How Does WordPress Benefit A Business?

With dominating more than half of the digital market share, WordPress is undeniably the leading CMS today. The platform lets you create an attractive and highly functional portal which is loaded with all the modern features. The SEO driven elements of WordPress allow the developers to create websites which ensure higher revenues and organic traffic on the website.

WordPress is a well-known CMS for its performance-oriented features. The platform is continually gaining recognition for business website development. Companies are looking to hire WordPress developer who possess expertise at creating custom WordPress solutions. Developing exclusive themes and  plugins is becoming popular these days, given their efficiency and ease of usage.

Hiring a dedicated team of developers from certified web development firms ensures that a business achieves splendid services. Where a business website needs to come up clean in terms of proficiency and reliability, it is important that only professional should be relied on. Being involved with the WordPress sphere on a daily basis, these developers make use of the latest tools and techniques for rendering an amazing web portal.

The skilled and professional WordPress website development companies let their clients manage their business website with ease. The developed is focused on addressing the target audience in mind, hence ensuring the highest ROI.

These companies deliver services which are in sync with the needs of the customers, while keeping website management simple. The WordPress developers keep themselves updated with the latest trends of the market and deliver websites which are bug-free and performs phenomenally well once they go live.

You should always consider the WordPress development services who have a record of delivering services of greatest quality and have helped businesses increase their productivity. Getting in touch with WordPress professionals will offer the following advantages:

All-In-One Services

Hiring dedicated WordPress services ensures a complete solution. The project includes website development, support, maintenance, responsive, theme development, customization and much more.

Web Customization

Although WordPress provides features to perform some basic customization, a skilled developer is always needed to tame this robust technology. Tweaking the WordPress platform as per the needs of the business requires specialized knowledge of the CMS and it becomes crucial to hire a developer for it. It is the duty of the developer to perform various tasks which includes development, integration, extension and support for the website.

Tested Methodologies

Hiring the professional WordPress services isn't just for creating a website. Once the website has been finally launched, it must be able to index higher in the search engine rankings. These services assist you to make the most out of the CMS by ensuring that the site ranks well on the leading web browsers.

Apart from a higher online visibility, the website is also able to achieve features like W3C compliance, crisp content and SEO optimized keywords for making it easier for the search engine crawlers to index the website.

10 Reasons Why You Should Use WordPress for Your Website

Unarguably one of the best CMS platforms in the world; WordPress is the ideal platform for business websites. Many people ask why businesses should use WordPress, isn't it a blog platform for bloggers? Yes, WordPress is used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers across the world but it's also the most advanced and well-equipped Content Management System that powers million of regular websites. Nearly 50% of the world's website that use any sort of CMS use WordPress as their CMS system. 

 

 

 

If you're having second thoughts about whether to choose WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Adobe CQ; here are the 10 reason why you should be using WordPress:

#1. It's Easy to Use


It wasn't long before when you needed to add something to the website you had to call your web designer to do it. If you needed to add something or edit some content you, would have to go to your web designers and pay them to make the change. Today, staying up to dated means whether you stay in business or not, so websites are constantly updating pictures, adding more content, writing blogs to reach as many as possible and more importantly you save money on making changes to the website. This is where WordPress has the advantage over its rivals, the ease of use. Really, anyone can do it. But I prefer to hire a WP developer in the initial stage as they make theme more user friendly for the users.

#2. It's Free


Whether you've started blogging or started your business website; WordPress is absolutely free and you get 3 GB of storage in the free package, you can upgrade to Premium or Business depending on your need for $99 and $299 per year respectively. In business package you get unlimited storage, custom domain, advance customization, 50+ premium themes to choose from, live chat support, and Google analytics.

#3. Flexibility


It's an all-rounder for sure, and that's what you get with WordPress. Apart from the flexibility of adding different functionality, it can be used for adding portfolio site, or run ecommerce website, it works for almost everything with the ability to schedule the post.

#4. SEO Friendly


Google loves WordPress, so do we. In fact in the year 2009 Google's Engineer Matt Cutt endorsed WordPress in 2009 during Wordcamp and his own blog is also powered by WordPress. Not only that, it optimizes the content fast, title tags and headings, permalinks, and so many more features make it more SEO friendly.

