What Makes a Great Business Landing Page?

Your landing page makes or breaks your online marketing strategy. Around 65 percent of marketing professionals feel lead generation and driving traffic to a website is one of their most important tasks. The two goals work intricately together, so those who visit your page are most likely to become customers.
1. Know Your Audience
The key to a landing page which converts is knowing the target audience for that page. Create a buyer persona which represents the typical customer who lands on the specific page. Gear the tone of the writing, images and even CTAs to the preferences of your buyer. For example, if your audience is mostly Generation Z, you might use pop culture references and a lighter tone than if your audience is made up of baby boomers.
2. Have One Purpose
Most sites offer multiple landing pages, but each page should have one primary purpose. If you provide too many different options on a single page, buyers grow confused about what they are supposed to do next. A strong landing page moves users to a sole purpose. For example, if your goal is to get site visitors registered for your newsletter, you might explain what your newsletter offers, give them an incentive to sign up
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18559/what-makes-a-great-business-landing-page

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/24/what-makes-a-great-business-landing-page/

How Discovering WordPress Changed my Young Career

Discovering WordPress all the way back in 2004 was a turning point in my young career. Here’s how it came about.
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18558/how-discovering-wordpress-changed-my-young-career

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/how-discovering-wordpress-changed-my-young-career/

James Kemp and Iconic – How I Built It

Sponsored by: James Kemp is the founder and lead developer of Iconic, a popular WooCommerce extension shop. James has managed to do well in an increasingly saturated space. His approach to solving problems and determining if there’s a market for his new ideas is an interesting one. He offers lots of great advice on everything from research to development, and launching.
The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained (CGP Grey)
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18557/james-kemp-and-iconic-how-i-built-it

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/james-kemp-and-iconic-how-i-built-it/

SEO writing guide: From keyword to content brief

If content is queen, and the critical role SEO plays a role of bridging the two to drive growth, then there’s no question as to whether or not keyword research is important.

However, connecting the dots to create content that ranks well can be difficult. What makes it so difficult? How do you go from a target keyword phrase and write an article that is unique, comprehensive, encompasses all the major on-page SEO elements, touches the reader, and isn’t structured like the “oh-so-familiar” generic SEO template?

There’s no one size fits all approach! However, there is a simple way to support any member of your editorial, creative writing, or content team in shaping up what they need in order to write SEO-friendly content, and that’s an SEO content brief.

Key benefits of a content brief:

• Productivity and efficiency – A content brief clearly outlines expectation for the writer resulting in reduced revisions
• Alignment – Writers understand the intent and goals of the content
• Quality – Reduces garbage in, garbage out.

So the rest of this article will cover how we actually get there & we’ll use this very article as an example:

• Keyword research
• Topical expansion
• Content/SERP (search engine results page) analysis
• Content brief development
• Template and tools

Any good editor will tell you great content comes from having a solid content calendar with topics planned in advance for review and release at a regular cadence. To support topical analysis and themes as SEOs we need to start with keyword research.

Start with keyword research: Topic, audience, and objectives

The purpose of this guide isn’t to teach you how to do keyword research. It’s to set you up for success in taking the step beyond that and developing it into a content brief. Your primary keywords serve as your topic themes, but they are also the beginning makings of your content brief, so try to ensure you:

• Spend time understanding your target audience and aligning their goals to your keywords. Many call this keyword intent mapping. Rohan Ayyr provides an excellent guide to matching keywords to intent in his article, ‘How to move from keyword research to intent research’.
• Do the keyword research in advance, it will allow writers and editors the freedom to move things around and line it up with trending topics.

How does all this help in supporting a content brief?

You and your team can get answers to the key questions mentioned below.

• What will they write about? Primary keywords serve as the topic in your content brief.
• Who is the intended audience? Keyword intent helps unearth what problem the user is trying to solve, helping us understand who they are, and what they need.

Now with keywords as our guide to overall topical themes, we can focus on the next step, topical expansion.

Topical expansion: Define key points and gather questions

Writers need more than keywords, they require insight into the pain points of the reader, key areas of the topic to address and most of all, what questions the content should answer. This too will go into your content brief.

We’re in luck as SEOs because there is no shortage of tools that allow us to gather this information around a topic.

For example, let’s say this article focuses on “SEO writing”. There are a number of ways to expand on this topic.

• Using a tool like SEMRush’s topic research tool, you can take your primary keyword (topic), and get expanded/related topics, a SERP snapshot and questions in a single view. I like this because it covers what many other tools do separately. Ultimately it supports both content expansion & SERP analysis at the same time.

• Use keyword suggestion tools like KeywordTool.io or Ubersuggest to expand the terms combined with Google search results to quickly view potential topics.

• Use Answerthepublic.com to get expanded terms and inspirational visuals.

• Alternatively, Ann Smarty offers up four additional tools, for related keywords to support topical expansion.

You’ve taken note of what to write about, and how to cover the topic fully. But how do we begin to determine what type of content and how in-depth it should be?

Content and SERP analysis: Specifying content type and format

Okay, so we’re almost done. We can’t tell writers to write unique content if we can’t specify what makes it unique. Reviewing the competition and what’s being displayed consistently in the SERP is a quick way to assess what’s likely to work. You’ll want to look at the top ten results for your primary topic and collect the following:

• Content type – Are the results skewed towards a specific type of content? (For example, in-depth articles, infographics, videos, or blog posts)
• Format – Is the information formatted as a guide? A how-to? Maybe a list?
• Differentiation points – What stands out about the top three results compared to the rest?

