WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most powerful website engines out there. Because of its easy to use features, it takes no time for an unprofessional to build an out-of-the-box site. With this platform and a quality WordPress hosting provider, having a site up and running is not a big deal.
With elegant and simple layout, WordPress has so much to offer to developers in order to meet both business and personal needs.
If you are a WordPress beginner, you will be impressed with its customizable features, free themes, and so many easy DIY features. While one of the most challenging tasks is to choose a theme, however, you can check 000webhost.com if you are looking for a list of free WP themes for all kinds of different websites.
For some, free themes are enough to develop a website, but for others, premium (paid) themes are a better choice.
So, how do you decide which theme is right for you?
Let’s have a look.
Pros of free WordPress themes
Absolutely free. Free WordPress themes are completely free. You can download them, use them on your website and make money. No hassle and no hidden charges.
Strict review process. These free themes tend to be bug-free and secure, all thanks to a strict review by some experts who scan and test the themes before they are added into the theme directory.
Loads faster. Free themes come with limited features. But, it loads faster and you will get sufficient time to develop your site.
More plugins. Because developers have to follow strict guidelines of theme review, they tend to support more plugins compared to premium themes.
Easy to download. These themes are easy to download. You don’t have to struggle a bit to get these themes because they are available from the WordPress dashboard.
WordPress free themes come with ample benefits. It helps developers to learn various theme development skills because, after the theme review process, the experts suggest the changes and audits the theme’s code.
Also, it helps the developer to build their reputation, and understanding of the basics of a WordPress theme.
Cons of free WordPress themes
Just like many things in life, free WordPress themes come with a few disadvantages as well. These are:
Limited functionality and features. Most of the free WordPress themes do not provide additional features like landing buttons, using shortcodes, creating buttons etc.
Lack of professional design. Some of the free WordPress themes look unprofessional and may implement poor navigational controls. Background colors may also not be attractive.
Limited support options. WordPress free themes come with limited options like you can’t respond to support queries.
Zero obligation. If you are looking for a warranty, then free themes are not for you. Right or wrong, only you are responsible for it. There could be updates to the them, though, which could fix issues.
Not a unique design. When you check the internet, you’ll find many blogs and sites that have used the same free WordPress theme. Moreover, with free themes, you’ll get restricted options to customize the look of the theme.
Compatibility issue. Most of the free themes have compatibility problems with plugins. Many of these problems could be related to updates to the WordPress core, that causes a conflict with the free theme that may not be updated to the changes to the WordPress core.
To make the right choice, the first thing you should know is the difference between free and paid themes and how they differentiate from each other.
Let’s now know more about premium or paid themes now.
WordPress paid themes come with lots of advantages like consistent updates, theme support and much more. Here are a few pros of premium/paid WordPress theme.
Pros of premium WordPress themes
All kinds of support like phone, email, forum etc. Whether you are a WordPress beginner or a pro, with WordPress paid themes you will get all kinds of support that suits your needs. You can contact them via phone, email or participate in the forums, the choice is yours.
High quality. Compared to free themes, WordPress themes are higher in terms of generating value, for creating positive feedback loop, etc.
Advanced functionality. When you opt for a paid version of a WordPress theme, you will get access to a number of advanced functionality like Elegant themes, WooDojo plugins or even advanced admin panels. This makes site configuration and customizations much easier.
High-quality design. A good design goes a long way and it doesn’t need any proof. From backend admin menus/pages to page templates, a high-quality design can help you to improve the productivity of your site.
Guaranteed security. Where free WordPress themes come with a ‘at your own risk’ label, premium/paid site comes with guaranteed security to their customers.
Cons of premium WordPress themes
Higher price. Let’s face it, premium WordPress themes are expensive. There are chances the theme you choose can be a bit high in price, and after you bought it, you need some sort of licensing fees as well. That may become a little expensive than what you could afford.
