Most people spend a good amount of time, effort and money creating a successful website . . . but that can go away in less than a minute.

All it takes is one hacker to breach your site.  Poof! It’s Gone !!

Once a site is hacked, it can take a huge amount of time to recover and rebuild it.

You’re trying to decide which platform is best for your new website.

So many choices! Which to Choose?

Here we touch on several of the most popular platforms for websites, appropriate for e-commerce, informational sites, business services, and non-profit entities.

If your website has been in WordPress for a while, it’s probably easy to locate images and graphics to include in your posts and articles. As time goes on though, and you’ve uploaded hundreds of media files – the time spent locating a particular image can get to be annoying.

This particular Plugin allows you to add structure to your media library. You can set up folders using categories you choose, then assign your images and files to those respective folders during the upload process. Makes it easy-peasy to find media files for posts.

Messy links are like a messy desk … it’s just nice to have everything tidy.

Short URLs hide full links from prying eyes that may view the source code on your website and in Social media.

Here we have a WordPress Plugin that lets you easily shorten any current or future links on your site using your own domain name without using an outside tool such as Bit.ly, Tinyurl, etc. Plus you can track clicks that come through these shortened links to learn where your site visitors are coming from and which links are being clicked on the most.

Site Kit, Google's official WordPress Plugin, is out of beta and is now available for all WordPress sites.

This Google Plugin answers these common questions:

• How are people finding my site?
• Where can I make improvements?
• How are people using my site?
• Am I making money?

This Plugin specializes in converting visitors to subscribers. Allows you to easily create high converting subscriber forms and target them strategically at various target spots on your website.

Engage and Convert Visitors with Announcements on the Welcome Bar, Engage to Reduce Bounce rate or offer a variety of custom CTA (call-to-action) options.

Quickly Grow Your Subscriber List by displaying attention grabbing, high converting Email opt-in forms and build your subscriber list.

Would you like to spend less time on client estimates, and invoicing?

Would you like to get paid faster?

Made for small to mid-size businesses, self-employed companies and freelancers - this Plugin easily creates custom Estimates and Invoices in minutes from within your WordPress Admin Dashboard, and streamlines the daily tasks of billing clients and creating project estimates.

This newly released Giveaway and Contest Plugin may prove to be the easiest and most effective Plugin you’ve ever used for managing contests and giveaways.

RafflePress

https://wordpress.org/plugins/rafflepress/
https://rafflepress.com/
cost:  Free & Pro version

Description:

RafflePress was designed to assist small businesses jumpstart online growth with a giveaway Plugin that's powerful, easy to use and affordable for small business owners.

Would you like to add a Survey or Feedback form to your site? Check out the Contact Forms, Surveys & Quiz Forms Plugin by Formidable Forms Builder for WordPress. 

Features include:

• Build Registration forms, Calculators, Surveys, Contact forms and more.

• Comes with built-in reporting and data display.

• Create totally custom forms from scratch with an easy-to-use drag & drop form builder interface.

• View all contact form and survey entries from the WordPress Dashboard.

• Export Email data to other services such as Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, GetResponse, etc.

• Customize the submitted success message or redirect user to another page for more advanced form needs.

Referrer Spam bots hit your website every day … and you’re not even aware of it.

Learn what Referrer Spam is, and how you can Block it . . .

What is Referrer Spam?

Referral Spam is when a spammer bot sends multiple and ongoing bogus hits to your site that show up in Analytic reports. Ghost Referral Spam occurs when the spammer bot bypasses your website and hits the Analytics server directly.

When your Analytic reports contain Referrer Spam, you won’t ever get an accurate report for your website performance.

When left unattended, these bogus hits skew Analytic statistics and may affect your website ranking in the search engines.

Do you have code or text you want to replace quickly on a website? The Real-Time Find and Replace Plugin is your answer! This Wordpress Plugin dynamically replaces code and text within your website.

Use the Real-Time Find and Replace Plugin in these instances:

You’re working with a WordPress theme and can’t access the copyright or remove preset links.

You want to make changes to the theme page coding without touching the Editor files.

Change / replace text information appearing on multiple webpages in about five minutes, which allows you the opportunity to change individual pages at your leisure.

Tweak text on a product or shopping cart page.

Change last name of an employee that’s just gotten married.

Revise an Event title.

The uses are endless.