Content brief development: Let’s make beautiful content together

Now you’re ready to prepare your SEO content brief which should include the following:

• Topic and objective – Your topic is your primary keyword phrase. Your objective is what this content supposed to accomplish.
• Audience and objective – Based on your keyword intent mapping, describe who the article is meant to reach.
• Topical coverage – Top three related keyword phrases from your topical expansion.
• Questions to answer – Top three to five from topical expansion findings. Ensure they support your related keyword phrases as well.
• Voice, style, tone – Use an existing content/brand style guide.
• Content type and format – Based on your SERP analysis.
• Content length – Based on SERP Analysis. Ensure you’re meeting the average across the top three results based on content type.
• Deadline – This is only pertinent if you are working solo, otherwise, consult/lean on your creative team lead.

[Note: If/when using internally, consider making part of the content request process, or a template for the editorial staff. When using externally be sure to include where the content will be displayed, format/output, specialty editorial guidance.]

Template and tools

Want to take a shortcut? Feel free to download and copy my SEO content brief template, it’s a Google doc.

Other content brief templates/resources:

• https://izea.com/2018/05/02/content-marketing-brief/
• https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/12/content-strategy-kit-marketers/content-brief-example/

If you want to streamline the process as a whole, MarketMuse provides a platform that manages the keyword research, topic expansion, provides the questions, and manages the entire workflow. It even allows you to request a brief, all in one place.

I only suggest this for larger organizations looking to scale as there is an investment involved. You’d likely also have to do some work to integrate into your existing processes.

Jori Ford is Sr. Director of Content & SEO at G2Crowd. She can also be found on Twitter @chicagoseopro.

The post SEO writing guide: From keyword to content brief appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/16/seo-writing-guide-from-keyword-to-content-brief/

How to Easily Create a Job Board in WordPress (NO HTML Required)

Do you want to create a job board in WordPress? Job boards allow people to find jobs and companies to post their own job listings.

With the growing trend of the gig economy, starting a job board has become a popular online business idea. You can make money by accepting payments for job listings.

In this article, we will show you how to easily create a job board in WordPress and make money from it. You can also use this tutorial to add a job board to an existing WordPress site.

Getting Started with Your Job Board Website in WordPress

You will need the following items to create a job board website with WordPress.

• A domain name (This will be your website’s address. Example, wpbeginner.com)
• A web hosting account (This is where all your website files will be stored)
• A job board extension for WordPress
• Paid job listings add-on (if you want to accept payments for job listings)

Let’s start with the domain name and web hosting account.

Domain names cost around $14.99 per year and web hosting plans start from $7.99 / month (usually paid annually).

This may sound like a lot of money if you are just starting out.

Luckily, the folks at Bluehost are offering WPBeginner users a free domain name, free SSL certifcate, and discount on hosting. Basically, you can get started for $2.75 per month.

→ Click Here to Claim This Exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

Bluehost is one of the biggest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.

Once you purchase hosting, Bluehost will automatically install WordPress for you. If you need instructions, then follow our guide on how to install WordPress for detailed step by step instructions.

Now that you have WordPress ready, it is time to create a job board website with WordPress.

Setting up a Job Board in WordPress

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Job Manager plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will need to create a few pages that the plugin will use to display different sections of your job board.

On each page, you just need to enter a title and then add a shortcode.

Let’s get started. The first page we’re going to create will be for jobs. Simply create a new page and enter Jobs in the title field. In the content area, you need to add a shortcode block and paste the following shortcode inside it:

[jobs]

After adding the shortcode, click on the publish button to save your changes.

Next, you will need to repeat the process to create a ‘Submit Job Listing’ page and add the following shortcode:

[submit_job_form]

Lastly, you need to create a ‘Jobs Dashboard’ page and enter the following shortcode in the content area:

[job_dashboard]

Now that you have created all the required pages, let’s move on to plugin’s settings.

Head over to Job Listings » Settings page and click on the ‘Pages’ tab.

From here, you need to select the pages you have created earlier and then click on the save changes button to store your settings.

After that, you need to review other settings on the page. Let’s start with the ‘General’ tab first.

On the general page, you can select the date format, add Google Maps API key, or delete data when you uninstall the plugin.

Note: Google Maps API key requires you to provide billing information, and you will be charged based on your usage. If you don’t want to use Google Maps API, then you can leave this option unchecked.

After that, you can switch to the ‘Job Listings’ tab. There are a number of options on this page to control the display and features available for job listings. You need to review and adjust them to your own requirements.

Similarly, you can control the job listings submissions by switching to the ‘Job Submission’ tab. From here, you can control new account settings, submission moderation, edit controls, and more.

To protect your website against automated spam, you need to switch to the reCaptcha tab and enable it by adding the API keys. You will find a link to generate the required API keys next to each option.

WP Job Manager also sends notifications to site administrators and users. You can control them under the ‘Email Notifications’ tab.

Bonus tip: we recommend using the WP Mail SMTP plugin to fix the common WordPress not sending email issue.

Once you are done, don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.

Adding New Job Listings

Depending on your settings, logged-in users can submit jobs directly from Submit Jobs page you created earlier.

As an administrator, you can directly add jobs from the WordPress admin area.

Simply go to the Job Listings » Add New page and provide a title, description, and the job type for the job listing you are adding.

After entering the title, description and choosing a job type, you need to scroll down to Job Listing Data section. There you can provide more information about the job such as location, application email or URL, company information, company logo, job listing expiration date, etc.

After filling the job listing data, you can preview the job by clicking on the preview button.

After that you either add more details if you need to or simply click on Publish button to post the listing.

