Copying a Live WordPress Site to a Localhost

Today we have a step-by-step walk through on how to move a live WordPress website to a local host. This way you can run WordPress offline. Why would you want to run WordPress offline? Maybe you wan to to play with new plugins or themes or test changes before making them on your live site. Whatever the reason, it’s not hard to do and it doesn’t take long. Anyone can follow this tutorial and quickly have a locally hosted WordPress site. This way you can use WordPress without being connected to the internet.

I made this tutorial because I thought it would be useful. The WordPress Codex is a great reference and can help you do many things, including moving a live site to a local host. For some users, it can be hard to understand. Especially beginner. The language can often seem confusing and convoluted.  This tutorial shows you simply how to move your site without the hassle. This is a companion post to our recent article on How to Install WordPress Locally With XAMPP. Read more

How to Pimp Your Website with SVG Animations

Different screen sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios make it difficult to offer a consistent visual experience. This is especially true for those who want to represent the best pixels.

Scalable vector graphics (SVGs) help us solve part of this problem decently. SVGs can be really helpful on certain points and create a more visually impressive experience without putting too much pressure on the web browser or affecting the loading time.

Read more

trends2017

8 Main WordPress Trends of 2021

The first months of 2021 are behind us and now is the time to look into the future and assess current trends of 2021. Any WordPress Site administrator must always look towards the future to keep up with the new trends of design, user interface and content delivery style for his or her readers.

It is impossible to list the number of current trends completely within a single review. In addition, trends tend to be complemented and change over time. At the moment, we consider the most important and interesting trends that will definitely affect the development of WordPress sites during the current year.

Some of the trends that we will now consider, are already used by leading projects and WordPress sites on other platforms. If you already use at least half of the trends listed here, then your project is clearly on the right way to success. If all of the following will be a novelty for you, then you still have time to implement all these methods.

Read more

Top 5 Amazing Benefits Of Choosing WordPress Development For Business Sites

WordPress is one of the most widely used and easily customizable CMSs (content management systems) used by business owners worldwide to create their own branded websites. Many people choose a WordPress website project because it is an open-source program, which means that developing sites with WordPress is always in your pocket.

There are many ways that a WordPress development company can help a business owner make a strong impression in the online world. These companies can provide customized WordPress expertise to enable a company to create websites ideal for their specific requirements.

Setting up WordPress can also help customers get the most value for their money. From developing WordPress plugins to developing themes, a WordPress development company in India can offer its customers various services that help improve their online position and create a strong impression for their target customers. Read more

Cross Browser Testing: How to Perform on Your WordPress Website

Each change of design, interface, navigation or any other feature of your WordPress website might potentially cause some problems in performance. This is not a reason to decline any changes, rather to make them wisely and test the results before publishing them live. One of the most important challenge your changes should face is the cross browser testing.

You probably know that there are more than one popular browsers in the world. Although Google Chrome is the popularity leader among other browsers, it covers only 65% of desktop users and 57% of mobile platform users. Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Edge, and Safari are still strong and preferred by many people around the world. It means that you need to consider not only the most popular browser users but also other part of your potential audience. You would not decline of at least 35% op your visitors in a moment, would you?

Fortunately, WordPress platform can provide you with ample opportunities to test and optimize your website design, content and features throughout all of the popular browsers. Special plugins and services allow you to bring cross browser testing even without knowledge and skills in web development or design. In this article we will observe and analyze the main features and opportunities that some dedicated services can give to your WordPress project.

Read more

Easiest Ways to Convert Your WordPress Website into a Mobile Application

Easiest Ways to Convert Your WordPress Website into a Mobile Application

Mobile applications (or simply “apps”) represent the new way of user interaction with websites of all types. Any modern WordPress website should aim to have at least a mobile version of its content. The next step of involving users into your WordPress project is the creation and development of a mobile application.

There is a strong trend of modern users` transition from desktop devices to mobile ones. In other words, people are using their smartphones and tablets more and more often to visit websites, read news, estimate and buy products and services, leave their comments and testimonials, and much more. Modern mobile devices are already providing users with all corresponding opportunities according to their demands. However, not all web projects appear to be ready for such changes. Is your WordPress website ready for them?

Most beginners in the field of WordPress website administration delay the development of mobile application for their project. This is an awful mistake to make, because the share of mobile users is always growing. It means you will constantly loose audience without a proper mobile application for your project.

We will analyze the opportunities WordPress gives website owners to convert their projects into mobile applications. The process is not so complicated as many WordPress website owners imagine. Premium WordPress plugins and services are ready to make the most difficult parts of the work for you. We will observe some examples of such tools in this article to give you a sophisticated understanding on how to convert your WordPress project into a mobile application without special web development knowledge and skills.

