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WordPress – What About You Need To Knows/WordPress had been and still is the leader in the website development industry powering more than 35% of existing websites on the internet (as of 2020).

But is it right for you?

Look:

There are many different options online for creating a website. WordPress is only one of them. Every option out there has its own advantages and disadvantages. To avoid any pain in the future, it’s a good idea to choose your platform wisely right from the beginning. So, if WordPress is among your options, then let’s learn the pros and cons of using WordPress together.

Now, WordPress – does it even have a disadvantage? Everyone out there seems to love it!

Yes, it does.

But, let’s begin with Pros

WordPress Pros

1. User Friendliness

Get this:

People think programming is the first thing you should know before you build a website. But WordPress proved it wrong. Not completely, but you don’t need to touch the single line of code if you don’t want too much-advanced functionality on your website and you need an easy-to-use platform.

Plus, today third-party drag and drop page builders provide a completely code-free WordPress WYSIWYG experience. With the right WordPress builder creating and running a WordPress website is a piece of cake (codeless cake).

This is how a standard WordPress dashboard looks like. See there is no code.

Uploading content, editing, and customizing are also beginner-friendly on the WordPress content management system. You basically just press buttons or drag and drop things where needed.

Also, most web hosting companies provide a 1-click WordPress site installation. So, you can install WordPress on your website with no external help. Online tutorials eliminate the need for developers here.

2. Plugins and feature extendibility

Before we proceed any further, here is a major reason why most people love and use WordPress website– it’s the Plugins (add-ons) that make WordPress super easy to use.

With more than 57,000 free and paid plugins (this number constantly changes), you can find a plugin for almost anything you might need.

And again a plugin means a ready solution to your problem – no need to code.

Things are quite easy if you use WordPress plugins:

Want to add or remove website functions? – Install and configure the plugin

Features such as social media integration, third-party tool integration, individual webpage design, e-commerce functionalities, live streaming, chatting, forums, etc. can be embedded with a single click of plugin activation.

Woo-Commerce plugin permits you to remodel your website to an e-commerce site where you are able to accept payments directly through the website and manage the products right from your WordPress dashboard.

3. Responsiveness

Are you looking to build a website? What if visitors are using different devices to browse your website?

Yah, you got it right, the content won’t align properly if the website isn’t responsive.

Well, the worry is over.

With the availability of more than 1000s of responsive WordPress themes, the website content aligns perfectly on any device without affecting the UX of the website.

Here is the interesting thing…

Like WordPress themes, the WordPress drag and drop page builders we mentioned above are also fully responsive.

Great examples are the two drag and drop page builders — Divi and Elementor.

Above that, most of the modern themes support Google AMP pages, with that your website loads instantly providing better UX to the visitors.

4. SEO Ready

Ever thought about how your website gets ranked on a search engine?

You got it, it’s SEO.

Although WordPress does not come with built-in SEO functionality, there are plugins that do this work for it (like Yoast) and make WordPress SEO friendly for a search engine.

SEO plugins for WordPress help with all the basic SEO setup you need to do like sitemaps, indexing, control over robots.txt, etc.

Additionally, SEO plugins help with optimizing the content with meta tags, keywords, and other features like a warning about keyword stuffing.

So, WordPress SEO is quite easy and effective (unlike commercial site builders) with the help of free and paid SEO plugins.

5. Open source

WordPress is an open-source content management system, meaning that anyone can use WordPress. In addition to that, WordPress source code can be changed and redistributed.

This makes it easier to switch between different developers when needed, and sharing the code online saves a lot of developing time. It will also save you time if you come up with any problem while developing a website.

Most themes and plugins are open-source software licensed under GPL; thus, WordPress programmers are open to sharing the code online.

Sharing the code online, the WordPress community became so large that you can get support easily when you are messed up with your website or need to add extra functionalities to the website.

6. Inexpensive and reliable

WordPress software is available for free but you need some space on the internet to host and build your website.

Usually, WordPress hosting and some basic WP-theme/page builder costs are the only investment you need to make to start a WordPress website from scratch.

WP software is robust and can handle lots of concurrent visitors. The performance of WordPress depends on the quality of your hosting plan and the way you manage your website.

Assigning different roles to additional users makes it easy to provide permission to access certain areas of websites.

Thousands of websites globally (including big names like Techcrunch, BBC America, Sony Music, and others) use WordPress, which once again demonstrates that WordPress is indeed a great product.

Now that we have discussed the pros, let’s move to the cons of WordPress…

Cons of WordPress

1. Vulnerability

Being an open-source content management system, WordPress can be vulnerable (which is one of the biggest cons of WordPress). Security is still a big challenge for many users.

Our aim is not to frighten you, but…

The heavy dependence on external plugins increases the chance of slipping malicious code to the software making the website vulnerable.

Nevertheless, you can take the following precautions:

• Never use WordPress themes or plugins that are not being maintained by their developer (you will see the last update date before adding it to your website)
• It’s a good idea to host one website per server
• Use a WordPress plugin for security and enable two-factor authentication
• Make use of CDN to protect the server from DDOS attack
• Back up your website regularly (so you can get back your website with ease). Most quality WordPress hosting companies have automatic backups. If your hosting company does not have it, manually backup your website.

2. Expensive as you move forward

As your website grows larger, the maintenance costs increase. You might need to upgrade your self-hosted WordPress hosting plan, and use the premium services from the third-party tools.

Security is still a big issue – thus, you need to make some investment in security plugins, CDN, etc. so that you can retrieve your website within minutes.

Adding features and functionalities to the website requires some investment, but on the other hand, if you move forward and need upgrades then this probably means your website is growing.

3. Developers needed

Starting a website with WordPress is not difficult but maintenance is sometimes challenging.

Sometimes, WordPress can be hard, which is one of the cons of WordPress.

While customizing your WordPress website you might mess up with the backend or make other accidental mistakes. When your WordPress website breaks you might need developers to fix it. Not always, but this happens (every quality WordPress hosting includes automatic backups as mentioned above and if something goes wrong you usually can restore the previous version of your website).

On top of that, sometimes a certain plugin might conflict with another plugin and this might result in your site being down until you fix the conflict. This is another type of issue that may require developer involvement.

However, for the most basic stuff (especially for building and creating things) no developer is needed. You can do most of the things yourself like the integration of e-mail marketing software, CRM software, payment gateway integration, installing lead generation tools, self-hosted WordPress hosting setup, and so on.

WordPress Pros and Cons: Wrapping things up

Wrapping up on the pros and cons of using WordPress we wanted to highlight that like everything else out there WordPress also has its good sides and not-so-good sides. But overall,

WordPress is an amazing product and a top choice of millions. We absolutely love it here at Siteefy.

It’s flexible, it’s relatively easy to use.

You don’t need to be a professional website designer to develop a beautiful and fully functional WordPress site.

The responsive themes and page builders make it simple to design complete websites, individual pages, and other website elements.

With the help of different plugins, you can extend the capability of your WordPress site even further if needed.

Yes, it’s true that there is some learning curve in WordPress, but you know – it’s well worth it.

References

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Top 50 Reasons Your Website Deserves to Be Penalized By Google/Google’s on an uncompromising mission. It wants to give its users access to accurate information, unique content and the finest writers. It continually tweaks and improves its algorithms so that the best of the web gets the exposure it deserves.

Unfortunately, there’s a flipside: a penalty. That’s the consequence of Google taking issue with something on your site. Sometimes a penalty is well deserved, but even if you know you’re in the wrong, you probably want to do something about it.

What Is a Google Penalty?

Google has been changing its ranking algorithms since December 2000. That’s when it released its toolbar extension. At the time, the toolbar update represented a sea change that would create the SEO industry as we know it. In fact, it was the first time PageRank was published in a meaningful or usable form.

Over the next decade-and-a-bit, Google continued to refine the quality of its search results. Over time, it begins to eliminate poor quality content and elevate the good stuff to the top of the SERPs. That’s where penalties – come in.

The Penguin update was rolled out in 2012. It hit more than 1 in 10 search results overnight, wiped some sites out of search entirely, pushed poor quality content off the map and forced optimizers to think much more carefully about their content strategy. Since then, SEO professionals have been very tuned in to Google’s plans, fearing the next update in case it results in a penalty for a site they’re working on.

Recognizing a Penalty

Penalties can be automatic or manual. With manual penalties, you’ll probably be told, but you may not always know you’ve been targeted if the cause is algorithmic. Those penalties may take even the most experienced SEO professionals by surprise.

For algorithmic penalties, here are some sure-fire clues.

• Your website is not ranking well for your brand name any more. That’s a dead giveaway. Even if your site doesn’t rank for much else, it should at least do well on that one keyword.
• Any page one positions you had are slipping back to page two or three without any action on your part.
• PageRank for your site has inexplicably dropped from a respectable two or three to a big fat zero (or a measly PR of one).
• The entire website has been removed from Google’s cached search results overnight.
• Running a site search – site:yourdomain.com keyword – yields no results.
• Your listing – when you eventually find it in Google – is for a page on your site other than the home page.

If you see one or more of these factors, you can be pretty sure that a penalty has affected your site.

Why Has Google Penalized My Site?

Google is continually tweaking and revising the way it indexes content.

While it does publish clues about its algorithm updates, it rarely comes clean about all of its reasons for changes. Fixing things can be tough.

To get you off on the right track, here’s the part you’ve been waiting for: 50 common reasons for Google taking issue with your site. While we’re not saying we know the definite reasons for a penalty, we do know that these factors all contribute.