To manage existing job listings, you need to go to Job Listings » All Job Listings page in the WordPress admin area.

There you will be able to see all the job listing posted on your job board. You can click on the pencil icon to edit a job listing, see the filled jobs, and delete existing job listings.

Your website visitors will be able to view all job listings by visiting the jobs page you created earlier.

Logged in users will also be able to manage their job listings by visiting the jobs dashboard page you created earlier.

Adding Paid Job Listings

You may have seen several reputable sites adding a job board to generate extra revenue from their website. If your blog has a good reputation among industry peers, then companies wouldn’t mind paying a small fee to get their job posting listed on your site.

To enable this feature, you will first need to install and activate the Simple Paid Listings plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

It is a paid add-on for WP Job Manager and allows you to accept payments for job listings using PayPal or Stripe.

Upon activation, you need to visit Job Listings » Settings page and switch to the ‘Paid Listings’ tab.

On this tab, you can choose your preferred payment gateway and provide API information.

Note: You will need to enable SSL / HTTPS on your website to receive payments. See our article on how to get free SSL certificate for your site for detailed instructions.

We hope this article helped you easily create a job board in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of proven ways to make money online for more ways to generate revenue from your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Easily Create a Job Board in WordPress (NO HTML Required) appeared first on WPBeginner.

source https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-easily-create-a-job-board-in-wordpress-no-html-required/

Elementor Performance Tests Vs Normal Theme

In this article, I would like to present you a performance load test over Elementor page builder to see exactly how much is increasing your page load time. These days is important to have a fast loading site to be better for your visitors and have a more good bounce rate. This speed is important especially on mobile where the internet speed is not that good as on a desktop and where the user doesn’t have that much patience.
Elementor is the best page builder plugin that you can use as it has a lot of features and can help in creating very beautiful websites designs in minutes, it is mobile responsive and not expensive at all it even can be used for free with the free version.
Many are telling that if you are using Elementor you don’t even need a WordPress theme and you can just use Elementor for everything. This is actually true but you will see in this article that the things are not quite like this.
Plugins and Theme Used for Tests
For these tests, I am using a couple of Plugins and Astra Theme to test the Elementor Performance increase from the normal Astra load time. The plugins that are installed on my site are:
Yoast SEO
ThirstyAffiliatesa
Affiliate Coupons
WP Rocket
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18556/elementor-performance-tests-vs-normal-theme

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/elementor-performance-tests-vs-normal-theme/

TranslatePress WordPress Translation Plugin Guide

I think you will agree with me when I say creating a multilingual website is no easy task. Especially for a beginner. Which translation plugin do you choose? Do you translate your website manually or automatically? Do you hire a professional translator? Does translating your website affect your SEO rankings?
All these (and more) are pertinent questions to ask yourself as far as translating your WordPress website goes.
Turns out you can easily translate your WordPress website into more than 200 languages using the TranslatePress plugin.
And in this guide, we show you exactly how to install and translate your website with one of the best WordPress translation plugins of 2019 and beyond.
Read on to learn how you can use the TranslatePress WordPress plugin to offer your content and products to visitors from all over the world without breaking a sweat.
What is TranslatePress?
Before we get lost in the impressive suite of features, let us first learn more about this multilingual WordPress plugin.
What is TranslatePress? TranslatePress is a nifty WordPress translation plugin handcrafted by the same awesome guys who brought you Cozmoslabs. It is loaded to the brim with all the features you
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18555/translatepress-wordpress-translation-plugin-guide

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/translatepress-wordpress-translation-plugin-guide/

WordPress GDPR Compliance – Everything You Need to Know

You might have heard of the term “GDPR” being discussed around the web. It’s still a pretty hot topic, especially with all that is going on with data breaches and security in the news. To put it simply, GDPR is a privacy law designed to give citizens back control of their personal data. Hands down, GDPR is impacting how the entire internet deals with data. The scary part is that the deadline was last year (May 25th, 2018) and many questions regarding GDPR are still plaguing people: What exactly is GDPR? In layman’s terms.
Does GDPR impact me?
What do I need to do for GDPR compliance?
Many have a tendency to put off what they don’t understand. Taxes are a good example. For a lot of us, GDPR has simply been a lower priority on our checklists. But the GDPR deadline has come and gone and you really should take a few moments and determine whether or not you need to make changes to the way your business and or website operates. If you don’t there could be hefty fines involved.
Don’t worry, we’ll try and explain everything you need to know about GDPR below, as well what you can do to prepare. But we aren’t lawyers, so we’ll try not
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18554/wordpress-gdpr-compliance-everything-you-need-to-know

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/wordpress-gdpr-compliance-everything-you-need-to-know/

Top advanced YouTube SEO tips to boost your video performance

YouTube is not just a social media platform. It’s a powerful search engine for video content. Here’s how to make the most of its SEO potential.

There are more than 1.9 billion users who use YouTube every month. People are spending over a billion hours watching videos every day on YouTube. This means that there is a big opportunity for brands, publishers and video creators to expand their reach.

Search optimization is not just for your site’s content. YouTube can have its own best practices around SEO and it’s good to keep up with the most important ones that can improve your ranking.

How can you improve your SEO on YouTube? We’ve organized our advanced YouTube SEO tactics into three key areas:

• Keyword research
• Content optimization
• Engagement

Advanced YouTube SEO tips to drive more traffic and improved rankings

Keyword research

It’s not enough to create the right content if you don’t get new viewers to actually watch it. Keywords can actually help you understand how to link your video with the best words to describe it.

They can make it easier for viewers to discover your content and they also help search engines match the content with the search queries and their relevance.

