Category Archive iT World Hacking Tutorial

WordPress – What About You Need To Knows

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.

WordPress Themes in Dashboard

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.

Wordpress pro - Plugin supported to enhance features

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.

Pro - Responsive themes for mobile friendly sites

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).

con – need developers

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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WordPress Visual Editor Not Working? Here’s How to Fix It

WordPress Visual Editor Not Working? Here’s How to Fix It/We always hear about bloggers with an income that tops some CEOs. The average annual salary of a CEO is $250k, while the top blogs report the same revenue in only one month. Don’t worry; this post is not a “get rich quick scheme.” Making money blogging takes a lot of hard work. You are not going to go off and write your first piece of content today and wake up in a mansion.

Planning your blog to make money

To make money from a blog, you need to plan your strategy carefully. There are several factors to consider. Firstly, blogging is not a side hobby, but something that needs to become your full-time work. It requires quality content that engages the public and is imminently shareable on social media.

Impact of Blog Posts on Inbound Traffic

The chart above shows that companies who post 16 or more times per month get 3.5 times more traffic than those posting between 0 and 4 times. Putting the time into quality content pays dividends in the long run, especially if your goal is to make money blogging.

Second, to make money from a blog, it must have engaging, useful, and informative content. Realistically, you can write about anything if readers show an interest in it. There are schools of thought that say your blog should be something you are passionate about, but to make money, it needs to be a topic your audience demand.

Blogging to make money is not an opportunity to be self-indulgent or nostalgic about things you love to do. The context of the blog must be the reader first.

Third, make sure there is an audience to write for. You could decide to write about why 11 isn’t pronounced as “onety one” in a very engaging and informative way, but I doubt many people will search for it. If an audience does not exist for your blog, it will not make money.

Finally, plan how you are intending to make money. The quality blog content will draw in traffic, but that is not how you make money blogging. There are probably well over 50 different ways to make money from your blog.

We are not suggesting you do all of these activities, but you need to work out what will be successful for your blog. For example, let’s say you love soccer and see that it’s a hugely popular topic so start writing about it.

You are not a professional player so the audience won’t want to pay to see me show off my skills. Similarly, you might be able to source and sell merchandise, but that adds a whole new element to your strategy. The best option here would be affiliate marketing with product links to earn a commission (affiliate marketing is a topic for another day!).

The most common ways to make money blogging are:

  • Ads on your site
  • Affiliate marketing
  • Selling products (digital or physical)
  • Sponsored posts where someone pays you to write about their brand or product
  • Services like freelancing or hosting webinars

The time it takes to earn money from your blog can vary. Organically, getting traffic to your blog can take a month or two. Depending on how you choose to make money, it could be six months until you see income.

Over time, as you generate authority, backlinks, shares, likes, and followers, earnings can start to skyrocket. Patience is a virtue in the blogging world. There are methods for accelerating your earnings such as by using paid advertising if you have the capital to invest. As our recent post shows, with so many websites out there, customers need time to find your blog.

As a helpful hint, prioritize making your blog mobile-friendly. Per our previous post, approximately 89% of people who recommend a brand, do so after having a positive mobile experience.

How top bloggers make money blogging

Before moving on to the types of blogs that make money online, it is worthwhile seeing what some of the top bloggers do. For this purpose, we are not including blogs that are more like media publishers such as Mashable or Buzzfeed. Although they are both technically blogs, the focus here is the typical work from home, sit in your PJs money-making blogger.

Tim Sykes is reportedly the highest-paid blogger out there at around $15 million per year (that is not a typo). The majority of his money comes from selling DVD courses that explain how to sell stocks and trade. Checking his Instagram profile, the 1.5 million followers probably don’t do him much harm either.

Timothy Sykes Instagram page showing number of followers

Elisa Larson and Emma Chapman are popular bloggers for their brand A Beautiful Mess. They make money blogging through a mix of advertising, sponsorships, course, training, and products. Elisa and Emma have a massive social presence across several channels which appears to be the foundation of their success.

Lindsay and Bjork are two of the original food bloggers, running Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro. Between them, their income is around $90,000 per month from advertising, sponsorship, affiliate marketing, and subscriptions. Their loyal following comes from showing others how to create recipe blogs.

There are many more bloggers doing an outstanding job of making money blogging. The three above are examples of different blog types, each of which performs well. The thing they have in common is that they all feature topics that matter a lot to their audience.

Types of blogs that make money

Next, we are going to focus on some types of blogs that do indeed make money. This list is not definitive by any means, but from reviewing the most successful blogs, sticking to these areas looks like the best way to make money blogging.

Personal Finance

Financial bloggers like Tim Sykes tend to make good money. There are caveats to this of course.

First, you need to come over as an expert in the field and somebody that people need to listen to.

Second, the posts must be genuinely helpful for the reader.

The writer of Financial Samurai, Sam Dogen, was able to retire at 34 years old, so you would imagine he knows what he is talking about. The blog shares his knowledge and provides tips to subscribers.

Expert finance blog from Financial Samurai

Health and Fitness

Health and fitness is a perfect topic to make money blogging as it will always be popular. The best thing about health and fitness is that it is easy to monetize. For example, you can act as an affiliate for products, sell fitness plans, provide workout videos, offer memberships and subscriptions, personal training services, and more.

The best health and fitness blogs have their own niche. There are lots of them out there so if this is your chosen topic, to make money blogging you will have to stand out from the crowd.

Jessi Kneeland has put a focus on the body confidence aspect of health and fitness, while Nerd Fitness has an obvious target market.

Nerd Fitness niche health and fitness website to engage a target audience

Nerd Fitness Blog

Food and Dining

Anything with delicious-looking photos of food is likely to be popular. We spoke about Pinch of Yum earlier in this post, but there are plenty of others that have been very successful in making money from blogging about food.

Show Me The Yummy is full of recipes with appetizing photography. The site is full of advertising and links to back up the income from their subscription service. The blog offers a massive amount of resources for both beginner and advanced cooks.

Again, having a niche is a big part of making money with food blogging. Deliciously Ella has been around since 2012. Ella Woodward set up the blog after she was diagnosed with Postural Tachycardia Syndrome. The aim was to track her eating and experiment with making healthier recipes. Ella sells many products on her blog and ships them worldwide.

Example showing vibrant photos to attract readers

Deliciously Ella food blog

Home Decor and DIY

DIY and crafting have always been big and now even more so since the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving people in lockdown. Readers are always researching and looking for home inspiration. To make money blogging, there are plenty of options on this topic.

There are countless unique blogs, each with their own ideas. Shanty 2 Chic is a blog founded by sisters, Ashley and Whitney. The aim of the blog is to show their audience how to create innovative and affordable furniture that turns a house into a home. It mainly features their journey as they create the products.

Shanty 2 Chic is loaded with ads but they also have their own Amazon storefront to sell their “favorite picks” as affiliates.

Fashion and Beauty

Fashion and beauty blogs can get a huge following if the blogger has a unique sense of style. There is a lot of competition in the sector, but if you have a vibrant personality and lots of charisma, this is the one for you.

Tutorials are the way to go with beauty. They can show your products to the world and make you relatable to your audience. As a blogger, that does mean you are competing with the likes of Rihanna and Fenty Beauty, but there are plenty of ways to make money.