1. Buying links. Some swear it doesn’t happen, but actual evidence is mixed. Buying links could certainly be seen as an attempt to manipulate PageRank, and therein lies the controversy. If you’ve been buying bad links (and lots of them), your actions could have caught up with you.
2. Excessive reciprocal links. Swapping links was once an innocent marketing tactic until it started to be abused. If you’ve been exchanging lots of links with clients, it could be seen as a manipulation attempt.
3. Duplicate content. Hopefully this one’s obvious: any duplicate content on your site makes it less useful in Google’s view, and that could result in a penalty. Make sure your content is unique and well-written; use tools like Copyscape.
4. Overusing H1 tags. Correctly structuring content helps with SEO. The H1 tag helps Google to understand what the page is about. Excessive H1 tags could be seen as an attempt to pump Google’s listing with keywords.
5. Internal 404s. Google wants to know that you tend to your content and weed out any errors and problems. If you’re delivering 404s inside your own website, it’s a sure fire signal that your users aren’t getting the information they ask for.
6. Links from sites in another language. This one seems unfair, right? You’ve got a legitimate link from a client in another country, yet it’s technically counted against you. Well, Google’s reasoning is sound: users generally tend to prefer one language, so linking to sites in another language isn’t that useful for them.
7. Keyword stuffed content. There are all kinds of weird and wonderful ‘rules’ about keyword density in content. The truth is that none of these rules are proven, and a very high keyword density is a flag for poorly written content. If Google detects a weirdly high number of keywords in a page, it may penalize you – rightly or wrongly.
8. Footer links. Some web designers use footer links as a navigational aid; some try to manipulate PageRank by using the footer as a place to pass link juice unnaturally. There’s a short discussion about this on Moz.
9. Missing sitemap data. Google uses the XML sitemap to parse your site’s structure and learn how it’s put together. Make sure your XML sitemap is available and up-to-date, and then submit it in your Webmaster Tools account.
10. Hidden links. All of the links on your site should be visible and useful to users. Anything that’s hidden is considered suspicious. Never make a link the same color as the background of a page or button, even if you have an innocent reason.
11. Broken external links. If you don’t keep links up-to-date, Google will assume you don’t care about the user experience and are happy to pack visitors off to various 404 error pages. Check links periodically and pull the duff ones.
12. Scraped content. Sometimes website managers pull content from other sites in order to bulk our their own pages. Often, this is done with good intentions, and it may be an innocent error. But Google sees this as pointless duplication. Replace it with your own original content instead.
13. Hidden content. Less ethical optimization tactics include disguising text on a page to manipulate the theme or keyword weighting. It goes without saying that this is a big no-no.
14. Anchor text overuse. Once upon a time, SEO experts worked on linking certain keywords in order to reinforce their authority. Since the 2012 Penguin update, the over-use of anchor text linking is strongly discouraged. Switch out your forced, unnatural keyword links for honest links phrased in real English.
15. Neglecting hreflang. Neglecting what now? ‘Hreflang’ is designed to notify Google that you have intentionally published duplicate content for different languages or localities. The jury’s out as to whether it really helps, but using it can’t hurt in the meantime.
16. Website timing out or down. When a website goes down, everyone gets upset: the visitor, the webmaster and the search engine. If Google can’t find your site, it would rather de-index it rather than keep sending visitors to a dead end.
17. Keyword domains. While domain names aren’t that risky in themselves, domain names with keywords in might be. Consider the anchor text linking issue: if we repeatedly link to that domain, Google might see that as anchor text manipulation. If you do use an exact match domain, make sure it has plenty of great content on it, otherwise Google will assume you’re trying to fool people into clicking.
18. Rented links. Some experts still believe rented links are valid and useful for SEO. They pay for them on a monthly basis and change them around occasionally. However, we’d consider them paid links, and so would most of these experts on Quora.
19. Using blog networks. As far as Google is concerned, any kind of network is a sign of potential SERP manipulation. Most blog networks have now shut down or given users the chance to delete all of these incoming links. You should too.
20. Affiliate links all over the place. Google isn’t necessarily opposed to affiliate websites, but a high number of affiliate links is a red flag that the content may not be up to scratch. Although it’s possible to mask affiliate links with redirects, Google is wise to this tactic, so don’t rely on it.
21. Site-wide links. We all need to link pages together, but Google is constantly scanning those links for unnatural patterns. A classic example is a web developer credit in the footer of a page. Don’t just nofollow: remove them entirely.
22. Overusing meta keywords. Meta keywords have been a topic for debate for some time. They are way too easy to manipulate. Make sure you use no more than five per page.
23. Slow speeds. If your site’s slow to load, your users will get frustrated. Many, many factors affect hosting speeds, so this is quite a tricky problem to assess and troubleshoot. Use a caching plugin or a CDN right away. You could also move your site to a data center closer to your most frequent visitors: that’s a little more involved.
24. Spun content. Spinning is content theft. It could land you in hot water if the Google penalty doesn’t catch up with you first. Bought some super-cheap articles? Sometimes content is spun by the ‘writer’, so you may not even know about it. If the price was too good to be true, that’s a sign you may have bought spun articles.
25. Comment spam. Most commenting systems have an automated spam detection system, but some comments still make it through. Keep a close eye on the comments you’re getting. Also, don’t let spam build up; if you don’t have time to moderate it, switch commenting off entirely.
26. Black hat SEO advice. If you publish information about manipulating SERPs using black hat methods, expect to be penalized. Matt Cutts hinted at this in a video blog.
27. Hacked content. If your site has been hacked, Google will quickly remove it from SERPs. Act quickly to contain hacking attempts and restore sites from backup if the worst does happen.
28. Speedy link building. It’s natural to want your new site to rank quickly. Don’t overdo it. Lots of similar links pointing to the same place is a sign of automation. Don’t artificially bump your link velocity: make gradual changes over time.
29. Spam reports. Google has published an online form for spam site reporting. Your site might have been submitted as a potential source of spam, genuinely or maliciously.
30. Forum linking. We’ve all used forums awash with signature links. Sometimes there are so many, it can be hard to locate the actual posts. If you add a forum link, use good, natural linking techniques and consider making it a nofollow too.
31. Hiding your sponsors. Having a sponsor is no bad thing. Plenty of sites wouldn’t exist without them. Don’t try to hide your sponsors, but follow the rules: nofollow sponsor links and make sure Google’s news bot doesn’t crawl pages where those links can be found.
32. Robots.txt flaws. The robots.txt file should be used to tell search engines how to deal with your site. While there are legitimate reasons for excluding pages from robots.txt, do it sparingly: excessive blocking could be the cause of your penalty.
33. Links to suspicious sites. Never associate yourself with a website that is doing something ethically or legally dubious. Hacking, porn and malware-ridden sites should be avoided. Also, try to remove links to other sites that have been penalized in the past, assuming you know about it.
34. Landing pages. Businesses sometimes try to use multiple landing pages in order to improve their position in SERPs. Some companies also try to improve their position by creating lots of one-page websites optimized for a single keyword, then funneling users through to another site. Google considers this kind of thing to be bad practice.
35. Over-optimization. Google doesn’t like to see too much of a good thing. An over-optimization penalty usually means you’ve gone a step too far in your bid to obsessively out-SEO everyone else in your industry. Cool it and publish some natural content before your rank suffers.
36. Advertorials. The controversy around advertorial content was perhaps the most well-known of the pre-Penguin 2 debates. An advertorial is basically a page of content riddled with paid links, and often these pages were being used for aggressive manipulation of search results. The most famous example was Interflora: read about its penalty here.
37. Too many outbound links. When linking to other websites, keep it natural. A high quantity of links is a sign that you’re swapping links with people for the sake of mutual SEO benefit.
38. Redirection. If you’ve received a penalty on your site, using a 301 redirect could transfer the penalty to a new location. What’s more, the penalty could linger if you remove the redirect later. To be safe, don’t do it.
39. Error codes. Aside from the obvious 404 error, there are a range of others that Google really hates to see. 302 (temporarily moved) isn’t ideal; if you really must redirect something, use 301. Also, if you see any 500 errors, deal with the root cause as soon as you can. Find invisible errors with this WebConfs HTTP Header Check tool.
40. Duplicate metadata. Some blogging tools and CMS platforms make it all too easy to create duplicate metadata by accident. While metadata isn’t a cause for a penalty on its own, it can be a sign of a duplicate content issue on your site. In any case, it’s undesirable; try to deal with it.
41. Malicious backlinks. Your site NEVER deserves this penalty – but it is something you should know about. If you’re really unlucky, an unethical competitor may try to shove your site down the SERPs by getting it penalized. The most common cause is a malicious backlink campaign.
42. Targeted keywords. Google is waging war against some of the keywords most frequently appearing in spam sites. ‘Payday loans’ is a good example of a keyword that has already been targeted, although some people feel that it could do more. If you legitimately operate in an industry that’s rife with spam, expect to be caught in the crossfire.
43. Smuggled links. Don’t be sneaky and put links into script files. Google is much better at analyzing scripts and picking out weird links that shouldn’t be there.
44. Poor mobile websites. Google can normally detect a valid link between your mobile site and your website. If it’s poorly designed, it may not. Make sure the mobile site is sent to a device where the user agent is set to mobile. Matt Cutts also suggests using a separate subdomain.
45. Few outbound links. Google wants to see content that references other content of a similar standard. If you don’t share the love, it might look like an attempt to attract traffic unnaturally.
46. Domain has a bad rep. You may have innocently purchased a domain with a bad history, and that could cause you problems when you try to build a new site around it. Unfortunately this is often a dead end street; you may be best cutting your losses and buying another domain rather than throwing more money at the problem.
47. Content theft. Even if you don’t steal content, someone else could steal yours. This is troublesome, since getting the content removed could involve filing multiple DMCA takedown notices or pursuing sites in court. If you’re penalized for this, try asking Google to remove the stolen content.
48. Prominent ads. Advertising is OK when treated as a secondary concern. Ads should never dominate the page content or play second fiddle to an article or blog.
49. Using a content farm. Over the two years since Panda was phased in, it has been considered poor form to buy content from a ‘farm’ (defined as “sites with shallow or low-quality content”). If your content is poorly researched, light on detail or exists mainly to fill up the page, employ a professional rewrite it.
50. Beware of quick fixes. Don’t employ anyone that claims to have a magical, foolproof technique that will help to get your site to the top of the SERPs. The only way to rank well is to put in the groundwork over time.

How to Deal With a Penalty

Figured out the cause for your penalty? You’re halfway to fixing it – if it’s fixable at all.

Every problem will require a slightly different solution, but here are some things you can try.

• Don’t panic. Even massive websites suffer from penalties.
• Disavow troublesome links. Ask Google not to count troublesome links that are harming your website. Here’s the link to the disavow tool, and here’s Matt Cutts’ advice on the subject.
• Get some links removed. While disavow is good, it’s not perfect. Put in some legwork and try to get some of the links taken down.
• Request reconsideration if your penalty was manual.
• Wait it out. Sometimes it takes Google a while to act on your changes and disavow requests, and then it could take a while for it to re-crawl your site.

In a few cases, it’s better to abandon a site rather than fight a Google penalty: if your domain has been tarnished, there’s little you can do. But most penalties can be fixed with a little effort, some hard work and an ethical approach to rebuilding your site.

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Best Website Monitoring Tools and Services/Review of the Best Website Monitoring Tools and Services. When I open a website, I want it to run fast that too without any breaks. If what I expect is not available or if it has uptime with poor quality then I instantly switch to another website.

And end up finishing my task like looking for information, placing orders, etc. with the one that works better. Thereafter, I shall give priority to the one I used with a better experience. Just like me, many others follow the same logic and such customers do not go back to the websites with poor speed or downtime.

Thus, the customer’s experience is directly proportional to the business of the websites. Customers with bad experiences bring loss to the business.

Hence nowadays, the owners of company websites have started giving more importance to the stability and constant availability/uptime of the websites. For this purpose, each organization uses different uptime testing tools to monitor their full-time accessibility and website unavailability to the customers.

The current market has many such uptime testing tools. Most of which are free of cost. By using such tools one can get notified as and when the URL goes down or when the website is unavailable.

Using such uptime testing tools is always reasonable than making a manual team to continuously monitor the screen for the downtime issues. In this article, we will take a look at the most popular Uptime Testing Tools that are available in the market along with their key features.

Best Website Monitoring Tools And Services

Given below are some popular open-source free website monitor service:

#1) SolarWinds Web Performance Software

Solarwinds Web Performance Monitor can find and fix internal as well as external site and app performance issues. It will perform the complete performance monitoring and continuous synthetic transaction monitoring. It will give you detailed load-time metrics.

Key Features

• Web Performance Monitor provides an intuitive, browser-based transaction recorder that can record complex, multi-step transactions.
• It can monitor a lot of applications from multiple locations.
• It provides an intuitive dashboard so that you will be able to quickly see and troubleshoot issues.
• You can track sites and apps that are inside or outside your firewall.
• It will let you generate out-of-the-box and custom website performance reports for page load speeds, transaction health, website uptime, etc.
• It follows a simple pricing model i.e. based on the number of monitored transactions and locations. The price starts at $2055 and it offers a free trial.

#2) eG Innovations

eG Innovations is a converged application performance and IT infrastructure monitoring solution that is intended to answer the toughest question facing IT, administrators, today, which is “why is my application slow?”.

Using synthetic and real user monitoring capabilities, it tracks the digital experience of applications 24×7. Detailed code-level insights using tag-and-follow byte-code instrumentation helps identify application code inefficiencies, slow queries, third party slowness, etc.

eG Enterprise monitors every layer and every tier of the infrastructure supporting business applications, using a universal monitoring technology. Everything from hardware to storage to virtualization to containers is monitored from a single pane of glass.

It provides exceptional accuracy when automatically pinpointing the cause of IT service slowdowns, using an automated root-cause diagnosis technology. It auto-correlates the user experience with the underlying infrastructure and application components and makes application performance monitoring easy, effective, and efficient.

Key Features

• Monitor any type of application (web, thin client, SAP, SaaS applications) and any infrastructure (physical, virtual, hybrid, cloud).
• Monitors all aspects of digital user experience for web applications and provides insights for rapid triage of problems.
• It provides application code-level visibility that will help developers to detect and fix performance issues if any, and ensure an optimal end-user experience.
• End-to-end visibility and automated diagnosis simplify application performance troubleshooting.

=> Visit eG Innovations Website

#3) Site24x7

Site 24/7 is the simplest tool to keep a check on the website’s uptime.

It is free of cost for 5 websites and 10 alerts per month. After which it costs $9 per month for 10 websites in 8 different test locations and 50 alerts.

Key Features

• It covers many locations in the world, to monitor a website’s page load and pace, in major areas of the globe.
• It does Transaction monitoring, Network monitoring, and Server monitoring.
• It also monitors Critical Cloud-based applications and identifies different errors.
• It supports many protocols like HTTPS, HTTP, TCP, PING, DNS, etc.
• It is linked to services such as Zapier and Pager Duty for notifications.
• Its plan also includes verification of checks and alerts.
• It takes care of outages and root cause analysis of the server issues.

Official Website: Site24x7

#4) Pingdom

Pingdom offers free monitoring of the website. Its free monitoring is limited to one website only and requires credit card information too. This tool is very popular in paid monitoring services and is used by many big organizations.

Its presentation of reports as the public status page is very reliable and beautiful too. Minimally, it costs $14.95 for the uptime checking of websites or servers.

Key Features

• It provides more than 60 locations for monitoring a website.
• It takes care of alerts via email or SMS and of website testing too.
• It includes monitoring of page speed.
• It also offers additional features that might not be available in other uptime tools.

Official Website: Pingdom

#5) SiteUptime

SiteUPtime is an open-source tool with the limitation of one website uptime testing for 30-60 minutes. A user can validate for eight different locations across five continents.

For paid plans, it provides some other additional services as well.

Key Features:

• It validates the uptime testing status with instant reports.
• It monitors – HTTPS, SSL, Web Page content, DNS, POP3, SMPT, TCP Ports, FTP, and pings.
• A user can configure email or alert triggers for getting 1-5 errors.
• A user can get emails or alerts when the website is up again.
• The detailed reports of all failures and monthly logs are available to the user to browse through an account control panel.

Official Website: SiteUPtime

#6) Monitis

Monitis is one of the popular and multiple service provider tools. It is used by many big organizations like Siemens, Puma, etc. Monitor.us uptime testing tool is another most popular and trusted tool used by business giants like eBay, ADOBE, etc.

It is now merged with Monitis. It gives a 15-day trial option with unlimited monitoring. The cost of paid plans depends upon the number of monitors and monitoring locations.

Key Features:

• It is used to monitor websites, networks, applications, servers, cloud, etc with a root cause analysis.
• It allows more than 30 locations across the globe to monitor uptime.
• Detailed reporting is available in the form of email alerts and SMS.
• Multiple protocols can be used like HTTP, PING, HTTPS, DNS, POP3, IMAP, TCP, etc.
• It provides interval checks of 1 minute.
• It also provides an archive of the last 2 years’ performance.

Official Website: Monitis

#7) Montastic

Montastic is a quite old, but very user-friendly and an open-source uptime testing tool. This tool validates the availability or the uptime of the website and acknowledges the same by sending warnings of the website crashes via RSS or e-mail.

A user can monitor 3 websites with the free option with 30 min check intervals.

Key Features:

• A user can monitor 15-200 websites with 5 min check intervals from a paid account.
• Most of its check locations are from the US for open source. For paid users, they provide additional locations worldwide.
• It supports HTTPS, HTTP, and an end-user interface.
• It acknowledges uptime as well as downtime in the reports.
• They have their windows or Mac widgets to send messages or warnings, apart from sending them via emails or RSS.
• Paid plans are also available from $5 to $29 with some additional features.
• It has a REST developer API.