Whether you're a service business, a retail location, only sell online, or any type of group or organization - a stylish presentation of “who's who” really helps to connect you and your staff to those visiting your website.

Most often used on dedicated about us, employee, member, or meet our team pages - easily present your business and/or organization in a professional manner on your website using a plugin. Include bios, social media links, and more.

There are many strategies used to make a website standout, and one of the most undervalued elements is the Favicon.

What is a Favicon?

A Favicon (short for ‘favorite icon’) is a website file that contains one or more icons associated with a specific website or webpage. Browsers providing Favicon support will display the Favicon in the URL address bar, and next to a webpages name in a list of favorites or bookmarks. Some browsers use the assigned Favicon as a desktop icon.

If you have updated your Wordpress site to the new Wordpress 5.0, you will notice that the classic content editor has been replaced with a new editor called Gutenberg. This new block style editor is a little different from the classic content editor and takes just a little getting used to. But once you grasp the hang of it, Gutenberg is easy to use and has some nice features to enhance your website.

With Google Places and Google Local Search crawling the internet for user generated reviews, collecting and displaying customer reviews on your website is an important piece of your overall SEO plan.

An easy way to collect Customer Reviews from your website is to install a Plugin to facilitate the process.

One such Plugin is WP Customer Reviews, which is a lightweight and configurable Plugin that displays reviews in a format that’s search engine friendly. WP Customer Reviews lets you designate a specific webpage to receive testimonials of your business products and/or services. Try it out and see if you like the results this Plugin offers.

With more and more people placing orders and doing business on their smartphones, it’s to your benefit to make it easy as possible for customers and/or potential clients to reach out to you directly from your website.

For many of your site visitors, the online Contact form may suffice for general questions, product/service quotes, comments and inquiries but depending on your business niche there are those who may need to speak with you or your staff immediately. This is where a Tap to Call option works wonders.

With over 100,000 active installs, the Call Now Button WordPress Plugin is a solid plugin for creating click-to-call options for display on varied devices.

Marketing your business takes so much time and effort … here’s a plugin that may just enhance efficiency and management of your content.

Editorial Calendar, an easy to use plugin is brilliant for keeping your Blog post schedule organized and always accessible. Scan the calendar overview to see what and when you’re publishing next week or months down the road, with options to edit and add - you can even move posts around to different dates.

If you have a website that may appeal to a non-English speaking audience, you may want to consider using a WordPress Translation plugin on your site to reach those viewers.

The most widely used plugin for website translation is Polylang.

Polylang is a free WordPress translation plugin that allows for multilingual content creation.

Polylang allows users to select their preferred language from their profiles, and it automatically downloads the respective WordPress language packs. Polylang fully supports RTL languages and works with most WordPress themes.

What are Featured Snippets?

The definition of a Snippet according to Google is “a description of or an excerpt from the webpage”, that follows the title and precedes the URL and Cached link.

Google advises to use clear Titles, and accurate meta tag Descriptions which help them generate useful snippets in their search results.

Worth looking at is the Blog2Social Wordpress plugin that allows you to customize, auto-post, schedule and share social media posts within the Admin panel. Available in both Free and Premium options.

Features Include:

• Automatically turns your Blog post into the right format for each social media channel.
  
  
• Auto-posts at the best times for each social media channel.
  
  
• Streamlines the manual task of sharing Blog content on each individual social media channel.

One photo is worth a thousand words … or so the saying goes.

If you sell products online, Wordpress Plugins can enhance your products visually to the point where buyers can inspect everything from intricate detail to being able to read labels clearly. Sometimes, the visual can make the difference between a sale and moving on.

You may want to display a location map for your business or organization, or you may have a special event you need to showcase a map for directions.

A WordPress Plugin will help you easily accomplish placing a customized map on your WordPress site to feature your physical location and other important information.

View your website performance from inside your WordPress Admin area with real time statistics at a glance. Tracks real-time visitors, per-page performance, referral sites, links (internal, affiliate and outbound, file downloads and e-commerce sales, and more.

Online marketing takes time. Peripheral events that affect your online marketing efforts take time to process.

If you could use a little extra time in your week to devote to other tasks, then you may want to try out a few of the plugins we’ve found to help you out.

Scheduling Posts within WordPress is a feature many people never notice. It’s a helpful option that allows you to set the exact date and time for publishing a Post. Useful for maintaining a regular publishing schedule whether you’re on vacation or just having a busy week.

Did You Know?