A video keyword research can help you discover new content opportunities while you can also improve your SEO.

A quick way to find popular keywords for the content you have in mind is to start searching on YouTube’s search bar. The auto-complete feature will highlight the most popular keywords around your topic. You can also perform a similar search in Google to come up with more suggestions for the best keywords.

If you’re serious about keyword research and need to find new ideas, you can use additional online tools that will provide with a list of keywords to consider.

When it comes to picking the best keywords, you don’t need to aim for the most obvious choice. You can start with the keywords that are low in competition and aim to rank for them.

Moreover, it’s good to keep in mind that YouTube is transcribing all your videos. If you want to establish your focus keywords you can include them in your actual video by mentioning throughout your talking. This way you’re helping YouTube understand the contextual relevance of your content along with your keywords.

Recap

• Use the auto-complete search function to find popular keywords
• Perform a Google search for more keyword ideas
• You can even use SEO tools for additional keyword ideas
• Say your keywords as part of your videos

Content optimization

There are many ways to improve the optimization of your content and here are some key tips to keep in mind:

1. Description

Your description should facilitate the search for relevant content. A long description helps you provide additional context to your video. It can also serve as an introduction to what you’re going to talk about. As with blog posts, a longer description can grant you the space to expand your thoughts. Start treating your videos as the starting point and add further details about them in the description. If your viewers are genuinely interested in your videos then they will actually search for additional details in your description.

2. Timestamp

More videos are adding timestamps in their description. This is a great way to improve user experience and engagement. You are helping your viewers to find exactly what they are looking for, which increases the chances of keeping them coming back.

3. Title and keywords

Keywords are now clickable in titles. This means that you are increasing the chances of boosting your SEO by being more creative with your titles. Be careful not to create content just for search engines though, always start by creating content that your viewers would enjoy.

4. Location

If you want to tap into local SEO then it’s a good idea to include your location in your video’s copy. If you want to create videos that are targeting local viewers then it’s a great starting point for your SEO strategy.

5. Video transcripts

Video transcripts make your videos more accessible. They also make it easier for search engines to understand what the video is about. Think of the transcript as the process that makes the crawling of your content easier. There are many online options to create your video transcripts so it shouldn’t be a complicated process to add them to your videos.

Engagement

Engagement keeps gaining ground when it comes to YouTube SEO. It’s not enough to count the number of views if your viewers are not engaging with your content. User behavior helps search engines understand whether your content is useful or interesting for your viewers to rank it accordingly.

Thus, it’s important to pay attention to these metrics:

• Watch time: The time that your viewers are spending on your video is a good indicator of its appeal and relevance to them.
• Likes, comments, and shares: The starting point of measuring engagement is to track the number of likes, comments, and shares in your videos. They don’t make the only engagement metric anymore but they can still serve as a good indication of what counts as popular content. Likes may be easier to achieve but comments and most importantly shares can skyrocket the engagement and views of your videos. It’s not a bad idea to encourage your viewers to support your work. It is actually a common tactic. However, make sure that you’re not trying too hard as this is not appreciated. Every call-to-action needs to feel natural in your videos.
• Subscribers after watching a video: The number of subscribers serves as an indication of your channel’s popularity. People who actually subscribe to your channel after watching a video make a very good indication of your content’s engagement.
• CTR: The click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks your video is receiving based on the impressions, the number of times that it’s shown. For example, if you optimize your content to show up high in rankings but it still doesn’t get too many clicks, then it means that your viewers don’t find it appealing enough to click on it. This may not be related to the quality of your content but on the first impression that it gets. You can improve the CTR by paying attention to your title and your thumbnail. Bear in mind that YouTube is not encouraging you to clickbait your viewers, so you shouldn’t create misleading titles or thumbnails if you want to aim for higher rankings in the longer term.

Learning from the best

A good tip to understand YouTube SEO is to learn from the best by looking at the current most popular videos. You can also search for topics that are relevant to your channel to spot how your competitors are optimizing their titles, their keywords, and how thumbnails and descriptions can make it easier to click on one video over another.

Have any queries or tips to add to these? Share them in the comments.

The post Top advanced YouTube SEO tips to boost your video performance appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/22/top-advanced-youtube-seo-tips-to-boost-your-video-performance/

How to Build a Scalable E-Commerce Store With WordPress (In 3 Steps) • Pagely®

Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18553/how-to-build-a-scalable-e-commerce-store-with-wordpress-in-3-steps-pagely

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/how-to-build-a-scalable-e-commerce-store-with-wordpress-in-3-steps-%e2%80%a2-pagely/

How to Fix Image Upload Issue in WordPress (Step by Step)

Are you facing image upload issues on your WordPress website? For most beginners, image upload errors can be quite confusing because they can appear without you doing anything different.

Failure to upload images is one of the most common image issues in WordPress. Luckily, it is quite easy to fix, and you can do it yourself.

In this article, we will show you how to easily fix the image upload issue in WordPress. We will also explain what causes this issue, and how you can prevent it in the future.

What Causes The Image Upload Issue in WordPress

The image upload issue in WordPress is typically caused by incorrect file permissions. Your WordPress files are stored on your web hosting server and need specific file and directory permissions to work.

Wrong file permissions prevent WordPress from reading or uploading file on the hosting server. You may get the following error when uploading image file:

‘Unable to create directory wp-content/uploads/2019/04. Is its parent directory writable by the server?’

Another sign of this issue is that your images may disappear from the media library.

My site was working fine before? Who changed the file permissions?

This could happen due to a number of reasons. A misconfiguration on your shared hosting server can sometimes change those permissions without you doing anything.