Official Website: Montastic

#8) UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is another popular uptime testing open-source tool. It allows a user with a free account to monitor 50 sites with 5 min intervals and a two months log. It keeps checking the code in the header of the website and warns with the message on finding any problem.

Key Features:

• Like other uptime testing tools, it also provides paid services at $5.50 per month with some additional features.
• A user can validate uptime, downtime and response time too.
• It checks HTTP, HTTPS, port, ping, and keywords.
• It provides a user with 12 different locations for monitoring.
• It allows a user to ignore minor level downtimes by specific settings.
• The methods for sending alerts are E-mail, RSS, Twitter, Slack, Push, Hipch, SMS, etc.

Official Website: UptimeRobot

#9) HostTracker

HostTracker is a very strong uptime testing tool. It works great for alerting and tracking during downtime. Many popular companies like Colgate, Microsoft, Panasonic, etc are using this tool.

With its free plan, a user can monitor 2 websites in every 30 minutes. Paid plans come with enhanced features and unlimited alerts.

Key Features:

• Two different websites can be monitored in two different domains.
• The reports are available on a yearly, quarterly, monthly and weekly basis.
• Issues are informed via e-mail or SMS.
• The protocols which are supported are HTTP, HTTPS, ping, AMTP, port, Oracle, POP3, MS SQL, etc.
• Its paid plan starts with $3.35 per month for 5 websites.
• A user can track useful data and get distributed monitoring.

Official Website: HostTracker

#10) Are My Sites Up?

Are My Sites Up? is also an open-source web tool for uptime testing of websites. The user with the free account of a 15 day trial period can test 5 different websites, 25 TIMES A DAY, for uptime and receive email/SMS alerts on poor performance.

Key Features:

• The free account can be shared with two or more users to monitor the website uptime.
• The minimum paid plan starts from $2.92 per month with some additional features.
• The tool provides access to iPhone and Android applications to view, delete, add or edit all the websites in the account.
• The check time is 1 min for a free account and 5-15 min for paid accounts.

Official Website: Are My Sites Up?

#11) FreeSiteStatus

FreeSiteStatus is a web-based uptime testing application. This tool is very reliable and fast.

The free account is available with 60 min monitoring for a 14-day trial but with limited features.

Key Features:

• The application has a feature of ‘Quick Test’ for instant monitoring of website performance.
• The paid account costs $2.0 per month for monitoring and $.25 per SMS.
• It supports protocols like HTTP, HTTPS. POP3, FTP, My SQL, etc.
• It sends alerts via email, SMS, and Push.
• Multiple locations worldwide are available for monitoring websites.
• Reports and performances are represented in a graphical format for better understanding.

Official Website: FreeSiteStatus

#12) Uptrends

Uptrends is one of the most popular website/web applications uptime testing tools. The tool provides uptime information, to the website users, all the time.

The free trial of 30 days is available for this tool with limited features. In which it allows 10 websites monitoring with 1-60 min checks at worldwide locations.

Key Features:

• Its free trial is available with no credit card details.
• More than 150 worldwide checkpoints are available for monitoring with this tool.
• Its paid plan starts from $11 per month.
• Multi-Browser monitoring is available in its Advanced Business plan. Which includes waterfall report, third-party content and mobile web monitoring.
• The reports or alerts are sent by email or SMS.

Official Website: Uptrends

#13) Uptime Doctor

By using the Uptime Doctor tool, for uptime testing, a user can test 5 websites with a 1 min interval, at a free of cost.

The alerts will be sent via email or push messages on android as per the user’s choice.

Official Website: Uptime Doctor

#14) AppBeat

AppBeat uptime testing tool has paid as well as a free plan in it.

Under the free plan, a user can monitor 50 sites at 5 min intervals and get the reports in 100 emails.

Official Website: AppBeat

#15) InternetSeer

InternetSeer is considered to be the uptime testing tool with the largest monitoring websites in the world.

It has a standard plan as a free trial for one website at 60 min checks.

Official Website: InternetSeer

#16) Status Cake

Status Cake also provides a free plan apart from the paid ones.

Its paid plans start from $24.49. This paid plan has slower intervals, limited test locations and missing advanced monitoring features in it.

Official Website: Status Cake

#17) Observu

Observu is a very simple uptime testing tool with free as well as paid plans.

A user can monitor 5 to 50 plus websites and APIs by automatically using multiple locations worldwide.

Official Website: Observu

#18) Livewatch

Livewatch uptime testing tool is a free and simple web to monitor the website instantly.

Rest other plans are paid ones and it provides proper PDF reports of any failures or downtimes that occur.

Official Website: Livewatch

#19) UPTIMIA

The UPTIMIA uptime testing tool also provides a free account.

It monitors the availability of HTTPS, HTTP, DNS, TCP, UDP, Email services and others along with the website performance with a real chrome browser.

Official Website: UPTIMIA

#20) Insping

Insping is one of the simplest uptime testing and performance monitoring tool.

Its free plan includes two URLs, in 5 min intervals, with two users and floating locations.

Official Website: Insping

#21) Binary Canary

Binary Canary uptime testing tool with a free account monitors 5 websites with 15 min frequency, from multiple locations.

While the paid plan starts with $5 per month and can monitor 5 to 100 websites with 1-minute frequency, from global locations.

Official Website: Binary Canary

#22) idera.com

ideara.com uptime testing tool is good for SQL server performance monitoring 24/7 from anywhere.

Official Website: ideara.com

#23) Happy Apps

Happy Apps is a good performance and uptime testing tool.

It provides a large number of checks in a few seconds with an easy setup of alerts via email and SMS.

Official Website: Happy Apps

Conclusion

By using the above-mentioned Website Monitoring Services, anyone can save their business beforehand. Once the user gets the alerts of the downtime or other issues, they can instantly resolve the issue before it’s too late.

Apart from the above popular tools, there are some more uptime testing tools around. You just need to explore the one which suits best and reasonable for your website.

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Top Website Application Performance Monitoring Tools In this era of Information Technology, Application Performance Management (APM) monitors the performance of software applications.

APM ensures that it provides services to the customer up to the level defined and identifies the problems related to the application performance. Application performance can be monitored or tracked using different categories like load time, the response time of the application, etc.

Nowadays, with the use of technology the applications are becoming more and more complex and distributed. Hence it is necessary to monitor the performance of an application to provide greater satisfaction to the end-user

Top Website Application Performance Monitoring Tools

Here are the complete details of the most popular Website and Application Performance Monitoring APM Tools.

#1) Traceview

Earlier it was known as Tracelytics which was acquired by AppNeta and now it is a part of SolarWinds.

SolarWinds was found in 1999 with its headquarter in Texas, USA. More than 150 employees are working here and it has revenue of $429 million.

It is an Application Performance Monitoring tool for web applications. It provides a deep insight into the application, better end-user experience, and is a very cost-effective performance monitoring tool.

Key Features

• Traceview supports Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.
• It monitors, web applications and SaaS applications.
• Traceview supports a detailed level of code-level performance monitoring.
• It fixes the problem with a real user monitoring system.
• It supports online as well as email and phone support.

=> Download Free

#2) eG Innovations

eG Innovations is an industry leader in application performance and IT infrastructure monitoring. Founded in 2001, eG Innovations has expanded its portfolio over the years to support monitoring for over 180 applications including Java, .NET, SAP, SharePoint, Office 365, and more.

Hundreds of organizations around the world use eG Innovations’ flagship application performance monitoring software, eG Enterprise, to solve their IT challenges such as slow apps, downtime, code-level errors, capacity issues, hardware faults, config changes, and so on.

eG Enterprise helps application managers, developers, DevOps, and IT Ops personnel detect the root cause of application performance issues and troubleshoot faster.

Key Features of eG Enterprise

• Monitor the digital experience of users as they access applications and be the first to know when their user experience is affected.
• Get code-level visibility into applications using distributed transaction tracing and identify reasons for slowness: code errors, slow queries, slow remote calls, etc.
• Benefit from deep-dive performance insight into the application infrastructure: JVMs, CLRs, application servers, message queues, databases, and more.
• Auto-discover dependencies between applications and underlying IT components (network, virtualization, cloud, container, etc.) and construct topology maps.
• Isolate the root cause of performance slowdowns using built-in correlative intelligence and machine learning.

=> Visit eG Innovations Website

#3) Datadog

Datadog APM enables you to analyze and isolate dependencies, remove bottlenecks, reduce latency, track errors, and increase code efficiency to optimize your application.

Distributed traces correlate seamlessly with browser sessions, logs, profiles, synthetic tests, process-level data, and infrastructure metrics, giving you full visibility into your application’s health across all hosts, containers, proxies, and serverless functions.

Features

• Seamlessly correlate between application performance to logs and underlying infrastructure metrics in one integrated platform.
• Tracing without Limits – Search and analyze 100% of traces (no sampling) in real-time and retain only the ones that matter to you using tag-based rules.
• Continuous Profiling – Analyze code-level performance across your entire stack with minimal overhead, identify your most resource-consuming methods (CPU, memory, etc.) using tags, and correlate it with relevant requests and traces.
• Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetics – Measure and improve your front-end application performance and end-user experience in real-time or by simulating controlled browser and API tests, and tie them to relevant traces, logs, and infrastructure metrics.
• Auto-detect anomalies to surface issues and reduce alert fatigue with ML-based Watchdog.
• Navigate applications seamlessly with the Service Map and other out-of-the-box dashboards and visualizations to reduce resolution time and release features more quickly.
• With over 400 turn-key integrations, Datadog seamlessly aggregates metrics and events across your full DevOps stack.

=> Visit Datadog Website

#4) Sematext APM

Sematext APM provides real-time end-to-end visibility into web application performance by tracing individual and business transactions to detect the slowest and under-performing parts of your application. It helps troubleshoot faster and improve user experience.

Key Features

• See how applications interact with underlaying components, databases and external services in real-time.
• Real-time alerting helps discover anomalies before they impact the end-user.
• Get code-level visibility to pinpoint root causes for performance issues and reduce MTTR.
• Ability to track & filter database operations and slow SQL to detect the most time-consuming transactions.
• Custom pointcuts (for JVM).
• Sematext AppMap shows inter-component communication and their throughput, latency, error rates, etc.

=> Visit Sematext Website

#5) ManageEngine Applications Manager

ManageEngine Applications Manager is a comprehensive application performance monitoring software built for today’s complex, dynamic environments. It gives deep performance insight into business-critical applications – both within the data center and on the cloud. It is easy to use and can be set up in minutes.

Key Features

• Agent-based monitoring with byte-code instrumentation and code-level diagnostics for Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, and Ruby applications.
• Synthetic transaction monitoring from multiple geographical locations for multi-page end-user workflow simulation.
• Out-of-the-box support for over a hundred applications and infrastructure elements.
• Extensively monitor hybrid cloud, virtual, and container technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker.
• Identify and resolve the root-cause of issues faster with automated application discovery, tracing, and diagnostics (ADTD).
• Anticipate future resource utilization and growth with machine learning-enabled analytics.

Applications Manager is used by users in varied roles such as IT Operations, DBAs, DevOps engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, application developers, application owners, Cloud Ops, etc. in 5000+ businesses worldwide.

#6) New Relic

New Relic was established in 2008 by Lew Cirne. New Relic has grown so fast and quickly that now it has become an integral tool for developers, IT support teams and business executives. It is now servicing thousands of customers to improve the software or application performance.

New Relic is spread across the globe with offices in San Francisco, Portland, Dublin, Sydney, London, Zurich, and Munich. New Relic has a fantastic growth rate and it delivers around $263 million in revenue in the current fiscal year 2017 and it has a year on year growth of 45%.

New Relic APM provides the facility to drill down the application of performance-related problems.

It provides performance-related metrics as given below

• Response Time, Throughput, Error Rates, etc.
• Performance of external services.
• Most time-consuming transactions.
• Cross-Application Tracing.
• Transaction breakdown.
• Deployment Analysis, History, and Comparison.

New Relic supports languages like Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, and PHP. And it also provides performance monitoring for mobile apps, advanced browser performance, and infrastructure monitoring.

=> Visit New Relic Website

#7) AppDynamics

AppDynamics is an American Application Performance Management Company that was found in 2008 and is based out of San Francisco. More than 1000 employees are currently working with a revenue of $118 million in 2017. It was ranked #9 in the Forbes list among 100 top Cloud companies.

AppDynamics is part of Cisco now; Cisco has completed the acquisition in March 2017. AppDynamics provides end to end, real-time performance of complex and distributed applications.

It has the following key features

• It supports languages like Java, Node.js, PHP, .NET, Python, C++, etc.
• Sends the alert for a business-critical issue with automatic performance base-lining.
• Resolves production application performance issues by monitoring each and every line of the code.
• Using AppDynamics, the root cause of any issue can be easily identified and fixed.
• Using the alerts and Response, Appdynamics automatically discovers what is normal with the performance.

Visit the official site: AppDynamics

#8) Opsview

opsview is a software company which was launched in 2005 with its headquarters at Reading, England. It has offices in the United States at Woburn, Massachusetts.

opsview Application Monitoring tools provide a single view of the entire infrastructure and the performance of business applications. In the digital technology era, multiple applications are deployed at multiple locations so it is a very challenging task to get the performance data and display in a single context.

But opsview makes it easier using its automated and unified approach.

Key Features

• Opsview tracks the health and alerts of the application when it is not normal and before the end-user gets impacted
• It tracks the database availability and its connectivity with the client, storage metrics
• Opsview ensures that business-critical applications are meeting their SLAs
• It works with other Opsview product such as Opsview Mobile

Visit the official site: Opsview

#9) Dynatrace

Dynatrace was launched in 2006 with its headquarters in Massachusetts, USA. Currently, around 2000 employees are working for Dynatrace. It has around $354 million in revenue in the financial year 2017.

