Tag: development

There are good arguments to customize many parts of WordPress — but the search results page? What reason could there possibly be to make changes to that? How could this page be any different?

The truth is, the WordPress search results page isn’t natively very interesting. This gives you the chance to highlight the articles you want more eyes on and make the page a little more useful.

I hereby, cordially, invite you to find out along with me. Just imagine, at the end of this post, we could both be smarter than we were before. Are you in?

Why Customize WordPress’ Search Results?

Alright, let’s start off with reasons why you should consider making changes to your site’s search results page and what things you might customize.

The Purpose of the Search Results Page

First, let’s get clear about what the function of the search results page is. As you can probably guess, it is supposed to help users find content they are looking for. To that end, they can enter a search term into the search field (that’s hopefully present on your site — more on that below).

WordPress will then serve up the search results page with everything it can find regarding that query.

Why should you care about this? Seems like WordPress has this part covered automatically, doesn’t it?

Because the search results page can have great impact on your site’s user experience, especially for eCommerce websites:

According to Econsultancy, up to 30% of ecommerce visitors use internal site search. Due to the increased level of purchase intent from searchers, they’re known to convert up to 5–6x higher than the average non–site search visitor.

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Makes sense, doesn’t it? Just think about how often you use the search function when you shop online. Exactly! But even WordPress sites without eCommerce functionality can benefit from learning how to customize the search results page.

What Could Be Improved About WordPress Search?

During my research, I could find the following areas of complaints about the native WordPress search function.

For one, until recently, there was no non-code way to customize the way the search results page looks. Unless you knew your way around PHP, CSS, and a code editor, you simply had to trust that your theme was doing a good job of displaying it and be satisfied with the content of the search page.

Secondly, the native WordPress search function is not always very good at what it does. It will often return no results for searches that actually have fitting matches.

In addition, it can be kind of slow. In good old PHP fashion, the WordPress search needs a page reload in order to display results, which isn’t the fastest way of doing things.

As a consequence, this leaves us with the following areas for improvement:

• Design — We’ll go over how to control the look of the WordPress search results page as well as the elements that show up on it.
• Search results — Making sure the results your visitors can find on the search page are relevant and satisfying.
• User experience — Improve search speed, make it more comfortable to use, and add some functionality to WordPress search that visitors are used to from Google or other search engines.

Sounds convincing at first glance, if you ask me. So, let’s get down to business.

Add a Search Form to Your WordPress Website

Naturally, working with the search results page in WordPress only makes sense if you even give your users a chance to access it. That means, you offer a search form somewhere where they can input their queries.

For that, WordPress offers a built-in search widget that you can place wherever want in your page templates and template parts. The latter is an especially good idea if you are using the same header on every page. In that case, you only need to edit the template part once and your changes will show up everywhere.

Generally, it’s a good idea to add the search form to a header, sidebar, or footer — elements that appear on every page. That way, you give your visitors an opportunity to search what they are looking for from wherever they may find themselves on your site.

How to make the search field show up on your site depends on whether you are using a block theme or classic theme.

Using a Block Theme and the Site Editor

If you use a block theme like Twenty Twenty-Two, you can perform this action via the Site Editor. You find it under Appearance > Editor.

In the initial screen, you can edit your homepage. When you click on the logo in the upper left corner, you gain access to the Templates and Template Parts menus.

For example, let’s say you want to add the search form to your theme’s default header. For that, go to Template Parts and then click on Header (Dark, small).

Doing so leads you to this screen:

Here, adding the search form is pretty simple, you can do it in several ways.

For one, use the plus sign in the upper left corner, look for the Search widget, and drag-and-drop it to your desired location.

Alternatively, create an empty element in the editor (e.g. via Insert before or Insert after on an existing element), click the plus sign on the editor page, and look for the search widget or enter /search to add it directly.

Either of these methods will make the search form appear in your theme that you can then customize with the help of the block options on the right and settings bar on top.

Save your changes and it will show up on the page.

The Same Process in a Classic Theme

If your site runs on a classic theme, you can add the search widget in any widgetized area that it offers. To find out which options exist, go to Appearance > Widgets.

Adding a widget works the same way as with the Site Editor. Click on the plus sign in the upper left corner or on one of the widget areas. Then, search or browse for the search widget and input it into the widget area.

If you are not satisfied with your choices, you can also add more widget areas to your theme.

Alternatively, it’s also possible to add the search form directly into your page templates via code. Paste the snippet below wherever you want it to appear.

<?php get_search_form( true ); ?>

Here, too, it makes sense to go for a template part such as your header, so you don’t have to do it for each template separately. Be aware, however, that you should always make file changes like this in a child theme.

Change the Design of the Search Results Page

Alrighty, now that you have search form on your site, it’s time to customize the look of the WordPress search results page once someone uses it. This process, too, depends a lot on your theme.