For example, your web hosting provider ran an upgrade which unexpectedly changed file permissions.

If everything else is working fine on your website, then you can simply apply the correct file permissions to fix the image upload issue.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to set correct file permissions to fix image upload issues in WordPress.

Fixing Image Upload Issue in WordPress

You will need to use an FTP client to change file permissions.

First, connect to your website via FTP and then go to /wp-content/ folder. Inside, you’ll find the uploads folder, which is where WordPress stores all your media uploads including images.

Now right click on the uploads directory and then select File Permissions.

This will bring up the file permissions dialog box.

First, you will need to set file permissions for the uploads directory and all the subdirectories inside it to 744.

To do that, enter 744 in the numeric value box, and then check the box next to Recurse into subdirectories option. Now click on the ‘Apply to directories only’ radio button.

Click on the OK button to apply these changes. Your FTP client will now start applying file permissions to the directories.

Note: If setting directory permissions to 744 does not seem to solve your problem, then try 755.

In the next step, you will need to set file permissions for all the files in the uploads directory.

To do that, right click on uploads directory and select file permissions. In the file permissions dialog box, change the numeric value to 644.

Check the box next to Recurse into subdirectories. Lastly, you need to click on ‘Apply to files only’ radio button. Click on the OK button to apply these changes.

The FTP client will now change the permissions for all files inside the uploads folder. Once it is done, you can go back to your WordPress admin area and try uploading images again.

Note: if you don’t know how to use a FTP client, then you can also use the file manager provided by your WordPress hosting company. Since the screenshots will vary from each host, you will need to talk to their support to find instructions.

We hope this article helped you fix the image upload issue in WordPress. You may also want to see our article on how to optimize image SEO to get more organic traffic to your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Fix Image Upload Issue in WordPress (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.

source https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-image-upload-issue-in-wordpress/

Minimum WordPress PHP Version update

Building on the robust infrastructure of WordPress 5.1, another release is in the offing at the end of this month. Perhaps the most crucial thing to note with the new update – WordPress 5.2 – is that all users would have to upgrade their version of PHP to PHP 5.6.20. Following the release of WordPress 5.1, many users have taken the plunge, updating to more recent PHP versions. So you just might fancy doing same if you’ve not done that to prevent losing out on the latest features to follow WordPress 5.2. If you’re thinking a manual WordPress update, well that wouldn’t work too.
Presently, WordPress recommends that users upgrade to its recommended version – PHP 7.3 And it’s not hard to see why. With the most recent PHP version equipped to breeze through your backend needs, updating your site will no doubt drive drastic improvements on your site speed, which is what you want to keep your visitors glued to your pages.
Plus, a spike in the performance department will additionally cut the number of servers needed to host websites. As we all reckon WordPress’ towering dominance in the content management system world, it’s another big leap
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18552/minimum-wordpress-php-version-update

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/minimum-wordpress-php-version-update/

The Blogsmith Freelance Success Grant

Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18551/the-blogsmith-freelance-success-grant

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/19/the-blogsmith-freelance-success-grant/

Learn How to Reset a WordPress Website

Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to start over your WordPress site? Although WordPress allows everyone to easily start a blog, creating that perfect site you have been dreaming of isn’t so straightforward as you may have imagined. You will have to spend some time messing around with WordPress until you really get to understand how it behaves. That means you will wander around settings until you find everything you wanted to modify to your likings. No matter how careful you are, sooner or later you will make a mistake.
Also, while developing that perfect site, you will have to try on different themes until you get the one you were looking for. And because there are tens of thousands of different plugins, you will probably want to install two or three of the same functionality before you decide on the one you will use in the following months and years.
And if you’re just starting out, after a couple of hours or days of trying different things on WordPress, you might realize that you need to start over. So, how do you reset your WordPress site?
How to reset a WordPress site?
This time, we won’t bother you with technicalities & details. WordPress
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18550/learn-how-to-reset-a-wordpress-website

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/19/learn-how-to-reset-a-wordpress-website/

Why Trying to Be a Sysadmin to Save $20/Month Is a Bad Idea

Time and time again we see users on forums and social media complaining that managed WordPress hosting is a big waste of money. Their reason? It’s much better to manage your own server. Unfortunately, they never mention what all this actually entails. To a casual WordPress user, this can definitely give the wrong impression. It sounds easy and cheap, but the end result is you’ll probably end up spending a lot more time and money than you think. You’re probably thinking, “you guys are a managed WordPress hosting company, so aren’t you a little biased?” Perhaps, but we also have the advantage of seeing the perspective of both sides. We have sysadmins on the Kinsta team that manage all of our own servers for clients, and therefore, we know what it takes to do this properly and why for most of you, being a sysadmin is actually a bad idea. In fact, in some scenarios, it can be a downright nightmare. Being a sysadmin takes a lot of patience, skill, and you have to really enjoy fixing things that break!
Besides our own team, we also get to see all the feedback from clients who have previously tried to manage everything themselves. Once they arrive at a managed
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/18549/why-trying-to-be-a-sysadmin-to-save-20-month-is-a-bad-idea

source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2019/04/19/why-trying-to-be-a-sysadmin-to-save-20-month-is-a-bad-idea/

Using Python to recover SEO site traffic (Part three)

When you incorporate machine learning techniques to speed up SEO recovery, the results can be amazing.