Dynatrace Application Monitoring tool monitors and manages the performance of the software application. Along with that it also ensures the availability of the software application. All the individual and business transactions are monitored deeply at the code level by dynatrace APM.

It monitors real data, application performance, cloud environment, and infrastructure.

Key Features

• Dynatrace supports .NET and Java.
• End to end and code-level monitoring is done by dynatrace APM.
• It delivers better digital customer experience by understanding how the performance of an application is important to business growth
• It resolves problems proactively before the end-user gets impacted.
• This proactive approach has reduced the time to resolve the issue and it also saves the resources used for identification and resolution of the issue.
• The performance issue is discovered using artificial intelligence.

#10) Zenoss

Zenoss is a leader in hybrid IT monitoring and analytics software. It was launched in 2005 with its headquarters in Austin, Texas, USA. It has three software offerings – Zenoss core (Open source), Zenoss Service dynamics (Commercial software) and Zenoss as a Service (ZaaS).

Zenoss has a huge application monitoring capacity- that it monitors 1.2 million devices and 17 billion data points in a day. Zenoss won the Forbes award in 2016 for “Best Enterprise Software Startups and CEOs to Work For”

Key Features

• Zenoss reduces downtime with proactive application monitoring.
• Resolves the issues with seamless Infrastructure before the end-user gets impacted due to the issue.
• Zenoss can automatically monitor application events and provide immediate alerts & notification.
• Zenoss can integrate with leading APM vendor such as New Relic, AppDyanmics, Dynatrace, etc

Visit the official site: Zenoss

#11) Dell Foglight

DELL is a multinational computer technology company based out of Texas, United States and was established in 1984. DELL has around 138,000 employees across the globe. DELL acquired Quest software in 2012. Quest Software was well known as one of the leaders in 2011 for Application Performance Monitoring.

Dell Foglight monitors the performance of an application across various technologies such as .NET Java. It also provides various analytical dashboards, better user experience, and cross-mapping between an application and the database.

Foglight quickly identifies and resolves the issues related to applications, virtual environments, and databases. Foglight can be integrated with different other tools to monitor application performance along with the Infrastructure performance.

Key Features

• Foglight supports languages like Java, .NET, AJAX, etc.
• It is used to monitor Application Performance, database monitoring, storage platform performance, etc.
• It helps to improve compliance with the end-users SLA.
• Foglight captures user transactions to monitor the application health.

Visit the official site: Dell Foglight

#12) Stackify Retrace

Stackify was launched in 2012 by Matt Watson with its headquarters in Kansas, USA. It had a revenue of around $1 million in 2016. Stackify has been rewarded 2016 Editors’ Choice Award by PC Magazine for its tremendous work of Application Performance Monitoring. Stackify reported a 300% revenue growth in 2016.

Stackify provides an application performance monitoring tool – Retrace and with the help of Retrace, Stackify has around 1000 customers including small companies as well as giant organizations like Xerox, Microsoft, Honeywell, etc.

Key Features

• It supports .NET, Java and various other frameworks.
• Retrace can be integrated with other tools and it supports various environments.
• It is a SaaS-based APM tool and is designed specifically for developers.
• Retrace identifies the problems using detailed code-level performance trace.
• Retrace maintains the health of various servers and applications.
• It collects the details of all the applications stack and identifies its impact on performance.

Visit the official site: Stackify Retrace

#13) Application Insights

Microsoft is one of the reputed software company launched in 1975 with its headquarters in Washington, USA. More than 124,000 employees are working with a revenue of $90 billion. Microsoft jumps into the Application Performance Monitoring tool market by releasing “Application Insights”, which will help the organizations to understand how their applications are performing.

Application Insights is more focused on developers and is designed to monitor the application performance and to collect data to help in troubleshooting and improving the performance of the application.

Key Features

• Application Insights works with .NET, C++, PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, etc.
• It works with Window-based application along with Android and iOS platforms.
• Application Insights is used to monitor the response time for various requests, CPU, network, memory usage, etc.
• Quickly identifies any problem and finds out the root cause of the issue and fixes it immediately.
• It has a powerful alerting system such as response time, email, various metrics, etc.
• It provides various metrics and dashboards to ensure that an application is available and running.

Visit the official site: Application Insights

#14) CA Technologies

CA Technologies was launched in 1976 and is headquartered in New York, USA. It has more than 12K employees currently with a revenue of $4 billion.

CA Application Performance Monitoring supports web, mobile, cloud, mainframe, etc. It monitors the application performance and provides greater customer experience. CA APM is available on-premises for enterprise customers.

Key Features

• It identifies the problems quickly and resolves them immediately.
• Easily monitors application and simulates real user transactions.
• It safeguards the application performance from Mobile to Mainframe.
• Improvement in the digital performance of the application and customer journey.
• Simplifying and speeding up the detection and resolution of the issues results in reducing time and efforts.
• It provides better metrics when compared to other APM tools.
• It is easy to deploy and a stable APM tool.

Visit the official site: CA Technologies

#15) IT-Conductor

IT-Conductor is an enterprise-grade IT/SAP Service Management solution in the Cloud providing End-User Experience Monitoring, App & Infrastructure Monitoring, Impact Analysis, Root Cause Analysis, Notification, and IT Process Automation. IT-Conductor Automates so your IT Operations can Accelerate!

Minimize Noise > Maximize Performance.

It has the following key features:

• APMaaS (Application Performance Management as a Service): Monitor & Manage SAP WITHOUT Installation, Subscription-based, easy wizard-based setup, Powerful best-practices service management templates will save effort and operation costs.
• Proactive Performance Management: Pinpoint Problems with Performance & Availability, Unified service level management provides uniform support of new technologies, components, and architectures.
• Automated: Automate Root-cause Analysis by making sense of Application Diagnostics, Integrated Infrastructure provides IT process & runbook automation, including job scheduling.

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen the various Application Performance Monitoring tools.

There are still a lot of APM tools available in the market which can be chosen based on the project need and application performance.

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Top Penetration Testing/ Vulnerability Scanning Software /At times, I have seen testers and business owners getting mistaken to understand the basic idea behind the penetration test and vulnerability scan.

They both are often confused as the same services. When the business is unable to decide whether to go for a penetration test or vulnerability test. Is penetration testing same as vulnerability testing or are they different? If they are different then are they related? Which one to choose – Penetration test or Vulnerability test?

We will try to find out the answers to all the above questions in this tutorial.

Top Penetration Testing/ Vulnerability Scanning Software

To begin with, I would like you to read five sentences

• Bananas grow on a Tree.
• A normal human being uses only 10% of his brain.
• Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis in old age.
• Bats are blind.
• Penetration testing is same as that of Vulnerability scan.

Can you guess one common thing among all the above statements? They all are Myths. Yes, that’s right. They all are indeed myths.

However, in this tutorial of ours, we are bothered neither about the Bananas nor the Bats. All we care is about Penetration testing being compared to the Vulnerability scan. To know more about the comparison or to prove that the statement is a myth, we will first analyze Penetration testing and Vulnerability scan separately.

Penetration Testing Intro

A Penetration test is also known as “Pen Test” in short. This kind of test is done to a system to find a way into the system. This may expose the important data that is stored by the system to the outside world.

In general, the penetration testing target can be of White box type or Black box type.

Black Box Penetration Testing

Typically, the tester is not provided with any details of the system except the name. This is very similar to real life hacks where the hacker is not aware of anything else other than the name of the application.

Black box testing replicates the real-life conditions and is not time-consuming. However, because of unknown areas related to source code and infrastructure, there is always a possibility of missed out portions of the system.

White Box Penetration Testing:

In this process, all the necessary data related to the system which has to undergo penetration testing is provided to the Tester.

The data can be network architecture, system configurations, source codes etc. This is a lengthier process than that of Black Box type Pen testing. This is a thorough process and has a deeper coverage when compared to the Black box type.

Pen testing is always performed with the permission/request from the client. Performing Pen testing on a site without the owner’s consent is illegal and can be termed as Hacking.

By now, we know what penetration testing is, and it’s time to know the reason why organizations opt for it. It is said, better to be safe than sorry. Pen testing makes an architecture stronger and resistant to attacks.

Vulnerability Scan Intro

A vulnerability scan is used to find out the vulnerabilities/weakness in a system. This task is performed by running an application [called as the vulnerability scanner] on the target computer. These applications or scanners can be executed directly on the target computer or from a network location.

Network location comes into picture for bigger organizations whereas it is not feasible to execute the scanner on the local computers all the time.

Now, How do you know which scanner can work for your application? The answer is pretty simple. That is, the Vulnerability scanners hardly use the system details/parameters while scanning.

All they need is the IP of the system. With the IP alone, a vulnerability scanner can find out the potential places where an attack can be performed on the system.

There are situations where a company has Intranet and not all the computers are exposed to the internet world. In that case, the vulnerability scanner has to be run from within the Intranet by which the scanning for both internal vulnerabilities as well as the external vulnerabilities can be caught.

Once a test/scanning is completed, the scanner helps in getting a report displaying all the possible vulnerabilities. The report generated has various data related to the vulnerabilities in it.

The data ranges from, the server statistics [based on vulnerability index], the status of different services running on different servers, the status of the vulnerabilities found based on their severity level.

Once a report is generated, it has to be analyzed to find out the real situation. Not all the time, the vulnerabilities found are that serious. There might be cases, where the scanner will pull the name just because the data which was expected doesn’t match the output. But, that may not be a true vulnerability after all.

That is the reason why further analysis has to be done on a vulnerability scan report to find out if the vulnerability found is a right one or not.

Penetration Testing Vs Vulnerability Scanning

We now know what a Penetration testing process is and what vulnerability scanning is.

Now proceeding with a head-head clash between the two giants would be a fun-filled one.

Example:

We shall get into a real-life example to understand the difference between the two.

Let’s take Mr. X for an example. Mr. X is a heist specialist. We shall observe his plan for his next heist. He is planning to rob a Bank present in the middle of the city.

The Bank building is surrounded by a Police station, a Fire station, a Public Park [which stays closed at night] and a Pond. The bank building is a 20 floored building with a helipad on the top of it. Before he actually robs the bank, he needs to find the possible entry points into the Bank building.

The sides of the building that has a Police station and Fire station are impossible to breach. They operate 24X7 and who would dare to rob a bank using Cop’s den as the entry point! That leaves Mr. X with 3 other options. Yes, you got it right. He is also having the Roof as an Entry point [Remember Heath Ledger from the Batman Trilogy?].

The Rooftop seems to be an odd choice here as the building is only 20 floored and the chances of getting caught by people around you is very high. And, the Bank is the only single high rise building standing in the area. So, that makes the Roof entry a big NO! With the two leftover options, Mr. X starts analyzing the Lake as an entry point.

Lake can be a good mode of entry but, the visibility would be a concern. How would someone react if they see someone swimming at the midnight, that too towards the Bank building? The last option is Public Park.

Let’s analyze the park in detail. It is closed to the public after six in the evening. Park has a lot of trees that give the necessary shadow and supports for stealth mode. The park has a boundary wall that is shared with the Bank premises.

Now, all the analysis above can be said as a Vulnerability scan. A scanner does all these things. To find out a vulnerable position to get in.

Going back to our story, let’s assume that Mr. X becomes successful in entering the bank through the Public park entry point. What does he do next? Whether he breaks into the Vault to get the cash or the deposit lockers to get the valuables.

This part is the Penetration testing. You get access and try to exploit the system. You get to know the depth that you can go with this attack.

Note: No banks were robbed while writing this tutorial. And, it is also not advisable to follow the footsteps of Mr. X.

I am leaving you with the below comparison chart so that you can get more clarity on the difference between the two.

Is Vulnerability Scan & Penetration Testing Related to each other?

Yes, Vulnerability scan and penetration testing are related to each other. Penetration testing has a dependency over the vulnerability scan.

To initiate Penetration testing, a complete vulnerability scan is done so that the tester gets to know any vulnerabilities that are present in the system and then exploit them.

So, with a vulnerability scan, we get to know the possible vulnerabilities but these vulnerabilities are unexploited till this point. It is penetration testing that confirms the extent up to which the vulnerability is possible to be exploited.

They also intersect with each other at certain points as shown in the below image

Which one to Choose – Pen Test or Vulnerability Scan?

Having understood the difference between them both, now the question arises as – which one to choose?

Well, the goal of a vulnerability scan is to find out the weaknesses of your system and fix them. Whereas, the goal of penetration testing is to find if someone can break your system and if yes, then what will be the depth of attack & how much meaningful data can they obtain.

Together, a vulnerability scan & pen test can tell you what is at risk and how it can be fixed. The aim is to improve the overall security of your system. You need to choose between the two depending on the criticality of your business. If you go for a pen test, then it covers a vulnerability scan as well.

However, a pen test is very costly (around $4,000 to $20,000) and a time-consuming one as well compared to a vulnerability scan. The reason being it brings very accurate and thorough results and it eliminates false positive vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, a vulnerability scan is very quick and far cheaper (nearly $100 per IP, per year, depending on the vendor) than a pen test. As an organization, you can go for vulnerability scans on a monthly, quarterly or even weekly basis. And, opt for a pen test annually.

Most Popular Tools

Some of the commonly used tools for Vulnerability Scanning include:

• Nessus
• Nikto
• SAINT
• OpenVAS, etc.

Commonly used tools for Pen Test include:

• Qualys
• Core Impact
• Metasploit etc.

Pen testers also write their own exploit code as per the requirement.

Conclusion

From this tutorial, we realize that both Pen Test and Vulnerability Scan are entirely two different activities that are performed to make the application safer from attacks. They can also be used together if required.