Using the Site Editor, Again

The look of the search results page in WordPress is controlled by a page template. The one we are looking for in the Site Editor is called Search (who would have thought) and you find it in the aforementioned Templates menu.

Click it to land in the Template Editor.

Here, you can make all the changes you want. For example, this is what the search results page looks like in Twenty Twenty-Two by default:

One of the easiest things I can do to modify the way it looks is to exchange the default Query Loop block with a block pattern. After that, it ends up looking like this:

Quite different, don’t you think?

Customizing the Search Results Page Via Code

In case you are not using a WordPress theme that lets you customize the search results page visually, you can also do it with code. To render the page, the theme will either use search.php, if it is present, or else fall back on index.php (check out the WordPress template hierarchy to understand how that works).

Once you have created a child theme, copy the parent theme’s search.php to it or else, make copy of index.php, rename it to search.php and place it in the child theme. After that, open it with your favorite code editor and customize it to your needs.

Of course, if you are using a classic theme and don’t know code, you can also use a page builder plugin.

Plugin Options to Improve the WordPress Search Results

After dealing with the design of the search results page, it’s time to talk about how to customize its content. For that, we will concentrate on plugin options. First of all, because there are several good ones out there, secondly, because customizing the search results via code simply goes beyond what we can cover in this article.

1. Relevanssi

This plugin replaces the standard WordPress search function completely and makes the following changes:

• Order search results by relevance, not date.
• Enable fuzzy matching, meaning it also shows partial matches to the search query.
• Support for using the AND and OR query modifiers as well as quotes for exact match search.
• Highlight search terms in search excerpts and in the results when you click on them.
• Ability to search taxonomies, comments, custom fields, including WooCommerce SKUs and Advanced Custom Fields content.
• Search suggestions when there are no result (“did you mean…?”).

The free version offers a lot more features and there is a premium version with even more. Just be careful: Relevanssi needs a lot of database space for its index, so be sure you have that available in your hosting before installing the plugin.

2. Ivory Search

One of the main functionalities of Ivory Search is that it lets you create unlimited search forms and display them wherever you want. Available positions include the site header, footer, widget areas, navigation, and anywhere where you can place shortcodes. You can design and customize your forms as needed or use the included templates. In addition, you can customize what content exactly each will search for.

Besides that, the plugin improves the search functionality on your site in the following ways:

• Faster search through an index-based search engine.
• Search images, files, and attachments, shortcode content, WooCommerce products, and more.
• Live search functionality.
• Search specific content or exclude content from results.
• Track searches on your site in search analytics.
• Multilingual search.

A premium version with additional features is available.

3. Better Search

This plugin, too, replaces the default WordPress search. It produces results acccording to both the title and content of your posts, pages, and custom post types. You can also control where the plugin searches, including meta fields, authors, taxonomies, even comments.

What’s more, Better Search shows results by relevance and allows you to customize the search output, assign greater weight to the title or content, and offers other filters and actions. Finally, you can show the most popular searched content in form of a widget and customize searach results with your own template and custom CSS.

4. Paid Search Plugins

Aside from the above plugins, there are also a bunch of paid offers:

• WP Fastest Site Search — Though in the WordPress directory, this is actually a paid plugin with a 14-day trial period. The only free part is the voice search functionality, which is useful for mobile. Aside from that it comes with no-code UI customizations, PDF and image search, synonyms and autocomplete, and more.
• SearchWP — Sorts results depending on where they are found. The plugin can search custom fields, ecommerce products and details, categories, tags, and other taxonomies, the content of documents on your site (e.g. PDF, docx), and more. You can adjust the importance given to different search attributes and exclude taxonomies. The same company also makes a free enhancement for live search.
• YITH WooCommerce AJAX Search — Specifically for improving search on WooCommerce sites. Allows to search within a specific category, by vendor, or by SKU. It can show prices in search results and has different search form layouts available, including full-screen.

5. Other Search Plugins

Finally, here are a few plugins that make smaller changes to the WordPress search functionality:

• Search & Filter — A free plugin that allows searchers to refine their search by choosing categories, tags, or post types to search in. It also displays the search term at the top of the search page. That way, users can be sure that the search was done, even if it turns up empty.
• Highlight Search Terms — A small and lightweight plugin that does only one thing: highlight the search term in search results as well as on the pages it found after clickthrough. It’s compatible with BuddyPress/bbPress as well.

Final Thoughts: WordPress Search Results

And there you have it, both the reasons why you might want to customize the WordPress search results page and how to do it. I, for one, feel a bit smarter, how about you? I hope you use the information above to improve this vital part of your WordPress website.

Do you know any other ways to customize the WordPress search results page? Anything else to add? Let us know in the comments!

The post How to Easily Customize the WordPress Search Results Page appeared first on Torque.