The Blonde Salad is the foundation that has given fashion blogger Chiara Ferragni a $200,000 per month income. She started as a personal blog in 2009 and now has built a massive fashion brand. Chiara makes money blogging mainly through product sales after spending years developing her brand equity.

Fashion and Beauty blog example

The Blonde Salad fashion blog

Lifestyle

A lifestyle blog refers to just about any topic that is hard to classify as anything else. For much of the time, it gives the writer license to post content on whatever they like. As long as it is captivating and something the audience wants to see, they will come back. A lifestyle blog tends to focus more on personal preferences and opinions.

If you type “a cup of” into Google, the first result you see is “A Cup of Jo.” This is a daily lifestyle blog by Jo Goddard covering fashion, beauty, food, design, and parenting. She writes personal stories, features home makeovers, tutorials, and recipes. Jo makes money from ads and her shop, which promotes all the products in the blog posts.

Lifestyle example showing how A Cup Of Jo makes money blogging

A Cup of Jo lifestyle blog

A different type of lifestyle blog is Vulcan Post. The team post news about technology and products that impact the daily lifestyle of their readers. With millions of readers, although not publicly stated, Vulcan Post offers the opportunity for advertisers to offer up their products for features. It is likely this is where they make money blogging.

Parenting

Any new parents out there will know how often they scan websites and blogs looking for advice. Parenting blogs that provide great content and information are an excellent income stream.

Mommy On Purpose is full of tips from pregnancy to labor, living with kids, family finances, and how to start your own blog. There are plenty of advertising and affiliate links throughout the site as well as blogging courses.

Blogs for moms will always be successful because parents continually seek out advice.

Making money blogging

There are plenty of ways to make money blogging. Hopefully, this post helps understand some of those that are easier to monetize. However, if you have another idea, don’t be hasty and rule it out.

In reality, anything can work if you put the time, effort, and resources into it. The types listed here are the ones that have proven to generate income time and time again.

With so many ways to make money from blogging such as advertising, affiliate marketing, selling products, and sponsorship, proper planning can make anything possible.

Go out there, find an audience, secure your niche, and get blogging today. If you are looking for help to get started, check out our guide to building a website from scratch.

References

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WordPress Page Builder/WordPress WYSIWYG Editors

WordPress page builder/WordPress WYSIWYG editors (also known as WordPress page builders, WordPress visual editors, and even as WordPress website builders) is a hot topic today!

The reason is that WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the World.  42% of all websites on the entire Internet use WordPress as their CMS. Hands down, WordPress has tons of advantages – that’s true.

However, it has also one significant disadvantage: unlike DIY website builders WordPress is not the easiest solution if you are not tech-savvy.

That’s the exact reason why we have WordPress WYSIWYG Editors (also known under many different names as already stated above).

Best WordPress WYSIWYG Editors Table

Editor Grade Price
Divi Builder A From $89
Elementor A Free
Beaver Builder A- Free
Thrive Architect A- From $19/month
Themify B Free
Visual Composer B Free
WP Page Builder B Free
Oxygen B $99/year
Brizy B Free (Pro from $49)
Live Composer C Free
MotoPress Page Builder B From $39
WPBakery Page Builder B From $45
Colibri B From $67

1. Divi Builder (Best WordPress Page Builder Overall)

Divi gets a lot of positive customer reviews

Pros

  • Powerful page builder
  • Theme building capabilities
  • Excellent pricing and one-time payment option
  • Global elements and styling
  • Regular updates and support

Cons

  • Long learning curve
  • Uses shortcode based widgets
  • Can be slower at times with long pages

Divi is probably the most popular drag-and-drop WordPress builder out there. It literally transforms WordPress into a WYSIWYG editor.

Divi Builder is

  • super easy to use
  • beautifully designed
  • extremely powerful

Here is how Divi Page Builder looks in action:

Divi-WordPress

Building a website with Divi is a breeze. There is probably nothing you can’t build with it.

Plus, Divi comes with hundreds of professionally designed layouts accessible right from the Divi builder in your WordPress panel.

Divi WordPress Page Builder Plugin Layouts Library-min

Some of these layouts are complete website packs which means that all you need to do is to pick one and add your content.

The process of adding Divi pre-made layouts and website kits to the WordPress site looks like this:

Using Divi Premade Layouts
Divi pre-made website kits and layouts can be added in a few clicks.

Check this Divi Digital Marketing Layout Live Demo as an example (this is the one we are using in the GIF image above).

This is the type of pre-made templates (and website kits) you’ll get access to with your Divi Builder.

If you are not planning to have something very special or extremely unique on your website, Divi pre-made templates are great for building your website from scratch literally in the blink of an eye.

Here is a quick video that explains Divi in detail:

Now let’s see how Divi looks behind the scenes when you actually build on WordPress with it.

There are two ways of building websites with Divi Builder:

The first one is Divi WordPress Visual Page Builder where you edit your website on the front-end (right on your website like in the screenshot below).

Divi Visual Editor Screenshot
Divi Visual Editor

This Divi Visual Page Builder is currently one of the best drag and drops WP editors on the market. It’s a true WYSIWYG editor.

The second option is the Back-end Builder (or Divi WireFrame view) – where you work in your WordPress dashboard (or inside Divi Visual Builder) with Divi modules, sections, rows, and columns like in the screenshot below:

*After the introduction of Gutenberg Editor, for this option to work, you need to have the WordPress Classic Editor plugin installed. Alternatively, you can turn on WireFrame view on Divi Visual Builder (frontend).

Both Divi page building modes are actually great.

And it’s also amazing to have both of these editor types available within one master WordPress editor.

It’s a mere matter of personal preference what option you use.

WireFrame view is great for visualizing the structure of your page and organizing long-form content with lots of elements and design.

This one is definitely among our favorite Divi features. Plus, Divi Visual Builder and WireFrame view work seamlessly together:

Divi Builder WireFrame View
Switching between Divi Visual Builder and Wireframe view

Importantly, Divi is more than just a WordPress page builder.

It’s more like a complete WordPress website builder and marketing toolset.

Divi has everything you may need for your WordPress website starting from an intuitive drag and drop interface and ending with advanced functionality like A/B testing:

Divi is more like WordPress Site Builder - it has even Split Testing-min

Just check the Elegant Themes Divi page to see all it has to offer. It’s amazing.

The official Divi page itself is the perfect example of the utmost web design.

Free Divi Test Drive

Explore the surprising power of Divi Visual Builder

Try Now

Divi Builder Main Features:

  • Drag and drop WordPress page builder with front-end (true WYSIWYG) and back-end editor
  • No coding skills required
  • Easy setup
  • Intuitive user interface
  • Inline text editing
  • Works with any WordPress theme
  • Responsiveness
  • Awesome 24/7 Support
  • Huge user community (including Divi centered forums, websites, and communities with countless tutorials on everything you might need)
  • Divi Marketplace (where third party Divi creators make their Divi related products, such as extensions, child themes, layouts, landing pages, and individual landing page elements available to Divi users)
  • Amazing Bloom & Monarch Plugins Included as a bonus

Additional Features

  • 100+ Complete Website Packs
  • 800+ Pre-made Designs
  • 40+ Website Elements
  • Divi Library where you can save your custom designs, modules, and layouts
  • Global elements
  • Split testing functionality
  • Bulk editing
  • Animations
  • Undo/Redo functionality
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Searchable & filterable settings
  • Custom CSS control
  • Nice integration with WooCommerce (WooBuilder)
  • History, Backups, and Autosave
  • Export/Import options

Divi is compatible with Gutenberg.