#5. WordPress is constantly evolving


Yes, WordPress started out as a blog engine, but it has become so much more. With each new release new possibilities are added. And since it is "Open Source" there are thousands of developers writing plugins to extend its functionality.

#6.Customizable


What you get with WordPress is a huge array of free themes to choose from and you can pay $20 to choose from their premium themes. Because of the thousands of themes and plugins, you can make your website according to your need and preference, and plugins certainly are the best part about WordPress. The best part is most of them are free and easy to download and install. WordPress theme customization isn't a difficult task but will require some time to understand basic principle of web designing.

#7. Mobile Friendly


Well, that's one thing off your list to be worried about. Google has already made it clear about the important of websites being mobile-friendly, if not, it can affect their ranking on mobile search engines. WordPress is already a responsive platform and its themes support mobile optimization also.

#8. Multi-user Capability


There's a very good chance that there are a number of people working on your business website to keep the site updated and running. WordPress understands that and has made it easier by assigning different roles to different individuals, here's that:

•     Super Admin – somebody with access to the site network administration features and all other features.
•     Administrator – somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site.
•     Editor – somebody who can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users.
•     Author – somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.
•     Contributor – somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them.
•     Subscriber – somebody who can only manage their profile.

#9.Saves Money


Apart from being free to download and install, it's an open source CMS which means you don't need to hire a professional to look after bugs and issues. WordPress does that already.

#10.Support


That's one more thing you get with WordPress is a lot of support, If you find yourself stuck somewhere, visit the WordPress forum and you can post your question there.

Wrap Up

Well, there are definately more than 10 reason why would use WordPress for your website. But it's ease of use and adding functionality to it with ease, makes life so much easier for non-technical people.

How to Create a Strong Verification for your Maintainable WP Meta boxes?

In order to give strength to its hook system, WordPress leverages event-driven pattern for designs. Though, we know that the design patterns are certainly dependent on each other , thus it is highly unlikely to recognize a design pattern. This is what which makes WordPress flexible.

Apart from achieving exclusiveness, other thing which WordPress developers look for is to create a code which is easily maintainable. As with the advancement of technology and enhancement in the features the codebase of any web app tends to grow more complex. Thus, with passing time it becomes difficult to preserve the clarity and maintainability of the code.

This is equally applicable on WordPress, be it a plugin, an extension, themes or any other project type. The thing which is important is to write a maintainable code.

That's it!

No! certainly not!

This is where developers go wrong, as they make sure that they have followed all the steps to a write maintainable code. Let's for instance they apply meta box, apply options and also apply tabbed navigation in the WordPress dashboard, but they forget to check whether the code they have written works for real or not.

In this blog we will go to the server side in order to apply code which can verify that whether the user has the authority to save the meta data or not .

How to verify that the permissions are granted?

You need to incorporate a security check during the serialization process so as to check whether the user has the ability to save post meta data and to publish. To do this we can use nounce value so as to implement this. This is a number which is used once in order to protect URLs from the scope malicious users.

1. How to add a Nounce?

To add a nounce in the meta boxes, you need to implement the functionality in the markup which will render the post template. For this you need to load admin/views/authors-quick-tab.php and then after you need to update the template so that it contains wp_nounce _field.

<div id="authors-quick-tab">

<h2 class="nav-tab-wrapper current">

<a class="nav-tab nav-tab-active" href="javascript:;">Tab 1</a>

<a class="nav-tab" href="javascript:;">Tab 2</a>

<a class="nav-tab" href="javascript:;">Tab 3</a>

</h2>

<?php

// add tabbed content

include_once( 'tabs/tab1.php' );

include_once( 'tabs/tab2.php' );

include_once( 'tabs/tab3.php' );

// Add a nonce field

wp_nonce_field( 'authors_quick_tabs_save', 'authors_quick_tabs_nonce' );

?>

</div>

The code written above has introduced a nonce which has the functionality for saving the authors quick tabs (which we've named authors_quick_tabs_nonce) . This was also linked with a value which is figured out by authors_quick_tabs. This won't load on the very first go when you will load your web app on browser, as these values are displayed in a hidden field.

Those people who are intrigued can launch a suitable bowser's development tool in order to check the meta box, and you would get something like this and of course with a different value of nonce.