The Gutenberg editor has completely changed how we build websites and web pages with WordPress. It allows users to create content and layouts piece by piece and comes with many tools to do so. In this post, we want to look at some of the best blocks Gutenberg has to offer for that purpose.

The WordPress editor is a complex piece of software. It’s easy to overlook some of the features of Gutenberg, including the many blocks it comes with.

Consequently, there might be some that you have no idea exist but that could seriously improve your workflow and make it easier to run your site. This list of the best Gutenberg blocks aims to make sure that isn’t the case.

How to Add Any Block to the WordPress Editor

Before moving on to the finest layout elements included in Gutenberg, let’s go over a quick refresher for how to add blocks to the editor. Basically there are three different possibilities:

• Slash commands
• The Add block button
• The block inserter

Here’s how each of them work.

1. Using Slash Commands

These get their name from the fact that you access them by typing a slash forward (“/”) in an empty line of the editor. Doing so automatically opens a menu with frequently used blocks.

You can directly choose one via the mouse cursor or arrow keys on the keyboard. At the same time, if what you are looking for doesn’t show, simply start typing the name of the block you want to insert. It will then appear in the menu for you to pick.

This is the fastest way of adding a block to the WordPress editor. It works both in the page/post editor and the Full Site Editor.

2. Via the Add Block Button

Next up, is using the small “+” button that shows up in the editor below the last-used line.

A click on it opens up a similar menu as the slash commands where you can pick from a list of frequently used blocks or search for what you need by name.

The menu also shows available block patterns during search. You need to choose blocks via the mouse, this menu does not work with the keyboard. A click on Browse all opens up the block inserter, which brings us to the third method.

3. Working With the Block Inserter

You can acccess the block inserter by clicking the big blue “+” button in the upper left corner of the editor screen.

Doing so opens up the entire list of blocks (and block patterns) available on your website in a separate side menu.

Scroll to find what you need or use the search bar on top to directly look for it. When you have found what you want, you have two ways to add it to the page:

1. Click on the block to insert it where the cursor is currently located (it will show the position with a blue line when hovering over your chosen element).
2. Drag and drop the block to your preferred place.

Here Are the Best Blocks Gutenberg Has to Offer

Alright, after this quick discourse, it’s time to see what blocks Gutenberg brings to the table that is worth inserting into your site and pages. Note, that in this case, we just concentrate on default blocks available in the editor (with one exception). Of course, it is possible to add more blocks to Gutenberg via plugins but we can not cover all of these here.

Query Loop

We are starting off the list with what is arguably the most powerful block that the block editor has to offer: the Query Loop. It’s basically a WordPress loop, the piece of code responsible for outputting any content in WordPress’ posts and pages, wrapped in a single block.

How It Works

Query Loop allows you to add custom content to your pages very easily. When you input it into the page, you have two options: start with a block pattern or a blank template. When choosing the second option, the block asks you to pick whether to display your content title, date, excerpt and/or image.

(Note: Working with this block works best if you already have posts on your website. Query Loop will use them as examples.)

Once on the page, you have a multitude of ways to customize the content. Two of the most important you can find in the block options on the right.

You can a) choose the post type that you want the block to output and b) add filters for what posts or pages show up. For example, you can direct the loop to only show content from certain categories, authors, or with certain keywords. In addition, you have the ability to order it from newest to oldest, the reverse, or either direction of the alphabet.

Besides that, you can customize what information shows up for each post in the loop. The easiest way to do that is via list view in the upper left corner. It allows you change the order of the post title, featured image, and date. You can even add things like excerpts (see also the next item in this list). Any change to Post Template will affect every single item in the Query Loop.

Finally, you are able to change the design of the content very easily. For example, you can switch the loop between list and grid view in the block settings bar on top.

It’s also possible to change the number of columns, modify colors, and more. That doesn’t even take into account the many possibilities to adjust the look via block patterns.

What’s Great About This Block

What makes Query Loop one of the best Gutenberg blocks? The fact that puts power into the hands of everyday users that, in the past, were only reserved for developers and people with good PHP skills. Now anyone can create and customize the WordPress loop and output filtered lists of content anywhere on their site.

Coupled with the Site Editor and its ability to export site customizations, that means that you can create a custom theme and edit page templates without any coding knowledge. Democratization of publishing at work.

Post Title, Excerpt, Content, Featured Image

We already mentioned these blocks in the Query Loop block section above but, as parts of the blocks for theme building and templating, they are worth looking into further.

How It Works

Post Title, Post Excerpt, Post Content, and Featured Image allow you to display important information and content from pages and posts wherever and in whatever order you want. For that reason, you usually don’t use them inside posts or pages but in templates and template parts. You access those in the Site Editor (Appearance > Editor, when using a block theme) by clicking on the logo in the upper left corner.