Read more

What is WordPress VIP

Quick Tip: What is WordPress VIP

Most website owners tend to consider WordPress platform as a cheap tool to build and customize web projects. We have already debunked this and other myths about WordPress but there is still a great opportunity for enterprise level web project that we did not mentioned and reviewed. We are now talking about WordPress VIP.

VIP (Very Important Person) relates to any sphere of products and services of a unique quality level. WordPress VIP is not an exception. This project is created especially for big web projects with extended budgets. What features does WordPress VIP actually have, how much does it cost and for whom specifically is it interesting — we will tell in this short overview article. The information will be useful not only for large projects but also for developing ones to estimate their future goals and ways of achieving them.

Read more

How to Style the Comment Form on Your WordPress Website

How to Style the Comment Form on Your WordPress Website

Comment form is one of the simplest (and therefore one of the most important) ways to involve your WordPress website visitors and provide them with a feedback opportunity. Comment forms represent the way to concern your users` time and effort to take part in the life of your project. That is why you probably will need to style any default WordPress theme`s comment form into some unique shapes. It could be very small nuances but they do play the important role on how users perceive your WordPress website or blog.

Most premium WordPress themes allow an admin to customize all elements of his website within a convenient drag-n-drop editor. Today we will consider a bit more complicated but much more all-purpose way to customize your comment forms — with the help of CSS stylesheets of your WordPress theme. This experience will also help you to acknowledge the basic opportunities of WordPress website development and maybe proceed further in learning hidden traits of the WordPress platform.

Read more

Configuration Tricks for Your WordPress Website

Configuration Tricks for Your WordPress Website

Although WordPress is often considered as the website platform for beginners, it has lots of opportunities for advanced fine-tuning. These options are mostly hidden from a sight of most WordPress administrators just because a thoughtless manipulation with them can cause severe problems in the work of your website. There is no need to worry about your website safety, if you have done a back-up before customizing your WordPress configuration file.

Today we are talking about WP-Config file and its hidden opportunities to fine-tune your WordPress website. Most WordPress administrators had no experience with WP-Config because most hosting providers install it automatically to prevent any harm by inexperienced website owners to their own projects and to minimize the consequential damage.

The wp-config.php file has lots of opportunities not only for fine-tuning your WordPress options but also for troubleshooting and enchanting your website security. If you want to know more about WordPress platform from inside and seek to develop your website in a professional level, then this article will be very useful for you. Arm yourself with your website back-up and any of available FTP clients (FileZilla, for example) and hop into the world of extended WordPress configuration!

Read more

Latest Trends of UI Design for a WordPress Website

Latest Trends of UI Design for a WordPress Website

User Interface (or shortly UI) relates to every element of your WordPress website with which a user interacts. On the other hand, User Interface is a common term that describes an overall opinion and impression of a use about your whole project, its features and how they correlate with user`s demands.

User Interface is usually created by professional web designers but owners of smaller WordPress projects should know the main features and trends of modern UI as they need to deal with the web design of their websites by themselves. It is anyway important and interesting sphere of knowledge which every person connected with web development should be aware of.

UI design changes through time as every part of the web development industry. We have gathered the most interesting and trending facts about the modern UI design in this article. Do not miss the opportunity to stay in touch with the latest trends and evolve your WordPress project in accordance with them.

Read more

Google Web Designer logo

Google Web Designer — Perfect Tool for Ads` Creation

The process of creating suitable design for online advertisement can be very difficult for the beginners in the field of website administration. WordPress websites also need good advertisement banners either to promote themselves or to provide additional service for paid advertisement for their clients. For a long time, there were only some difficult tools to create web design elements like Photoshop. But now the situation has changed for the sake of all website owners who does not possess special web design skills.

Google Web Designer is a brand new application that gives you all needed tools to create advertisement design of any difficulty without special knowledge. Google Web Designer is the new way to incarnate all your design ideas to practical use. We will observe this wonderful tool in this article to show you the main features and opportunities it gives to any website owner, including WordPress administrators.

Read more

Examples of Using Artificial Intelligence within WordPress

Examples of Using Artificial Intelligence within WordPress

Artificial Intelligence (widely used as AI abbreviation) was an example of science-fiction matter just 20 years ago. Now Artificial Intelligence is the new step in the development of computer science and linguistics combined. AI used to handle all the boring and repeatable work for humans. But now it is rapidly evolving and making progress in lots of activities, making some things even better then human beings.

That has even become a reason to worry for lots of people around the world. Would not AI become smarter than the most intelligent scientists? Will the AI replace humans once? But whatever you answer to these question by yourself, it is no doubt that artificial intelligence is a must-have tool for any modern website, business or community.

What can a modern AI exactly do and how could you use its features for your WordPress website? This article will answer the questions related to Artificial Intelligence for website development. We will also observe the most interesting examples of using AI within your WordPress website for completing lots of different tasks.