<input type="hidden" id="authors_quick_tabs_nonce" name="authors_quick_tabs_nonce" value="q4df212f34">

2. Check the Nonce

To make sure that the permissions of saving the post assigned to the user is implemented properly or not, you need to check the following three things:

• User must save the data on the 'post' post type
• Users must actually have save permission
• Post must be not automatically saved by WordPress

In order to incorporate the first two we can write a helper function and for checking the third one you can go for an intrinsic function. Primarily, you need to establish the hook as well as the functions that can make use of the helper functions and then you need to save your meta data. Now you need to add some piece of code in the Authors_Quick_Meta_Box which is given below.

<?php add_action( 'save_post', array( $this, 'save_post' ) ); ?>

The next step is to define the function. You can make use of the following code in which we have called two functions.

<?php

public function save_post( $post_id ) {

if ( ! $this->is_valid_fnc() || ! $this->user_save( $post_id, 'authors_quick_tabs_nonce', 'authors_quick_tabs_save' ) ) {

return;

}

}

?>

In the given code, it is written to run the save_post function when we call a save_post action. The function is written to verify that the saved post is not of the 'post' post type, and if the user do not has the authority to save then function should exit.

Definition of the function is must so as to make the logic work. Then we need to write the is_valid_fnc function as this function checks the $_POST array to ensure that the saved post type is a 'post'.

<?php

private function is_valid_fnc() {

/**

* check valid post type or not

*/

return ! empty( $_POST['post_type'] ) && 'post' == $_POST['post_type'];

}

?>

After this we need to add the user_save function, to make sure that the whether the saved post is automatically due to the WordPress or not. Further , if the user is saving the function so there should be a proper nounce value for that particular post.

<?php

private function user_save( $post_id, $nonce_action, $nonce_id ) {

$is_var_save = wp_is_post_autosave( $post_id );

$is_var_revision = wp_is_post_revision( $post_id );

$is_var_valid_nonce = ( isset( $_POST[ $nonce_action ] ) && wp_verify_nonce( $_POST[ $nonce_action ], $nonce_id ) );

// Return true or false.

return ! ( $is_var_save || $is_var_revision ) && $is_var_valid_nonce;

}

?>

Notice here that we're passing in the nonce_action and the nonce_id that we defined in the template in the very first step. We're also using wp_verify_nonce in conjunction with said information. This is how we can verify that the post that's being saved is done so by a user that has the proper access and permissions.

One thing you should note is that we are passing nonce_id and the nonce_action which were defined at the very beginning. Moreover, we will also use wp_verify_nonce conjunction in order to make sure that user who has proper authorities only can save the post.

Maintainable code is certainly an indispensable need of the modern development world. Thus, verifying it becomes a crucial task.

Feel free to share your queries!

Tips To Ensure That You Have An Adept VA For Your Web Development

If yours is an entrepreneurial business, Virtual Assistants (VAs) can help you boost your business. They can make your job amazingly simple by taking care of several tasks and thus, allowing you to concentrate over other essential that can lead to your enterprise growth. For instance, they can help manage calendars, an array of emails, handle campaigns to make sure that everything is working smoothly.

No doubt VAs can augment the website development process, but there are some crucial areas that must be dealt with utmost precision and thus, demand expert guidance. You can't simply hand over the sensitive controls to your VAs without getting yourself involved in them. However, by investing in some result-driven WordPress web development services, all the concerns related to web development will be managed by professionals. The adept WordPress developers can, thus, deliver a prolific web solution that can boost your business values.

Although, VAs are not that experienced to handle the crucial web development processes or maintain a business site, many business owners ask their VAs to put up a requisite website. The only apparent reason for this could be that this makes a cost effective way or enterprises want someone from their team to accomplish it.

For the folks who really want to put the responsibility of their website on their VA, it is essential to kick around and ensure that the chosen VA is appropriate for the job. Here I have enlisted a list of questions that can help you analyze the capabilities of your VAs and streamline your choice accordingly.