In the Templates menu, you are able to create custom page templates via the Add New button in the upper right corner.

You can assign those to posts and pages or, alternatively, set them up so that they automatically apply to certain kinds of content. Of course, you can also edit existing templates to change their design. For example, this is what single posts usually look like in the Twenty Twenty-Two Theme:

Here is the accompanying template:

Now, we can do the following changes:

1. Replace the featured image with a Cover block that shows the featured image, add a dark overlay, and move it to the same layout level as Post Content.
2. Move Post Title inside the Cover block, center it, and change its color to white.
3. Remove some of the spacers and change the style of the separator.

Just with these few steps, the page already looks quite different:

Here’s what the page template looks like in the Site Editor:

What’s Great About These Blocks

As you can see above, these are some of the best Gutenberg blocks because they are extremely potent. They allow you to move around and modify basic elements of your page display. With just a few clicks, you can make fundamental changes to how content appears on your site. Combine it with the Post Date, Categories, Tags, and Post Author Name blocks, and you can build web pages in whatever way you want.

Comments

The Comments block is the last theme block we want to talk about here. As you can probably deduce from its name, it’s responsible for adding the form to leave a comment as well as list existing user opinions on your pages.

How It Works

The important thing to keep in mind here, as will quickly become obvious when opening list view, is that the Comments block consists of several subblocks (note: you might have to click on the prompt to switch the block to editable mode to see these).

Namely, these are:

1. Comments Title
2. Comment Template (includes Avatar, Comment Date, Comment Author Name, Comment Edit Link, Comment Content, and Comment Reply Link)
3. Comments Pagination (consists of Comments Previous Page, Comments Page Number, Comments Next Page)
4. Post Comments Form

What should be obvious by now is that this compartmentalization allows you to arrange different elements in any desired order. For example, in the default block, the form to add a comment is at the bottom of the comments section. If want to make it easier for visitors to reach, you can simply move it to the top.

Alternatively, do you want to flip the order of the comment date and author name? Nothing easier than that.

In addition, each element comes with sensible design customization options. You can change the size and border radius of the Avatar picture, determine whether the author name should link to the author’s URL (and if it opens in a new tab or not), customize the comment date structure, or simply change text size, colors, and background colors for the elements.

What’s Great About This Block

Be honest, as a normal WordPress user, before Gutenberg, did you have any idea how to make changes to your comments section? Me neither.

Now, with the Comments block, you have almost full control over it! Even more, you can actually add a comments form to pages that usually don’t have them and also remove them on a post-to-post basis (if you create a template without the Comments block and assign it to your posts).

The only thing that’s definitely missing at the moment is the ability to customize text elements, e.g. change Leave a Reply at the top of the comments form to something that might go more with the branding of your site.

Row/Stack

Row or Stack is a formatting block that you encounter a lot but mostly without knowing it. Its sole purpose is to arrange elements horizontally or vertically and control their relation to each other.

How It Works

In order to understand how the Row and Stack blocks works, the best way is to look at template parts like headers and footers (inside the Template Parts menu in the Site Editor).

These not only often consist mainly of a Row element but also contain additional elements of the same type to control the look of elements inside the header.

As you can see in the markup above, this header is a Row block that contains another Row element for the site logo and title as well as a navigation block. It’s simple but sufficient.

However, the real magic is in the options that the Row block offers (besides the usual typography and color settings):

• Change the justification of elements (left, middle, right, space between items, and allow wrapping across multiple lines).
• Adjust orientation between horizontal and vertical (the latter turns it into a Stack rather than a Row block).
• Add padding and margin.
• Control block spacing.

This allows you to easily arrange elements in whatever way you need.

What’s Great About This Block

In the past, you needed to work with a lot of floats in order to arrange HTML elements horizontally and vertically. Even after things improved on the technology front, it was still necessary to familiarize yourself with things like flexbox and grid in order to make this happen. Now, it’s all just a few clicks away. Funny enough though, flexbox is the exact technology that the Row block is using, which you can see when you look at the page with browser developer tools.

Table of Contents

This is the only block that falls outside of the premise of this article as it is not yet part of the Gutenberg default blocks. At the time of this writing, it’s only available with the Gutenberg plugin installed and activated. However, it used to take extra plugins to get this functionality in the past and I am just excited that soon it will be a native function and wanted to give it a whirl.

How It Works

Creating a table of contents in Gutenberg is pretty easy. First, write and format your text, including your headings. Then, input the Table of Contents block into your page or post – that’s it. The block will automatically create a clickable table of contents from the headings on your page.

In addition, it adds the necessary HTML anchors so that the page jumps work. That way, when someone clicks on a link in the table of contents, the screen will automatically move to that heading.

What’s a bit thin at the moment are the block’s customization options. It only comes with settings to narrow down the content of the ToC to the current page (for paginated content) and customize things like text and background colors, sizes, as well as margin and padding.