How Much Does Divi Cost?

Okay, now how much does WordPress page builder Divi cost?

There are two pricing options offered by Elegant Themes for Divi Builder. One is yearly access which renews every year and the other one is lifetime access with single-time payment.

Here is the current pricing information for both options

  • Yearly access is $89
  • Lifetime access is $249

NB: Divi is a premium-only WP page builder – a free version is not available (but you can try Divi Demo for free here).

What is included

  • Complete access to all features, themes, and plugins (including beautiful Bloom & Monarch)
  • Unlimited websites
  • Unlimited users
  • Premium support
  • 30-day no questions asked money-back guarantee

Overall, Elegant Themes membership (where Divi belongs) is packed with value.

More on Divi Builder

  • Divi Builder Real Life Examples – The list of websites (some of the big brands) using the Divi framework
  • Text styling with Divi
  • Advanced code editing with Divi
  • Multiselect and Bulk editing with Divi
  • Divi built-in split testing
  • Divi WooCommerce Builder

20% OFF ELEGANT THEMES MEMBERSHIP

Membership includes unlimited access to Divi Theme, Divi Builder, Extra Theme, Bloom, and Monarch Plugin.

2. Elementor (Best WordPress Editor for Custom Design)

Pros:

  • Feature-packed free version
  • Intuitive user interface
  • Constant updates
  • Great documentation and videos
  • Active Facebook group community

Cons:

  • Can be complicated for new users
  • Custom styling doesn’t always work
  • No white label option for developers

Elementor is another widely popular WordPress drag and drop page builder plugin known for its ease of useclean code and speed (both in terms of plugin’s work and the speed of websites built with Elementor).

As a plugin Elementor has great reviews on WordPress (4.9 stars out of 5 based on 5051 reviews at the time of writing this post):

It also comes with over 80 design elements including image, text, video, map, icons and more.

Elementor Showcase

See the real websites built with Elementor

Elementor works great with most WordPress themes and plugins and is available in over 50 languages.

Many people consider Elementor to be the best WordPress page builder at the moment. However, Elementor is probably more than just a page builder plugin with some additional features. Elementor considers itself a complete WordPress site builder (and they boldly mention this on their homepage).

Here is how building with Elementor looks like:

We use Elementor here at Siteeefy, and here is how editing with it looks like:

Drag and drop editing with Elementor

Elementor is probably the best one among free WordPress page builders available today to WP users. And what is unique to Elementor as a free WordPress page builder is the fact that its free version is not restricted.

You get all that you need to build a WordPress website with Elementor Free which is amazing.

Before Elementor there was no free WordPress page builder of this level. All comparable products were premium.

While Elementor free version is awesome, Elementor Pro takes everything to the next level.

You get lots of useful stuff with Elementor Pro such as Elementor Popup Builder:

Elementor Form Widget:

Elementor-Pro-Form-Widget

…and other cool (and handy) WordPress widgets, tools and elements!

On top of everything, you get premium support with the Pro version of Elementor.

We actually wrote a whole article on Elementor Free vs Pro. You might want to check it out if you want to learn more.

One very unique feature of Elementor (which we also love and use a lot here at Siteefy) is their Elementor Finder:

Amazing, isn’t it?

Elementor Main Features

  • One of the best WordPress editors overall
  • High speed
  • Clean code (no lock-in)
  • 24/7 Support (Pro version)
  • AutoSave functionality
  • Redo/Undo functionality
  • Responsiveness
  • Role Manager
  • Elementor Finder

Additional Features

  • 150+ Elementor Kits and Templates
  • Easy integration with major marketing tools and platforms
  • Visual Form Builder
  • Advanced Pop-up Builder (includes 100+ pre-built pop-up templates)
  • WooCommerce Page Builder
  • Content Lock functionality
  • Cool motion effects and animations
  • Powerful Custom Positioning
  • Shape Dividers
  • Lightbox Overlay
  • Social Icons & Share Buttons
  • Star Rating and Reviews
  • Sticky Elements
  • Evergreen Countdown
  • Tutorials and other learning materials
  • Developer-Friendly
  • Third-party addons

Elementor Pricing

The free version of Elementor includes 30 basic widgets and a WordPress drag and drop page builder.

Elementor Pro version comes with 50+ advanced widgets and every other feature that makes Elementor one of the best WordPress page builder solutions on the market. This includes Elementor Theme Builder, Pop-up Builder, Visual Form Builder, Advanced visual effects and WooCommerce Builder.

Elementor Pro costs as below:

  • $49 for a single website
  • $99 for three websites
  • $199 for 25 websites,
  • $499 for 100 websites
  • and $999 for 1,000 websites

All plans include 1-year support and updates.

3. Beaver Builder (Best Simple WP Front End Editor)

Beaver Builder is another free and popular WYSIWYG editor for WordPress (Beaver Builder Lite is the free version and is available here).

Beaver Builder’s nice and neat WordPress drag and drop editor allows users to work on their WP sites without using a single line of code.

With Beaver Builder your coding skills do not matter and creating a stunning website is possible with simple drag and drop manipulations.

WYSIWYG-Editors

Beaver Builder has an intuitive and clear interface which makes working with this editor easy for anyone. Over 1,000,000 WordPress websites have been built with Beaver Builder so far and this number is ever-growing.

Here is a quick introduction video to Beaver Builder:

Beaver Builder Main Features:

  • Simple and user friendly WYSIWYG editor
  • Intuitive drag and drop interface
  • No coding skills required
  • Responsiveness
  • Compatible with any WordPress theme
  • Helpful community
  • Awesome pre-made templates

Beaver Builder Additional Features:

  • WooCommerce Support
  • Save & Reuse Options
  • Shortcode Support
  • Widget Support
  • Import & Export Functions
  • Translation friendly
  • Social Buttons

Beaver Builder Pricing

Beaver Builder comes in the free version (Beaver Builder Lite) and three different yearly premium packages. The packages are Standard, Pro, and Agency. Here is what each package includes:

Standard Package – $99

  • Beaver Page Builder is included
  • Beaver Builder Theme is not included

Pro Package – $199

  • Beaver Page Builder is included
  • Beaver Builder Theme is included
  • Multisite Capability

Agency Package – $399

  • Everything that the two above packages include plus Multisite Network Settings and White Labeling

All three packages come with 1-year support and are valid for an unlimited number of websites.

4. Thrive, Architect,

Thrive Architect might not be as popular as Divi or Elementor, but it got a special spot among WordPress visual editors and some people consider it to be the best WordPress page builder on the market.

As the page builder positions itself, Thrive Architect is a “click to edit” solution (as they also call this “truly visual WordPress page builder”).

Similar to other WordPress page builders, Thrive Architect adds a real front-end editor to your WordPress meaning that you do not have to deal with WordPress back-end to build your pages.

This aligns well with Thrive Architect’s promise about a truly visual WordPress experience. If you want to edit something using Thrive Architect the only thing you need to do is to click on it and all possible editing options will pop up.

You can click and edit anything you have on your back-end right on the front-end where you actually see what you edit (as you know this is not possible when you work on the back-end).

So, the nature of Thrive Architect is a WordPress editor perfectly aligns with the WYSIWYG concept.

WP Front End Editor - Thrive Architect

Just like other builders listed above, Thrive Architect requires no coding skills.