This is the third and last installment from our series on using Python to speed SEO traffic recovery. In part one, I explained how our unique approach, that we call “winners vs losers” helps us quickly narrow down the pages losing traffic to find the main reason for the drop. In part two, we improved on our initial approach to manually group pages using regular expressions, which is very useful when you have sites with thousands or millions of pages, which is typically the case with ecommerce sites. In part three, we will learn something really exciting. We will learn to automatically group pages using machine learning.

As mentioned before, you can find the code used in part one, two and three in this Google Colab notebook.

Let’s get started.

URL matching vs content matching

When we grouped pages manually in part two, we benefited from the fact the URLs groups had clear patterns (collections, products, and the others) but it is often the case where there are no patterns in the URL. For example, Yahoo Stores’ sites use a flat URL structure with no directory paths. Our manual approach wouldn’t work in this case.

Fortunately, it is possible to group pages by their contents because most page templates have different content structures. They serve different user needs, so that needs to be the case.

How can we organize pages by their content? We can use DOM element selectors for this. We will specifically use XPaths.

For example, I can use the presence of a big product image to know the page is a product detail page. I can grab the product image address in the document (its XPath) by right-clicking on it in Chrome and choosing “Inspect,” then right-clicking to copy the XPath.

We can identify other page groups by finding page elements that are unique to them. However, note that while this would allow us to group Yahoo Store-type sites, it would still be a manual process to create the groups.

A scientist’s bottom-up approach

In order to group pages automatically, we need to use a statistical approach. In other words, we need to find patterns in the data that we can use to cluster similar pages together because they share similar statistics. This is a perfect problem for machine learning algorithms.

BloomReach, a digital experience platform vendor, shared their machine learning solution to this problem. To summarize it, they first manually selected cleaned features from the HTML tags like class IDs, CSS style sheet names, and the others. Then, they automatically grouped pages based on the presence and variability of these features. In their tests, they achieved around 90% accuracy, which is pretty good.

When you give problems like this to scientists and engineers with no domain expertise, they will generally come up with complicated, bottom-up solutions. The scientist will say, “Here is the data I have, let me try different computer science ideas I know until I find a good solution.”

One of the reasons I advocate practitioners learn programming is that you can start solving problems using your domain expertise and find shortcuts like the one I will share next.

Hamlet’s observation and a simpler solution

For most ecommerce sites, most page templates include images (and input elements), and those generally change in quantity and size.

I decided to test the quantity and size of images, and the number of input elements as my features set. We were able to achieve 97.5% accuracy in our tests. This is a much simpler and effective approach for this specific problem. All of this is possible because I didn’t start with the data I could access, but with a simpler domain-level observation.

I am not trying to say my approach is superior, as they have tested theirs in millions of pages and I’ve only tested this on a few thousand. My point is that as a practitioner you should learn this stuff so you can contribute your own expertise and creativity.

Now let’s get to the fun part and get to code some machine learning code in Python!

Collecting training data

We need training data to build a model. This training data needs to come pre-labeled with “correct” answers so that the model can learn from the correct answers and make its own predictions on unseen data.

In our case, as discussed above, we’ll use our intuition that most product pages have one or more large images on the page, and most category type pages have many smaller images on the page.

What’s more, product pages typically have more form elements than category pages (for filling in quantity, color, and more).

Unfortunately, crawling a web page for this data requires knowledge of web browser automation, and image manipulation, which are outside the scope of this post. Feel free to study this GitHub gist we put together to learn more.

Here we load the raw data already collected.

Feature engineering

Each row of the form_counts data frame above corresponds to a single URL and provides a count of both form elements, and input elements contained on that page.

Meanwhile, in the img_counts data frame, each row corresponds to a single image from a particular page. Each image has an associated file size, height, and width. Pages are more than likely to have multiple images on each page, and so there are many rows corresponding to each URL.

It is often the case that HTML documents don’t include explicit image dimensions. We are using a little trick to compensate for this. We are capturing the size of the image files, which would be proportional to the multiplication of the width and the length of the images.

We want our image counts and image file sizes to be treated as categorical features, not numerical ones. When a numerical feature, say new visitors, increases it generally implies improvement, but we don’t want bigger images to imply improvement. A common technique to do this is called one-hot encoding.

Most site pages can have an arbitrary number of images. We are going to further process our dataset by bucketing images into 50 groups. This technique is called “binning”.

Here is what our processed data set looks like.

Adding ground truth labels

As we already have correct labels from our manual regex approach, we can use them to create the correct labels to feed the model.

We also need to split our dataset randomly into a training set and a test set. This allows us to train the machine learning model on one set of data, and test it on another set that it’s never seen before. We do this to prevent our model from simply “memorizing” the training data and doing terribly on new, unseen data. You can check it out at the link given below:

Model training and grid search

Finally, the good stuff!

All the steps above, the data collection and preparation, are generally the hardest part to code. The machine learning code is generally quite simple.

We’re using the well-known Scikitlearn python library to train a number of popular models using a bunch of standard hyperparameters (settings for fine-tuning a model). Scikitlearn will run through all of them to find the best one, we simply need to feed in the X variables (our feature engineering parameters above) and the Y variables (the correct labels) to each model, and perform the .fit() function and voila!

Evaluating performance

After running the grid search, we find our winning model to be the Linear SVM (0.974) and Logistic regression (0.968) coming at a close second. Even with such high accuracy, a machine learning model will make mistakes. If it doesn’t make any mistakes, then there is definitely something wrong with the code.

In order to understand where the model performs best and worst, we will use another useful machine learning tool, the confusion matrix.

When looking at a confusion matrix, focus on the diagonal squares. The counts there are correct predictions and the counts outside are failures. In the confusion matrix above we can quickly see that the model does really well-labeling products, but terribly labeling pages that are not product or categories. Intuitively, we can assume that such pages would not have consistent image usage.