If you want more detailed options (such as the ability to remove the double numbers that are visible above), you can convert it to a static list, which has more settings and makes the list editable.

In that case, the Table of Contents block only works as a shortcut. There is also no way to convert the list back to the original block.

What’s Great About This Block

Creating a table of contents used to be kind of tedious. You had to manually copy the heading text, input HTML anchors, format it, and add the right page links. Now, all of that is done for you – and in seconds!

Sure, there is room for improvement. The current lack of customization options is a bit of a bummer. Page jumps also don’t work in preview because the block uses the URL slug of the finished post. However, it still makes the process of adding a table of contents in WordPress much easier.

What Are Your Best Gutenberg Blocks?

The WordPress editor is constantly evolving and adding new blocks to its repertoire. For that reason, it’s easy to lose track of what exactly it has available.

Hopefully, you have found some inspiration in the article above and maybe the motivation to try out some more blocks. If you discover something you really like, we’d love to hear from you!

What do you consider to be the best Gutenberg blocks? Anything to add to the list? Let us know in the comments!

The post 8 Best WordPress Gutenberg Blocks (And How to Use Them) appeared first on Torque.

Nowadays, nearly every business has a website. Therefore, you’ll want to retain your competitive edge by providing an excellent User Experience (UX). However, you might lack the knowledge and skills to measure your site’s performance.

Fortunately, you can monitor your web performance easily with the right tools. For instance, you can track important data about your site’s accessibility, speed, and database performance. Then, you can make the necessary adjustments to improve your UX.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at website performance monitoring. Then, we’ll explore five effective ways to monitor your site. Let’s get started!

An Introduction to Website Performance Monitoring

Website performance monitoring is about tracking essential data to make your site more user-friendly. Once you identify areas for improvement, you can take the necessary steps to reduce bounce rates and boost your search rankings. 

Website monitoring should be a continuous process. This is because factors that affect performance are constantly evolving and changing. This includes your connection speed, operating system, and the number of files on your site. 

There are different types of website monitoring methods you can use. One of them is synthetic performance monitoring. This is an active approach that evaluates your user journey and measures your availability, functionality, and responsiveness. 

You could also opt for real user monitoring. This assesses your user interactions, taking note of load time and transaction paths. 

How to Monitor Your Website Performance (5 Ways)

Now that you understand a bit more about website performance monitoring, let’s look at five ways you can implement it on your website.

1. Track Your Uptime

Uptime refers to your website being available and accessible to users. On the flip side, when downtime occurs, your site is unreachable. This can result in a loss of traffic and revenue.

The main cause of downtime is a poor hosting service. Other times, unstable plugins and themes can take their toll on your website’s performance. 

You can measure your uptime using a WordPress monitoring tool like WP Umbrella:

This management tool provides automatic backups, update management, and maintenance reports. Plus, you’ll be alerted by Slack or email whenever downtime occurs. Better yet, this tool can even prevent PHP errors caused by themes and plugins, which are common causes of downtime. 

To improve your uptime score, you may need to switch to a quality web host like WP Engine.  Additionally, we recommend that you ditch any unnecessary themes and plugins.  

WP Enfine and WP Umbrella are by the way compatible and can give you a competitive edge if you want to manage multiple website effortlessly. 

2. Measure Your Time to First Byte (TTFB)

Time to First Byte (TTFB) evaluates the responsiveness of your server. Specifically, it measures the time between the browser requesting a page and when it receives the first byte of data from the server.

A poor TTFB score can be influenced by many factors. For instance, it can be explained by a slow SSL certificate validation, poor network connection, and more.

To find out your TTFB, you can use a tool like Pingdom. This combines synthetic and real user monitoring to assess your site’s availability, page speed, and transaction paths:

Alternatively, you could opt for the free Geekflare TTFB tool to find out how fast your TTFB is from three different locations. Simply enter your URL and you’ll get an immediate result:

To improve your score, you can try implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare. This will ensure that your website loads quickly, no matter where your visitors are located around the world.

Another way you can improve your TTFB is by using a caching tool. Some hosting companies offer built-in caching with their plans. If yours doesn’t, you can use a plugin like WP Super Cache.

3. Check Your Page Load Time

Page load time refers to the average time it takes for your entire page to load, including all text, images, and other elements like JavaScript. It’s an important metric to monitor since it lets you know how fast your server is running.

It has been found that the bounce rate increases by 32 percent as page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds. Therefore, keeping a check on this figure can help you retain your visitors. 

The easiest way to measure your page load time is to use a tool like WebPageTest. This enables you to assess your users’ real experience from different locations:

Then, you can improve your site speed by reducing image size and quantity. You may also need to compress your media files. 

