 years ago)
If you install your new WordPress site there are three main hosting solutions available for you. You can go either with shared, VPS (virtual private server) or dedicated hosting. I won’t mention cloud here as it’s a hybrid solution.
It could be a dilemma here which one is right for you. This is not a question for me and I’ll describe why later in this post. Each of hosting types has its cons and pros of course. I’ll mention just a few of them.
Shared hosting:
Pros:
- Cheap
- Easy to configure (most of them offer one-click WP install)
- Easy to maintain your common tasks (most of them use Cpanel)
Cons:
- Worst performance (suitable for small/medium websites)
- You cannot configure the hosting environment (choose/tune web server, MySQL server and so on)
- No or limited flexibility for your custom tasks
VPS:
Pros:
- Cheap
- Much better performance in compare to shared hosting (suitable for medium/larger websites, even large sites can run on VPS after fine tuning)
- Great flexibility. You can do almost all things you can do on a dedicated box.
- You can fully configure your entire hosting environment (install/tune/test web server, MySQL server and so on).
Cons:
- The performance is not as good as on the dedicated box (not always, best VPS hosting providers can easily outperform budget dedicated boxes).
- You usually get less RAM and CPU power in compare to a dedicated box.
- You need server management skills (if you use unmanaged solution)
Dedicated server:
Pros:
- The best performance (not always, best VPS hosting providers can easily outperform budget dedicated boxes)
- Great flexibility. This server is yours so you can do anything (or almost anything :)).
- You can fully configure your entire hosting environment (install/tune/test web server, MySQL server and so on).
Cons:
- Most expensive solution.
- You have to pay extra money to get e.g. two hard drives, SSD drives, HW RAID.
- You need server management skills (if you use unmanaged solution)
Now if you read all Pros and Cons it can be a bit confusing. What the hell? Which one is the best for me?
Let’s imagine you’re running a WordPress site with 1000 uniques/day and need proper hosting. If you’ve no experience with server management the answer would be probably simple for you. You’ll choose shared hosting because there is no need for server management.
For those who’re ready to learn or have some server management skills, I would recommend choosing VPS. Why ? Because you’ll get much more flexibility, scalability, and power. If you’ll go with VPS you’ll get good performance with the flexibility you can’t achieve with a shared solution.
There are many VPS providers however you want the best service possible I personally used about 10 VPS providers already and can easily compare them. So here is my list of Top 3 VPS providers:
Don’t ask me which one is the best as all of them are great providers and everyone can offer something outstanding, e.g. RamNode – great performance and uptime, DigitalOcean – snapshots, Vultr – startup scripts. All three are using SSD drives in RAID10 and are very reliable VPS hosting providers with thousands of customers.
There is one important thing you have to consider. There are three most widely used virtualization solutions used by VPS providers:
- OpenVZ
- KVM
- Xen
I don’t want make the extensive comparison here as this post is about something else. Anyway… The main difference is that OpenVZ based VPS shares kernel with all other VPSs located on the same node. KVM based VPS uses its own kernel. What does it mean?
In generalKVM boxes are more secure unfortunately they’re using more RAM because of the kernel. OpenVZ uses less RAM because of the shared kernel. There is also difference between resource allocations. e.g. OpenVZ has ability to’Burst’ RAM and other extra resources available when nodes are underused. Xen resources (RAM, etc) are fully dedicated and private.
[tip color=”lightgreen”]TIP: If you want to save some RAM go with OpenVZ VPS. Unfortunately only RamNode offers OpenVZ.[/tip]
I personally use RamNode for my WP sites just because of OpenVZ support and the VPS performance I measured before I made my decision.
In this tutorial, I’ll use DigitalOcean. If you’re interested in some speed tests I made the extensive review of DigitalOcean and you can check it here.
[tip color=”lightgreen”]TIP: DigitalOcean and Vultr offer hourly billing so you can simply sign up, play and try features yourself[/tip]
DigitalOcean (DO) intro:
DigitalOcean was primarily created for web developers and for development purposes. Why ? Here is the list of main features. Read it and you’ll see why
- 6 locations to choose from (New York, San Francisco, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam).
- SSD drives in standard config.
- User-friendly Control Panel.
- IPv6 (not very important for most users).
- Hourly billing.
- Very flexible (upgrade/downgrade).
- Ability to move between locations.
- Backups.
- Snapshots.
- SSH keys.
- DNS.
- Private network.
- 1Gb/s connection.
- API.
A lot of webmasters decided to use DO as their live hosting because of the features they offer.
Step 1: Create your VPS (Time required: 90 seconds)
In the first step, we’ll create our VPS. First you have to create your account with DigitalOcean. You can use my affiliate link to sign up. With this, you’ll get $10 starting credit to your account.
Enter your email and password and click “create account” button. Now it’s time to create your VPS. After the successful login, the following screen will appear. Click “Create Droplet”
Enter the hostname for your droplet. It can be anything you want. I prefer to use a name that describe the sites used on the server, e.g.myblog.vps1. In this example, I’ll enter WPdroplet.
Now select your preferred Linux distribution. We’ll select Ubuntu 14.04 x32.