Read more

Meet Gutenberg the New WordPress Website Editor

Meet Gutenberg — the New WordPress Website Editor

Gutenberg is the name for the new WordPress website editor. This editor is coming to all WordPress websites with the 5.0 update but can be tested even now inside your admin dashboard. In this article we will show and analyze the vital changes Gutenberg brings to the WordPress platform.

It is hard to believe, but WordPress was released 15 years ago. In 2003 there were other trends and needs for the most personal websites created within the platform. Web development, design, content and social media trends have changed nearly every month during these 15 years. So, there is no surprise WordPress desires to implement some revolutionary changes for its main tool — page and post editor. The new name means the new attitude to creation and editing your content.

Read more

7 Useful Features to Improve Your WordPress Website

7 Useful Features to Improve Your WordPress Website

WordPress is full of opportunities for every type of web project. These are not only thousands of WordPress themes for any possible topic but mainly WordPress plugins that could extend the functionality of your website significantly in a matter of a few minutes.

Let us take a look at WordPress features that could be easily brought by plugins. In this article we have gathered the features and relative plugins which you probably did not know before. Some of them are created for special needs but most are useful for nearly any WordPress websites owner.

The participants of our today`s list are premium plugins with extended features compared to their free analogues. These plugins include the quality control and professional customer support for their users. these features could be essential for the beginners in the field of WordPress website administration.

Read more

What Is the Difference between WordPress org and WordPress com

What Is the Difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?

Most WordPress platform`s newcomers are confused with the existence of two similar names: WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Despite of similar names, these platforms are very different in their essence, features and opportunities. It is crucial for any WordPress admin to know the difference and to make the right choice from the first steps.

Today we will make the detailed analytics of these two platforms and provide you with the important information for your choice. This article is the “must-read” for any new WordPress website owner. So, if you have a friend or a client who is in the position of a WordPress newcomer, then you should share this article with this person for his or her good.

Read more

How to Add a Parallax Effect to Your WordPress Website

How to Add a Parallax Effect to Your WordPress Website

Parallax effect is a modern web design tool that aims to engage your audience and keep it on your WordPress website for a longer time. Basically, parallax effect is created by the difference of the scrolling speed between a background image and an overlay content. Background image scrolls much slower and this difference creates an illusion of depth for the whole user`s impression on your website`s design.

Parallax effect is widely used within most of the modern premium and free WordPress themes. It is especially popular for portfolio type of websites and some small business web representatives. These types of websites prefer to use the landing pages over and try to impress a user from the first sight and keep him or her engaged through the whole content of the page which could be very long-scrolling and contain lots of content blocks.

Today we will pay our attention to the process of creating parallax effect on any WordPress website. We will consider three of most effective ways to create parallax effect: with the help of WordPress themes, plugins and CSS coding opportunities.

Read more

YouTube vs Vimeo

YouTube or Vimeo – How to Choose Better Service for WordPress Website

Video content is getting more and more popular nowadays. It is now simply inevitable to use videos on your WordPress website if you want to keep the loyal audience and increase it. And you do not need to create your own video content. You can just use the YouTube and Vimeo services to look for thematic content and put it to your WordPress website for your users’ entertainment.

It should be also mentioned that WordPress itself provides and opportunity to upload videos on your server. But this method of storing and showing videos is connected with lots of problems due to big sizes of video files. Services which are specially created for this purpose are much better and convenient for both WordPress admins and users.

Today we will compare YouTube and Vimeo services as two most popular video hostings of the world. Both services provide ample opportunities for video bloggers or for those who want to use the created content for the sake of their WordPress projects.

We will focus on such subjects as pricing, monetization, upload limits, audience reach, video editing options and privacy control. YouTube and Vimeo will be compared within these metrics in this article. This comparison will give you the clear picture of all main features for both services and will allow you to make the best choice for your WordPress website.

Read more

Disable Widgets

Quick Tip: Disabling WordPress Widgets

Widgets are very important and helpful tools to set up and develop your WordPress website. But sometimes we store more tools than we need for the near future. In this case the problem of overwhelming by the widgets can appear. The other situation that involves widgets` disabling can appear when you change your WordPress theme or make some other changes in the website design. Some widgets can no longer work efficiently with the new design set up.

Than you can decide to return to the previous version of design or just the need of some old-and-faithful widget can appear. All this cases need to be dealt with suitable approach. How to maintain WordPress website and admin panel in order and disable the unnecessary widgets? In this article we will desirable 3 of the most simple and efficient ways to deal with this issue.

Read more

WordPress Secure Connection Error

WordPress Secure Connection Error — Fixing the Issue

WordPress secure connection error is one of the common issues any website administrator can face. So it is important to know what causes such an error and how to deal with it. As WordPress is a large web platform with lots of additional plugins, tools and extensions, it is not always obvious where to look in case of errors.