4. Keep an Eye on Your Bounce Rate

As we mentioned earlier, your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site after landing on one page. There are several reasons why users may decide not to hang around and explore the rest of your website. For example, they may be put off by slow speeds and poor web design. 

It’s important that you monitor this metric, as it’s a large teller of your UX. Sites with high bounce rates tend to be slow and unresponsive.

If you want to keep an eye on your bounce rate, Google Analytics is one of the best tools to use:

You can also gain insight into your customer journey with features like real-time reporting, funnel exploration, and engagement levels. To boost your bounce rate, you can make sure your site is responsive, your content is readable, and your Calls-to-Action (CTAs) are strong and clear.

5. Monitor Database Performance (Connection Time and Error Time)

There are two main ways that you can monitor your database performance. The first is connection time. This refers to the time it takes for the user to make a connection with your server. The second is error time, which measures the percentage of requests that contain errors. 

These metrics are especially important if your site features lots of dynamic content pulled from your database. Plus, a slow-responding site often has a poor-performing database. 

SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor is a comprehensive tool that looks for database indicators like Queries Per Second (QPS) and Transactions Per Second (TPS):

It also identifies the number of open database connections and the number of queries for each error code, enabling you to find frequently occurring errors.

To improve your database performance, you can increase your memory limit, strengthen your CPU, increase disk space, and optimize queries. Most of these can be done by upgrading to a more powerful hosting plan.

Conclusion

The key to a successful website is to prioritize your UX. Otherwise, you risk sending visitors directly to your competitors. With the right tools, you can access important metrics like page load time and bounce rate, and take steps to improve them.

To recap, here are five ways to monitor your website performance:

1. Track your uptime using a WordPress monitoring tool like WP Umbrella.
2. Measure your time to first byte with Pingdom.
3. Check your page load time using WebPageTest.
4. Keep an eye on your bounce rate with Google Analytics.
5. Monitor database performance using a tool like the SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor.

Do you have any questions about website performance? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post How to Monitor Your Website Performance (5 Ways) appeared first on Torque.

While factors such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are essential for your site’s growth, they don’t mean much if it isn’t secure. If you haven’t taken measures to increase the stability of your WordPress website, it might be at risk of poor performance and cyber hacking.

Fortunately, there are many steps you can take to stabilize your WordPress website. Actions such as using managed hosting and tightening up your password security can help safeguard your website and improve its performance. This will help ensure that your data is protected and your site is functioning optimally. 

In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of having a site that performs smoothly at all times. Then, we’ll show you different ways to improve your site’s stability. Let’s get to work!

Why WordPress Stability Is Important

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) that powers over 40 percent of all websites on the internet. While the platform is considered very safe, its popularity makes it an easy target for malicious actors.

Cyber hackers can do a lot of damage to your site. They might steal your data, add spam links to your pages, and even take down your site entirely. Furthermore, a site that is not secure can experience frequent downtime.

Additionally, your WordPress site could experience other issues that affect its performance. For example, if you use a shared server, your page could go offline when there is a surge in traffic.

A website that is constantly down or glitchy can affect your brand reputation and damage your sales. That’s why it’s important to increase uptime as much as possible.

Fortunately, there are many measures you can take to stabilize your WordPress website. Making your site more secure can help improve its speed and overall performance. This may in turn boost your traffic and conversion rates.

How to Increase the Stability of Your WordPress Website (5 Ways)

Now that you know the importance of having a stable WordPress site, let’s take a look at some steps you can take to make it more reliable.

1. Use Managed Hosting

Unmanaged hosting means that you’re responsible for maintenance tasks like software updates and security scans. It is usually a cheaper alternative, which is why some people choose it over other options.

With managed hosting, the hosting company takes care of updates and provides security measures so that you don’t have to. These tasks are important as they can help stop cyber attacks on your site. They can also prevent glitches and other issues caused by outdated plugins and themes.

WP Engine offers fully managed WordPress hosting to help you keep your site secure:

It offers a 40-percent page speed increase for your site and guarantees uptime during traffic spikes. This way, you wouldn’t have to worry about poor site performance and lost conversions.

2. Implement a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers located around the globe. When you use a CDN for your website, static versions of your site’s files are delivered from the server that’s geographically closest to the visitor’s location.

Overall, a CDN helps improve page loading times. This can lead to a better user experience, and therefore a lower bounce rate.

If you’re looking for a powerful CDN for your website, Cloudflare is a popular option:

This software provides you with a global network of servers designed to make your website secure and reliable. There is a free option for single websites, with paid plans starting at $20 per month.

3. Enable Automatic Backups

Keeping a backup of your website enables you to recover information quickly if ever it gets hacked or you accidentally delete essential files. If a mishap occurs, you’ll be able to easily restore an earlier version of your site.

