To find more great plugins, check out Torque’s free eBook, The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Plugins. Download it here. Not too long ago, I was trying to fix a problem with my site in cPanel’s File Manager. I don’t clearly remember what the problem was exactly, only that I wasn’t very good at fixing it. While messing around inside of File Manager’s darkest recesses, I accidentally deleted my site. No, really. No joke here. I deleted my blog. That was like ~500 hours of hard work thrown down the drain. The good thing, however, is that two days prior to my […]
Popups or No Popups? That Is the Question. . .
One of the long-time feuds in Internet marketing, and more specifically, email marketing, is the dispute on whether or not you should use popups on a website to get people to perform a certain action (usually to sign up for a mailing list). As with almost all controversies, there is no right or wrong answer to this question. There are two sides to the popup story, and before you decide where you and your website stand, you need to understand both the advantages and disadvantages that come with popups. Advantages Let’s start off on a positive note by taking a […]
How to Set up Disqus Comments on Your WordPress Blog
The built-in WordPress commenting system does a fine job all by itself, but it’s good to remember that there are a several other systems out there that, for some, provide a better user experience. One of the most popular is Disqus (pronounced ‘discuss’). It’s used all over the web, across many different platforms. In this article, Im going to provide a tutorial how to install it on your own WordPress blog. There are two ways to install Disqus on your WordPress blog. One way is to first register your site with Disqus, then install the WordPress plugin and go through the simple […]
Uncovering WPMU DEV’s Free Custom Sidebars Plugin
Custom Sidebars is a free plugin recently released by the team from WPMU DEV. The creator of this extremely useful plugin, Javi Marquez, is now part of the WPMU DEV developer team. From its title, it’s obvious what this plugin does. But I’m going to tell you a bit more about why it is so useful, and provide a short tutorial on how it works. Most sites running WordPress use one or (maximum) two sidebars. Typically, the same one(s) are displayed on every page, no matter what part of the website a user is browsing. What Custom Sidebars gives you is […]
How to Write an Irresistible Plugin Description: Downloads Guaranteed
Have you developed a solid WordPress plugin, got it listed on WordPress.org, and established it as a mark of credibility for your WordPress development portfolio? If you have, great. That was the easy part. Getting downloads—now that’s the hard part. The first step in marketing a free WordPress plugin is to craft an alluring, download-generating description for its listing. If you don’t know how to do that yet, you’re reading the right post. In my book, there are 4 key elements that make up a great description: keyword optimization, bullet-point listed features, social proof, and a high-quality featured image. Let’s take a detailed look at each […]
5 Plugins That Display Beautiful Charts and Graphs in WordPress
To find more great plugins, check out Torque’s free eBook, The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Plugins. Download here. We all know that solid data and research adds authority and credibility to blog posts. Case studies and simple statistics are the most popular presentations of research in the blogosphere. But there’s also one very important data visualization tool that often gets ignored by bloggers—charts. Charts have always been a superb way to help people see extensive amounts of data at one glance. We use charts for presentations and PowerPoints, but how many times do you see one in a blog post? […]
5 Social Locker Plugins & Tools to Boost Your Blog’s Social Signals
Struggling to get your content shared on social media? Try using a social locking tool to increase your social shares on every post. When you create valuable content, you obviously want to reach as many people as possible. With every hit of the “publish” button, you cross your fingers and anxiously hope that your readers share your post. Sometimes they do . . . but sometimes they don’t. But what if there was an easy way to increase your number of shares every time you publish new content? You’ll be happy to know there is (and you’re probably not using it)—social lockers. Instead of […]
The Ultimate Guide to Speeding Up WordPress
Roughly 4 years ago, Google announced page load speed as a SEO ranking factor. Since then, webmasters around the world have been contriving new ways to keep their load times down. In this article, I’m going to provide a collection of these practices to help you speed up your WordPress site. Before you start implementing any of the tips I’m about to list, it’s important that you know the current speed of your WordPress site. This will allow you to accurately compare the before/after results when testing the new plugins and steps listed. My favorite tool for this is Pingdom, but […]
10 Things I Would Do to Improve WordPress as a CMS
WordPress is the greatest 🙂 WordPress powers roughly 74 million websites on the internet, and has over 46 million user downloads—making it the preferred content management system (CMS) on the web. The WordPress.org database boasts 29,000 plugins and hundreds of free themes—and that’s not even counting themes and plugins sold externally. But you’ve heard that before, right? I mean, WordPress statistics are all over the web. Today, I’d like to look at WordPress through the eyes of an objective critic, rather than a glossy-eyed admirer (in real life, I’m frequently both). In this post, I’ll discuss 10 simple, yet important, […]
How WordPress 3.9 Will Look and Function
WordPress 3.8—code name Parker— was released on December 12 of last year, and surprised many as it introduced a more sophisticated back end UI with updated typography. Overall, the update was a success, and the new, customizable UI was a hit. The newest iteration, WordPress 3.9, has been officially announced to be released on April 16 2014. Although 3.9 isn’t set to usher in any drastic changes like its predecessor, it does introduce a fair amount of new features that are likely to be well-received by the WordPress community. Let’s take a quick look at exactly what the new version entails. Theme […]
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