It comes with pre-made conversion elements such as buttons, testimonials, lead generation forms, and countdown timers.

Check this quick Thrive Architect walkthrough video:

In contrast with other WordPress page builders, Thrive Architect makes a special accent on being built for business and conversions focused websites.

On top of that, 291 different landing page templates are available in Thrive Architect library to use at the moment of writing this post.

Thrive Architect Main Features:

  • Full front-end drag and drop builder (true WordPress WYSIWYG editor)
  • Designed to speed up the page building process
  • Desktop, smartphone, and tablet previews
  • Mobile responsiveness
  • Thrive, Theme Builder,
  • Thrive Quiz Builder
  • Thrive Apprentice (Course builder)

Thrive Architect Additional Features

  • 291 pre-designed and conversion-focused smart landing page templates that are also fully customizable (Thrive Architect has its own Smart Landing Pages technology)
  • Plus ready-made pages for all your other marketing needs including webinar and product launch pages
  • Additional pre-built conversion-focused elements (buttons, countdown timers, forms, testimonials, etc.)
  • Easy integration with the major marketing tools
  • Simple landing pages designed to quickly validate business ideas
  • A/B testing functionality
  • Blog post layouts and elements designed for higher user engagement
  • Font customization
  • Full-width layouts
  • Hover effects
  • Advanced mobile customization options
  • Animations

Thrive Architect WP Drag and Drop Plugin Pricing

Thrive Architect comes at two different pricing options:

  • Thrive Suite Membership at $19 per month which is billed annually at $228. This membership includes access to all Thrive plugins and themes, with unlimited support and product updates.
  • Thrive Suite Membership at $30 per month, billed quarterly at $90. This plan also includes access to all the Thrive plugins, Thrive, Theme Builder, unlimited support, product updates, and Thrive University access.

5. Themify

Themify is a well-known WordPress back-end and front-end visual editor that comes with Themify Theme and Themify Builder (which is free as a standalone WordPress editing plugin).

The drag and drop editor can be downloaded independently as a plugin if you are using a different WordPress theme.

Here is how Themify works:

Similar to Divi Builder, Themify also provides two editing options:

  • Backend editing
  • Frontend editing

So, depending on your personal preferences you can use any of these options and comfortably switch between them.

With Themify backend builder you will be able to easily drag and drop different modules on your WordPress backend to build your pages.

Themify frontend interface at the same time includes a live editor which will provide you the classic WYSIWYG building experience, so you will be able to visually see what you do in real-time.

Themify Builder comes with over 40 professionally designed layouts which you can simply import and build your own pages based on them.

Stunning web pages on many different topics can be created literally in minutes with these pre-made layouts.

With Themify builder you can create amazing animation effects like this one below:

Themify Animation Effects

Additionally, Themify page builder plugin includes its own caching system that helps to reduce server resources and makes page processing faster.

Themify Builder Main Features:

  • The back-end and front-end page builder for WordPress
  • Mobile responsiveness
  • Multi-site support
  • Can be extended further with add-ons

Themify Builder Additional Features:

  • Undo/Redo functions
  • Import/Export functions
  • Easy duplicating
  • Flexible rows and columns combinations
  • Layout parts
  • 60+ animation effects
  • Custom styling

Themify WordPress Page Editor Pricing:

The basic version of Themify Builder is free.

6. Visual Composer

Visual Composer is another massively popular drag and drops WordPress page builder that requires no coding. It allows users to edit pages in real-time on the front-end and view the end results before hitting the publish button.

Design options include control over background, spaces, borders, parallax effects, and more right from the editor.

WordPress Visual Editors - Visual Composer

Hundreds of content elements are available in Visual Composer (some of them are available with Premium access to Visual Composer Hub only).

Visual Composer works with any WordPress theme and you do not lose your design layouts when you switch the themes.

Main Features:

  • WordPress WYSIWYG Editor
  • WordPress widgets support
  • Custom CSS
  • Global templates
  • Responsive design
  • Compatibility with Yoast SEO plugin

7. WP Page Builder

WP Page Builder is a visual page builder plugin developed by Themeum.

It is a beginner-friendly page builder with a clean interface and flexible customization options. You can use nested rows and columns to build any type of layout you want.

WP Page Builder by Themeum

Multiple ready-to-use blocks and templates are available that you can import to quickly build pages. But there’s no inline editing, and you will have to edit your text in the sidebar editor.

Some of the content elements included in WP Page Builder are accordion, carousel, form, post grid, button, flip box, heading, icon, image, progress, social buttons, and testimonial carousel.

While WP Page Builder is a nice plugin for building simple page layouts, you don’t get as many options as you get with other builders like Divi Builder or Elementor. Some advanced features like theme builder, popup builder, and marketing integrations are not included with this page builder.

Main Features

  • Front-end WordPress visual editor
  • 60 content blocks and 38 addons
  • 27 layout packs
  • Unlimited redo and undo options
  • WordPress widget support
  • Compatible with all WordPress themes
  • Translation ready builder

Pricing

Similar to Colibri, this page builder also has yearly and lifetime plans:

  • Single license — $39/year or $299 one-time payment.
  • 5 license pack — $59/year or $399 one-time payment.
  • Unlimited license — $99/year or $599 one-time payment.

You will get regular plugin updates and priority support with all the plans. There’s a standard 30-day refund policy also.

8. Oxygen

Launched in 2016 by Soflyy, Oxygen is one of the best WordPress page builders that has managed to attract a lot of users from the WordPress community.

It is a drag and drop page builder plugin that lets you build powerful WordPress websites with a combination of pre-built templates and other basic elements.

Oxygen builder WordPress Page Builder

The Oxygen Builder is a full WordPress WYSIWYG editor that supports theme editing too. So if you’re looking for a theme builder or an alternative to Divi or Elementor, Oxygen is a great option to consider.

Check this video to see Oxygen in action:

If you use WooCommerce on your website, you can use Oxygen to create and customize all your shop pages such as products page, checkout page, and product category pages. It also supports WooCommerce styles such as buttons, links, widgets, texts, notifications, and more.

Oxygen Builder Main Features:

  • Drag and drop visual editor
  • Fully responsive editing
  • Flexbox layout engine
  • Scroll animations
  • Full WooCommerce support
  • Global colors
  • SEO-friendly
  • Speed
  • Supports dynamic data
  • Built-in Gutenberg support

Oxygen WordPress Visual Editor Plugin Pricing:

The best thing about Oxygen is that, unlike other page builders, Oxygen only has one-time plans, so you don’t have to pay every year, and all the plans include lifetime updates, lifetime support, and unlimited installations.

The three pricing plans Oxygen offers are:

  • Basic plan – costs $99 and covers only the primary Oxygen page builder.
  • WooCommerce plan – costs $149 and includes the primary page builder plus WooCommerce integration.
  • Agency plan – costs $169 and covers basic, WooCommerce, and the Gutenberg block editor.

As the Oxygen page builder is relatively new and trying to establish its presence in the market, they have very competitive prices, so if you like the page builder, it’s best to buy the WooCommerce or the Agency plan before they increase their price to match the other costlier page builders.

9. Brizy

Launched in 2018, Brizy is a relatively new drag-and-drop page builder that lets you build stunning websites quickly and easily with no coding required.