Here is the code to put together the confusion matrix:

Finally, here is the code to plot the model evaluation:

Resources to learn more

You might be thinking that this is a lot of work to just tell page groups, and you are right!

Mirko Obkircher commented in my article for part two that there is a much simpler approach, which is to have your client set up a Google Analytics data layer with the page group type. Very smart recommendation, Mirko!

I am using this example for illustration purposes. What if the issue requires a deeper exploratory investigation? If you already started the analysis using Python, your creativity and knowledge are the only limits.

If you want to jump onto the machine learning bandwagon, here are some resources I recommend to learn more:

• Attend a Pydata event I got motivated to learn data science after attending the event they host in New York.
• Hands-On Introduction To Scikit-learn (sklearn)
• Scikit Learn Cheat Sheet
• Efficiently Searching Optimal Tuning Parameters
• If you are starting from scratch and want to learn fast, I’ve heard good things about Data Camp.

Got any tips or queries? Share it in the comments.

Hamlet Batista is the CEO and founder of RankSense, an agile SEO platform for online retailers and manufacturers. He can be found on Twitter @hamletbatista.

The post Using Python to recover SEO site traffic (Part three) appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/17/using-python-to-recover-seo-site-traffic-part-three/

21 Best WordPress Themes for Nonprofit Organizations

Are you looking for the best WordPress themes for nonprofits?

Charity and nonprofit websites require an appealing presentation with the right tools to achieve their donation goals. It can be possible with the use of a professional WordPress theme.

In this article, we will show you some of the best WordPress themes for nonprofit organizations that will help you get maximum donations.

Making a Website for a Nonprofit Organization

WordPress is the most popular website builder among nonprofits around the world. It is free and open source which gives you the freedom and flexibility you need for a solid online presence.

Just to be clear, there are two versions of WordPress. WordPress.com which is a hosted solution, and WordPress.org also known as self-hosted WordPress. See our comparison of WordPress.com vs WordPress.org for more details.

We recommend using self-hosted WordPress.org. It gives you access to all the features of WordPress right out of the box (without any restrictions).

You’ll need a domain name and WordPress hosting account to start your self hosted WordPress website.

It’s recommended to use Bluehost. They are one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress hosting provider.

They have agreed to offer WPBeginner users discount on hosting plus free domain and SSL Certificate. You’ll need SSL to collect donations in WordPress using third-party services like Stripe.

→ Click here to claim this exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

Once you have purchased hosting, you can move on to installing WordPress. See our guide on how to make a website for step by step instructions.

That being said, let’s take a look at the best WordPress themes for nonprofits and charities that you can use on your website.

1. Astra

Astra is a lightweight and super flexible WordPress theme. It comes with multiple website layouts including a template for nonprofit and charity organizations. This theme can be integrated with popular page builders to design the pages of your website instantly.

It has layout settings, header options, unlimited colors, beautiful crisp typography, and easy customization. Astra can perform faster than other regular WordPress themes.

2. OceanWP

OceanWP is a powerful and free WordPress theme with multiple website templates. It can be used to create a nonprofits website with all the basic features. OceanWP is a fully responsive theme and has the fastest page load time.

It allows you to add a donate now button in the header alongside the navigation menu. You can also add a custom logo, social icons, image slider, and more. The theme is easy to set up and offers useful extensions to add more features to your website.

3. Outreach Pro

Outreach Pro is a beautifully designed WordPress theme for nonprofits, charities, and religious organizations. It is built on top of Genesis framework, which ensures rock solid WordPress speed and performance.

It includes page templates for archives, blog section, and a landing page template. Other features include customizable headers, theme options panel, and multiple widget-ready areas to just drag and drop items to your website.

StudioPress is now a part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. You can get this theme and all 35+ other StudioPress themes if you sign up for WP Engine hosting to build your website.

Bonus: WPBeginner users also get additional 20% off. Get started with WP Engine.

4. GiveWP

GiveWP is a popular WordPress donation plugin for charity and nonprofit websites. It works great with all the standard WordPress themes and makes it easier for you to collect donations. It comes with useful addons for recurring donations, tributes, fee recovery, and more.

It integrates with popular payment solutions to help you in achieving your donation goals. GiveWP has flexible options and enhancements that makes the customization easier. You can also set up donation forms on different landing pages of your website.

5. Ultra

Ultra is an all-purpose WordPress mega theme suitable for all kind of websites including nonprofits. It ships with 9 pre-made websites, 1-click demo content installer, and visual page editor to help you create engaging websites in minutes.

It includes animated counters, progress bars, contact form, Google Maps, pricing tables, and more. It is eCommerce ready and beginner friendly.

6. Zeko

Zeko is a wonderfully designed WordPress theme for charities and nonprofits. It features a clean and professional design with flexible options. All theme options can be easily set up using theme customizer with a live preview of your website.

Notable features include 5 page templates, blog with multi-column grid and flexible sidebars, unlimited colors, WooCommerce, BuddyPress, and bbPress support.

7. Grassroots

Grassroots is another excellent WordPress theme for nonprofits and fundraising websites. It features fullscreen video backgrounds on the homepage allowing you to create highly engaging landing pages.

For fundraising and donations, the theme supports WooCommerce, contact form, and donation plugins. Other than that, it includes featured content, staff and sponsors sections, custom logo upload, and multiple colors.

8. Divi

Divi is a powerful WordPress theme that can be used to build any kind of website easily. It comes with multiple pre-built website layouts and demos. You can simply use a demo website and make changes with the Divi builder to create your nonprofit website.

