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 Become a WordPress Professional

WordPress certainly needs no introduction. With over 41% of the top 10 million websites in the world using it as of May 2021, WordPress is still the go-to platform for content management, including blogs, online stores, forums, media galleries, mailing lists, and many more. To quote Fred Meyer, WordPress is a factory that makes web pages.

But like any other content management system, WordPress needs professional developers to tweak it to optimal performance and truly make it shine. Needless to say, the hunt for these professionals is becoming quite intense, which spells exciting employment opportunities for those ready and willing to try. But, if you are considering a career in this direction, you need to know which skills and abilities are required, and what makes a WordPress developer perform well.

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5 Effective Ways to Power Your SEO Techniques to Boost Website Visibility

More targeted visitors to your website, product page, or landing page equates to more conversions and sales. It also means a higher search ranking on SERPs. But how can you strengthen your SEO techniques to drive more organic traffic? 

If you’re dependent on web users to find your blog or website through online searches, boosting SEO strategy should be your top priority. That way, more consumers will find you online. According to research, 70% of online experiences start with a search, and Google page one gets the most clicks. 

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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.

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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.

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Bitcoin within WordPress — How to Accept Payments Easily

Bitcoin within WordPress — How to Accept Payments Easily

Cryptocurrencies become more and more popular every day. This popularity is based on anonymous payments and lower transaction fees compared with the classic payment methods (such as credit cards, PayPal and other). The name Bitcoin was essentially registered back in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamato. Since those days there had appeared more than 1000 kinds of cryptocurrencies but all of them are connected with the one common principle of anonymous payments.

We have already described some of the modern premium WordPress plugins which help to build cryptocurrency-based communities and provide service connected with different Altcoins. Today we will provide you with the full guide on creating Bitcoin payment method for your WordPress website. In other words, this manual will help you to set up an additional payment method via Bitcoin cryptocurrency for your customers. Taking into account the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies, this advice should be applied as soon as possible.

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How to Build a Perfect Multilingual WordPress Website

Modern business on the internet should have the ability to mass-scale through the introduction of new language versions in accordance with the expansion of the company or brand to the markets of new countries and regions. Fortunately, the WordPress platform fully supports multilingual websites and blogs. Most of the modern free and premium WordPress themes allow you to optimize content for many languages ​​of the world, and convenient plugins take on the technical part of the process.

However, translating content into the languages ​​you need is just the beginning of the way to create a truly multilanguage project. It is necessary to take into account the cultural characteristics of different countries and regions, as well as the features of the marketing campaign for each of the language versions of the site. There are also certain nuances in optimizing the site for user search queries that can not be ignored. All this is a complex and multidisciplinary work on the multi-language WordPress site.

Such a complex work may seem too complicated, but in fact the task remains quite feasible if it is decomposed into separate processes. Moreover, many of the processes can be performed by means of WordPress plugins for you.

Today we will consider in detail the issue of creating multilanguage WordPress sites — from content translation to site optimization and marketing campaign for new regions. We hope that these tips will help you to create all necessary language versions for your WordPress site or blog without any unnecessary fuss.

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Guide to Create WordPress Community Forums via bbPress

Communities based on forums may seem a little outdated nowadays, but in fact they have a number of undeniable advantages for use in certain cases. Communication on the internet began with forums, but their long history does not make them useless and obsolete. Quite the opposite, for a long time forums have been able to hone their functionality and features to the extent that administrators and ordinary users feel the optimal combination of available features and an intuitive interface for working with them.

Community forums for WordPress are usually created and maintained via bbPress system. bbPress has three major advantages that distinguish it from a number of competitors: it is really lightweighted, fully integrated with the WordPress platform and easily customizable, even without knowledge in web development and design.

bbPress is ideal for two purposes: selecting a separate zone for thematic and free communication between users of your project and creating technical support forums for your customers. As a rule, these are exactly the goals pursued by WordPress administrators for their projects, so we will also focus on the features and capabilities of bbPress in the context of meeting the respective needs and requirements.