There are plenty of backup options available for your WordPress site. For example, the BackWPup plugin enables you to do backups of your website for free:

This plugin has many features, including:

• Complete automatic restore
• Encrypted backups
• Full database backup
• Management of backup archives

It’s important to note that many managed hosting plans offer automatic backups. Check with your provider to see if your WordPress website comes with a backup plan.

4. Tighten Login Security

Having a strong login procedure can help protect your WordPress website. You can do this by using a Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) plugin, like WP 2FA:

When you set up 2FA, a verification code will be sent to your mobile phone. You’ll need to enter this code into your WordPress login page to access the dashboard. This can help stop unauthorized users from gaining access to your site with automated password guessing and brute force attacks.

You can also protect your website by using long and strong passwords. A secure login process can provide overall stability for your site and keep your data safe.

5. Install an SSL Certificate

A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypts the information exchanged between your website and your users. This makes it more difficult for hackers to steal personal data.

Sites with an SSL certificate use HTTPS instead of HTTP, which makes them more secure. Many hosting companies like WP Engine will provide this certification for you.

If your hosting provider doesn’t offer this feature, you can use a plugin like Really Simple SSL:

This tool will automatically configure your website to use SSL for extra protection. It also has additional features and a server health check to help you ensure that your site is performing optimally.

Conclusion

Although WordPress is a secure platform, it still has many vulnerabilities. To keep it safe, you’ll need to take some precautionary measures. These will help protect it from cyberattacks while increasing its performance. 

To summarize, here are five ways to increase the stability of your WordPress website: 

1. Choose a managed WordPress hosting provider such as WP Engine.
2. Implement a CDN such as Cloudflare to improve your site’s performance.
3. Enable automatic backups with a plugin such as BackWPup.
4. Protect your password and login process with a tool like WP 2FA.
5. Check to see if your web host offers an SSL certificate, or use a plugin such as Really Simple SSL.

Do you have any questions about how to improve the stability of your WordPress website? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post How to Increase the Stability of Your WordPress Website (5 Ways) appeared first on Torque.

With so many web hosts available, it can be difficult to choose one that offers the specific development features you need. Especially since most web hosts cater to general users that might be looking for a more basic service.

Fortunately, it’s easier to choose a web host when you know what to look for. Whether you want an intuitive control panel, an affordable solution, or powerful security features, we can help you find the hosting provider that best suits your web development needs.

In this post, we’ll discuss some of the features to look for in a web hosting provider. Then, we’ll explore six of the best web hosts for developers. Let’s get started!

What to Look for in Developer-Friendly Web Hosts (5 Key Factors)

Here are some of the key factors to consider when choosing a new web host for your development needs.

Resources

Whichever server your sites or apps end up on, it’s essential that they have enough resources to execute effectively. Some of the key resources to pay attention to include general storage, bandwidth, and the central processing unit (CPU).

All of these factors will determine how your programs are executed. Additionally, it’s useful to check what sort of random access memory (RAM) is offered because this will limit the amount of data you can access quickly and easily.

Scalability

When choosing a developer-friendly web host, it’s best to think long-term. You may want to ask yourself: what plan will be more useful if I’m expecting significant growth? On the flip side of that, you don’t want to start out with big ambitions only to end up paying for a bunch of features you don’t use.

That’s why it’s a good idea to choose a developer web host that enables you to scale your resources up and down as you need. Therefore, pay-as-you-go plans can be an excellent solution since they’re more flexible.

Frameworks

While you can manually install dependencies using SSH, it’s much quicker to choose a developer web host that’s already configured to run your preferred programming language. Typically, the more popular frameworks to look out for include PHP, Python, and MYSQL.

However, it’s also useful to make sure that your web host supports multiple programming languages if you plan on working with more than one. Additionally, you might want to access numerous server types such as Apache and Node.

Security

Security is always an important consideration with any type of hosting. While shared hosting can be a more affordable option, it can involve greater risk since it lacks proper barriers between applications. Therefore, if one website on the server gets infected, there’s a chance that your website will also go down.

What’s more, rather than simply choosing the type of hosting service you’d like, consider some of the extra features offered by the provider. For instance, some hosting companies include automated backups, staging environments, firewalls, and website monitoring as part of their packages.

Reliability

One of the main considerations with web hosting is that your site remains available and accessible at all times. Otherwise, you can lose out on traffic and revenue. This can also make your site appear untrustworthy.

With this in mind, the best developer web hosts will offer no less than 99.99 percent uptime. It’s also crucial that you can easily get in touch with the support team should any issues arise.

6 Best Web Hosts for Developers

Now that you know what to look for when making a decision, let’s check out six of the best web hosts for developers.

1. WP Engine

WP Engine is a powerful, security-rich web host that can provide you with smooth and speedy performance. Thanks to its native user portal, it’s ideal for working with WordPress. It’s also a great option for collaborative work, enabling you to set unique user permissions, assign roles, and log activity.