• Are they capable enough to analyze and create a chart to represent insights of target market, so that your target audience will be clear. Thus, a site can be designed keeping them in mind.
• Do they have branding and graphic design skills? Do they know the absolute way for optimizing images so that images can be instantly downloaded from any device?
• Do they know about the latest web trends and have insights to choose the best suitable layout that can leverage your target market and business?
• SEO is quite essential, Do they know how to achieve a search engine optimized website?
• Do they possess any programming skill so that if something went wrong that can be handled and fixed appropriately? Other than the premium products, if any custom design is required, would they be able to customize your site without leaving the quality behind?
• Do they know how to turn a site into a responsive site so that your business can reach myriads of devices with a flair.
• If they are writing content for the web, do they aware of the ground rules of copywriting?
• Do they belong to marketing field? If yes, what is their education and how many years of experience do they have in the field? Is it sufficient for your business.
• Do they know about all kinds of feature and functions that can be integrated to deliver an enhanced website? Are they aware of a few plugins for particular categories?
• Are they aware of other CMS platforms that can offer a superior experience than WordPress (like is Magento is better than WordPress if you want to develop an eCommerce website)?

If you get positive response for all the aforementioned questions, your chosen VA is ideal for developing your enterprise website. Otherwise, it is advisable to hire WordPress developer and reap the benefits of this blissful platform.

There are numerous web development companies that offer invaluable development services at competitive prices. Therefore, you can easily seek one that best suits your project needs and business objectives.

Creating a WordPress E-commerce Store That Invites Shoppers

E-commerce is a very fascinating industry, and thanks to WordPress, now anyone can become an imperative part of it and capitalize on our evolving online shopping habits. Thousands of businesses out there opting for WordPress to build an e-commerce website that engages users and stimulates them to shop.

However, designing an e-commerce website using WordPress is one thing, and planning right moves for traffic generation and revenue maximization is entirely another. After having WordPress e-commerce development , you also need to outline a competitive strategy for your online store, so that customers keep on returning.

E-commerce web design is a broader concept that isn't just limited to the aesthetics of a store. To influence the overall success of your business, it's important for you to follow some best of breed strategies, such as SEO, an inviting landing page, smooth transaction process, and much more, so that customers don't ditch you during the process. A remarkable e-commerce creates an environment that encourages its visitors to act and complete the process they've initiated.

Here are some key tips and tricks that you can implement when it comes to building and running a WordPress e-commerce website.

1. Go for Email Marketing

Email marketing can be an indispensable tool for any online business when it comes to maintaining a healthy and long-term relationship with its customers. It's a handy solution for entrepreneurs to gain an insight of their customers and thus interact with them accordingly. Creating email lists is a critical aspect for the success of any online store. Without an evoking email list, it will become difficult for you to encourage users for repeat sales. 

 

Mere traffic generation shouldn't be your ultimate goal, you need visitors that should be converted into promising customers. A thoughtful email list will help you achieve this objective in an efficient manner.

2. Embrace Blogging

If you are running an e-commerce channel that is based on WordPress, then you can easily supercharge your business with the addition of informative blogs and articles to your website. Blogging has to be a key strategy to influence your website growth and boost sales. 

 

Blogs attract traffic instantly and make users feel confident about your website. They inform customers about a range of products, so that they can make right decisions at the time of purchase.

3. Responsive is the Key

With the proliferation of smartphones and mobile devices, customers' expectations regarding online shopping have also increased. Today, the majority of online shoppers prefers to purchase from their mobile devices, thus resulting in increased mobile traffic and need for responsive websites. Therefore, it is important for online players to embrace responsive design to ensure a pleasurable mobile shopping experience. 

 

Failing to create a responsive website will not only provide a bad experience, but also results in lower search engine ranking. In order to avoid such issues, make sure your website is optimized to suit the growing needs of a variety of mobile devices. You can hire WordPress Expert and ask them to build a responsive theme for your website to cater your mobile audience. You can also download some pre-built themes from some leading theme markets for your site.

Conclusion

Creating an e-commerce website using WordPress is a big step, but if you are serious enough to make the most out of it, make sure you have implemented the above mentioned tips to get the user's attention towards your website.

Speed Up Your WordPress Website Performance With Varnish Cache

Lets face it, WordPress standard installation is slow. And installing a number of plugins, themes and images makes it a lot more slower. You can minify your CSS and JS with help of “Better WordPress Minify” plugin, or you can use EWWW Image Optimizer plugin to reduce your images file size. However, there are lot of other factors that affects your WordPress site performance.