Don’t have any official review process. Another disadvantage of premium themes is they don’t have any official review process so they can ignore WordPress development best practices in a few areas.
Crossing over into plugin domain. It is quite common that WordPress themes can cross over a few plugins domain and offer some features that may disappear when you change themes.
Slow loading speed. The main aim of developers is to create more themes with irrelevant features. You may not use many of those features, but the features that you don’t use can actually slow down your website.
To sum up
When looking for a WordPress theme, make sure you build a website that can cater to your every need. Other than browser support, responsive design, load time, it is important for you to build a website that helps your business to stand apart.
It’s completely fine to start with a free version of a WordPress theme and then upgrade when you think it’s the right time.
When buying a WordPress theme, it is important to understand the pros and cons of both premium and free WordPress themes. Your selection is based on your website needs, budget as well as on the aesthetic preferences.
To build a strong customer base, it is very important to offer the best customer support. WordPress has various kinds of themes to enhance the appearance and functionality of a WordPress-powered website. You can take advantage of the WordPress help desk theme to deal with customer issues in an effortless, and timely, manner.
Ticket management
Customer issues are managed in a very efficient way with the WordPress ticket system. New tickets can be easily created with the available knowledge base and the tickets can also be resolved very quickly. Ticket management can be done effectively so that any issues are resolved within the least amount of time.
When you choose the TicketLab theme, you will not need to depend on any additional plug-in. The theme offers one of the best end-to-end best ticket support systems available. The service offered will be transparent to the end-user so that there will be no impact to the customer experience.
Before placing an order, you can go through the demo to acquaint yourself with the solutions offered by the WordPress theme. The product is trusted by more than 9500 customers spread across the world.
Benefits
There are many benefits to using the TicketLab theme, including:
Clutter-free management of tickets.
Management and update of tickets on a priority basis.
The ability to handle tickets from a single dashboard.
Support tickets can be sent to Trello so that there will be perfect coordination between the support and engineering teams.
The bugs are reported to Github. It will facilitate quick resolutions.
The theme is ideal to build a self-help community forum.
Pages can be created with the visual composer in a very efficient manner.
It is very important to organize issues raised by customers in a systematic way. The issues should be resolved sequentially within a quick timeframe. The multi-lingual ticket system offers various attractive features, and the helpdesk theme can be customized by clients very easily. The SEO-optimized theme will help customers find answers that meets their requirements. The site can be prepared very quickly with the completely flexible visual enhancer.
If you are a new user, you can get a quick insight of the help desk theme by going through the WordPress knowledge base articles. The theme is synchronized with Zendesk so that you will be able to update tickets from any location at your convenience.
The platform is an ideal option to build a perfect workflow between the ticketing system and the forum.
The tickets can be marked as open, pending and closed as per the resolution. The TicketLab theme can be considered the next generation of the online helpdesk with complete support from the website.
The load time of a blog is a critical factor not only for retaining visitors, but also for performing well in search engines. There are many ways you can reduce the load time of a blog, and in this post I will look at an actual example of how I managed to reduce the load time of a blog by 90%!.
Before I go into the steps, I’ll provide a little background. I recently switched hosts, and while the new host is cheaper, I noticed a decrease in performance. On top of that, I am on the shared hosting plan, so I don’t have the performance luxury of a VPS.
Since I have chosen to have my blogs on a cheap plan, there aren’t as many options available to me as there are for the more expensive plans, such as memory caching and more dedicated hardware.
While there are limitations, there are also options that I can use to help with the load time of my blogs. The good news is that the options to increase the performance of my blogs don’t cost anything, and can actually be done in minutes, and not hours or days.
In the next several sections I will show you the performance of my blog before optimizing it, and then after it is optimized. There are a few things to note:
The blog I am optimizing is a simple gaming blog called Skyrim Travels.
It currently uses the free service from CloudFlare to help with content caching.
The blog uses a child theme based on the Thematic theme.
For WordPress caching, it uses the Hyper Cache plugin.