Brizy page builder

While the WordPress page builder market is dominated by plugins like Elementor (5M+ installations), Divi (767,000+ installations), and Beaver Builder (300,000+ installations), Brizy has managed to get over 80,000 active installations just 3 years after the initial launch.

Brizy offers a fully responsive visual builder with real-time editing. It uses React technology as the backend of the tool, making the drag-and-drop editor very fast and easy to use. The Brizy editor supports smart content tools that show most of the customization options (like text size, color, link, duplicate, etc.) for each content element right on top of it, which saves time.

Many premium features like visual contact forms, sliders, and global settings are included within the Brizy free version. The free version contains 26 builder elements, responsive control, global blocks, and more!

Brizy free version

If you want full site editing capabilities to create and customize header, footer, post layout, archives, etc., you can subscribe to Brizy Pro.

Main Features

  • Full site editing with 100% responsive control
  • In-built mega menu and popup builder
  • WordPress email integration
  • 300+ layouts and blocks
  • 4000+ vector icons included
  • Marketing integration with Zapier, Mailchimp, Drip, ConvertKit, etc.
  • Dynamic content and ACF support
  • White label option for freelancers and agencies

Pricing

Brizy offers three different pricing plans:

  • Personal — $49 per year for 3 sites.
  • Studio — $99 per year for unlimited sites.
  • Lifetime — $299 one-time payment for unlimited sites.

All plans include all the Brizy Pro features, one year of updates, and premium support.

You also get access to WooCommerce Builder, Popup Builder, 300+ template layouts and blocks, 12 Pro elements, custom fonts, and many marketing integrations with Brizy Pro.

For a limited time, with each Pro plan, Brizy is offering complimentary access to the Brizy Cloud platform, so that is an added advantage if you go with Brizy Pro.

Additional resources on Gutenberg

10. Live Composer

Live Composer is a free and open-source drag and drops WordPress page builder plugin that you can use to create and customize your WP websites.

What we particularly like about Live Composer is that they (like Elementor) call their product a WordPress site builder and not simply WordPress page builder, plugin or editor.

Most of the editors listed on this page started out as page builders and plugins, but most already turned into complete WordPress website builders. So, Live Composer reflects this fact in their main message.

Currently, Live Composer offers a 100% drag and drop page builder interface with more than 30 content modules.

Live Composer WordPress page builder

With Live Composer content modules, you can create custom landing pages, blog posts, and other page types (about us, service, homepage, etc.).

The builder seamlessly works with all the WordPress themes, so you don’t have to invest in any particular paid theme.

Live Composer Main Features:

  • WordPress WYSIWYG Editor
  • 30+ content modules
  • Responsive editing
  • Full visual drag and drop builder
  • SEO friendly
  • Landing page support
  • Full WooCommerce customization
  • In-built Portfolio presets

Live Composer Pricing:

The basic Live Composer site builder is a free WordPress page builder plugin with two premium extension plugins to which you can upgrade if you need more customization options.

  • The Pro extension pack costs $49 for 1 site and $99 for unlimited sites. This extension offers additional features such as restricted content, contact forms, preloader, breadcrumbs, ACF support, mega menu, and more.
  • The Woo extension pack is priced at $49 for 1 site and $99 for unlimited sites. This extension offers full product page customizations, product listing grids, account stylings, checkout, and cart page customizations.

Both extensions include 12 months of support, regular updates, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. In case you don’t like the product, you can easily ask for a full refund.

Additional WordPress Page Builders, Visual Editors and Other WordPress Editing Plugins

11. MotoPress WordPress Page Builder

MotoPress is another drag and drop WordPress page builder plugin capable of designing pages, posts, and custom post types. You can build 100% responsive websites with MotoPress, without writing a single line of code.

MotoPress Page Builder and Frontend Editor

The best part about this plugin is that it works smoothly with all WordPress themes, and it comes with 30+ built-in content elements like text, image, slider, grid gallery, button, social buttons, video, audio, post grid, accordion, tabs, table, and more!

Main Features

  • Visual WordPress Editor
  • Editing for mobile, desktop, and tablet devices is available
  • It comes with mobile-ready layouts
  • From sections to widgets and pages, everything is customizable
  • It is compatible with WPML (WordPress Multilingual plugin) and multilingual interface

MotoPress Page Builder Pricing

You will get three pricing options with MotoPress builder:

  • Personal plan at $39 for 1 website.
  • The business plan at $69 for 5 websites.
  • Developer plan at $139 for unlimited websites.

All plans include a yearly license for automatic updates and support.

12. WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress

The WPBakery WordPress Page Builder lets you build responsive websites, and it also allows you to manage your content with ease as it comes with an intuitive WordPress front and back end editor.

WPBakery page builder for WordPress

Similar to other WordPress builders listed on this page, you won’t require any technical skills or programming knowledge to create websites using WPBakery page builder. The editor also comes with several premium content templates and predefined layouts, which allow building WordPress websites in a very short time.

Main Features

  • This WordPress plugin supports both front end and back end editing
  • Comes with 80+ predefined layouts and grid design templates
  • Comes with a shortcode mapper
  • Multisite and multilingual support
  • 200+ addons with hundreds of content elements
  • Built-in user role controls
  • Compatible with WooCommerce and Yoast SEO

WPBakery Page Builder Pricing

The regular package is available for $45 for use on 1 site, along with free updates, 6 months premium support, and access to a template library.

The extended package is available for $245 for use in a single SaaS application, along with free updates, premium support, and theme integration.

13. Colibri WordPress Page Builder

Colibri is a full site drag-and-drop page builder based on the WordPress Customizer. From the header, footer, page content, post layout, navigation menus, global and individual styling — you can edit everything in the Colibri page builder.

All the builder content components are fully customizable with settings like background and colors, typography, alignment, border, shadow, margins, and paddings.

Other than that, Colibri has over 90 website packs and over 150 predefined blocks for sections like about, features, services, testimonials, team, portfolio, contact forms, etc.

Main Features

  • Multiple hero section designs
  • Shape dividers
  • 90+ full website templates included
  • 150+ pre-designed blocks
  • 40+ drag-and-drop content components

Pricing

Colibri offers both yearly and lifetime plans:

  • Personal at $67 yearly or $159 one-time payment for 1 site.
  • Business at $74 yearly or $209 one-time payment for 5 sites.
  • Agency at $129 yearly or $359 one-time payment for unlimited sites.

All plans offer priority support, constant updates, and 20% renewal discounts (applicable on yearly plans only).

14. Page Builder by SiteOrigin

The most popular WordPress page builder plugin out there that is totally free but powerful.

Page Builder by SiteOrigin might not be as advanced as other page builders listed here, but it does its job well. This page builder offers back-end and front-end editing options based on widgets.

SiteOrigin Page Builder works with any theme and keeps your layout and content in place when you change your WordPress theme.

Page Builder by SiteOrigin does not require any coding to build beautiful WordPress websites and pages that are fully responsive. It’s easy enough to edit WordPress pages with this editor both on the back-end and front end.

Although its functionality is not as rich as the premium options above the SiteOrigin Page Builder does its job effectively and with ease. It’s a nice simple (a little old-fashioned) page builder plugin, but probably not more than that.

Main Features:

  • Based on content elements
  • Front-end and back-end functionality
  • Works with any WordPress theme
  • Useful history browser that lets to roll forward and back through your edits

15. Gutenberg WordPress Editor

WordPress has relatively recently launched a new visual builder called Gutenberg, which is designed to ease the workflow for the users and give powerful styling options built-in in the editor.