[tip color=”lightgreen”]TIP: Please keep in mind that 32bit versions use significantly less RAM than their 64bit equivalents. Check this article where I’ve compared distributions offered by RamNode for the RAM usage[/tip]
Now select the size of your VPS. You can select from 9 predefined sizes. The smallest one is VPS with 512MB RAM, 20GB SSD disk, and 1 CPU which will cost you $5/month. The largest one is VPS with 64GB RAM, 640GB SSD disk, and 20CPU. We’ll select the smallest one for our new VPS.
[tip color=”lightgreen”]TIP: Don’t worry, you can upgrade later if your traffic will reach the sky :)[/tip]
We can now select the location of the VPS. There are 6 locations available now. They’ve added Frankfurt recently.
[tip color=”lightgreen”]TIP: Always choose the location in your preferred region, e.g. if you target east coast US visitors then use New York [/tip]
There are few more settings available for you. You can enable private networking or backups (this option will raise your monthly price by 20%).
You can also add SSH keys to the newly created VPS so it won’t prompt you for the password when you access the VPS via SSH. More information about generating SSH keys can be found here.
[tip color=”lightgreen”]TIP: I strongly recommend you to generate your SSH keys and enter them to the DO system. It’ll save you some time during login as well as it adds more security to your VPS[/tip]
Now click “Create Droplet” and the system will start to create your droplet. It usually takes less than a minute to generate it.
In the next part, I’ll show you how to install LEMP (Nginx, MySQL, PHP) stack which will power your WP site as well as WordPress. And all of this fully automatically within few minutes
Stay Tuned !
Top 10 Newspaper Themes for WordPress 16 Jun 2015 6:09 AM (9 years ago)
When it comes to creating a superb newspaper website, it requires an altogether different type of design. The design should be flowing well and should be modern while still being clear and simple to use. Owing to the multi-niche nature of newspaper websites, things are bound to get cluttered, but what prevents that from happening is a solid and well-organised WordPress theme for your newspaper website.
Thinking of starting a newspaper website? Get an awesome premium theme from this list of the best 10 newspaper themes for WordPress.
This theme has been the best for a long time now and is a compulsory requirement for your news, magazine or review website. It has an awesome rating system and supports YouTube videos too. bbPress, BuddyPress, Woocommerce, etc. come integrated with this theme. This fast and simple theme supports responsive Google ads and gets Visual Composer free! The theme sports a plethora of features including multiple layouts, an outstanding theme panel, customizable backgrounds, Revolution Slider, live Ajax search, and so much more! With lifetime support and regular updates, this theme is an unavoidable package!
Gonzo is a simple and logical theme created with CSS3/HTML5. This extremely responsive theme is retina ready and retains it looks right down to a mobile screen. You get an excellent percentage/star rating system for review posts. The five different layouts provided by this theme are made to match every need. Right from a simple blog roll to a complex yet user-friendly homepage which is well-organized, this theme will never let you down. Adpress and bbPress compatible, this theme is one of the best looking newspaper themes you can get.
This one is a clean and modern retina-ready theme with a fully responsive design. SmartMag suits newspapers and magazines the best, but it looks equally good on review sites and blogs as well. The front-end of this theme is excellent, while the admin backend is simple and the easiest to use. This theme uses HTML5 and rich snippets to get an awesome SEO support built-in, thus getting better ranks in Google search for your site. SmartMag enhances the content and makes the whole user-experience more engaging and appealing for your users.
This feature-rich theme is one of the best sellers with a cutting-edge design. It gets the exclusivity of the Valenti Drag and Drop Builder which makes customizing fun and extremely easy. This theme also boasts of a unique MegaMenu to give you awesome drop-down menus. One of the most love features of this site is the parallax effects. You can set the parallax effect on the featured image of any post. Valenti is ecommerce-friendly too with native support for bbPress, BuddyPress and Woocommerce.
Goodnews has been tagged as the most flexible WordPress theme ever. IT stands true to this tag, thanks to the high level of customizability that it offers. Thanks to its responsiveness, this theme will make your website accessible equally from any device. SEO has been kept in mind while developing his theme, so you can be sure that your SERP rankings will be high. The Ads system is a breeze to use. Layer Slider, Revolution Slider, Visual Composer, all come included! The theme is bbPress and Woocommerce compatible and is translation ready too.
Max Mag is a WordPress theme loaded to brim with features! It makes your newspaper or magazine website look utterly professional. Max Mag boasts a retina ready responsive design, thus eliminating the need of maintaining a separate mobile version of your website, as this website looks awesome equally on all the screens. This theme is bbPress and Woocommerce ready and gets a sticky menu bar. Every one of the category pages get a slider, which not every theme provides. Drag and drop makes customizing the homepage easier, while 16 custom widgets ensure the best functions for your site. The possibilities with this theme, just like its features, are endless!
With this theme, publishing becomes easier than ever on your newspaper site! Newsmag is a clean theme featuring a rating system and YouTube support. Clean SEO practices ensure that your site remains in the top search results. This theme is blazing fast and a child’s play in terms of use and user-friendliness. The whole theme is responsive, yes, the ads too! Featuring a customized lightbox, a smart sidebar, smart lists, drag & drop gallery, and a bunch of many other exciting options, this theme is very popular among the bloggers.