In this article we will analyze the possible reasons of secure connection error within a WordPress website and the methods to fix this issue. The article will be helpful for the beginners in the sphere of WordPress administration and development.

Read more

wordpress-developers

Top 6 Places to Hire WordPress Developers and Experts

WordPress is a fully open platform for your website or blog. This means that you can add any element of front-end or back-end interface as desired. However, this requires some knowledge in the field of web development and design. Alternatives are ready premium WordPress plugins and themes, which include a variety of additional functions. But this approach is not always effective. In addition, the existing themes and plugins can meet not all unique ideas that you want to implement on your website or blog.

There is a simple way out of this situation. Professional developers and experts in the field of WordPress administration can help you with any challenge to implement the unique features of the site or blog. These experts can work in a team or alone, but all of them are distinguished by the excellent knowledge of WordPress as a platform and an opportunity to quickly finalize your project.

Today we will talk about where to find such experts, and how exactly can they help your web project on the WordPress platform. In fact, there are two main approaches to the search for the WordPress developers to carry out certain work on the site: it is an appeal to the services of specialized companies or finding a freelancer.

Read more

Styling Contact Form 7 in WordPress

For most people creating a WordPress website, a contact form is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. An effective contact form doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to serve it’s purpose. As long as email is still around – contact forms are something that most websites should have. Displaying links to your social media accounts and an email address is fine, but contact forms make things even easier for people to contact you. You can use your contact list for lots of useful things like building marketing purposes, customer support issues and more.

If you decide to dive into WordPress without a whole lot of background knowledge (like I did), one of the first things you will end up fiddling with is a contact form plugin. Contact Form 7 has been downloaded over 6 million times! With over 1 million active installs, it is by far the most popular contact form plugin for WordPress. It works great and it is free. One of the best things about it is that you can use it to learn. Read more

Adding Custom CSS to WordPress

WordPress is heavily reliant on CSS stylesheets. Making simple CSS changes to a WordPress website is one of the first things that beginners want to do.  Luckily it’s super easy to add custom CSS styles to your site.

There are lots of different methods and anyone, I mean anyone can do it. I showed my 8 year old niece how to do it and she doesn’t even understand the difference between an iPad and an iPod, or at least she thinks the terms are interchangeable. Today we have a quick guide on adding custom CSS to your WordPress website. Read more

Migrating a WordPress Website to a New Host

Using a test server to develop your WordPress website is the best way to make changes to a site. There are a few important advantages doing things this way instead of on a live site. Once you have tested everything on your local machine or remote server, then and only then should you publish your site to a live domain.

This post is part 3 in a 3 part series on creating a local test server. Previously we showed you how to install WordPress locally with XAMPP and how to copy your live site to a localhost on your machine

After you have created a test server by installing your site locally and you have copied your live site to your localhost — the next step is to move your test site back to your live host. This post will show you how to migrate your site to a live host. This means you are moving your database and site files (themes, plugins, posts, WordPress core etc.). Read more

Install WordPress Locally With XAMPP

XAMPP (cross-platform, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl) is an open source web hosting solution stack on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris operating systems. You can install it to provide a similar environment as your web host’s server to use WordPress on your computer (locally). This allows you to run WordPress core and display in your browser without being online.

There are some helpful features that a local host can offer for web designers and developers. This tutorial will cover using an all-in-one program. We are going to show you how to quickly setup a local host to run WordPress offline in around 10 minutes with XAMPP. It’s completely free and easy. The WordPress Codex has more information on Installing WordPress if you are interested in learning more. If you liked this tutorial, check out our post on Copying a Live WordPress Website to Your Local Host, which can help you move a live site offline.  Read more

What is a WordPress Framework?

Before I did a little research on the subject, I always had trouble understanding exactly what a framework is. After doing some digging I’m still a little confused on the matter. Do some searching online and you’ll find that the terms “framework” and “library” are interchangeable depending on the context.

At first it’s kind of like when people start talking about using GPU’s as CPU’s. Or when someone asks you what “is” is? (e.g. Bill Clinton on the witness stand) Unless you have been working with computers and discussing computer science theory for a while, the concepts can get twisted in too much theory to do you any good. Think of hot rods or PC’s as an example.

Read more

Creating a Child Theme in WordPress

What is a child theme? Why should you use one? How can you use them to modify an existing theme? These are all questions I aim to answer in this post. No matter how good your theme is you are going to want to customize it for your own use. It could be something as simple as changing the page layout or something more complicated like modifying the functionality of a shopping cart.

You can do this easily in WordPress a number of different ways. The easiest would be to download a plugin, which you could do. But, there is always a better way of doing things and sometimes using a plugin isn’t always best. For simple changes using plugins can be a bit of an overkill and drain your resources. Read more