Unlike other page builders, Gutenberg comes pre-installed with WordPress.

This new builder uses a new blocks approach where each paragraph, image, etc. is considered a single block so that you can style everything the way you want without the need for coding.

Gutenberg block editor

You can create modern and multimedia heavy layouts with Gutenberg without installing any additional plugin.

But as Gutenberg is new and is geared towards ease of use, it lacks a few advanced features such as wrapping options, padding, and margins, etc.

Gutenberg currently has only backend editing functionality, so it’s not a complete WordPress WYSIWYG editor like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, and others. You don’t see the final output in real-time when editing with Gutenberg. To see your changes on the page you need to use the preview function (which means an additional click every time).

This default WordPress editor is best if you are looking to create simple layouts. It’s not as advanced as other WordPress page builder plugins listed on this page.

Gutenberg Editor Main Features:

  • Native to WP
  • Paragraph block
  • Heading block
  • Subheading block
  • Quotes block
  • Image block
  • Gallery block
  • Cover Image block
  • Video block
  • Audio block
  • Columns
  • Lists block
  • and, Buttons block
  • Integrations and addons

Gutenberg Pricing:

Gutenberg is completely free and is now included in all WordPress 5.0 installations by default. If you haven’t updated to the latest version yet, you can install the Gutenberg plugin from the WordPress repository for free.

16. Microthemer — Live CSS editor for WordPress Site Builders

Microthemer is a live CSS (point-and-click) editor that you can use to get developer-level design control on your website. You can design responsively, create CSS grid layouts, integrate with the page builder of your choice, and get expert help with this editor.

Microthemer Live CSS Editor

You can use Microthemer to change the page design in a matter of seconds as the style edits instantly make an appearance on the screen. Microthemer also shows the HTML code for the selected elements, which makes it easy to edit and stylize.

Main Features

  • Microthemer can customize any part of a WordPress page
  • Comes with a variety of (150+) CSS styling options
  • It is equipped with drag and drop CSS grid controls
  • Supports Google fonts
  • Comes with a revision and restore feature
  • Built-in responsive design support with multiple breakpoints
  • Integrates well with other popular WordPress page builders like Elementor, Oxygen, and Beaver Builder

Microthemer Pricing

Microthemer offers both yearly and lifetime pricing options where yearly plans have an annual fee, and they can be canceled or upgraded at any time. The lifetime plans have a pay once, use forever policy.

The plans are as follows:

  • Standard yearly plan at $49 for 3 sites in total, 1 year of free upgrades and support
  • Developer yearly plan at $90 for unlimited sites, 1 year of free upgrades and support
  • Standard lifetime plan at $78 for 3 sites license, lifetime upgrades and support
  • Developer lifetime plan at $399 for unlimited sites, lifetime upgrades and support

Lastly, there’s a Developer monthly plan at $0 for the first month (afterward, it’s $8.99/month), which is good for users to try the builder before paying for it.

17. Advanced Editor Tools (TinyMCE Editor)

Previously known as TinyMCE Editor, Advanced Editor Tools is a rich text editor that now merges the WordPress classic editor and the Gutenberg editor. This means that you can use the Classic Paragraph Block of the old classic editor in the new Gutenberg editor — giving you the best of both worlds.

The Advanced Editor Tools plugin allows you to add, remove, and arrange different buttons in the visual editor toolbar as per your choice, and it also lets you configure up to four different rows of buttons, including tables, colors, background, text, font family, and font sizes.

Main Features

  • Allows you to opt between the classic block and classic paragraph in terms of setting the default block in the WordPress editor
  • Allows you to create and edit tables in the classic editor and the classic blocks
  • Search and replace function
  • Supports custom font family and font size in the classic block and classic editor

TinyMCE Pricing

The basic version of TinyMCE is available on WordPress.org, which you can download for free.

To get access to the premium editor, you can subscribe to its cloud essential plan at $25 per month, which, when billed annually, you get 2 months free. It can be billed monthly as well. You will get ticketing support in the premium plan, more than 9 premium plugins, and premium icons and skins.

There’s another cloud professional plan which costs $75 per month which offers everything in the cloud essential along with a link checker, spell checker pro, and accessibility checker.

18. Blog Designer and Blog Designer PRO for WordPress

Blog Designer is a quick and free solution for anyone who wishes to have a responsive blog page along with the website. Blog Designer comes with 10 unique blog templates, and you can easily set up your WordPress website’s blog with it.

This plugin allows you to create nice and clean blog pages without any technical or CSS skills up your sleeves. The admin panel is also user-friendly, and beginners can use it easily too.

However, Blog Designer is not an advanced all-in-one WordPress drag and drop plugin like other more sophisticated visual editors listed above on this page. It’s a simple WordPress plugin for simple tasks.

Main Features of Blog Designer

  • Fully responsive
  • Cross-browser support such as for Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and others
  • The number of posts per page can be managed easily
  • Comes with 10 default blog templates
  • Custom CSS support
  • Translation ready

Main Features of Blog Designer Pro

  • 50 default blog templates along with more than 200 options for combinations
  • Comes with 10 grid templates
  • More than 5 unique timeline templates
  • Over 3 magazine templates
  • More than 40 single post layout designs with several features
  • Over 600 fonts

Pricing

Blog Designer is available for free on WordPress.org, while Blog Designer Pro’s regular license is available for $59.

19. Genesis Blocks (former Atomic Blocks) – Gutenberg Blocks Collection

Atomic Blocks has changed its name to Genesis Blocks, but the beautiful design, powerful blocks, and the plugin’s innovative team remain the same.

Atomic Blocks is not a complete WordPress editor as such. It’s a WordPress plugin with a collection of page building blocks made for the new Gutenberg block editor.

After WordPress introduced Gutenberg, new WordPress editor plugins started to appear aiming to fill Gutenberg gaps and extend its functionality. Genesis Block is one of those WordPress plugins and it adds a lot of extra value to Gutenberg editor.

Atomic Blocks for Gutenberg

The plugin makes it easy for you to customize the page layouts and design sections to get better and faster results with Gutenberg.

Main Features

  • Google AMP support
  • Premium block, section, and layouts library
  • Role-based user permissions

Atomic Blocks Pricing

The basic version of Atomic Blocks is free, which includes 14 blocks4 pre-built page layouts and 8 pre-built sections.

20. Ultimate Blocks – Gutenberg Blocks Plugin

Ultimate Blocks is a Gutenberg blocks library plugin that over 20,000 WordPress users use. It’s similar to Atomic Blocks in its functionality.

The plugin comes with 15 Gutenberg blocks, including team block, price list block, testimonial block, info box block, content filter, table of contents, HowTo schema, countdown, and others.

The good part about using Ultimate Blocks is that it is equipped with built-in support for the Astra theme, which allows you to create good-looking websites.

Main Features

  • Comes with 23 new blocks
  • Comes with an infobox
  • It is equipped with content timeline blocks

Ultimate Blocks Pricing

Ultimate Blocks is free.

Best WordPress Page Builder: Who is the Winner?

As you can see there is a big variety of different WordPress editors (both free and premium). Telling which one is the best among them is not an easy task.

Competition is fierce between WordPress page builder plugins and every popular page builder out there considers itself to be the best.