This is an exciting theme for newspaper and magazine blogs. Continuum features custom page templates, unlimited shortcodes, custom sidebars and menus, custom widgets, and many more useful technical features. The review system is one of its kind and flawless social media support has been given natively in this theme. It also comes with premium magazine options like “Breaking News!” grid or “In the Spotlight” grid and so on. Makes up for a trendy blog totally!
Braxton WordPress theme for newspaper websites is the perfect example of form and functionality. This theme looks extremely sleek and modern and is fully-responsive on every device, flaunting its retina-ready pixels. For ads, four distinct units including one custom wallpaper ad comes with this theme. bbPress and Woocommerce are supported natively, while the theme also gets RTL support to be translation ready. You get to choose from 600 Google Fonts and each category page has a featured slider of its own. Sticky menu bar, Lazy Load, Infinite scrolling, page/post slideshows, etc. are only a handful of the vast features available in this theme.
Last but not the least on this list stands the highly professional theme Deadline. Setting up this theme is super easy and customization is simple too. If you are someone who loves the controls in his hand, then this theme is perfect for you, allowing you to control the look and feel of your site completely. Fluid images and fluid grids along with smart mark-ups make this theme viewable equally on any device or screen of any size, thanks to Deadline’s responsive design. Someone who is looking for a totally de-cluttered and very clean design should go for this theme.
10 Things You Must do After Installing WordPress 15 Jun 2015 2:08 PM (9 years ago)
It is a fact that WordPress is the most popular CMS today. No matter if you are going to install WordPress for the first time or you are a developer and install it every day, there are few things you must do right after the installation. In this article, we will see 10 most important things that should be done after every WordPress installation irrespective of the website type you are building.
1. General Settings
After installing WordPress, it is most important to make sure you have the correct Site Title, Site Tagline and URLs of your WordPress site. It is also important to set your timezone, date format, time format and week start day so that you have all basics set up before you actually start working on your website.
2. Set Permalinks
Next important thing you should do is to set up permalinks. Permalinks are actually URL structure and it is very important to set them up properly. By default, the post or page links of a WordPress website look like this:
http://example.com/?p=123
These are not user friendly and are bad for SEO (search engine optimization) point of view too. You can choose any option out of the available options like Day and name, Month and name, Post name etc. Post name is usually the simplest if you do not have a lot of articles and it will make your URLs look like this:
http://example.com/my-post
It is obviously clear that the latter format will look much better for your URLs and will be user friendly as well as search engine friendly.
3. Install Your Theme
You might think it is better to first put all content and then choose a new theme and apply it. It is also a fine approach but there is a problem with that. If you have done formatting like adding spacing before headings, making paragraphs justified or adjusting font sizes etc.; that does not necessarily mean that those new styles will look good on your new theme too! So, it is a much better approach to apply your theme first before you start importing or writing any content.
4. Trash Hello Dolly, Hello World and Sample page
It is important to remove any unnecessary content that comes with WordPress. You should remove the Hello Dolly plugin, Hello World sample post and a page named ‘Sample page’ which is created when you create your WordPress website. All this content has no use so it is best to remove it before you start working on your actual website.
5. Secure your WordPress website
Security is the most important thing for any website. You should also keep your WordPress blog secure by taking appropriate measures. The first step is to generate your Authentication keys. These keys are used for encrypting your information and cookies etc. so it is essential to update them to be more secure. Go to this link for generating new keys:
https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt
This link will randomly give you a set of new security keys. You can refresh the page any number of times and it will give you a new set of keys every time. And then you should go to your wp-config.php file and update these values.
If you want to go a step further, read this article and make your WordPress site even more secure.
6. Activate Akismet to Avoid Comment Spam
Comment spam is a headache for almost every blog owner. To avoid this in the first place, it is highly recommended to take measure right after you install your blog. Akismet comes with every WordPress installation. All you need to do is to set it up.
If you would like to check even more options for avoiding comment spam, check out this article here.
7. Set up a backup plugin
Without a backup plugin, you risk of losing your important data if your website get hacked or there is any other issue. So it is clever and very important to have a plugin installed for keeping your website backed up and avoid any risk of losing your data. Few of the best plugins you can get for this purpose are UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, Duplicator and BackUpWordpress.
8. Install an SEO plugin
Search Engine Optimization is becoming more and more important day by day. Without an SEO plugin, you cannot expect good SEO results. So it is very effective to install an SEO plugin right after you install your WordPress site. Few of the good SEO plugins you should check out are SEO by Yoast, All in one SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps.
9. Delete default ‘admin’ account
One of the most important things is not to choose ‘admin’ as the administrator account for WordPress as it will make your website far more vulnerable to attacks. So go into your account and create a new account, make it administrator and remove the default ‘admin’ account.