Vulnerability test identifies the possible loopholes and Pen test exploits these loopholes to uncover the extent of damage/theft that can happen to the business-critical information. They are done to fix the loopholes and avoid any potential attacks and security breaches to the information system.

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Best Android Application Testing Tools nowadays automated tests are used during almost every testing process. This is not surprising, as properly organized automated testing greatly reduces the time needed for a testing process, excludes errors and omissions in tests execution caused by a human factor.

There is a wide choice of tools for automation. Some of them are free, some are rather expensive. Some automation tools were created years ago; some have just appeared on the market. Each tool is unique and possesses certain characteristics.

A wide choice of available automation tools makes it difficult to select the most suitable ones for a project. The problem is that hardly any of the existing tools fully corresponds to project requirements.

In Order to Make Automated Tests Effective and Profitable One Should

• Research the software product under test and the project;
• Clearly, determine what tests are to be automated;
• Formulate requirements to the automated tests and the tools for automation;
• Study at least several available and more or less suitable tools for automation;
• Select the most suitable one or more tools basing on the researches;
• Discuss the chosen automation tools with other project parties, explain the choice, and get their approval;
• Proceed to tests automation.

Such an approach and sequence of steps would be approved by most of the quality assurance experts.

Many different kinds of computers have appeared recently, their appearance started the rapid development of software products. The most amazing is the evolution of mobile devices; they significantly differ from common personal computers by characteristics, ways, and conditions of interaction with them.

Consequently, smartphones and tablets require special mobile applications that differ from desktop ones.

The operating system of most of the personal computers is Windows. Among popular mobile operating systems are Android, Apple iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone, Symbian and others.

Top 11 Android Testing Tools

Let’s explore modern tools for automated testing of applications supported on one of the most widespread mobile operating system – Android.

Here is the list of the best Android Application Testing tools:

• 21labs
• Appium
• Selendroid
• Calabash
• Robotium
• monkeyrunner
• Ranorex
• UI Automator
• Kobiton
• Testdroid
• TestComplete
• Experitest

Best Android Application Developing Tools

#1) 21 – AI Test Creation And Analytics For Android

21 is a sophisticated, self-learning test automation and analytics platform for Android applications.

21 Offers

• Fast and intelligent authoring – AI that pre-builds tests with a full-featured editor for customizing your tests
• Results you trust – Seamless algorithmic locators system to support automated tests across native, React, Cordova, Flutter, Ionic, and other frameworks. No locators needed.
• Eliminate maintenance and flaky results – Self-learning maintenance autonomously updates tests and assures your team can focus on developing new features while relying on test results.
• Release with confidence – Production integration uncovers the data needed to close the feedback loop, analyze actual coverage. Own your quality gate and release it with data.

21 is fully SaaS, requires no installation or devices to create or execute tests. We offer access to dozens of devices seamlessly.

=> Visit 21 Website

#2) Appium Android Automation Framework

It’s a framework for creating automated tests for iOS and Android. It is a free tool. It supports Android versions from 2.3 and later. Appium utilizes the WebDriver interface for tests running. It supports many programming languages, such as Java, C#, Ruby, and others which are in the WebDriver library.

It can control Safari and Chrome on mobile devices. This allows testing mobile websites using Appium and these browsers.

But some automated test engineers complain that it provides poor, insufficient reports. Also, its weakness is reduced XPath support on mobile devices.

Website: Appium

#3) Selendroid

This test automation framework is for hybrid Android apps and mobile web. It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux OS. It supports test writing with Selenium 2 client API. For emulators and real devices, Selendroid is useful. To make it scalable and a platform for parallel testing, integration with Selenium Grid is allowed. It has an extension to help you.

Features

• Selendroid is compatible with JSON Wire Protocol.
• It has a built-in Android driver web view app to test the mobile web.
• It will allow you to find UI elements through different locator types.
• Hot plugging of hardware devices is supported by Selendroid. Many more such features are included in Selendroid.

Website: Selendroid

#4) Calabash

This automation testing framework is to perform acceptance tests for Android and iOS apps. It can be used by everyone i.e. mobile developers as well as the ones who don’t know coding skills. The tool enables the automatic UI interactions within an application like inputting text and validating responses.

Calabash contains libraries. With the help of that, test-code will be able to programmatically interact with native and hybrid apps.

Features

• Calabash provides a facility to allow you to configure tests to run on hundreds of Android and iOS devices.
• It provides APIs that have functionalities to run native apps on touch screen devices.
• It provides access to the Xamarin test cloud.
• It supports cucumber.
• Support for cucumber automation will let you write the tests in plain English.

Website: Calabash

#5) Robotium Android Testing Tool

Robotium is one the first and frequently utilized automated testing tools for software supported on Android.

Robotium is a free Android UI testing tool. It is suitable for test automation for different Android versions and sub-versions. Software developers often describe it as Selenium for Android. Tests created by Robotium are written in Java. In fact, Robotium is a library for unit tests.

But it takes much time and effort to create tests by means of Robotium, as one must work with the program source code in order to automate tests. The tool is also unsuitable for interaction with system software; it cannot lock and unlock a smartphone or a tablet.

There is no Record and Play function in Robotium, and it does not provide screenshots.

#6) MonkeyRunner Android App Testing

monkey runner is one of the popular Android Testing tools used for automating functional tests for Android software.

This tool is more low-level than Robotium is. One does not have to deal with the source code in order to automate tests. The tests are written in Python, one may use a recording tool for creating tests.

monkeyrunner can run tests on real devices connected to a PC or emulators. The tool has an API that allows it to control a smartphone, a tablet or an emulator from outside of Android code.

A significant disadvantage of the mobile app testing tool is that it is necessary to write scripts for each device. Another problem of MonkeyRunner is that the tests require adjustments each time when the user interface of the tested program is changed.

Website: MonkeyRunner

#7) Ranorex Android Application Testing Tool

Ranorex is a good tool for test automation not only for the latest but also for early versions and sub-versions of Android, beginning from Android 2.2.

One of the Ranorex advantages is its detailed reports with screenshots. It can connect a smartphone or a tablet to the Internet via WiFi.

An automated test engineer can elaborate data-driven tests, excluding XML data format, by means of this Android tool. Ranorex Studio enables an automated test engineer to create tests easily, just clicking the mouse. It allows for elaborating additional program modules. The modules may be utilized during late development cycles for more complex test scenarios.

It is a commercial mobile application tool; its license price is 1990 EUR. Ranorex searches elements rather slowly; it takes up to 30 seconds to perform such an operation. One must instrument APK files for Ranorex. Otherwise, it is impossible to automate tests by means of this tool, as it works only with instrumented APK files.

Ranorex is frequently utilized for creation tests for early Android versions.

Website: Ranorex

#8) UI Automator For Android Test Automation

This tool has been recently elaborated by Google. It supports Android versions beginning from 4.1. One should select another Android app testing tool in order to automate tests for earlier versions. UI Automator is able to interact with all kinds of software products for Android, including system applications. This enables UI Automator to lock and unlock a smartphone or a tablet.

Scripts created by means of this tool can be executed on many different Android platforms. It allows reproducing complex sequences of user actions.

UI Automator also can utilize external buttons of a device, such as buttons for going back, volume regulation, turning on and off the device.

It can be integrated with a testing framework TestNG. In this case, UI Automator can generate informative and detailed reports, similar to reports generated by Ranorex. This tool also searches elements very fast.

Software testing experts find UI Automator good for quality mobile application testing on many Android platforms. It is one of the best tools for Android applications, as it is elaborated by Google especially for this operating system.

Usually, about 80% of new software bugs reproduce on all the supported platforms. So, one may perform mobile testing on one of the widely used platforms and discover up to 80% of defects. The rest 20% will be found on all the other platforms. That means that in most cases it is better to test software products thoroughly on fewer platforms than hastily on numerous.

At present Android 4.1 is installed on about 66% of all devices using the Android operating system. That is why many automated test engineers often decide that UI Automator is the most suitable solution.

Website: UI Automator

#9) Kobiton

Kobiton is a mobile testing platform that provides the functionalities to perform manual as well as automated testing on real devices. It provides full support for gestures, orientation, etc. to perform testing on real physical devices in the cloud. You will be able to test iOS and Android devices in a highly responsive environment.

Features

• Kobiton provides a centralized management interface that will let you combine your local on-premises devices and cloud devices.
• With Kobiton you will get scriptless automation on any device.
• This intelligent test automation will allow you to perform manual testing on one device and replicate the same test on hundreds of devices.

Website: Kobiton

#10) Testdroid

SmartBear BitBar is the mobile and web app testing platform to perform manual or automated testing on real devices. You will be able to access the real device cloud that will have the same HW and OS versions that your customers use.

It is an all-in-one real device testing cloud that has functionalities for automated testing in any framework, manual app testing, and AI-driven codeless testing for real devices at scale.

Features

• SmartBear BitBar provides unlimited device concurrency that will let you run any number of automated mobile tests on Android and iOS devices at the same time.
• For manual app testing, the platform will let you remotely control devices. This will help with troubleshooting the issues reported by customers.
• It supports all the languages and any native mobile test automation framework.

Website: Testdroid

#11) TestComplete

SmartbBear’s TestComplete is the Automated UI Testing Tool with AI. It provides the platform to test desktop, web and mobile applications with a hybrid object and visual recognition engine. It is a flexible automation tool and for creating functional GUI tests, there is no need to choose between scripting and scriptless testing.

Features

• TestComplete has a hybrid object and visual recognition engine
• It provides the features of data-driven testing, automated test reporting and analysis, object recognition with AI, and HTML5 test automation.
• To help you find the dynamic UI elements quickly, easily, and accurately its object recognition is a combination of property-based and AI-powered visual recognition.
• For scripting, it supports seven languages like VBScript, JavaScript, Python, etc.

Website: TestComplete

#12) Experitest

Accelerate Mobile testing cycles and increase the quality of your releases with high-volume automated android testing

• Create & execute hundreds of automated tests in parallel on real Android devices in the cloud
• Easily create your first Appium test
• Run advanced mobile test automation directly from your IDE
• Automate any type of application, gesture, and scenario
• Integrate with your CI/CD tools and workflow
• Automated mobile testing under real-life conditions
• Integrate into any IDE, testing framework & CI for rapid application delivery
• Access visual test reports and advanced analytics

Conclusion

Test automation is a complex task. It requires thorough preparation and researchers. One should also keep up with all the novelties in information technology, applications, and test automation tools. All this knowledge is necessary for creating the most effective tests.

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The Best Cybersecurity Software to Protect Your Business from Cyber Threats. Cyber Security Software is a must for Cyber Security and Privacy of a business or individual. Cybersecurity is the method that is used to protect the network, system, or applications from the cyber-attacks. It is used to avoid unauthorized data access, cyber-attacks, and identity theft.

Application security, information security, network security, disaster recovery, operational security, etc. are the different parts of cybersecurity. It needs to be maintained for various types of cyber threats like Ransomware, Malware, Social Engineering, and Phishing.

The graph below shows the use of security metrics across companies.

Types Of Cyber Security Tools

CyberSecurity Software can be categorized into different types as mentioned below:

• Network Security Monitoring tools
• Encryption Tools
• Web Vulnerability Scanning tools
• Network Defence Wireless Tools
• Packet Sniffers
• Antivirus Software
• Firewall
• PKI Services
• Managed Detection Services
• Penetration Testing

How Important Is Cybersecurity?

The importance of cybersecurity can be understood through the research performed by Mimecast. It says that there is a 26% rise in the ransomware, 88% of companies saw email-based spoofing, and 67% of the organizations have reported that there is an increase in impersonation fraud.

Making use of public Wi-Fi makes your device or data more vulnerable to the attacks. According to the research performed by Norton, 54% of internet users use public Wi-Fi and 73% of people knew that public Wi-Fi is not safe even if it is passwords protected. All these statistics prove that cybersecurity is the need of the hour.

While selecting a Cybersecurity tool, Cyber Resilience should be considered. Cyber Resilience means making every effort to stop the threat plus simultaneously working on minimizing the effect of a successful attack. With this feature, business and email communication can be continued without disruption.

List Of The Best Cyber Security Tools

Enlisted below are the most popular Cyber Security tools that are used worldwide.

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Comparison of the Top CyberSecurity Software

Let’s Explore!!

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Best Cybersecurity Software to Protect Your Business

#1) SolarWinds Security Event Manager

Best for small to large businesses.
Price: It provides a fully functional trial for 14 days. The price for the product starts at $4500.

SolarWinds Security Event Manager is a network and host intrusion detection system. It performs real-time monitoring, responding, and reporting of security threats. It has highly indexed log search capabilities. It is a cloud-based scalable solution.

Features

• Threat intelligence will get continuously updated.
• It has features for Security Information and Event Manager.
• It offers features of Log correlation and Log event archive.
• It provides a comprehensive set of integrated reporting tools.

Verdict: Solarwinds Security Event Manager is a cloud-based solution developed for Managed Service Providers as an all-in-one solution of the SIEM tool.

=> Download Free

#2) Intruder

Best for small to large businesses.

Price: A 30-day Free trial is available. It includes three pricing plans i.e. Essential, Pro and Verified. Contact them for more details about their pricing information.

Intruder is the most popular cloud-based network vulnerability scanner that helps you to find the cybersecurity weaknesses in your most exposed systems to avoid costly data breaches. It is the right solution for your cybersecurity issues. It helps to save your time to a great extent.

Features

• Over 9,000 security vulnerabilities.
• Unlimited scans on demand.
• Unlimited user accounts.
• Checks for web application flaws such as SQL injection and Cross-site scripting.
• Emerging threat notifications.
• Smart Recon
• Network view
• PCI ASV scans available.