All tests for load time will be performed using Pingdom Tools
With the above points in mind, let’s first take a look at the starting point for reducing the load time of the blog.
Reduce the load time of a blog – before
To begin, I head over to Pingdom Tools and analyzed the load time of my Skyrim Travels blog. You can use any online tools for measuring your blog, but I find Pingdom Tools to be easy to use and easy to understand.
After running the test I got the below result.
Pingdom Test Before Optimization
The load time of the blog was at 2.55 seconds, which wasn’t too bad, but it still was higher than I would have liked it to be. Actually, I was surprised and thought it would be higher.
The performance grade indicated 61 out of 100, which I don’t like. You can see some of the issues in the lower part of the image, with the colour red meaning something could be improved. There were several issues with the performance, and the good news was that many of the issues in red could be fixed easily and with minimal effort on my part.
The one thing I do want you to be aware of when performing tests on your blog is the number of requests that are made to display a page of your blog. The more requests a visitor needs to make, the longer it will take to display the content. Try to reduce the number of requests needed for your blog as much as possible. In the case of my blog, I could reduce the number of requests automatically as I fixed the issues.
Pingdom Test Before – Content Breakdown
Speaking of requests, the image above helped show me the content for the various requests that are made to my blog. The two tables on the right showed the content type of each request and the domains receiving the requests. From the table I could see that 19 requests were made for scripts and another 19 were made for images. The Skyrim Travels blog does have a lot of images to display, so I won’t worry about those requests, but I could do something about the number of script requests.
Apparently a lot of CSS files (15 requests), are also downloaded from the blog by a visitor. I should be able to also reduce this number, as well.
On the left side we can see the content size by both type and domain. While I won’t worry too much about the size, I should be able to reduce the number slightly. The largest size for content are the images, which I should be able to compress further, but at this time, I do have other options. The scripts and CSS files I should reduce slightly as I perform the optimizations.
Reducing the load time
Now that I know some of the issues that I needed to fix, let’s look at each issue and the solution that I implemented to fix the issue.
Note:
When I did the optimizations for my blog I disabled the Hyper Cache plugin as well as set CloudFlare to Development Mode. This allowed me to see the effects of the changes I was making to my blog. When All optimizations were done, I re-enabled the Hyper Cache plugin and turned off Development Mode in CloudFlare.
Combine external JavaScript and CSS
For my WordPress blog, fixing this issue was fairly easy as it just required me to install and configure one plugin – Better WordPress Minify. I have used other minify plugins in the past, but I find this one has worked the best for me.
I simply downloaded and installed the plugin and BWP Minify appeared on the left from my WordPress dashboard. From there I clicked the BWP Minify option to view the General Options page.
Since I wanted to minify both the JavaScript and CSS files I clicked the Manage enqueued Files tab at the top. When the page to manage the files was first displayed I was shown the following message:
No enqueued files detected.
Please try visiting a few pages on your site and then refresh this page.
You should clear this list once in a while to get rid of files that are no longer being used as this is not done automatically.
I then visited my blog – it doesn’t get much traffic so it would take a while for the enqueued files to populate the lists. Once I viewed a few pages, the two lists were automatically populated.
I accepted the defaults, and clicked the Save Changes button at the bottom. Once the changes were saved, I opened the blog to ensure it was still displaying correctly. Minifying resources such as JavaScript or CSS can affect the look at feel of your blog so it is always best to view multiple pages on your blog, and to try out various aspects, such as commenting, to ensure everything is still working.
Note:
Since I disabled both my caching plugin and CloudFlare, I could see the effect of minifying my JavaScript and CSS files immediately. Had I kept either enabled, then I would have seen the cached version, and not the results of the minified files. Ensure that you disable any caching before viewing your blog after minifying the files.
Once I confirmed my blog was still displaying correctly, I looked at resolving the next issue.