10. Remove the Admin Bar
Most users prefer to avoid admin bar while browsing their website. For doing this for all users, you can add this code to your functions.php file and the admin bar will not show for any user.
add_filter('show_admin_bar', '__return_false');
Top 10 Travel, Hotel and Vacation WordPress Themes 3 Jun 2015 1:14 PM (9 years ago)
Let’s accept it. Nobody likes to browse a vacation website that looks so dull and old. If you have got a travel website, it must look exciting. Period. I mean that’s the whole point of that website. Visitors must feel good looking at your website, otherwise there is no way they are going to stay on your website, leave alone use your services or read your blogs. This can definitely hurt your conversion rate.
So if you have a travel, hotel or vacation WordPress blog or are making a new one, picking one of these themes will definitely keep you ahead of the competition!
Brooklyn is one of the best looking themes, thanks to the parallax effects. And when coupled with a one page design, you can be sure to mesmerize your visitors. The design is fluid and responsive and fits in easily on any screen size. You can add a portfolio of pictures and can create pricing tables easily. The theme supports WPML and Slider Revolution comes free! You can choose from over 13 predefined demo setups and can setup your choice in just a click.
This theme is specially designed for travel companies, but can also be used for other purposes as well. The package post type features enables you to showcase your travel packages easily to the visitors. A pre-made booking form is also included along with a package filter feature. The theme is retina ready and fully responsive and has been coded with the best SEO practices to benefit you in the search engine ranks. Layer slider enhances the beauty while the easy page builder makes customization a child’s play. Woocommerce is supported too.
This theme is marketed as ‘a luxury template’, and it does stand true to this tag. The theme looks awesome and modern, while being extremely user-friendly. Choose from 4 great color schemes and 19 PSDs to make your own customizable style. An advanced booking system with availability checker comes integrated with this theme, making it easy for your customers to plan their travel and stay. The theme is translation ready and comes with features like events list and customer testimonials. PayPal payments are supported, so taking deposits is a breeze.
Listify is essentially a directory theme, so listing hotels and making reservations therein is very quick and perfect with this theme. This theme matches excellent functionality with great looks, making it a full-on awesome package. Woocommerce, OpenTable, Resurva, and Guestful are already supported if you want a reservations system; this can actually make one of the fastest listing and reservation site. The theme comes with powerful plugin integrations and is made with SEO in mind, so this theme makes for a win-win situation.
This WordPress theme is high on capability. Vellum is totally SEO optimized and fully responsive. It has a unique structure and you can create any style, layout or design out of this single theme. UberMenu lets you create highly functional mega menus with multiple columns, subtitles, titles, icons, etc. Slider Revolution comes included and does wonderful animations for your gallery slideshows. Visual Composer helps you to customize the theme as per your taste with the simple drag & drop mechanism.
This theme can practically be used for any reservations site, be it hotel or hostel or anything similar. The admin panel is crazy easy and the theme auto-generates a good-looking page for every room, including all the rooms in the slider. A nice order form is included too for the customers to make inquiries. The theme has a clean and simplistic design and supports WPML too. Unlimited color scheme and more than 20 slider effects make this theme simply superb.
This theme is fully responsive and designed especially for travel operators, tour agencies, and other such services in the tourism category. BookYourTravel supports full translation and gets an integrated powerful booking system. It is coupled with advanced filtering and availability checker to make the experience easier for your customers. There is a review system included too, and in case of partners, front-end management is easy with this theme. Payments are easy with Woocommerce integration and PayPal and many others. Customized widgets and 9 color schemes enhance the customizability further.
Have a booking website for hotels, spas, resorts, etc.? Then Nice Hotel is the perfect theme for you. The theme looks absolutely luxurious and a notch above all the other booking site themes. You can easily add images and descriptions for the rooms and services with Accommodation Management while the Booking Wizard makes it easy for the customers to reserve the room of their choice. The theme is fully responsive and WPML ready and comes with 4 predefined skins. If you prefer your own style, you can easily customize with the help of color picker. The home page and contact page are easy to configure, and you also get management system for events and testimonials.
This theme is specifically made for travel and/or review magazines. This responsive BuddyPress theme looks elite and is backed by a solid framework. Customizability is a breeze with unlimited color schemes and two predefined unique skins. You can also customize the background to match your content. The rating system is one of the best-in-class with the option of using stars, numbers, letters, or percentages. User ratings feature make your website genuine to the visitors, and a ton of other great features like great sliders and carousels make the theme a perfect investment.
Midway suits all types of travel business websites. With ease of use and high level of customizability, it has one of the most powerful theme panels. Searching, booking, and managing tours is a child’s play with this theme. It is really easy to use and customize, comes packed with powerful tools for managing, searching and booking tours, changing styles and more. This theme gets unlimited sidebars and integrated social links along with 4 custom user forms and 2 slider types. Payment system is simple enough too and the integration of Google Analytics make the theme more functional.
5 Best Gallery Plugins for WordPress 28 May 2015 7:56 PM (9 years ago)
Galleries have become more important today than ever before. Reason? They are used not only for portfolio or photography websites but also for many other type of WordPress sites including news-related sites and blogs. A picture or a video based gallery is more engaging for website visitors and give you website a much better look too. So, in this article, we have gathered 5 of the best WordPress gallery plugins you can find today. Check out the list below and see which one is perfect for you!