Verdict: Intruder is a one-stop solution for all your cybersecurity needs.

=> Visit Intruder Website

#3) Bitdefender Total Security

=> Avail 50% OFF From Bitdefender Total Security Here

Best for small to large businesses.

Price: Bitdefender Total Security is available for $42.99. Download it for 1 year for 5 devices for $24.99. A free trial of 30 days is available for Bitdefender Total Security.

To provide online privacy and personal information, Bitdefender Total Security provides the features of file shredder, social network protection, privacy firewall, vulnerability assessment, safe online banking, etc. It provides 24*7 comprehensive support. It has features for Anti-Phishing and Anti-Theft.

Features

• Bitdefender Total Security provides multi-layer ransomware protection along with ransomware remediation.
• It offers Network Threat Protection.
• It has features for complete real-time data protection and advanced threat defense.
• It has functionalities for Web Attack Prevention, Anti-Fraud, and Rescue Mode.

Verdict: Bitdefender is an anti-malware software. It supports Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS devices. It provides cybersecurity solutions for Home, businesses, Providers, and partners.

=> Visit Here To Avail 50% OFF From Bitdefender Total Security

#4) Malwarebytes

Best for small to large businesses and personal use.

Malwarebytes Pricing: It offers three pricing plans For Teams ($119.97 per year, 3 endpoints), Endpoint Protection ($699.90 per year, 10 endpoints), and Endpoint Detection and Response (Get a quote).

You can increase the number of devices as per your requirements. Home solutions start at $39.99 per year. A free trial is available on request.

Malwarebytes offers cybersecurity solutions for home as well as businesses. It can protect against malware, ransomware, malicious websites, etc. It can also protect against the advanced online threats that are not detected by the antivirus. It supports Windows, Mac, and Android, iOS, Chromebook devices.

For businesses, it offers various products and services like Endpoint security, incident response, etc. These solutions are available for Education, Finance, and Healthcare industries.

Features

• Malwarebytes makes the use of anomaly detection, behavior matching, and application hardening to protect from malware.
• It can clean up the infected devices.
• Malwarebytes will shut down the attack vectors from every angle regardless of the device you are using, Windows, Mac, or Android.
• It can provide multi-layered protection with endpoint detection and response for Windows.
• It can prevent threats in real-time.

Verdict: Malwarebytes provides the cybersecurity solution for home and businesses. It can prevent threats in real-time and defend against harmful sites.

Businesses can get the solution as per the requirements such as remotely managing endpoints, endpoint protection-detection & response services, protection for a specific number of devices, etc.

#5) Mimecast

Best for small to large businesses.

Price: You can get a quote for the pricing details. As per the reviews, the price for email security and threat protection starts at $3.50 per user per month (for 50 users).

Mimecast is a cloud-based platform that provides you email security and cyber resilience. It provides multiple products and services like Email security with threat protection, Information protection, Web security, Cloud Archiving, etc.

Features

• Email Security with threat protection protects from spear-phishing, ransomware, impersonation and some other types of targeted attacks.
• It has features for automated Content Control and data loss prevention.
• It provides web security by blocking inappropriate business websites and protecting against user-initiated malicious web activity & malware.
• It provides a Cloud Archiving facility to securely archive emails, files, and other data.

Verdict: Mimecast is good for Spam detection & blocking features and provides good email security & URL security.

Website: Mimecast

#6) CIS

Best for small to large businesses.

Price: CIS CSAT, CIS RAM, CIS-CAT Lite, CIS Controls, and CIS Benchmarks are available for free to everyone. CIS SecureSuite is available on a paid subscription. CIS Hardened Images and CIS Services are available for Pay peruse.

CIS stands for the Center for Internet Security. It provides various cybersecurity tools, services, and memberships. For commercial use, it provides CIS SecureSuite. CIS Security suite will include CIS controls and CIS Benchmarks.

Features

• For securing your organization, it offers a variety of products like CIS Controls, CIS-CAT Lite, CIS RAM, CIS CSAT, etc.
• CIS-CAT Lite performs an automated assessment.
• It provides 24*7 Security Operations Center and Incident Response Services.
• It provides tools like CIS-CAT Lite, CIS-CAT Pro, CIS Workbench, CIS RAM, and CIS CSAT.

Verdict: CIS has plans for securing your organization, specific platforms, and specific threats. It provides membership to product vendors, IT consultants & Hosting, Cloud, and Managed Service Providers.

Website: CIS

#7) Snort

Best for small and medium-sized businesses.
Price: Free

Snort is an open-source platform. It is an application for network intrusion prevention. It supports FreeBSD, Fedora, Centos, and Windows platforms. It can perform the task of watching network packets and streaming data to your screen.

Features

• Real-time packet analysis.
• Packet logging.
• It is an Open-source platform.

Verdict: Snort will act as the second level of defense as it sits behind the firewall. It can also compare the traffic against the set of rules.

Website: Snort

#8) Wireshark

Best for commercial and non-profit enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions.
Price: Free

Wireshark network protocols analyzer supports Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, NetBSD, etc. It has a standard three-pane packet browser. It can perform live capture and offline analysis.

Features

• Wireshark performs deep inspection of hundreds of platforms.
• It provides powerful display filters.
• It can decompress the files that are captured with gzip.
• It supports various protocols for decryption.

Verdict: Wireshark will provide you detailed information about what is happening on your network. It provides decryption support for many protocols. Wireshark will allow you to export the output in XML, PostScript, CSV, or Plain Text.

Website: Wireshark

#9) Webroot

Best for small to large businesses as well as individuals.

Price: Webroot Antivirus (for PC and Mac) is available for $29.99 per device per year. Internet Security Plus which is for PC, Mac, smartphones, and tablets are available for $44.99 for 3 devices per year. Internet Security Complete comes with 25 GB of storage. It will cost you $59.99 for 5 devices per year.

Webroot is a cloud-based platform. It can protect PCs, Mac computers, and mobile devices. It provides a solution for home use, home offices, businesses, and partners. It supports Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS platforms.

Features

• Real-time protection against threats.
• Endpoints and networks will be protected with multi-vector protection.
• It provides cloud-based threat intelligence services.
• It offers predictive threat intelligence.

Verdict: For businesses, Webroot provides DNS protection, Endpoint Protection, and threat intelligence. It also provides security awareness training to businesses. As per the customer reviews, it sometimes slows down other web applications but provides good protection to the network.

Website: Webroot

#10) GnuPG

Best for small to large businesses.
Price: Free

GnuPG is a tool for encryption and signing of data and communications. It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

Features

• Versatile key management system.
• It has access modules for all types of public key directories.
• It can be easily integrated with other systems.
• S/MIME and Secure Shell are supported by GnuPG.

Verdict: GnuPG is a free tool for encryption of data with a lot of features like key management and access to public key directories. It has good customer reviews for data encryption.

Website: GnuPG

#11) Norton Security

Price: Norton provides a 30-day free trial for Antivirus. The antivirus price starts at $5.99 per month. Norton 360 with LifeLock price starts at $9.99 for the first 3 months.

Norton provides an all in one solution through Norton 360 with LifeLock. The company offers cybersecurity software solutions such as Antivirus, Virus Removal, Malware Protection, Cloud Backup, Password Manager, and Secure VPN.

Features

• Norton Antivirus can protect against ransomware, viruses, spyware, malware, and other online threats.
• It provides five-layer protection for recognizing and blocking threats.
• It offers cloud backup services that can store and protect files and documents.
• Norton Password Manager is a simple, secure, and smart solution for managing passwords.
• It provides a secure Norton VPN.

Verdict: Norton security Solution is for computers, smartphones, and tablets. It has a variety of solutions like Antivirus, Password Manager, and VPN.

Website: Norton Security

#12) BluVector

Best for medium to large organizations.
Price: You can get a quote for its pricing details.

BluVector provides real-time advanced threat detection. This Network Intrusion Detection System is based on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and speculative code execution.

Features

• BluVector Cortex can respond to file-less and file-based malware.
• Threats like Zero-day malware and ransomware can also be detected, analyzed, and contained in real-time.
• BluVector Cortex is composed of three components i.e. AI-based Detection Engines, Intelligent Decision Support, and Connectors Framework.

Verdict: BluVector Cortex is an AI-driven security platform. It has flexible deployment options. It provides 100% network coverage and can be used by any sized organization.

Website: BluVector

#13) Nmap

Best for scanning large networks as well as single hosts.
Price: Free and open source.

NMap is a port scanning tool. It is used for network discovery and security auditing. It can be used for Network Inventory and managing service upgrade schedules. It will also help you with monitoring host or service uptime.

Features

• It has a command-line interface as well as GUI.
• It supports cross-platform.
• It can scan huge networks.
• It provides support to various advanced techniques.

Verdict: Nmap is a powerful, flexible, easy, and free tool with support for various port scanning mechanisms. Nmap suite includes a variety of tools like Zenmap, Ncat, Ndiff, and Nping.

Website: NMap

Conclusion

We have reviewed the top Cybersecurity software tools and saw the importance of cybersecurity. Gnu Privacy Guard, Wireshark, Snort are the free cybersecurity tools. CIS offers some products and services for free. Mimecast provides Email security with good spam detection and blocking capabilities. Snort is a completely free platform for real-time packet analysis.

Webroot provides security solutions for businesses as well as individuals. For businesses, it provides multiple solutions like DNS protection and Endpoint Protection.

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Best Software Development Tools and Platforms a Developer Should Know. Know which Software Tools developers use for developing the latest and modern feature-rich projects.

A computer program that is used by the software developers for creating, editing, maintaining, supporting and debugging other applications, frameworks and programs – is termed as a Software Development Tool or a Software Programming Tool.

Development tools can be of many forms like linkers, compilers, code editors, GUI designer, assemblers, debugger, performance analysis tools etc. There are certain factors to be considered while selecting the corresponding development tool, based on the type of the project.

Few of such factors include

• Company standards
• Tool usefulness
• Tool integration with another tool
• Selecting an appropriate environment
• Learning curve

Selecting the right development tool has its own effect on the project’s success and efficiency.

Use of Software Programming Tools

Given below are few uses of the Software Dev Tools

• Software tools are used to accomplish and investigate the business processes, document the development process of the software and optimize all the processes.
• By using these tools in the software development process, the outcome of the projects will be more productive.
• Using the development tools, a developer can easily maintain the workflow of the project.

Best Software Development Tools You Should Know

We have researched and ranked the best software programming and development tools. Here is a review and comparison of each tool.

#1) monday.com

monday.com provides an agile software development platform. It helps agile teams to build the products faster and iterate them swiftly.

It will let you integrate your existing software development tools and your data from multiple tools can be automatically brought to monday.com. You can automate the workflows with monday.com and save your time. The platform can be tried for free.

Key Features

• monday.com has features to customize your workflows so that you can plan your iteration needs.
• You will be able to track your team’s progress through real-time progress reporting.
• Exact effort tracking features will let you easily track the actual story points spent on different projects and tasks.
• Using forms you will be able to respond to bugs and issues quickly and efficiently.

=> Visit monday.com Website

#2) Embold

Fixing bugs before deployment saves a lot of time and energy in the long run. Embold is a software analytics platform that analyses source code and uncovers issues that impact stability, robustness, security, and maintainability.

Advantages

• With the Embold plugins, you can pick up code smells and vulnerabilities as you code, before making commits.
• Unique anti-pattern detection prevents the compounding of unmaintainable code.
• Integrate seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket, Azure, and Git and plugins available for Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.
• Get deeper and faster checks than standard code editors, for over 10 languages.

=> Get Embold For Free

#3) Linx

Linx is low code tool to build and automate backend applications and web services. The tool accelerates the design, development and automation of custom business processes, including easy integration of applications, systems and databases.

• Easy-to-use, drag-and-drop IDE and Server.
• Over 100 pre-built plugins programming functions and services for rapid development.
• One-click deployment to any local or cloud server.
• Input and outputs include nearly any SQL & NoSQL databases, numerous file formats (text and binary) or REST and SOAP Web services.
• Live debugging with step-through logic.
• Automate processes via a timer, directory events or message queue or expose web services, and call APIs via HTTP requests.

=> Click here to read more about Linx

#4) Quixy

Quixy is a visual, easy-to-use, and no-code platform to build complex custom enterprise software. It is used by businesses in more than 10 industry vertices to automate tasks & processes and build applications without writing any code.

On G2, it is rated as a leader in the Asia Pacific. It has a lot of pre-built solutions for various use cases like Incident Management, Expense Management, CRM, Project Management, etc.

Key Features

• Quixy is a Zero-Code platform and hence can be used by anyone.
• You will be able to build a User Interface by dragging and dropping more than 40 field controls.
• Visual Builder will help you to model processes and build workflows.
• It provides ready-to-use templates and components.
• Quixy Simulator will help you to test what is built.
• Quixy is an enterprise-ready platform and offers features like an audit trail, option to host on a private cloud, IP filtering, single sign-on, custom password policies, and multi-step authentication, etc.

#5) Atom

Atom is an open-source and free desktop editor cum source code editor that is up-to-date, friendly, and hackable to the core.

Key Features

• Atom supports cross-platform editing and works for various operating systems like Windows, Linux and OS X.
• An atom is a customizable tool with which one can effectively edit the look & feel of the User Interface, add few important features, etc., without editing the configuration file.
• Important features of Atom which made it a remarkable tool are its built-in package manager, smart autocomplete, multiple panes, file system browser, find & replace feature, etc.
• Atom is used to build cross-platform applications with web technologies using a framework called ‘Electron’.

Click here for further details on Atom.

