Everyone needs a vacation every now and then, including owners of WordPress websites. However, what happens to your site while you are away? After all, the Internet never closes. If you’re feeling like you can’t take time off for fear of having your site or business collapse, be unafraid. WordPress offers plenty of tools to prepare it for your absence. Whether it’s the holiday season or you’re going to a tropical island, with some preparation your site will be able to spend time without you and be fine. In the following, we will cover how to keep your site running, […]
7 Button Design Guidelines for WordPress That You Need to Know About
Creating button design guidelines might seem redundant. After all, you already know what website buttons look like, don’t you? So, do you really need help creating them? As common as buttons are, it should not be forgotten that they are a central part of web design with important functions: Buttons often make up the main call to action Buy buttons greatly influence revenue Email sign-up buttons help build your list Form submission buttons are important for lead generation Social buttons help share your content Because of that, in this post, we will give you a number of button design guidelines […]
11 Highly Effective Web Design Tips Backed by Research
On the Internet, web design tips are a dime a dozen. Many people have opinions on what the perfect website looks like. That’s because, to a certain extent, design is subjective. What one person likes, another might find hideous. At the same time, design is one of the most important factors for the success of a website. In fact, almost half of all users say that the website design is their main factor for judging a company’s credibility. As a consequence, it also influences conversions, bounce rate, and more. Sigh, if only there was a way to find some objective […]
Google RankBrain SEO – How to Use Google’s AI to Your Advantage
The exact way Google ranks websites has long been an enigma. Only two years ago did we get confirmation about the two most important ranking signals (hint: content and backlinks). However, you might not know that the third most important is relatively new: Google RankBrain. RankBrain is a machine learning algorithm that the search giant uses to improve its search results. It’s one of many web initiatives of artificial intelligence that will change our lives. Since RankBrain is such an important factor for deciding where your site will end up in the SERPs, you better not ignore it. Yet, chances […]
What Does the WordPress Community Think of the Gutenberg Editor? – A Review Roundup
The Gutenberg editor is one of the biggest changes coming to WordPress. But how does the community feel about it? In this Gutenberg editor review roundup we will aim to find out. Since Matt Mullenweg revealed Gutenberg at WCEU 2017, a lot has been written about it. Here on Torque alone we have a number of articles on the topic: What’s Next for WordPress: Why the Future is Great with Gutenberg Getting Ahead of Gutenberg How The REST API And Gutenberg Work Together What the Future of WordPress Development Looks Like With Gutenberg How to Test Your Plugins With the […]
The Google Mobile First Index and What It Means for Your WordPress Site
The Google mobile first index is upon us and it will further change the way we optimize our sites. Since mobile devices have surpassed desktop computers as the dominant Internet devices in 2016, the search giant has increasingly put emphasis on mobile friendliness. These days, if you don’t know how to make your WordPress website mobile friendly, you are likely already missing out on traffic. This development will increase further with Google’s latest update, the mobile-first index. As you can glean from the name, it will prioritize mobile pages in the search index even more. If you are not prepared […]
How to Improve Organic CTR (Click-through Rate) in WordPress
Search engines remain one of the most important traffic sources for websites. Learning to improve organic CTR (click-through rate) is crucial for taking advantage of them. When it comes to SEO, many website owners simply focus on ranking. They think that as long as they make it to the first page of Google, traffic will sort itself out. However, achieving a high rank in the SERPs doesn’t help you if nobody ends up clicking on your content. In that case, your search rank is nothing more but a vanity metric. Plus, CTR and search rankings are intimately connected. If you […]
CSS for Beginners: The CSS Box Model and How to Use it Correctly
When you run your own WordPress website, it’s only natural to want to gain more control over its design and functionality. One of the best ways to make sweeping changes to a site’s looks is CSS. With proficiency in CSS, you can change anything from the page layout over colors to fonts and background images. One of the most basic concepts to learn for this is the CSS box model. It’s a fundamental principle of web design. Understanding it enables you to almost endlessly customize your site’s layout to your desire. In this post for beginners, we will explain to […]
Using the WordPress Desktop App with Self-hosted WordPress – A Review
There are many tools to help you take care of your WordPress website. We have talked about some of them in the past in this post. Aside from them, there are also the official WordPress mobile apps. Although it has been around for a while, a lesser-known example is the WordPress desktop app named Calypso. It was originally made for WordPress.com customers to let them take care of their sites from their desktop computers. However, in combination with the Jetpack plugin, it also works for self-hosted WordPress sites. In this article, I will show you how to use it. I […]
Are WordPress Developers Really Cheaper to Hire?
One of the arguments for using WordPress is that affordable help for the platform is easy to find. It’s something I have seen claimed around the web a lot of times and I have made this argument myself, repeatedly. It seems simple enough: WordPress has less of an entry barrier for developers, meaning it’s easier to get into. It also has the largest ecosystem among all content management systems. That should mean a high supply of developers, which should result in low prices. However, it recently occurred to me that I have no concrete evidence to support that claim. Like […]
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