1. Justified Image Grid – Premium WordPress Gallery
Justified Image Grid is really one of the best gallery plugins you can find out there. There are countless features with each being more awesome than the other. For example, you can create gallery with justified images. What this means is that you do not have to crop your images but they will automatically fit in a grid, just like you would have seen on Google Images. Won’t it be great to have your gallery look natural and fun to browse?
The best thing is the unique responsive behaviour. Since it is a justified grid, images are not of same width, but even then the plugin handles them very well. Go to their demo page and simply resize your browser to see it in action. It brilliantly repositions your images and make them look nothing but best. For an even cooler effect, you can make your images black and white and show them in color only on however. This unique effect makes your galleries easier to browser and highlight an image only when it is hovered giving the user a much better experience.
What’s more, it can show Flickr photos, Instagram photos and even recent-posts based galleries. It really is one of the best gallery plugins you can see for WordPress today!
Current Sales: 11,846
Click Here to View and Download
2. Essential Grid WordPress Plugin
Essential Grid is another amazing plugin which is based on grids. You can show any content using the grids and creating grid-based galleries could not be any easier. It is created by ThemePunch, the same company who created Slider Revolution. If you like grid-style webpage or want a nice gallery with countless grid features then this is the plugin for you.
You can even easily import/export a skin just like you would do in Slider Revolution plugin. This plugin is very easy to use and the options are self-explanatory making the overall user experience very good. There are more than 25 skins included with the plugin and it is also mobile optimized. With such features, you can never go wrong if you choose Essential Grid plugin.
Current Sales: 8,416
Click Here to View and Download
3. Media Grid – WordPress Responsive Portfolio
Media Grid is basically a gird plugin for creative responsive portfolio website but it is great for many other purposes too! With unlimited layout possibilities, the visual builder and the support for custom fields of your own choice, it is a truly powerful portfolio plugin. Changing skin style is super easy. Just choose a style and click ‘set’ and you are all done.
Another great thing about Media Grid is that it is compatible with WooCommerce like few other top plugins. This makes it easy to create grids based on products and show their details, ratings and other data for making it visually appealing. While Media Grid is not as powerful or filled with tons of features like some other plugins but it surely has the best options for creating a portfolio website.
Current Sales: 8,089
Click Here to View and Download
4. Video Gallery WordPress Plugin /w YouTube, Vimeo
There are many gallery plugins for WordPress but this is a one created specifically for video galleries. Due to this reason, it has a lot of features related to video gallery creation and includes many layout styles. There are many options related to customizing video looks and the plugin also supports YouTube and Vimeo. Videos from both of these services is natively supported which means all you need to add is the video code and it will take care of the rest.
It is even touch-enabled which means it should work perfectly on all touch screen devices too. Moreover, the settings panel is simple and easy to understand even for a new user. For those looking for a dedicated video gallery plugin, this one has the most features for you.
Current Sales: 6,509
Click Here to View and Download
5. Bonus Free Item: NextGen Gallery
NextGen Gallery is really a brilliant WordPress gallery plugin which has a pro version too. But even the free version gives so many great features that you are never likely to expect from a free plugin. The ability to create multiple albums, galleries, give titles and arrange images however you want, are just few of the cool features this plugin has.
It is even possible to easily crop images, crop or edit thumbnails, show watermarks and easily import images using multiple methods. You can customize the look of the galleries using the custom CSS option. To summarize, if you are looking for the maximum options and want a free plugin then NextGen Gallery might be the best option for you.
Current Active Installs: 1 Million +
Click Here to View and Download
5 Top WordPress Slider Plugins 26 May 2015 1:15 PM (9 years ago)
A slider is very important for your website. Whether it is an ecommerce website or a news blog, slider makes it easy to show the most important and featured content in the first glimpse. But here is the problem, there are tons of slider plugins for WordPress out there that it is hard to find the best one based on your needs. In this article, we will share with you 4 of the top slider plugins which are all great. You can easily choose one out of these and get started with it in minutes.
1. Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Plugin:
Slider Revolution has become one of the most famous WordPress slider plugin because of its great features. There are many options for customizing the look and working of the slider. Options include creating multiple layers in a slide and they can be managed easily just by dragging. Each layer can even have a background image or a color or can even be a YouTube or Vimeo video! It’s as simple as a few clicks and that’s all it takes to build your slides.
There are many cool features including the integration of Google Fonts, post-based slider and a high quality touch-based interface which lets users on mobile device easily browse through the slider. This plugin is also compatible with WPML and Multi-site installations. The built-in visual editor makes it easy to edit slides and the timeline option allows you to change when and for how long a slide should appear.
The ability to create many types of sliders including post-slider and full-screen slider makes it a very powerful plugin. Slider Revolution also allows you to import or export a slider which is really a great feature making it easy to copy the slider across multiple websites.
Current Sales: 56,440
Link: Click Here to View and Download
2. LayerSlider Responsive WordPress Slider Plugin
LayerSlider Responsive is a WordPress plugin with many great features. It is among few of the most popular premium WordPress sliders. With over 200 cool slider transitions, you will never have to install another slider plugin just to get a transition style. Slider can be creating from posts, images, combination of text and images and videos. It is very powerful in terms of features and options.