Plus, each competing WordPress builder constantly tries to grow and improve further by adding new features, enhancing their drag and drop interface, live editor, content elements, page templates (including landing page templates) and by making the overall product easy to use and more user friendly.

So, the best page builder for WordPress is a little vague status that is hard to tell.

Even if told this status will probably keep passing from one builder to another as they improve and take over the competition.

To put it short, at this very moment the following builders are closer to being the best WordPress builder compared to others: Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Oxygen and Thrive Architect.

Conclusion

In case dealing with the code is not your strongest skill, drag and drop WordPress page builders are very helpful solutions that completely solve this issue for you.

What they do is that they literally transform WordPress into a simple and easy website builder.

Of course, it is up to you to decide which of the above is the best WordPress WYSIWYG editor, but one thing is for sure:

With page builders, you get the full power of WordPress and the ease of drag and drop (or WYSIWYG) at the same time – two major components combined in one.

FAQs

What is WYSIWYG mode?

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) mode is an editing mode where the user can see how the end result will look like in real-time while editing the document in the editor. The new WP editor – Gutenberg is a backend WYSIWYG editor that adds page-builder-like functionality to WordPress.

What is WordPress Page Builder?

WordPress page builder is usually a plugin which when enabled allows users to build websites in a code-free mode. Today, WordPress page builders are extremely advanced and are more like website builders with tons of sophisticated features and capabilities.

Do I need a Page Builder for WordPress?

It depends on what you want to build. For a very basic blog you normally don’t need a page builder. This is the original purpose for which WordPress has been initially built for. So simple blogging is very easy with WordPress, you don’t need a page builder for it.

But if you want to build a website (not just a blog) then you will likely need a page builder to do so (if you want to build code-free).

How do I add a page builder (WYSIWYG editor) to WordPress?

With Gutenberg, you don’t have to. Gutenberg comes preinstalled.

But if you need something more advanced, then this will depend on the particular WYSIWYG editor you want to use.

If the editor you want to use is available as a plugin you can add it by going to the WordPress dashboard > Plugins > Add New.

There you can search for the editor plugin (like Elementor or Beaver Builder), or you can upload the plugin .zip file directly. After that, click on Activate, and the editor will be available to use in posts and pages.

How do I use the front end drag and drop page builder in WordPress?

It’s important to note here that Gutenberg is not a front end editor. With Gutenberg, you edit in the backend but in WYSIWYG mode.

More advanced builders, like Divi, Elementor or Beaver Builder allow front-end editing, so the first thing you need to do in order to use them is to add them to your WordPress website.

Once you have the front-end editor installed and activated on your WordPress website, you can go to Posts > Add New and click on Edit with editor (different editors will have different wording here like “Edit with Divi” or “Edit with Elementor”).

To edit an existing page with the front-end editor, you can navigate to the pages (or posts), find the page that you want to edit, hover over it and click on Edit with the editor to open the page within the editor. Alternatively, you can just go to the page on your browser while logged in to your WordPress dashboard and you will see your editing options in the top bar.

Which free page builder is best for WordPress?

The best free WordPress page builders are Elementor and Beaver Builder. These page builders offer features like responsive live drag and drop editing, pre-designed templates, inline editing, background overlays, and 40+ free content widgets. You can download these page builders for free from the WordPress plugins directory.

Unlike Elementor and Beaver Builder, Divi does not have a free version.

How to use WP page builder?

Today, WordPress editing plugins are extremely user friendly and easy to use (both free and premium). The actual building part usually happens within a simple drag and drop environment where you can literally drag and drop, edit and customize elements right on your website in a true WYSIWYG mode.

Plus. the major WordPress builders like Divi and Elementor provide a great number of learning materials and tutorials. So, even if you don’t know how to use certain features you can always quickly learn it.

Are drag and drop WP themes the same as builders?

In most cases, yes.

With the evolution of WP editor plugins the line between drag and drop WP themes and drag and drop page builders became blurred. Today, top WordPress page builders come with their own themes (for example, Divi Builder comes with Divi Theme, Elementor with Hello Theme, and Beaver Builder with Beaver Theme).

 

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WordPress Visual Editor Not Working? Here’s How to Fix It

WordPress Visual Editor Not Working?/The WordPress visual editor is a text editor that lets you edit and write blog posts easily without having to learn HTML. When it doesn’t work, frustrating is the perfect word to describe it.

Luckily, it’s not that hard to fix and in this guide, we’ll cover the reasons why the WordPress visual editor stops functioning and how to get it working with a few different methods.

Reasons Behind the WordPress Visual Editor Not Working

Issues with Visual Editor are among the most common WordPress problems and unfortunately, there is no single solution to it (as it happens due to various reasons).

A few things can cause WordPress visual editor doesn’t work error. For example, there might be some faulty files and misconfigurations on your website preventing the editor from working properly.

Here are some common reasons why the WordPress visual editor stops working:

  • Faulty plugins
  • Outdated themes
  • Corrupted WordPress core files
  • User settings misconfiguration

✓ Quick Solution:

Switch to Gutenberg or Get a Front End Editor

The quickest and easiest solution to this problem is switching to the newest default WordPress editor Gutenberg or getting a reliable WordPress builder with front-end editing functionality (like Divi or Elementor).

With a proper page builder, you won’t need Visual Editor anymore. All editing will be front-end, right on the live version of your website in “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) mode.

Fixing the WordPress Visual Editor

There is a number of actions you can take to correct the issue by using the WordPress dashboard, your site’s file manager, or an FTP client.

Let’s start!

1. Clear Your Browser Cache

Sometimes your browser’s cache and cookies prevent WordPress from working properly. If this is the case, simply delete your browser’s data and try to use the editor again.

Here’s how to do it on Google Chrome:

  • Open Google Chrome, head to the three-dotted menu bar on the upper right side of the window.
  • Scroll down to More Tools > Clear Browsing Data
  • Choose what you would like to delete and hit Clear Data.

To do it on Mozilla, you need to:

  • Open Mozilla, head to the top right section with the three lines > Options.
  • Go to Privacy and Security, then scroll down to Cookies and Site Data > Clear Data.
  • Put a check on what you want to delete and hit Clear.

2. Edit User Settings Through the WordPress Dashboard

Sometimes this error happens due to a misconfiguration in the WordPress user settings. Luckily, you can easily fix it through the WordPress admin area. Here’s what you need to do.

  •  log in to the WordPress dashboard and head to Users > Your Profile.
  •  Make sure the Disable the visual editor when the writing option is not checked and update the profile.
Disable the visual editor when writing
  • Refresh your website and that’s it! If it still doesn’t work, try checking and unchecking the option.

If it doesn’t fix the issue, then leave it unchecked and proceed to the next method.

3. Use WordPress Default Theme

Not every WordPress theme is compatible with the visual editor, so it’s likely your theme could be the reason behind the visual editor not working.

To know for sure if it’s causing the error, change your current theme to a WordPress default like TwentySixteen. Here’s how to do it:

1. Login to the WordPress admin area and go to Appearances > Themes.
2. Locate the WordPress default theme and Activate it.

WordPress Admin Area

3. Now, refresh and check if the visual editor works again.

4. Disable Plugins

  • Faulty plugins can cause many issues on WordPress, the visual editor error is one of them.
  • To know if the plugins installed on your website are the source of the problem, disable them all and see if the error persists.
  • You can do it one by one through the WordPress dashboard, or you can rename your plugin folder through an FTP client to disable them all at once.