Today we will stop your attention at the bbPress platform for creating community forums: we will look at its functional features, customization capabilities, and additional features for connecting useful plugins. This guide can help you with creating and configuring your first community on the WordPress platform. We advise you to think about creating a place for communication of your users today, so as not to lose your potential audience tomorrow.

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How to Install and Use Google Analytics in WordPress

Google Analytics is a powerful modern tool to improve the performance of your WordPress site on the basis of studies of its audience. Google Analytics provides virtually any information about user behavior on your site or blog. But you should first of all bear in mind that Google Analytics will not work with sites that are hosted on a free WordPress platform. So if you want your project to develop and instantly improve, the first step in this direction would be the purchase of a good hosting service.

In this article, we will examine a consistent guide to install the Google Analytics tracking code on your WordPress site, as well as the basic techniques of audience research with the help of this wonderful tool. This information will be helpful for novice administrators of the sites in WordPress platform. We recommend using Google Analytics with the earliest days of your site launch. This allows you not to miss out on any changes in the composition of the visitors and their behavior on different pages of your project.

The main advantage of using Google Analytics is its simplicity and user-friendliness due to an intuitive interface. You will see that the Google Analytics installation and usage is pretty easy as we move on to our guide.

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WordPress Post Formats Guide

WordPress Post Formats is one of the most useful feature of the platform, which is available to all. Post formats expand opportunities for rapid deployment of posts in various styles. If your WordPress theme supports post formats, you can use prepared templates for various types of posts – from the gallery to chat. You can also customize the display of different post formats for the individual design of your site and the needs of its target audience.

The use of post formats provides the possibility to optimize the work with WordPress admin panel and allows you to make your website more enjoyable and easier to read by visitors. Post formats are relevant for those who wish to create a variety of content, not just the standard text posts with images. If you are still using only one post format, you should think about the variety of content on your website or blog. Users of your site will also appreciate more frequent updates of content, even if they are not as bulky as a standard text posts.

In this article, we will analyze in detail all kinds of WordPress post formats, as well as how to use them for different purposes. Here you will also find a top of the most interesting WordPress themes, which supports post formats and customization.

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Yoast SEO Plugin — Full Guide for WordPress

Yoast SEO Plugin — Full Guide for WordPress

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) pursues two goals: to improve the position of your site in the search results on thematic requests and optimize user interaction with your site. These factors are crucial for the development of any project on WordPress, so ignoring SEO is impossible. However, site optimization may seem a complicated and confusing process for the novice website owners. That is why special plugins are constantly being developed and improved to provide substantial assistance in the initial setup for SEO elements and maintaining the site within the established by the search engines requirements.

One of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress is Yoast. This plugin has earned the trust of the majority owners of WordPress sites due to a variety of features and an intuitive interface. Let us look at Yoast SEO plugin from the installation to the details of everyday use to highlight all the advantages of this tool.

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How to Gain Interest of Your Audience with Visual Content

How to Gain Interest of Your Audience with Visual Content

Visual content plays an important role in attracting the attention of your website`s readers in WordPress. On average, the text content with visual elements is 94% more effective than plain text post. Do you want to increase the involvement of your audience by 100%? In this case, we will share the most practically tested tips for creating visual content, which attracts the attention of users.

Methods for creating visual content are very diverse. Some of them require specialized knowledge and skills in the field of design. Others can be carried out even by inexperienced users, who use the handy tools. In this article, we discuss the various methods of creating visual content – from simple to those one which require advance preparation. Which of them will be more effective and optimal in terms of time spent and the result is for you to decide.

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How to Use MailChimp with WordPress

How to Use MailChimp with WordPress

Email marketing is an important part of your project in WordPress. Consider the fact that 70% of your site`s visitors will not get back to you after the first visit. Are you willing to lose the biggest part of your potential audience? In addition, a protection from such serious traffic loss is not a difficult task. It is enough to wisely use ready-made tools – MailChimp mailing service, integrated WordPress functionality or additional features of special plugins.