There are many transitions and styles including Parallax style which moves based on the mouse movement engaging the users in a much better way. There are 13 unique skins and 3 navigation types. With this many features, it is easy to choose LayerSlider no matter what type of website you have. And it is responsive too which means it will work great on mobile devices as well.
Current Sales: 29,666
Link: Click Here to View and Download
3. RoyalSlider – Touch Content Slider for WordPress
RoyalSlider is known for its gallery and HTML slider features. It has more than 10 templates and around 5 skins that you can use, which is much lesser compared to other plugins. However the styles are solid and should suit most users. There are gallery style sliders, content-based sliders and video based sliders.
Gallery-based slider is for creating a nice-looking image gallery which is idea if you are a photographer or designer and need to show your work. It should work for many other types of images too. The content slider is very nice in this aspect that you can put any HTML content (just like you normally create a page) which may include text, images or both. So it is very good when you need to show posts with or without a summary. There is a gallery with full screen option which lets the user scroll images as a full-screen slideshow.
Another very nice style is Slider with Animated Blocks. In this style, you can place any text, HTML or images and they will show as animated flat-background blocks. It is a very professional style which is great for websites with flat design. In short, you won’t get tons of features or transitions, but those that you get are very nice and professional.
Current Sales: 23,595
Link: Click Here to View and Download
4. Slider Pro – Responsive WordPress Slider Plugin
Slider Pro is another cool WordPress slider plugin and the best thing about it is that it was built with user experience in mind. The result? It is really great in terms of UI and gives a great user experience. Easy to use controls and powerful features are what Slider Pro is known for.
There are only 5 types of sliders but all these styles are customizable and have all the important features you might expect from a slider plugin. It includes lightbox support, responsive touch interaction, auto-scale layers and the ability to use mixed content in the slides.
Current Sales: 8,586
Link: Click Here to View and Download
5. Bonus Free Item: Soliloquy Lite
Soliloquy Lite is an amazing free WordPress slider plugin. It is the free version of the Soliloquy Pro which is the premium version. Even the lite version offers tons of great features and is better than most of the free plugins out there. The slider offers a responsive, super-fast and high performance system for creating and showing your slider. It is even SEO optimized and has great, clean code which will make the working and performance even better. In short, this plugin is indeed among the (if not, the) best free slider plugins you can find!
Active Installs: 80,000+
Link: Download Now
5 Amazing WordPress Plugins You must check out! 12 May 2015 12:51 PM (9 years ago)
One of the best things about WordPress is that using plugins, you can instantly add new features, whatever and whenever you want. This makes scaling your website super easy and with these plugins, you can add any custom functionality with the power to enable or disable them at any time. Due to this fact, WordPress plugins are becoming more and more popular every day. Unlike the old days, now there are tons of premium plugins too which supersede free plugins in many ways. Here are 5 great plugins you cannot miss!
1. Visual Composer: Page Builder for WordPress
It is very less likely that you are a regular WordPress user and you have not header of this great plugin. The great quality of Visual Composer plugin is that it makes it very easy to create any type of page with its graphical user interface. There is no need to write any line of code or manually place shortcodes. All you need to do is to drag and drop layout and media elements and it will automatically fit everything at its place.
With over 45 elements to choose from including image elements, galleries, headings, separators, video elements, text blocks and virtually anything you can think of, it will make your experience of creating pages painless and much easier.
Another unique feature is the front-end editor which shows the actual front-end of the page (instead of the WordPress page editor) and you can even edit from there. Cool? Yes it is. It is definitely worth integrating in your themes to boost the speed and experience of creating pages.
Check it out here.
Current Sales: 68,500 approx.
2. Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Plugin
Sliders have become a must-have part of every website now. It is one of the most popular type of plugin you see today. There are many of them out there, each one with its own characteristics. Slider Revolution is considered one of the, if not the, best slider plugin for WordPress with countless options for customization.
There are layers, timings for them, advanced position management, background images, looping options and many styles to choose from. Even you can add YouTube videos as slides with great ease. These are the reasons why many premium themes include Slider Revolution in their own theme package. If you buy it later on, installation is very easy and pretty straight forward. Slider can be added on any page or post just by clicking the icon for revolution slider and adding the slider you want to add (which you have already created).
Check the demo and get the plugin here.
Current Sales: 55,500 approx.
3. Hide My WP
This is a unique and new WordPress plugin that has some very cool features. Recently, a large number of WordPress plugins and themes have been found to be vulnerable to various types of attack, so the purpose of this plugin is to hide the fact that you are using WordPress, thus minimizing the possibility of an attack.
Hide My WP does this very cleverly by hiding many things including wp-login.php page and replacing it with something like wp-login.php?hide_my_wp=123. This precisely makes it very hard for an attacker to find the fact that you are using WordPress and even if he does, he cannot find the login page to attack.