#6) Cloud 9

Initially in 2010 Cloud 9 was an open-source, cloud-based IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that supports various programming languages like C, Perl, Python, JavaScript, PHP etc. Later in 2016, AWS (Amazon Web Service) acquired it for further improvement and made it chargeable as per the usage.

Key Features

• Cloud 9 IDE is a web-based platform that is used for scripting, running, and debugging the code in the cloud.
• Using Cloud 9, the users can work with serverless applications which help to switch between remote and local testing and debugging activities.
• The features like code completion suggestions, debugging, file dragging etc., make Cloud 9 a powerful tool.
• Cloud 9 is an IDE for web and mobile developers that help to collaborate together.
• Developers using AWS Cloud 9 can share the environment with the workmates for projects.
• Cloud 9 IDE lets to replica the entire development environment.

Click here for more information on Cloud 9 tool.

#7) GitHub

GitHub is a powerful collaboration tool and development platform for code review and code management. With this GitHub, the users can build applications and software, manage the projects, host the code, review the code etc.

Key Features

• With GitHub, developers can easily document their code and can host the same from the repositories.
• GitHub’s project management tools help its users to stay aligned, co-ordinate easily and get their task done accordingly.
• Few features of GitHub that make it a useful tool are its code security, access control among the team members, integration with other tools etc.
• Few developers use GitHub for experimenting new programming languages in their personal projects.
• GitHub can be hosted on servers and on a cloud platform. It runs on Windows and Mac OS.
• GitHub is free for open-source projects and public use. For developers it is charged @ $7/month, for teams @ $9/month and for organizations it is $21/month.

For further information on GitHub tool, visit here.

#8) NetBeans

NetBeans is an open source and a free software development tool written in Java that develops world-class web, mobile, and desktop applications easily and quickly. It uses C / C++, PHP, JavaScript, Java etc.

Key Features

• NetBeans supports cross-platform and works on any operating system like Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, Windows etc.
• NetBeans offers features like Smart Code Editing, writing bug-free code, easy management process, and quick user interface development.
• Java applications can be easily updated to its newer editions using the code analyzers, editors and converters offered by NetBeans 8 IDE.
• Features of NetBeans IDE that made it the best tool are debugging, profiling, dedicated support from the community, powerful GUI builder, out of box working, support for Java platforms etc.
• The well-organized code in NetBeans allows its new developers to understand the structure of the application.

Click here for further details on NetBeans.

#9) Bootstrap

Bootstrap is an open source and free framework for developing responsive websites and mobile-first projects using CSS, HTML, and JS. Bootstrap is widely used to design faster and simpler websites.

Key Features:

• As Bootstrap is an open-source toolkit, one can customize it according to their project’s requirement.
• Bootstrap is provided with built-in components that are used in accumulating responsive websites by a smart drag and drop facility.
• Powerful features of Bootstrap like a responsive grid system, plug-ins, pre-built components, sass variables & mixins allow its users to build their applications.
• Bootstrap is a front-end web framework that is used for quick modeling of the ideas and building of web applications.
• This tool guarantees consistency among all the developers or users working on the project.

More information on this framework is available here.

#10) Node.js

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform and JavaScript run-time environment that is built to design a variety of web applications and to create web servers and networking tools.

Key Features:

• Node.js applications run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Unix etc.
• Node.js is efficient and lightweight as it uses non-blocking and event-driven I/O model.
• Node.js is used by developers to write server-side applications in JavaScript.
• Node.js modules are used to provide rapid and well-organized solutions for developing back-end structure and integrating with the front-end platforms.
• The largest ecosystem of open source libraries is available with node.js package.
• Various IT Companies, software developers, small & large business organizations use node.js for developing web and network server applications in their projects.

Click here for more information on NodeJS tool.

#11) Bitbucket

Bitbucket is a distributed, web-based version control system that is used for collaboration between software development teams (code and code review). It is used as a repository for source code and development projects.

Key Features

• Useful features of Bitbucket that makes it a powerful tool are its flexible deployment models, unlimited private repositories, code collaboration on steroids etc.
• Bitbucket supports few services like code search, issue tracking, Git large file storage, bitbucket pipelines, integrations, smart mirroring etc.
• Using Bitbucket, one can organize the repositories into the projects with which they can focus easily on their goal, process or product.
• To rationalize the development process of any software it can integrate into the prevailing workflow.
• Bitbucket offers a free plan for 5 users with unlimited private repositories, standard plan @ $2/user/month for growing teams and premium plan @ $5/user/month for large teams.

You can reach here for further details on Bitbucket.

#12) CodeCharge Studio

CodeCharge Studio is the most creative and leading IDE and RAD (Rapid Application Development) that is used to create data-driven web applications or enterprise internet and intranet systems with minimal coding.

Key Features

• CodeCharge Studio supports various platforms like Windows, Mac, Linux etc.
• Using CodeCharge Studio, one can analyze and modify the code generated to study the web technologies which are used to work with programming projects in any environment.
• It supports various Databases like MySQL, Postgre SQL, Oracle, MS Access, MS SQL etc.
• Few important features of CodeCharge Studio are Visual IDE & Code Generator, web reports, online calendar, gallery builder, flash charts, AJAX, menu builder, database-to-web converter etc.
• By using CodeCharge Studio, one can minimize the errors, reduce the development time, reduce the learning curve etc.
• CodeCharge Studio can be used for a 20-day free trial and then it can be purchased at $139.95.

Documentation and sign up information about CodeCharge Studio can be accessed from here.

#13) CodeLobster

CodeLobster is a free as well as a convenient PHP IDE that is used to develop fully-featured web applications. It supports HTML, JavaScript, Smarty, Twig, and CSS.

Key Features

• CodeLobster PHP Edition rationalizes & makes things easier in the development process and also supports CMS like Joomla, Magneto, Drupal, WordPress etc.
• Few important and advanced features of CodeLobster PHP IDE are PHP Debugger, PHP Advanced autocomplete, CSS code inspector, DOM elements, auto-completing of keywords etc.
• PHP Debugger facilitates the users in debugging the programs at the time of coding and before executing the code.
• CodeLobster offers its users to enjoy the file explorer facilities and browser previews.
• CodeLobster is available in 3 versions namely free version, lite version @ $39.95 and professional version @ $99.95.

CodeLobster can be downloaded from here.

#14) Codenvy

Codenvy is a cloud development environment used for coding and debugging the applications. It can support sharing projects in real-time and can collaborate with others.

Key Features

• As Codenvy is a cloud-based IDE there is no need for any installation and configuration of this software development tool.
• Codenvy can be integrated with Jira, Jenkins, Eclipse Che extensions and to any private toolchain.
• Codenvy can be customized in many ways using IDE extensions, Eclipse Che, commands, stacks, editors, assemblies, RESTful APIs, and server-side extension plug-ins.
• Codenvy can run on any operating system like Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It can also run in the public or private cloud.
• Command-line installers generated by Codenvy are used for deploying in any environment.
• It is available at a free of cost up to 3 developers and for more users, it costs at $20/user/month.

More information on this tool is available here.

#15) AngularJS

AngularJS is an open-source, structural and javascript based framework used by web developers to design web applications in a dynamic manner.

Key Features

• AngularJS is fully expandable and works easily with other libraries. Each feature can be replaced or edited as per the development workflow and project needs.
• AngularJS works well with data-driven applications if the site is updated regularly as per the changes in the data.
• Advanced features of AngularJS are Directives, localization, dependency injection, reusable components, form validation, deep linking, data binding etc.
• AngularJS is not a plug-in or browser extension. It is 100% client-side and works on both mobile and desktop browsers like Safari, iOS, IE, Firefox, Chrome etc.
• AngularJS offers built-in protection against basic security holes which include HTML injection attacks and cross-site scripting.

Download AngularJS from here.

#16) Eclipse

Eclipse is the most popular IDE that is used by Java developers in computer programming. It is used to develop applications not only in Java but also in other programming languages like C, C++, C#, PHP, ABAP etc.

Key Features

• Eclipse is an open-source group of projects, tools, and collaborative working groups which play a key role in the development of new solution and innovations.
• Eclipse Software Development Kit (SDK) is a free and open-source software that is used by the developers in programming as per their respective programming languages.
• Eclipse is used in creating web, desktop, and cloud IDEs which in turn delivers a wide collection of add-on tools for software developers.
• Advantages of Eclipse are refactoring, code completion, syntax checking, rich client platform, error debugging, industrial level of development etc.
• One can easily integrate Eclipse with other frameworks like TestNG, JUnit, and other plug-ins.

#17) Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver is an exclusive software program and programming editor that is used for creating simple or complex websites. It supports many markup languages like CSS, XML, HTML, and JavaScript.

Key Features

• Dreamweaver is used across Linux and Windows operating systems including iOS devices.
• Dreamweaver CS6 provides you with a preview option with which one can look at the preview of the designed website on any desired device.
• The latest version of Dreamweaver is used to design responsive websites.
• Another version of Dreamweaver, named Dreamweaver CC combines a code editor and a design surface termed as a Live view to offer some advanced features like auto-completion of code, code collapsing, real-time syntax checking, syntax highlighting and code inspection.
• Dreamweaver offers various plans, for individuals @ $19.99/month, for business @ $29.99/month and for schools or Universities @ $ 14.99/user/month.

Click here for further details on Dreamweaver.

#18) Crimson Editor

Crimson Editor is a freeware, lightweight text editing tool and an epic of software development tools only for Microsoft Windows which are used as an HTML editor and source code editor.

Key Features

• Crimson Editor is the specialized source code editor that offers an amazing feature of editing the score of programming languages like HTML, Perl, C / C++ and Java.
• Features of Crimson Editor include print & print preview, syntax highlighting, multi-level undo/redo, editing multiple documents, user tools & macros, editing remote files directly using built-in FTP client etc.
• Size of Crimson Editor software is also small but the loading time is fast.
• The learning curve of this software is so fast. It comes with a complete help manual which makes the navigation part easy.

Crimson Editor can be accessed from here.

#19) Zend Studio

Zend Studio is a next-generation PHP IDE that is used for coding, debugging, prototyping and testing of mobile & web applications.

Key Features

• Zend Studio’s 3x faster performance helps in indexing, searching, and validation of PHP code.
• Zend Studio helps in deploying PHP applications on any server that includes cloud support for Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.
• Debugging capabilities offered by Zend Studio are using Z-Ray integration, Zend Debugger and Xdebug.
• It supports best-in-class development tools like Docker and Git Flow.
• Zend Studio works on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux platforms.
• Zend Studio software pricing for personal use is $89.00 and for commercial use is $189.00.

Zend Studio can be downloaded from here.

#20) Jira

Jira is the most popular software development tool that is used by agile teams for planning, tracking and releasing the software.

Key Features

• This tool is customizable and also has some prevailing features that are used in every development phase.
• Using Jira, we can accomplish the work in progress, generate reports, backlogs etc.
• Few other important features of Jira software are Scrum boards, Kanban boards, GitHub integration, Disaster recovery, Code Integration, Portfolio Management, Sprint Planning, Project Management etc.
• Jira works for Windows and Linux/Solaris operating systems.
• Jira software pricing in the cloud for small teams is $10/month per 10 users and for 11 – 100 users it costs $7/user/month. For a free trial, this tool is available for 7 days.

For more details about the free trial and other tool-related information, visit here.

#21) CloudForge

CloudForge is a Saas (Software as a service) product that is used for application development. It is used for collaborative application development in the cloud.

Key Features

• CloudForge is a secured and single cloud platform that is used by developers for coding, connecting and deploying the applications.
• CloudForge elastically balances your projects, teams, and processes.
• It is used to manage and integrate various development tools.
• Features of CloudForge are Version control hosting, Bugs & issue tracking, Agile planning, Visibility & reporting, deploying code to public & private clouds, etc.
• CloudForge is available for a 30 days free trial. Standard pack for small teams is available @ $2/user/month and Professional pack for small business & enterprise groups is available @ $10/user/month.

Click here for further details on CloudForge.

#22) Azure

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service that is used for designing, deploying, testing and managing web applications or hybrid cloud applications through Microsoft’s global network of data centers.

Key Features

• Microsoft Azure offers various services like mobile services, data management, storage services, messaging, media services, CDN, caching, virtual network, business analytics, migrate apps & infrastructure etc.
• It supports various programming languages (.NET, Python, PHP, JavaScript etc), widest range of operating systems (Linux, Windows etc), devices and frameworks.
• Detailed pricing information is available on their website. Sample example pricing for “App Service” is Rs 0.86/hour and that too its free for the first 12 months.
• Using Azure, we can easily spot the threats and lessen them, deliver the mobile apps flawlessly, manage the apps proactively etc.

Documentation and sign up information about Microsoft Azure can be accessed from here.

#23) Spiralogics Application Architecture (SAA)

SAA is a cloud-based development tool that is used to define, design, customize, and publish their software applications online without any coding.

Key Features

• Using SAA, the developers can preview the changes before issuing or deploying the applications.
• Even the users can select any pre-built application and customize them as per their requirement or can build it from scratch.
• Important features of SAA are drag & drop controls, customizing the controls, embed & built-in HTML editor, Interactive dashboard builder, predefined processes, a graphical representation of workflows & seamless integration etc.
• SAA supports various platforms like Windows, Android, Linux, iOS etc.
• SAA is available for a 30 days free trial and the paid plans start with $25/month/user for Pro Subscription and $35/month/user for Premier Subscription.

Access here for more information on SAA.

#24) Delphi

Embarcadero Delphi is a powerful object Pascal IDE that is used to develop cross-platform Native Applications with adjustable cloud services and comprehensive IoT connectivity.