Our choice has stopped on MailChimp, because it provides the most user-friendly interface and free service for newcomers. If your subscriber base has not yet reached 2000 people, you can use all the capabilities of the service for free. Then you will be offered to buy one of the existing packages of services at very reasonable prices. In any case, the start and initial testing does not require any financial investments.

Today we will talk about how to carry out initial MailChimp setup to work with the site on WordPress platform. A few simple steps will help you to understand that setting email campaign does not require extensive training or deep knowledge in the field of marketing or web development. In addition, we will address the theme of setting the most useful plugins to increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns – from the increase in the number of subscribers to the improvement of their interaction with your site.

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How Much Should You Spend on a WordPress Site

How Much Should You Spend on a WordPress Site

WordPress is a free platform for sites. But how much should the owner of the site pay actually to make it user friendly and successful? This question can not be answered in one statement. First of all, you should consider the fact that the majority of material expenditure for the start and support of any web project on WordPress platform can be replaced by the cost of your own time. If you have the desire to do everything by yourself, you can save funds considerably. But for many business people the purchase of ready-made solutions for WordPress is an optimal option.

Let`s consistently understand, from which parts consists the cost of creating and maintaining a website on WordPress. This will help you to make the right conclusion on what you can save, and what is better to buy as a ready-made product in your concrete case. We will try to parse the entire multi-faceted site maintenance process on WordPress platform, but will not go deeply into detail for not be ing distracted by the particular matters.

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How to Style Contact Form 7 With Ninja Kick: Contact Form Plugin

There are many reasons why you’d need a contact form on your WordPress website. You can use them to produce leads, provide customer service, get feedback, give quotes and book appointments among other things. Web forms are a problem that has been solved many times over. Finding a plugin to help is usually the most practical solution. Unless you are a good web programmer and you can bang out a web form in a couple minutes, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Recently we published a post on how to Styling Contact Form 7 in WordPress. While Contact Form 7 is an awesome contact form plugin and easy to use, you may want something a little more powerful. Perhaps you are looking for ways to make your form stand out so you get as many responses as possible. One way to build a killer contact form is to use Looks Awesome’s Ninja Kick: Contact Form plugin. Use it to create a engaging forms and record your submissions. 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

Jupiter Template Grid

First Time Setup of Jupiter WordPress Theme

Jupiter is a powerful WordPress theme that has been making a splash on Themeforest since it’s release in 2013. Things have really improved since the release of Jupiter 5.1 in April, 2016. This theme is powerful, lightweight and easy to customize. It’s like having an entire team of developers at your fingertips.

All it takes is a single click to import a fully functional website. There currently over 70 templates (demo content) available free with purchase of Jupiter. With 50 of those templates specifically built for business, it’s a great choice for any type of business website. 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

Choosing a WordPress Theme

Choosing a WordPress Theme — a Comprehensive Guide

Creating a website is exciting. That’s why it’s easy to rush through the process and make some wrong moves. There’s nothing wrong with diving right in. Many people learn better this way, yet more often than not, it’s unnecessary and counterproductive.

A little bit of research can save you a lot of time and effort. There are thousands of themes for WordPress. In fact, there are too many. The biggest marketplace for themes is Themeforest. Currently they have over 6,000 to choose from and more are being added all the time. It can be overwhelming trying to navigate through the sea (or forest) of software to find the perfect theme. 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

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

Installing Themes and Plugins in WordPress

WordPress is extremely user friendly. If you know how to install programs on a computer than you can build a modern website that looks feels professional. After you figure out how to join WordPress and find hosting, all you need to do from there is install themes and plugins to build virtually any type of website you can imagine. If you are already familiar with themes and plugins are, go ahead and skip down to the guide.