Other features include hiding template directory URL and customizing them by replacing the URL with something like www.example.com/template instead of www.example.com/wp-content/themes/template. There are a lot of great, unique features like hiding metadata from your pages and changing all the default URLs so that they are not predictable anymore. In short, this is a nice plugin and seems to be promising in terms of the features and making your WordPress website more secure.
You can check the plugin at this link.
Current Sales: 9,980 approx.
4. EventOn – WordPress Event Calendar Plugin
There are tons of event management WordPress plugins and EventOn is just another one. But it has more features than any other events plugin you can find out there. You can easily sort the events, colormark them and it comes with a great, responsive layout too. User experience is great making it easy to use it.
You can have events in many languages. The events are managed as EventCard data fields and an event can be put in many ways including having GoogleMaps, featured images and custom additional fields. Sorting options include country-based sorting and city-based sorting making it easy to find what you are looking for. It really seems to be the best events plugin out there.
Check EventOn here.
Current Sales: 12,500 approx.
5. Ninja Popups for WordPress
Ninja Popups is a highly customizable and professional popups plugins for WordPress. There are options for almost anything you can think of including showing popups after specific time or hiding after some page scrolling. It works great with all the major email marketing solutions including GetResponse, MailChimp, Aweber, CampainMonitor and iContact.
Ninja Popups include the option for many languages. There are predefined XML layout templates which gives a number of layout options and can be customized too. Google Analytics Event tracking integration is also part of the plugin. Ninja Popups has many great features you might want in a popups plugin and seem to one of the best if you are looking for a premium solution.
Check it out here.
Current Sales: 12,700 approx.
Top 10 WordPress Themes For Photographers 7 May 2015 4:39 PM (9 years ago)
The Internet houses a variety of websites for a plethora of different things. From business websites to personal blogs, they all look unique and dashing too if premium WordPress themes are used in their building. And when it comes to building an amazing and beautiful WordPress websites, the neediest ones in that case are the photographers. It is important for photographers that their website be eye-catching and filled with elegant features, so that the visitors are bound to check their portfolio collection. A good premium WordPress theme is indeed very necessary for photographers to convert the website visitors into business clients.
Below listed are the best 10 WordPress themes for Photographers who care for their business:
The King Size WordPress Theme for the photographers is developed by Denoizzed. The main target of this theme is the incalculable gallery, portfolio, slider and options of video display that are ideal for clients needing to showcase extensive capacity media package. A background full screen slider, image or video homepage sets the phase for a website wide media review experience which is truly noteworthy. The intuitive vertical menu navigation includes definite features of a design that is a piece of this present theme’s general appeal and one of the explanations behind its ubiquity.
2. Core Minimalist Photography Portfolio
The Core is a very Minimalist theme for Photography, Portfolio constructed with most recent WordPress highlights. It has image uploader as well as custom Post Type and other magnificent functions. This WordPress theme is the ideal match for all searching for ease that will do not sacrifice customizability and functionality. This theme puts pictures first and transforms them into the stunning background so clients won’t leave your site for quite a while. The core is usually the most popular digital photography design nowadays. It has experienced a few overhauls and still holds the solid position on this corner.
Invictus is a Full-screen video and image WordPress theme for photographers. Invictus is simple to utilize, super adaptable and has a completely responsive design! Using its accommodating design, web page in addition to options of post Invictus is quite intuitive to utilize and fully ready to control the field. The probabilities are usually endless! They have built Invictus theme with most recent HTML5/CSS3. Invictus delivers a person an awesome way to highlight their stock portfolio in an exclusive manner! Invictus can be employed for any kind of portfolio, nevertheless has been primarily built with regard to photography fans, video artists or creatives.
Photolux is an elegant and powerful Photography and Portfolio WordPress Theme which is ideally equipped for creatives and photographers who use portfolios in order to showcase their work. Photolux WordPress theme is fuelled by the progressed Pexeto Panel, which offers tons of possibilities to modify and manage any part of the theme. It is appropriate for both developers and newbies with no knowledge of coding. Photolux accompanies three base skins: Dark, Transparent and light, and also several options of backend for easy building and customization of your skin.
Chocolate is an elegant and powerful WordPress theme which consolidates perfect mix of minimal layouts and clean designs. It is a flawless theme for those individuals who are anticipating showcase their artwork and photography. This powerful theme is packed with features like responsive layouts, shadows with precise combinations, gradients plus more. It is user-friendly and with this you’ll receive several important options in order to modify your site.
Tripod is an expert WordPress photography portfolio with the implicit page builder. Tripod has a huge amount of downloads as of now. Tripod has boundless templates of custom layout, drag-n-drop page builder, eye-popping animations, and a ton more. A powerful portfolio WordPress theme is a sublime answer for a marvelous site.
7. Expression Photography Responsive WordPress Theme
Expression is a prevailing responsive WordPress theme, ideally equipped for creatives or photographers who use portfolios to successfully exhibit their work. This WordPress theme is powered by Pexeto Panel, which gives huge amounts of choices to modify and manage any part of the theme. Because of the design possibilities supplied you can modify the appearance with the design, in addition, to building your own customized pores and skin.