Leverage browser caching
Resolving this item involved editing the .htaccess file on my server. All root folders for your WordPress blogs should have a .htaccess file created. All I needed to do in this case was open the file in a text editor and add the following lines:
The above lines set the cache expiration time as well as the cache control settings. I won’t go into detail about what all the lines do, as they are well documented online. For your blog, you may want to adjust the times and cache settings as you may wish to use different values.
That was all that was needed to enable caching for the files. The next step was to remove the query strings from files to properly enable the caching.
Remove query strings from static resources
This is the last issue that I had to fix. By default, WordPress tends to add the WordPress version to the static resources by appending “?ver=” to each of the files. This has a negative affect on caching, and also one way for miscreants to determine which version of WordPress you are running, and then take advantage of any vulnerabilities in that version of WordPress.
You don’t need to have the version number appended to any of the static resources, so it is best if you just remove it.
Removing the version query string was really easy; I just had to add the following function to my functions.php file in my theme:
Once the function was added to my theme, I reloaded my blog and viewed the source. All static resources no longer had the version query string appended to the end.
One additional change in CloudFlare
I had corrected the issues that were reported by Pingdom Tools, but there was one additional change that I needed to make on CloudFlare to ensure that my blog not only loaded as fast as possible, but also allowed me, once I re-enabled CloudFlare, to preview any new posts without having caching issues.
Since my blog was already in CloudFlare, I didn’t have to go through the setup. So I logged into CloudFlare and selected my blog and then clicked Page Rules at the top. By default, CloudFlare allows me to add three page rules with the free CloudFlare account.
The three page rules that I added were as follows (you will obviously change the URL to match your blog):
URL: *skyrimtravels.com/wp-admin*
Disable Security
Cache Level: Bypass
Disable Performance
URL: *skyrimtravels.com/*preview=true*
Cache Level: Bypass
Disable Performance
URL: *skyrimtravels.com/*
Browser Cache TTL: 30 minutes
Always On: On
Cache Level: Cache Everything
Edge Cache TTL: a month
What the above three rules do is disable any caching when I access the WordPress dashboard (anything in wp-admin), or preview a post (preview=true in the URL). Everything else, like viewing my blog, I use the cache settings outlined in the rule. The cache settings will cause everything to be cached on the CloudFlare servers for one month. Anything that doesn’t have a browser expiry cache, will default to 30 minutes.
So after the browser cache expires in 30 minutes, and a new request is made for the same resource, the resource will be returned by the CloudFlare server instead of blog’s web server. The reason is because there are many CloudFlare servers around the world so regardless of where the visitor is located, it will be faster to download the files for my blog from a closer CloudFlare server than from my host’s server.
To avoid any issues with accessing the login page since it would use the third rule, I also installed the Rename wp-login.php so I could rename it to something like https://skyrimtravels.com/wp-admin-mylogin. It doesn’t matter what you name it as long as it begins with wp-admin so it would use the first rule, and not the third one.
Once all the above changes were made, I returned to Pingdom Tools to rerun the tests.
Reduce the load time of a blog – after
After making the changes I outlined above to my blog I was interested to see what improvements would result from the changes. Needless to say that I was surprised with how much of an improvement was seen once I ran the tests. One thing I should not, however, is that because I had to prime both the WordPress and CloudFlare caches, I had to run the test twice to see the improvements.
The image below shows the results of the test after the changes to the blog.
Pingdom Test After Optimization
The most notable improvement is in the response time, which is about 90% lower than the initial tests I ran. I ran the test multiple times and all tests reported around the same response time.
The second improvement is in the number of requests – decreased from 56 to 33 (41% decrease). This is a result of minifying both the JavaScript and CSS files into one or two files. The results of the minify also impacted the size of the files being download, which you can see in the page size. The initial test showed a page size of 348.6 KB, while the latest test shows a size of 278.3 KB, which is a 20% reduction in size.
The combination of reduced requests and page size have a drastic effect on the response time of the blog, as it would on any site.