Possibly by now, you'll be thinking to Hire WordPress Expert to get the job done. But, there's another viable solution. Wondering, what's the solution? Varnish Cache is a web-application accelerator which is designed for dynamic websites with heavy content.

Varnish Cache – A Foreword

This caching system stores copies of pages for readers who aren't logged in into WordPress admin. Whenever users requests for something it reaches to Varnish instead of the server. And then, Varnish looks for what user has requested and then forward the request to the server. The server sends the response to Varnish, which in turn sends that response to user's original request. But if Varnish would only perform such function, it wouldn't be much of help to us.

However, Varnish also help improve performance by storing the responses it has received from the server in the virtual memory. And so, Varnish is able to quickly send the next response to the user instantly from its cache, and thereby the load on server to process users requests is reduced significantly. This eventually help improves the response time and your process requests can be carried on great speeds.

How to Install Varnish Cache?

We’ll be setting up Varnish to listen to all web requests on port 80, while Apache will be supporting Varnish on port 8080. So, when Varnish will ask for a page that needs to be built manually, the request will get passed on to the Apache port 8080. Let's look at Varnish installation on our instance:

Edit Apache’s ports.conf file to listen on port 8080:


sudo nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf

You'll get the following outcome:

NameVirtualHost *:8080

Listen 8080


Next, you need to edit your “Apache” website config file in order to respond to port 8080:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress

Now, change the virtual host from *:80 to *:8080

<virtualhost *:8080>

You'll require to change your Apache default website to listen for web request on port 8080 or need to disable it:


sudo a2dissite 000-default

In case, you've decided to review your original Varnish configuration files later, you'll have to move those files to your home directory in the form of backups.

sudo mv /etc/default/varnish ~/default-varnish-old

sudo mv /etc/varnish/default.vcl ~/varnish-default-vcl.old


Replace your default Varnish configuration file with the one given below (copy and paste).

sudo nano /etc/default/varnish


Let's look at the configuration file that needs to be replaced:

/etc/init.d/varnish expects the variables $DAEMON_OPTS, $NFILES and $MEMLOCK

# to be set from this shell script fragment.

#
# Should we start varnishd at boot? Set to "no" to disable.

START=yes

# Maximum number of open files (for ulimit -n)

NFILES=131072

# Maximum locked memory size (for ulimit -l)

# Used for locking the shared memory log in memory. If you increase log size,

# you need to increase this number as well

MEMLOCK=82000

# Default varnish instance name is the local nodename. Can be overridden with

# the -n switch, to have more instances on a single server.

# INSTANCE=$(uname -n)


How to Configure Varnish?

Once Varnish is installed, edit your port and change it to 80. Just remember not to change your Apache port yet, and keep it running till you're sure that everything complies properly. Moreover, if you're not sure about your configuration files, configure Varnish for port 81, and the perform a side-by-side test without losing your users:

nano /etc/default/varnish

DAEMON_OPTS="-a :80 \

             -T localhost:6082 \

             -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl \

             -S /etc/varnish/secret \

             -s malloc,256m"


Next, make you'll need to make copy of the original VCL file:


mv /etc/varnish/default.vcl /etc/varnish/default-old.vcl

Configuring Apache

After configuring your Varnish cache, edit your Apache (or HTTP Server) so as to use some other port. (8080) Make sure to verify whether virtual host also configs or not.

nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf

NameVirtualHost *:8080

Listen 8080

Now restart the HTTP Server and Varnish. Varnish will listen to HTTP (web) traffic on port 80, and Apache in 8080.  But, how does Varnish will come to know where it needs to look for the HTTP Server? For this purpose, look at the top of default.vcl file.


/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

/etc/init.d/varnish restart

Getting Rid of Content from WordPress

In case you need to purge your WordPress website content manually or automatically when the posts are saved, install the Varnish HTTP Purge extension to your site. For doing so, add the following line of code to your
wp-config.php file:

define('VHP_VARNISH_IP','126.0.0.1');

Wrapping Up!

Adding plugins, images and other elements to your WordPress site makes it sluggish. However, you can make your WordPress site performance faster with help of Varnish Cache. This post will help you gain insight on Varnish cache, it's installation and configuration.