If you are new to blogging or WordPress in general, keep in mind that there is a difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Most people start off with WordPress.com – the free version of WordPress and move on to WordPress.org. You can’t install plugins on WordPress.com.
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Creating a Multisite Network With WordPress

The Multisite feature was introduced with the creation of WordPress 3.0 in 2010. When Multisite is activated on your WordPress website you can create separate sites on the same installation of WordPress. Every site uses the same database and shares themes and plugins, but use separate tables – and each site has its own media directory. There’s many applications for Multisite networks such as small business sites with different departments, a network of affiliated blogs, directory sites that users rent space on and more. This guide show you how to activate the Multisite feature and add new sites to your network.

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Backing Up or Moving a WordPress Site With Duplicator

It’s really important to backup your site, especially if you have sensitive data to maintain. Imagine losing all your blogs, comments, customer information or any other critical site data. Long gone are the days where it’s practical to do a manual FTP backup. Modern WordPress websites are complex and powerful. Because of this, backing up or transferring your website can be quite a chore.

The absolute best and easiest way to backup a WordPress site is with the Duplicator plugin. This plugin is really useful and free as well. I really don’t have anything bad to say about this one. Duplicator is also amazing when it comes to transferring an entire site as well. Moving your site can be tough. It’s much like ripping a house off of its foundation in pieces and setting it on another lot on the other side of the country.

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How to Setup a Podcast with WordPress

Starting a podcast is a great way to communicate your ideas and connect with an audience. If you are looking to start a podcast this article will show you how. We will go over all the tools and resources you need to get the perfect podcast setup in WordPress.

The actual word “podcast” is a combination of the words iPod and broadcast. The fact that the name for proprietary product (iPod) is synonymous with the term MP3 player is is a testament to the success of Apple’s marketing campaign.

This is analogous to the way people refer to tissues as “Kleenex” or how the term “Jet Ski” is used for personal water crafts. There are countless others including: onesies, Jacuzzi, crockpot etc. Okay now that we’ve covered the epistemology of the word lets define it.

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Manage Pingbacks in WordPress

A pingback is a type of comment that is created when you one blog post is linked to another blog post where pingbacks are enabled. Confused? Think about it like this.

  • You post a blog article.
  • Someone else links your blog article to their blog. If both have pingback enabled, you will receive a pingback.
  • You then go to the post that linked to you to confirm that your pingback came from there.

The pingback will appear in the comments section of your post. It will appear as just a link. Many people like this feature, and many don’t. There has been an increasing trend to stop using pingbacks. Are pingbacks dead? Maybe not but they might be on their last leg. The idea of a pingback is to facilitate a community of like sites. With the ubiquity of social media, it seems like the whole idea of pingbacks may now be a mute point. The @ sign in Twitter, a post on Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram can be just as effective if not more so. Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of pingbacks.

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How to Launch a Self Hosted Site With Bluehost

Many people who want to start a blog get bogged down with all the technological jargon and complicated processes involved. If you had a chance to create a beautiful blog without all the hassle wouldn’t you?

CMS solutions like WordPress make it easy for anyone to share their message around the world. The beauty of WordPress is that all you need to do is dive in and start developing. Most WordPress beginners choose the free hosting option, which is a great starting point. It’s a great way to get attention, build authority, and stay visible.

Setting up a self-hosted blog sounds technical but is, in fact, easy to do. And yes, I think it’s worth investing a little money into having full control over your website. I’m going to show you exactly what you need to do (if you already have a blog set up like this, feel free to share this post with a friend). Starting a blog is the easiest and least inexpensive way to build a platform.

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Mapping a Godaddy Domain to a WordPress blog

There’s two ways to publish a blog on WordPress. You can use an existing host such as bloghere.wordpress.com, or use a custom domain like awesomename.com or cleverurl.org. You have the option to change where your blog is published whenever you want without losing any content on your site.

If you already have a domain name with GoDaddy and you want to point your free WordPress.com blog to a custom URL, you can do this by remapping your domain. The process is fairly simple and it’s similar with any host provider. The only difference will be in navigating the user portal in your hosting account. This guide will show you how to map your existing Godaddy domain name to a WordPress.com blog.