What’s more, with WP Engine, you’ll get access to three staging websites, one for development, one for staging, and one for production. Better yet, each staging area comes with its own unique management menu.

Features:

• All plans can function as reseller hosting
• Choose from twenty server locations
• Access three staging environments

Pricing: WP Engine plans start at $20 per month.

2. InterServer

InterServer is a straightforward developer web hosting service that’s highly customizable. However, it does come with a steep learning curve, so it may not be the best option for beginners. Still, it’s a popular choice since it enables you to work with lots of programming languages including PHP, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, and Fast CGI.

One of the best parts about InterServer is that it’s a scalable solution, so you only pay for what you need. If you find yourself requiring more resources at any time, each plan provides a little more than the last, with just a small price increase. This is a great feature since many hosting providers have a large disparity between upgrades.

Features:

• Provides a staging option to work on your site privately and safely
• Plans include unlimited websites, storage, bandwidth, and an email account
• Offers free security features like a virus scanner, web application firewall, and in-house malware database

Pricing: You can start using InterServer for just $2.50 per month.

3. Kamatera

Kamatera provides a highly-configurable environment. For example, you can use it to build a cloud VPN from scratch and determine the exact amount of RAM, CPU, and storage that you’ll need. However, to fully take advantage of this requires a fair bit of technical knowledge and experience.

In any case, Kamatera is a great developer web host because it offers a flexible pay-as-you-go service. Therefore, you can adjust your server resources and your bill will instantly reflect this change. This makes it one of the best web hosts for scaling your applications. Kamatera also doesn’t scrimp on security, providing firewall protection, distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, and 24/7 support.

Features:

• Uses a cloud load balancer to stabilize performances during traffic spikes
• Choose from eighteen data centers around the world
• Instant setup

Pricing: Kamatera hosting plans start at $4 per month.

4. Hostinger

Hostinger is a well-known, reliable hosting solution that’s great for experimenting with your app. With this option, you’ll get access to your very own hPanel . This is a user-friendly, native management panel that’s simple to use and provides a clean, stylish interface.

What’s more, you can access Git support with any plan you choose, tracking changes and restoring previous versions easily. Hostinger also offers an access manager with all shared plans, allowing you to allocate specific roles and access options to team members.

Features:

• Weekly backups with all plans
• Choose your own data center closest to your audience
• All shared plans include DNS management, a free SSL certificate, and an email account

Pricing: Hostinger plans start at $1.99 per month for a single shared website. However, you can get VPS Hosting for $3.49 per month, and cloud hosting starts at $9.99 per month.

5. Liquid Web

Liquid Web is particularly well-known for its cloud hosting and VPS hosting plans. It’s a flexible solution that enables you to choose your own control panel, whether you prefer to work with InterWorx, Plesk Web Pro, or cPanel.

No matter which plan you choose, you can expect Git support, and amazingly, Liquid Web offers a 100 percent uptime guarantee. Better yet, if downtime does occur, you’ll be compensated ten times the amount you’ve lost. Plus, Liquid Web uses WP-CLI so that you can update, backup, and administrate your site easily.

Features:

• Access a ton of security features like firewalls, DDoS protection, and website monitoring
• Enjoy a 100 percent uptime guarantee
• Get full root access

Pricing: Liquid Web plans start at $25 per month.

6. InMotion

InMotion is a fully-featured web host that accommodates many programming languages like PHP, Ruby, Perl, and Python. This is even the case for its shared hosting plans. You can also add multiple users to your website and limit their actions easily on your account.

InMotion is one of the best developer web hosts for reseller hosting and includes white labeling for agencies. Plus, it’s a reliable solution, offering 99.99 percent uptime and 24/7 support. Additionally, you can benefit from plenty of security features like malware protection and free SSL certificates.

Features:

• Git support with all plans
• Provides SSL, SSH access, unlimited bandwidth, and free email
• WordPress is auto-installed and you can access other eCommerce tools

Pricing: InMotion plans start at $2.29 per month.

Conclusion

With so many hosting providers available, it can be difficult to choose the right one for your web development tasks. However, it’s easier if you know what to look for. When you consider factors like resources, frameworks, and scalability, you’re off to a good start.

To recap, here are six of the best web hosts for developers:

WP Engine: A powerful solution, great for testing and collaboration.

InterServer: Good for scalability, enabling you to pay for what you need.

Kamatera: A highly-customizable environment that bills by the second.

Hostinger: An affordable web host that’s also beginner-friendly.

Liquid Web: Guarantees 100 percent uptime and allows you to choose your own control panel.

InMotion: A robust web host, best for reseller hosting.

Do you have any questions about our list of the best web hosts for developers? Let us know in the comments section below!

The post 6 Best Web Hosts for Developers appeared first on Torque.