Let’s have a look at the content that is being downloaded from the blog.
Pingdom Test Before – Content Breakdown
The content information is largely affected by the minifying process for both the JavaScript and CSS files. When the two file types are minified, both the number of files that need to be requested, and the file sizes are reduced. The file size is reduced because the spaces, carriage returns, and comments are removed from the files.
As you can see above, the number of JavaScript and CSS files has been reduced. Both used to be two of the three most requested file types on the blog, with combined requests of 34. Now, after minifying the files, the total requests is 22 – a 65% reduction.
The largest reduction is with the JavaScript files. The initial test had 19 files being downloaded, and the now the requests number 4 (79% reduction). While not have as much of a reduction, the number of CSS files decreased from 15 to 8, which is still a nice 47% decrease in the number of files being downloaded.
As for the file sizes, that has also decrease, as well. The total size of the JavaScript files decreased from 116.64 KB to 51.8 KB, which results in a decrease of 56%. The CSS files didn’t have the same amount in decrease, but it was still a nice change – from 19.96 KB to 14.94 KB (25% reduction).
As I mentioned above, the decrease in both the JavaScript and CSS files are a result of minifying both file types.
With just a few changes made to my blog I have managed to significantly improve the response time for the visitors. There are many ways to optimize a WordPress blog, such as reducing the number of plugins, choosing themes that don’t load a lot of resources, but the changes I applied here can work for any blog, and Website.
WordPress is arguably the most popular content management software (CMS) available. The fact that WordPress is free, easy-to-use and has a tremendous amount of support available makes it an ideal CMS for creating and managing a website or blog.
While WordPress is designed to be easy-to-use, it also has enough complexity that allows you to create about anything for your website. For the average user, however, you won’t need to manage this complexity as there are plugins and templates to do most of the work for you. For others, you may want to look at what WordPress has to offer.
A WordPress site can be typically divided into two segments:
The general look and feel of a WordPress website generated by logic and templates.
A MySQL database in which all content powering the website is stored.
Ever since, I started using WordPress, I have found nothing that compares to this great content management system. This is because WordPress is versatile, and as such any person can be able to adapt it for use in any manner.
However, this was not always the case. When I first heard of WordPress, around six years ago, I simply dismissed it as one of those fads that come and go in a blink of an eye. But, I was wrong, and quite honestly, it was one of my mistakes, since I came on to later learn that WordPress was simply more than just a fad.
Optimizing your WordPress site for mobile web browsers is a great way to reach a significant portion of the Internet market. In this article we’ll be installing and reviewing a fantastic WordPress plugin that will allow you to publish your WordPress site for the Mobile web.
WordPress Mobile Pack was developed as a complete toolkit that makes the mobilization process simple, and fast. It includes a mobile platform switcher to help you select themes based on the audience visiting the site, mobile widgets, mobile themes, transcoding and device adaption, and an administrator panel also optimized for mobile browsers that will allow you to write new posts and edit the site on-the-go.
When starting a blog, WordPress is probably one of the best blogging platforms out there because not only that it has superb, professional themes, but also remarkably fast and easy to use. But if you want to make money out of your blog or website and take it to the next level, you cannot take advantage of the free web hosting option that WordPress has because not only that it has restrictions, but also the disk space and bandwidth is extremely limited. The amusing thing is that there are a lot of best WordPress hosting providers offering fantastic features at an affordable price. There are so many of them that finding the best WordPress web hosting for your website become a tedious task.
The purpose of the BackWPup WordPress plugin is simple: backup your entire WordPress blog. There are many plugins available that can accomplish the goal of backing up your WordPress blog, but to me, BackWPup does things better than most other backup plugins.
I am an advocate of regularly backing up data on my local computer and this same train of thought has also transferred over to managing my blog. I have read many stories of people losing their blog because something bad happened and they don’t have a backup to restore their blog’s data. BackWPup provides you with all the options needed to completely backup your blog automatically.