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Setting up Twitter Cards in WordPress

As Twitter continues to develop, more functions and features are added to enhance user experience. Many of these features mirror those of Facebook. Twitter Cards can be used for all types of content from videos and news articles to apps and products. Just add a few lines of HTML or use a plugin to add a cool Card to display content you share through Twitter. Summary Cards to make it easy to attach rich photos, videos and media to drive traffic to your site.

Currently twitter has 5 distinct card types:

Summary Card – Title, description, thumbnail, and links to Twitter account
Summary Card with Large Image – Same as Summary Card with a large, noticeable image
App Card – A Card that details mobile apps and allows for direct download
Player Card – A card to provide audio, video, gifs or other media

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How to Avoid Google Penalization

Sharing your content and optimizing your website for search engines are the best ways to attract visitors to your site. It’s important to incorporate all major search engines into your optimization strategy, not just Google. Yahoo, Bing and social networks like Tumblr and Facebook also have powerful search engines.

If you only focused on Google you’d be ignoring a large portion of the market. Nevertheless Google has grown to become the biggest player in the game when it comes to search engines. Having a high ranking on Google search can be one of the most valuable marketing assets for your website.

You’ve heard the saying, “The best way to hide a dead body is on the 2nd page of Google’s search results.” While we shouldn’t take this saying literally, we should take this message to heart. Ranking on the first page of Google can draw an enormous amount of traffic to your WordPress site. Read more

WordPress Redesign in 7 Easy Steps

If you regularly update content on your site, you will not be as likely to need an expensive complete overhaul of your whole site. The web design community has a phrase, “Re-align. Don’t re-design.” The idea here is that if you’re constantly making small tweaks to your site that help grow your community and meet your goals, this is likely to keep you site looking and feeling familiar so that when you update the style and content people still recognize your online brand. If you regularly update content on your site, you will not be as likely to need an expensive complete overhaul of your whole site.

If your site is completely outdated though, it’s probably best to redesign the whole thing. Indeed, with Google and other search engines incorporating more mobile into its search results you may want to consider a WordPress redesign to make your site look good on mobile devices. Additional, WordPress design trends come and go quickly and it is important for your site to give a professional and modern look. WordPress has made switching themes easy and without affecting the content of your site. Cumbersome switchovers are a thing of the past. However, keep in mind some things like sticking with the same general color scheme, keeping the navigation in the same place, or even keeping roughly the same content. It goes without saying that you also want to ensure that the site looks better.

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A Complete Guide to Migrate your HTML website to the WordPress

Are you thinking of migrating your HTML or a Static website to the WordPress platform? There is no doubt over the tremendous benefits of moving your site to the WordPress, which unquestionably is one of the most dynamic Content Management System in the present times and therefore, become the choice of millions. There are many reasons for such an upswing in the acceptance of the WordPress. One of the most key reasons is the ultimate advancement of the websites, it offers through the countless and indefinite benefits such as: user friendly interface, dynamic themes, responsive plugins and most importantly, expansive range of technical support, so that, you can never face any issue or difficulty in handling your website. In addition to this, you can easily update your website or blog post content as well as tweak minor or major settings by yourself only. This way you do not even need to understand troublesome coding, thus saving a lot of cost that you have to pay to Website developers for even tiny updates.

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Beginners Guide to Custom Fields in WordPress

WordPress allows many different ways to store and access data. If you need to quickly add content to a certain area of your post or page, you could choose to add it in the WordPress editor or you could also build a widget but the content would display on your whole site by default. Both of those solutions leave something to be desired in the way of options.

Creating a custom field in WordPress is a powerful, elegant solution that gives you more control over how you want your content displayed. There are many plugins and themes that use custom fields, and you have most likely come across them before even if you aren’t exactly sure what they are. If you are relatively new to custom fields, or aren’t sure how to use them, this article can help shed some light on the subject.

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