DK Photography is a premium WordPress theme developed with wonderful WordPress functions, like customized image uploader, custom post types, infinite colors available plus more. It is exceedingly customizable, in addition, to accompanying a cool and modern design. Without a doubt at this time there are several websites with digital photography available on the internet. Consequently make your site extraordinary and emerge from others. Using DK WordPress Photography theme, it is possible to modify your site in several ways. Browse from ten-page templates, four homepage styles plus six gallery page DK templates. Pick out your preferred colors through options of infinite shade, in addition, to type your fonts how you lean toward. That way it is possible for you to make your site extraordinary as well as exceptional.
The Village is a WordPress theme for new photographic artists as it packs a plenty of redid choices that aid clients in understanding the fundamentals of WordPress. The Village layout incorporates good modules which are unique and new, for example, the wall of interactive jQuery. This WordPress theme additionally includes 17 social icons and magnificent display administration.
The overall pattern in addition to the layout of this design has been inspired by the standard magazine layout. However here is the place that the similarities end, because Fluxus exceeds the standard formatting, in addition to delivers your articles in the 21st centuries. It could work and adapt any gadget, both desktop, and mobile; also it comes with a horizontal layout which usually permits you to watch your work in parallel manner for a superior point of view. The feature list is so long it couldn’t be possible to specify here, yet all that a potential customer needs to realize that Fluxus is without a doubt worth her/his time. Well, known photograph websites must utilize themes like this Fluxus WordPress theme so as to acquire widespread lure.
Dead Simple Tips to Gear Up WordPress Site For Mobile Phones 28 Apr 2015 2:13 PM (9 years ago)
We are living in a world, where mobile dominates an online shopper behavior. Put it simply, more and more users are using mobile devices instead of desktop for browsing the Internet, and most importantly, to make purchases. This suggests that making our websites mobile-ready has become more important than ever before.
Furthermore, with the release of Google’s new mobile-friendly algorithm update, according to which “mobile-friendliness will affect ranking on Google search engine”, running a website optimized for mobile devices has become a necessity than any passing trend.
Are you running a WordPress site that isn’t mobile-ready? Then reading this post will help you learn 5 dead easy tips on making your site optimized for mobile phones.
#Tip 1 – Pick a Suitable Mobile-Friendly WordPress Theme
You can make your website deliver consistent experiences to users no matter whether it is accessed via a desktop screen or a mobile device, by opting for a WordPress mobile theme. There are plenty of great WordPress themes available over the web, helping you set up a site and make it running in no time. In fact, picking the right mobile-friendly theme even save you from spending your time and money in hiring a professional to get the job done.
Just as the number of mobile devices is increasing, even the number of mobile themes is also on a rise.
#Tip 2 – Evaluate Your Website Using Google’s Mobile-friendly Test Tool.
Even though, you’ve installed a WordPress theme designed for mobile devices, it would be better if you’ll test whether it really features a mobile-friendly design or not. Luckily, you can do so with the help of Google’s mobile-friendly test tool. The best part is that the tool also explains the issues as to why a site is not mobile-friendly.
For example, here is a screen shot of the output I received after testing my website using the Google test tool:
#Tip 3 – Installing the Right Plugins
The third most important yet easy tip, you can follow is to install and activate the plugins that make the task of making your WP site more streamlined. You can find tons of great plugins serving many different purposes, including the ones that help in making your website mobile-friendly.
As a website owner, you’ll probably find yourself being short of time, when it comes to focusing on important aspects of the site. Moreover, you might not lack the technical knowledge required to make your site gear up for mobile devices. However, using a WordPress plugin can help you make your site mobile-friendly without having you to code.
For example: WP Mobile Detector plugin helps optimize sites for mobile devices in a matter of few seconds. This plugin, as the name implies, detects the device a user is using to access your site and accordingly loads a mobile theme.
#Tip 4 – Make Your Website Design Responsive
The best way to make your site mobile-ready is to make its design responsive. In essence, make sure that your site layout respond to the device, it is being accessed on. For instance, when viewed on a desktop screen, your site must be displayed in a manner that makes it look great on desktop systems. Likewise, your site must look good when viewed using any Smartphone or a tablet.
WordPress makes the task of having a responsive website easy, all you have to do is select a theme and customize it using the drag-and-drop page builder that comes prepackaged with WordPress.
If you’re still finding any difficulty in making your site feature a responsive layout, you can even look for professional assistance. In simple words, there are various web development companies that help in offering WordPress web development services to address your needs.
#Tip 5 – Create Content For Mobile Users
When users view any site via a mobile device, they usually skip most of the content and like to access the part that appears worthy to them. On the other hand, users visits a desktop site, when they need to access more information about your site. And so, when designing your site, you need to ensure that the content may seem irrelevant to mobile users isn’t visible when your site is being viewed using a mobile phone.
One great way to achieve such an objective requires hiding navigation menus, which opens up (or expand) when clicking on any icon or a symbol. For this, you’ll need to use CSS media queries, as it helps in making the menu responsive. Besides this, make sure to include large size buttons that are easy to tap even when your site is being navigated using smaller screen devices.
Conclusion
Making your WordPress site optimized for mobile devices isn’t a complicated process, and can rather turn out a simple process using the aforementioned tips.