Key Features

• Delphi is used to deliver powerful and fast native apps for Linux, Android, iOS, Mac OS, Windows, IoT, and cloud.
• Delphi is 5 times quicker in designing Hyper-Connected Apps using FireUI preview for multiple database platforms, desktops, and mobiles.
• Delphi supports RAD and its features like native cross-compilation, visual window layout, application framework, refactoring etc.
• Delphi provides an integrated debugger, source control, strong database, code editor with code completion, real-time error-checking, in-line documentation, best code quality, code collaboration etc.
• Latest versions of Delphi includes features like Quick Edit support, new VCL control, FireMonkey, installer, multi-tenancy support in RAD server etc.
• Delphi Professional Edition costs $999.00/year and Delphi Enterprise Edition costs $1999.00/year.

Free trial of Delphi is available here.

#25) Zoho Creator

Zoho Creator is a low-code platform that enables rapid development and delivery of web and mobile applications and assists to Build powerful enterprise software applications 10x faster. You no longer have to write endless lines of code to build an application.

It also provides key features like Artificial Intelligence, JavaScript, Cloud functions, third-party integrations, multi-language support, offline mobile access, integration with a payment gateway and more.

With over 4 million users worldwide and 60+ apps, our platform enhances business productivity. Zoho Creator is featured in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP), 2019.

Features

• Create more applications with less effort.
• Connect your business data and collaborate across teams.
• Create insightful reports.
• Gain instant access to mobile apps.
• Uncompromising security.

Verdict: Zoho Creator provides the low-code application development platform to build enterprise applications. It involves building applications with minimal coding which drastically reduces app-development time and effort.

Conclusion

In this article, we have researched and listed popular, modern and latest Software Development Tools along with their features, supported platforms and pricing details.

This is a comprehensive list of programming tools used for development on any modern project. You can boost your productivity by using these latest easy to use and learn dev tools.

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Simple Tricks To Speed Up Your Website/There can be a variety of factors that could be slowing your wordpress blog down. Some of the most common reasons are as follows:

• Bad hosting.
• Uncompressed and unscaled Images.
• Too many plugins.
• Too many widgets and fancy elements on the page.
• Too many render blocking javascript references.
• Too many HTTP requests generated because of many external JS and CSS file references.
• Inlined large CSS and JS files.
• Too many DOM elements (HTMl tags) coupled with too many DOM event listeners (scripts that need to make changes to the document).
• Uncompressed JS and CSS files.
• Not using HTTP Compression to serve content.
• Lack of a proper caching mechanism in place.
• Too many external font file references.

You can easily find out which of these factors is causing your pages to load slow using tools like Gtmetrix.com and PageSpeed Insights offered by Google.

Even without these tools, a simple glance at your website’s HTML source pages can reveal a lot about the issues at hand. Do you see large inline styles and scripts? Do you see many JS and CSS references? Do you see external JS references or inlined JS that your page does not need? Do you see a lot of unnecessary tags in the header? Then these could be the very reasons why your blog is slow.

Below are 14 simple changes you can make to your wordpress blog which will help your blog load faster.

1.) Compress Images

Uncompressed images are the number one reason for slow page loads. This includes your website logo, background images, buttons, featured images and images used within the article body. If your website uses a lot of images, it is best to look into compressing them.

There are a few good wordpress plugins that you can use to compress your images on the fly. The best ones are TinyPNG and WP Smush it. From the usage perspective, I recommend ‘WP Smush it’ as it is very user friendly.

You can get anywhere between 17% to 25% reduction in your image sizes using these plugins. And considering that the compression is lossless there will be no reduction in the quality of the images. WP Smush it also offers a paid version which uses lossy compression to reduce image sizes even further with minimum loss in quality. Both of these plugins also offer bulk compression option which means you can compress all your existing images easily.

Using plugins is a great way of easily compressing your images but you will not get any more than 15% to 30% reduction in the image size. If you want to get maximum reduction in size, say more than 50% to 70% reduction, you will need to manually compress your images using a good image compression software before you upload them to wordpress. There are host of free open source software out there. Two of my favorites are RIOT which can compress JPEG, GIF and PNG images and PNGoo(PNG Quant) which compresses PNG files.

If not all images, you can definitely consider using these programs for compressing your logo, buttons, favicon and background images.

If you want to learn more about these open source software programs and how to use them to get maximum reduction to your image sizes, check out these links:

2.) Scale Your Images and Specify Image Dimensions

When you upload an image, wordpress automatically scales the image into three different sizes – the full/original size, medium size (300 x 300 pixels) and thumbnail size (150 x 150 pixels). In addition to that, wordpress also automatically adds image dimensions when you add an image to your post using Add Media. So you are covered here.

But if you use a custom image size, say a 350 x 350 pixels image to display your related posts or a featured image, you will need to use the full image and then scale the image in HTML using width and height specifications. So essentially, you are loading the full image each time the image is requested and then scaling it down in the user’s browser resulting in slower downloads.

You can resolve this issue by specifying a custom image size in your functions.php file using the add_image_size function as follows:

add_image_size( 'unique_name', 350, 350, true );

Once you do this, wordpress will automatically resizes your new images into this new dimension and you can then call this new image using the unique name you specify as the first parameter. To resize all your existing images to this new dimension, you can use a plugin like wp regenerate thumbnails.

3.) Disable Hotlinking of Images

Hotlinking is the process of linking to your image on a different site while to image loads from your server. This can increase server loads in-case the hotlinked image is on a popular social network page which will eventually result in slower image downloads for your actual users.

You can use the following tool to check if your images are already protected from hotlinking:

http://www.htaccesstools.com/test-hotlink-protection/

If they are not protected, you can disable hotlinking using your cpanel or by adding the following to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]

This .htaccess file was created using: http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/

4.) Reduce the Number of Plugins and Widgets

Too many widgets can slow down your page loads considerably. So if your page loads take a very long time, consider removing some unwanted widgets. Similarly, deactivate and uninstall plugins that you no longer need. Most plugins add references to their CSS and Javascript files every time a page loads which can significantly increase the browser render times.

5.) Reduce Number of External Web Font Refences

Using too many external web fonts can slow down page loads considerably. Check your blog’s HTML source page to see if you find more than one external font (generally Google fonts) references. It is perfectly okay to have one or two font file references but more than that can impact page load times negatively. Considering removing references that you can do away with and making necessary changes in your style.css page.

6.) Defer or Async Javascript Execution

There are a host of javascript files that wordpress loads when a page is rendering in the user’s browser. These include some standard wordpress scripts, scripts referenced by your plugins and scripts referenced by your theme. Fancier themes load a whole lot more javascript than simple ones.

The point to note here is that not all script files need to be loaded and executed before the page load. Some can be made to wait using the defer attribute and some can be made to load and execute asynchronously while your content renders so they don’t block the rendering.

7.) Conditionally Load Javascript and CSS Files

When you activate a plugin it registers the required javascript and CSS files using the wp_enqueue_scripts function. This means, each time your page loads all these scripts and CSS files will load automatically. This is irrespective of if or not you are using the plugin functionality on that particular page.

Take for example the Contact form 7 plugin.

The Contact form 7 plugin is an extremely popular plugin that lets you add a contact form to your site. Given your requirement, you might be adding this contact form most likely on your website’s contact page plus a few other pages at the most. But the plugin loads its CSS and JS files on all pages of your site irrespective of if or not the contact form is present. This is the case will most plugins.

Yes you can use defer or async attributes on the Javascript tags (as mentioned in Point 6) but an even better solution is to completely block these files from loading when not required. In other words, load them only on pages that use the plugin functionality and block them on others.

8.) Minify CSS and Javascript

Minifying your external styles is a simple yet effective way of increasing your page load speed. CSS minification involves removing white spaces, combining related classes, removing comments and many such small optimizations to reduce the overall size of the file. Smaller files can be processed faster by the browser leading to faster page loads.

The simplest way to minify you CSS is to use an online tool like CSS minifier. To start, make a copy of your theme’s style.css file. Now open the CSS minifier tool and copy and paste the contents of your style.css file into the Input CSS section and click the Minify button. Once the minification is complete, copy the minified file from the Minified Output section and replace the contents of your style.css with the minified style.

Also, your theme might have added styles for various functionalities that you might not use. So before minifying, you can manually scan through your CSS file and remove styles that you don’t require. For instance, if you don’t use comments in your posts, you can remove all styles related to the wordpress comments.

You can minify external Javascript in the same way.

9.) Enable Keep Alive

Keep Alive is recommended by most experts as a means of speeding up your page load times. Keep Alive basically tells the browser to establish one connection instead of multiple connections to address user requests.

There is a possibility that your server already has this enabled. Use the following tool to check if or not this is enabled:

http://www.giftofspeed.com/enable-keep-alive/

If it is not enabled, you can enable this by adding the following to your .htaccess file:

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
    Header set Connection keep-alive
</ifModule>

10.) Remove Unnecessary Tags from WordPress Header

The wordpress header generated using wp_head throws in a lot of unnecessary tags which can be safely removed. The following are some of the tags that can be removed:

 # XFN (XHTML Friends Network)
 # wlwmanifest (Windows Live Writer) link.
 # Comments Feed
 # WordPress Version Generator 
 # XML RPC
 # Post Shortlink
 # RSS Feed Links

As you can see, these tags include services that you might never be using, like the XFN tag, wlwmanifest (Windows Live Writer) link and XML RPC which allows you to remotely post to your blog using a webblog client. This also includes the version generator tag which should always be removed as a security measure. These tags can easily be removed by adding the following to your functions.php page:

remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link'); //removes EditURI/RSD (Really Simple Discovery) link.
remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link'); //removes wlwmanifest (Windows Live Writer) link.
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator'); //removes meta name generator.
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_shortlink_wp_head'); //removes shortlink.
remove_action('wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );  //removes automatic feed links. 

11.) Enable Gzip Compression

Chances are that Gzip compression is already enabled by your web host using mod_gzip or mod_deflate. You can use the follow tool to check if you content is being compressed:

http://www.whatsmyip.org/http-compression-test/

Just enter the URL of any page on your site and click test.

If the test indicates that your content is not being compressed, you can try adding the mod_deflate module to your .htaccess file as indicated here.

As an alternative, you can also use PHP’s ob_gzhandler function to gzip the content for you. To enable this, just add the following to the top of your theme’s header.php page:

<? ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?>

12.) Enable Expires and cache control headers

Cache control and Expires headers tell the browser what to cache and for how long to serve a cached version before requesting a fresh new copy of the resource.

This can help reduce redundant HTTP requests and increase the page speeds hugely during subsequent request made by the same user. You can use these headers to set caching info for your images, styles, javascript, video files and HTML simply by adding the following to your .htaccess file:

# BEGIN Cache-Control Headers
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
    <filesMatch "\.(ico|jpeg|jgp|png|gif|swf)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "public"
    </filesMatch>
    <filesMatch "\.(css)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "public"
    </filesMatch>
    <filesMatch "\.(js)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "private"
    </filesMatch>
    <filesMatch "\.(x?html?|php)$">
        Header set Cache-Control "private, must-revalidate"
    </filesMatch>
</ifModule>
# END Cache-Control Headers

# BEGIN Expire headers
<ifModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresDefault "access plus 5 seconds"
    ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 2592000 seconds"
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
    ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 2592000 seconds"
    ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
    ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
    ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
    ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
    ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 600 seconds"
    ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access plus 600 seconds"
</ifModule>
# END Expire headers

To read more about these headers checkout the original source below on tutsplus:

Source: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/optimizing-wordpress-loading-speed-with-headerphp-htaccess–wp-25279

13.) Remove version from style and script links

WordPress tends to add a version number to CSS references which makes them uncachable by proxy caching servers. To check if this is true in your case, open your website’s source page and check your style references to see if they have a question mark (?) symbol at the end as shown below:

http://sitename.com/wp-content/theme/style.css?ver=56

If this is the case, add the following to your theme’s functions.php to get the question mark removed.

/*remove version from style and script links*/
function remove_cssjs_ver( $src ) {
    if( strpos( $src, '?ver=' ) )
        $src = remove_query_arg( 'ver', $src );
    return $src;
}
add_filter( 'style_loader_src', 'remove_cssjs_ver', 15 );
add_filter( 'script_loader_src', 'remove_cssjs_ver', 15 );

Source: Get rid of ?ver on the end of CSS/JS.

14.) Include a Cachable Favicon

A favicon is a small icon specific to a website which is displayed in the address bar of a browser. All browsers request for a favicon on page loads and not having a favicon results in a 404 response from the server. Even though this won’t lead to any significant page delay it is best practice to have a favicon in place. Just make sure that you favicon follows these guidelines:

• Make sure it is a .ico file.
• Keep the dimensions of the icon to 16×16 pixels.
• Keep the file size under 1kb.
• Upload the favicon to the root/main folder of your website and one to your current theme’s main folder.
• Optionally you can add the following to your theme’s header.php page

  <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://sitename.com/favicon.ico" />

• Make the favicon cacheable using cache control and expires headers. (Refer point )

Here’s a great article from wordpress.org on how to create and upload a favicon for your wordpress blog.

15.) WP Super Cache

Last but not the least, make sure to install a caching plugin. The one I recommend is WP Super Cache as it is a fairly easy to set up for beginners. This plugin is coauthored by Automattic which is the company behind WordPress. Install the plugin and select the ‘Use mod_rewrite to serve cache files‘ option.

Apart from these, there are other optimizations you can make which include concatenating your CSS and JS files, lazying loading images, optimizing your MYSQL database, configuring etags, using CSS sprites, using base64 encoded images, using a CDN (content delivery network), inlining smaller JS and CSS and using advanced server caching to name a few. But most of these are a overkill and are not necessary for smaller sites. That said, optimization should always be done based on the specific requirements of a website. Which is why it is important to find the main reason behind the slowness of the website before deciding to implement advanced changes.

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