Launched in 2002, LinkedIn has evolved into a community of motivated business professionals ready to connect and network. Leveraging itself as the largest professional media marketing network in the world, LinkedIn now has more than 430 million members in 200 countries.

Sometimes you may want to tweak the Header and Footer areas of a WordPress theme, without having to go into the actual files to edit. This can easily be accomplished by using a Plugin.

While most WordPress themes do come with Admin panels for customizing headers, footers, and other areas of a page, you may find a Plugin is easier for you to use on a regular basis – especially if you’re adding snippets of information you want to change on a regular basis.

Why optimize images before placing on your website?

• Reduce overall download time.

• Increases the viewer’s experience.

• Images will become SEO friendly.

Most often, the largest files on a webpage(s) are going to be images. Large files impact download speed, which usually translates to the site being assigned a Ding by the search engines. Ranking will drop. High quality images in most cases can make or break the sale of an online product or service. People often leave sites when they have to wait for images to download.

Everyone has their own method of compressing and optimizing their images. Most often a graphics program is used, then images are uploaded to your WordPress site.

Testimonial Plugins simplify the process for adding customer feedback to your WordPress website.

Reviews from people who have first hand experience with your business go a long way in building trust and credibility to future customers/clients.

If you configure a Testimonial plugin so site visitors can enter reviews first-hand, be sure to monitor and respond. Promptly responding to reviews creates dialog with your current customers/clients, and increases the odds of a prospective customer to make a purchase.

Show off your client comments and positive feedback about your services / products on all of your website pages, don’t hide them away on one isolated page. If a site visitor is viewing a product/service page, and is not sure whether to buy from you or not – if they see several Testimonials/Reviews by verified purchasers – they’ll feel more secure in placing an order.

Here are a few Testimonial plugin options to experiment with.

If you have trouble putting all your thoughts into words for your Blog or website posts, here are a few tidbits to remember each time you sit down to write. Tips of what you should include, what to leave out, and how to optimize posts to perform in search engines. Tools to generate topic ideas.

If you have a website in WordPress, an ad management Plugin can be helpful in several different ways.

An ad management plugin will basically accept any html coding, so you may want to use an ad plugin for other purposes than third party advertising. Think of how you might use an ad plugin in areas of your site where you’d like to feature something special:

• Highlight upcoming Announcements, Events or Sales.
• As a rotation with graphics/photos and links, to direct site visitors to other parts of the site you want noticed, or new pages repeat site visitors may not know about.

If you want to display affiliate links, sell ad space, accept sponsored posts, or place unique coding as it applies to your website - here are a few ad plugin options to experiment with.

Learn how to create tables with columns using TablePress, a straight forward, simple plugin that allows you to create and edit tables and columns for addition to pages and posts.

Great customer service and support is important to the success of any business website. The faster and easier it is for potential buyers to get answers about your product or service, the more likely they are to buy from you. Happy customers translate into a solid online reputation for you and your company. We will cover several good WordPress Plugin options to assist with your onsite customer support solution.

Keeping abreast of how your website is performing is important. Google Analytics is a great tool you can use to analyze page views, returning visits, etc. Several methods are available for connecting Google Analytics to your site code.

If your website framework is in HTML, the Google Analytics code can be generated within Google Analytics and placed manually into each website page you want to track. If your website is utilizing a WordPress theme, most of them come with built-in support allowing you to generate the tracking code, and paste into the dedicated area of the theme or plugin. Once the tracking code is inserted into the correct area you will be able to view visitor activity on your website. 

Wordpress sites are more often susceptible to a security breach because they require a user name and password to enter the Administration area. Straight HTML coded websites experience other methods for hackers to take over their site. If your website utilizes a managed hosting solution, plugins update and perform security updates for the operating system on a regular basis.

Digital security is probably one of the most important aspects of running a website. As a business, your website is capable of collecting massive amounts of information. Some of this information is crucial and very sensitive.

A breach in your security can bring about countless hours of headaches and migraines. If the damage is severe enough, you might even end up dealing with lawsuits. Nothing is more important than a secure website.

WordPress is one of the most used open source website creation tools out there. Although being open source means we get a ton of plug-ins and modifications created by all sorts of genius minds across the world, it can also mean increased vulnerability. This is exactly why observing some common security measurements can take you a long way when it comes to creating a secure website. Let’s take a look at what you can do to bulletproof your WordPress website.