It includes hundreds of elements and modules to add amazing features on your site. The drag and drop builder makes it super simple for you to use these elements anywhere on the layout.

Divi theme offers real-time design, responsive editing, click and type feature, and more. It allows you to customize everything and organize your content to fit properly in the rows and columns. It’s quite flexible and easy to set up.

9. Maisha

Maisha is a clean and modern WordPress nonprofit theme for NGOs, welfare, and charities. It features a modern homepage with multiple slider styles, headers, and layout settings. It also includes 15 page templates, blog section, and powerful options with live theme customizer.

It supports WooCommerce, WPML, and it is fully translation-ready. It ships with a slider plugin to create a responsive WordPress slider.

10. Foundation

Foundation is another excellent WordPress nonprofit theme. Designed to raise funds and engage audiences, it features a prominent welcome message followed by two call to actions both located above the fold on the homepage.

It includes social media integration, custom logo upload, sponsors section, and easy templates to integrate with your donations form. It offers a simple and quick setup with easy customization options.

11. Maranatha

Maranatha is a gorgeous WordPress theme for religious, spiritual, and nonprofit organizations. It comes with built-in sermons management area where you can upload audio, video, PDF, and text files. You can also organize your library in a series by topics and books.

Its modern homepage displays a full screen image or video header followed by parallax effect as users scroll down the homepage. It also comes with sections for different locations, events calendar, and news or blog page.

12. Benevolent

If you are looking for a free WordPress theme for nonprofits, then take a look at Benevolent. This versatile theme features a modern homepage with a beautiful slider, custom menu, and call to action button.

It has four footer areas, a right sidebar, and includes four custom widgets for the recent posts, popular posts, social media and the featured post. It is translation ready and optimized for faster page loads.

13. Nayma

Nayma is a thoughtfully designed multipurpose WordPress theme with several ready-made websites included in one package. It includes a 1-click demo installer to set up a complete website with demo content.

It uses a modular approach to design and comes with several modules that you can just drag and drop to create your own page layouts. It is WooCommerce ready and can also be used to create multilingual websites.

14. Exodus

Exodus is a beautiful WordPress theme for religious and spiritual organizations. It features a professional homepage with engaging slider and call to action. It also includes a sermon management section with full multimedia support.

It also has sections to add ministries, staff and volunteer profiles, events, locations, etc. It is designed to be easily used even by non-technical users with simple and flexible customization settings.

15. Faith

Faith is an excellent free WordPress nonprofit theme for NGOs, church websites, and charitable organizations. With professional clean design and flexible options, it offers an engaging user experience out of the box.

Notable features include custom menu, social media integration, featured posts block, featured content slider, testimonial sections, welcome message, and more. It has multiple page layouts for different sections. All theme options are neatly organized under live theme customizer, which makes it quite simple to use.

16. Saved

Saved offers a very modern looking WordPress theme for religious and nonprofit organizations. It includes a drag and drop homepage layout, video background, slider, and contact details widget with Google maps.

Church websites can use the Theme’s companion church content plugin, which adds sermons and multimedia library support to your website. It also includes sticky navigation menu, custom colors, custom widgets, typography, and custom logo support.

17. Charitize

Charitize is a simple and free WordPress theme for nonprofit organizations, charitable foundations, churches, and nonprofit associations. It has homepage sections for the custom slideshow, featured posts with thumbnails, donate now button, navigation menus, sticky posts, and contact forms.

It comes with tons of customization options including colors, background, post formats, right sidebar, and more. You can use the theme customizer to make changes with live preview.

18. Resurrect

Resurrect is a modern WordPress theme for church websites, nonprofit organizations, and other charity-based sites. It’s an urban-inspired theme with an appealing design to attract donors. It allows you to add videos, create events, upload photos, and display inspirational quotes.

Other than that, it offers a section to add your location map and address. If you have multiple offices, this theme has a column block to display all your addresses easily. It’s easy to use and offers custom background, fonts, colors, etc.

19. Landing

Landing is a popular multipurpose WordPress theme to design any type of website. It can be used to create beautiful landing pages and get more donations. You can use the powerful Themify drag and drop builder to create your website pages instantly. It has built-in tools and elements that reduces the effort of manually editing pages.

It features 25+ pre-built layouts, header design options, custom post types, and more. You can also integrate email marketing services like MailChimp to connect with your visitors. Landing theme supports WooCommerce and translation ready to let you create a website in your own language.

20. Forward

Forward is a simple and elegant WordPress theme designed specifically for nonprofits. It allows you to easily add your own logo, colors, fonts, and more. It includes all the options you’ll need to build an engaging website.

Other features include WooCommerce support, email signup form, staff profiles, sponsors, and live theme customizer. It is easy and quick to set up even for absolute beginners.

21. Narcos

Narcos is a modern WordPress multipurpose theme designed with tons of features to create any kind of website or blog. It can be used to create a website for your nonprofit organization or charitable foundation. It has a beautiful and clean layout with custom options. It’s packed with Visual Composer to design pages with the drag and drop functionality.

Moreover, this theme comes with homepage sections to display your event photos, featured posts, sponsors’ logos, and information about your organization. The parallax scrolling feature makes it easier for your visitors to check out all sections. It’s fully responsive and performs faster than many other regular WordPress themes.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress theme for nonprofits. You may also want to see our step by step WordPress SEO guide for beginners and a list of must have WordPress plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 21 Best WordPress Themes for Nonprofit Organizations appeared first on WPBeginner.

source https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/best-wordpress-themes-for-nonprofits/