Here we’ll show you how to do it through an FTP client

  • Connect your web server to the FTP client. Here we’re using FileZilla as an example.
  • Head to the Remote site panel and locate wp-content.
  • Find the plugins folder and right-click to Rename it.
Disable plugins on WordPress - FTP

4. That’s it! Once you’ve renamed the folder, all of your plugins will be disabled automatically.

If disabling your plugins doesn’t do the trick, rename the folder back to its original name and try the next option. To figure out which specific plugin is causing the issue, enter the plugin folder, and enable all plugins one by one. Once the visual editor doesn’t work after enabling one of them – you’ll know the culprit.

5. Re-install the Latest Version of WordPress

If you’re not using the latest version of WordPress, you might want to update it immediately.

But if you’ve been using the latest one yet still getting the error, you can try reinstalling your website.

But remember to create a backup of your site before proceeding with the method in case something goes wrong.

The easiest way to do this is through the WordPress dashboard. Log in to your admin area and head to Updates by hovering over the dashboard menu option. Then, click Re-install Now.

Fix WordPress Visual Editor By Reinstalling WordPress

If you prefer to do it manually, follow these simple steps to re-install your website core files through FileZilla.

  • Download the latest WordPress version.
  • Extract the zipped files on your computer, then delete the wp-content folder.
  • Connect to FileZilla and head to your site’s root directory (/) under Remote site and press on it.
  • Now, head to the Local site, select the extracted WordPress files and right-click to upload them to the directory.
Reinstall WordPress FTP
  • Once a prompt message pops up telling you the Target file already exists, select Overwrite and tick the Always use this action and Apply to current queue only options.
  • That’s it! Once the upload finishes, you have reinstalled the WordPress core files.

Now, check if the visual editor works properly. If it’s still not there, check out the last method.

6. Edit the wp-config.php File

The last resort to solve the error is to edit your wp-config.php file. You can do it through your site’s File Manager, or an FTP client.

Follow these instructions to edit the wp-config.php file through the File Manager:

  • log in to your hosting provider’s control panel and head to the File Manager.
  • Once you’re in the public_html directory, locate your wp-config.php file. Right-click to edit the file.
WordPress Visual Editor Not Working - Edit the wp-config
  • Add the following line right under the <?PHP opening tag: define(‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false);
  • Save changes and refresh your site to check if the visual editor is back to normal.

That’s it! Your WordPress visual editor should be working perfectly.

Advanced options to fix the WordPress Visual Editor Not Working

There are other advanced options that may be required to fix the error in WordPress if the simple fixes do not solve the problem. Using any of these methods, you have to make certain changes and modifications to the WordPress files.

Replace your TinyMCE folder

It is possible that an incomplete WordPress installation or upgrade corrupted your core files and led to a “WordPress visual editor not working” error. In order to fix this, you need to replace the corrupted TinyMCE folder with a new one. Here’s how:

  • Download a corresponding version of WordPress from the WordPress website and extract the zip file to a suitable location on your computer.
  • Access your WordPress files on your server using an FTP client like FileZilla and double-click on the path: wp-includes > js.
  • Locate a folder called ‘TinyMCE and delete it.

delete tinymce folder

  • On the left-hand side of FileZilla where you have your computer files, locate your newly downloaded WordPress folder and double-click on the path: wp-includes > js.
  • Locate the ‘TinyMCE folder, right-click on it, and click Upload.  This will replace the folder you deleted.

Wrapping Up

There you have it! Quick fixes on how to solve the WordPress visual editor problem. Here’s a quick recap:

  • Clear your browser’s cache.
  • Edit the WordPress user settings through the WordPress dashboard.
  • Change the current theme to the WordPress default.
  • Disable WordPress plugins through the FTP client.
  • Re-install WordPress core files from the WordPress dashboard or manually through FTP.
  • Edit the wp-config.php file.

Pretty easy, right? We hope that now you can get back to easily creating your content. Good luck and if you still have any questions, let us know in the comments.

References

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Top 50 Reasons Your Website Deserves to Be Penalized By Google

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.

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

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

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

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 Developing Tools

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.

What is System Testing

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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Best Cybersecurity Software to Protect Your Business

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.

Fact Check: According to the research performed by CompTIA, 26% of the large organizations, 20% of the mid-size organization, and 17% of small businesses make heavy use of security metrics. The same research says that the Cybersecurity market has recorded a growth of 10.2% in 2018 and has a revenue of $91.4 billion.

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.

Pro Tip: To maintain effective cybersecurity, there are certain steps to be followed i.e. updating software or systems, conducting security audits from top to bottom, social engineering audits, regular data backups at work, and maintaining physical security & industry compliance.

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

Our Ratings Best For Category Features Free Trial Price
SolarWinds Security Event Manager 5 Stars Small to large businesses. Cloud-based tool for SIEM. Threat Intelligence, SIEM Security & Monitoring,
Log correlation & Analysis,
Network & Host Intrusion Detection, etc.
Available for 14 days. It starts at $4500.
Intruder 5 Stars Small to large businesses. Cloud-based Vulnerability Scanner Over 9,000 security vulnerabilities,
Checks for web application flaws,
Emerging threat notifications,
Smart Recon,
Network view,
PCI ASV scans available.
Available for 30 days. Get a quote
Bitdefender Total Security 5 Stars Small to large businesses Cybersecurity software Multi-layer ransomware protection, Network threat protection, etc. Available for 30 days $24.99/year for 5 devices,
Bitdefender Total Security: $42.99
Malwarebytes 4.5 Stars Small to large businesses & personal use. Cybersecurity for home and business. Multi-layered protection,
Prevention of threats in real-time, etc.
Available on request. Personal: Starts at $399.99/year &
Business: Starts at $119.97/year.
Mimecast 5 Stars Small to large businesses. Email Security & Compliance Platform. Cyber Resilience for Email,
Email Security Web Security,
Cyber Security Training, etc.
No Get a quote
CIS 5 Stars Small to large businesses. Cybersecurity tools Securing Organization, Securing a specific platform, & Tracking specific threats. No Free as well as paid subscription tools.
Snort 5 Stars Small & Medium-sized businesses. Network intrusion prevention system. Real-time packet analysis,
Packet logging.
No Free
Wireshark 5 Stars Commercial & non-profit enterprises, government agencies, & educational institutions. Network protocol analyzer. Decryption of various protocols, Output in XML, PostScript,
CSV, or Plain Text, Inspection of hundreds of platforms, etc.
No Free
Webroot 4.5 stars Businesses and Home use. Cybersecurity for endpoints, networks, PCs, & mobile devices. Real-time protection,
Multi-vector protection, Predictive threat intelligence.
Available Antivirus: $29.99/device/year. Internet Security Plus: $44.99 3 devices/year. Internet Security Complete: $59.99 5 device/year.

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

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

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]

Note: Replace yourdomain.com with the domain name of your site.

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.

Note: To look for external font file references, you can use CTRL+F to open the search/find box in your browser and then look for the word ‘font’ within the head tags.

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.

Note: As mentioned earlier, make sure to make a copy of your original style.css file. This is because, minified CSS is hard to edit and hence you will need the original uncompressed file if you want to edit existing styles or add new ones. It goes without saying that if you edit your style, you will need to minify it all over again. This is why it is best to use minification only after you are sure you won’t need any further edits.

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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