What Are Facebook OG Tags And How To Add OG Tags /Both Facebook and Twitter use social media meta tags to gain more information about shared content? Facebook uses the open graph protocol whereas twitter uses twitter cards. Using these markups, you can essentially tell Facebook and Twitter (and other platforms that use this schema) a lot about your content, like what category your content falls in and what title, description, and image to use while displaying your content.

This way, you are better in control of how your content is being shared and thereby can attract more traffic from this shared content.

What Are Facebook OG Tags And How To Add OG Tags

What Are OG (Open Graph) Tags?

Facebook OG tags (Open graph meta tags) are specifications that allow you to tag your webpage content. When someone shares your page on facebook, facebook accesses these meta tags to display your content.

For example, you can specify an image that facebook must use while a particular article is being shared. This way, facebook knows exactly which image to use and does not have to use a random image on your webpage.

Here are some basic og tags that you can use to tag your content:

1.) og:type

The og:type meta tag allows you to describe the type of content you are sharing. Facebook allows a host of content types and a few of them as are follows:

• article: As the name suggests, this content type can be used to represent an article, blog post or a news story.
• place: The place content type can be used to represent a place, venue, a business, a landmark, or any other location.
• product: The product content type can be used to represent a product in an online store.
• profile: The profile content type can be used to represent the profile of an individual a person, a celebrity, artists, or musicians.
• books.author: This content type can be used to represent a single author of a book.

So if you are a content blog, you can use the following meta tag for your article pages:

<meta property="og:type" content="article" />

Similarly, if your content is a celebrity profile, then the tag would be as follows:

<meta property="og:type" content="profile" />

To find the complete list of content types that you can use, check out this link: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/opengraph.

2.) og:url, og:title and og:description:

The og:url, og:title and og:description meta tags are used to represent the original URL of the content, the title of the content and its description. Their format is as follows:

<meta property="og:url" content="http://sitename.com/article.html"/>  
<meta property="og:title" content="Title of the Article" />  
<meta property="og:description" content="Small (less than 200 words) excerpt of the article." /> 

3.) og:image

The og:image property can be used to tell facebook what image to use while displaying your content. Multiple instances of the og:image tags can be used. This gives the user a choice to use his preferred image while sharing.

The format is as follows:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://sitename.com/main-image1.jpg" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://sitename.com/fallback-image1.jpg" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://sitename.com/fallback-image2.jpg" />

As shown in the format above, your main image needs to be at the very top followed by fallback images. The fallback images can be used in-case the article does not have a main image.

In-case of a wordpress blog, the main image will be the ‘post thumbnail’ also known as the ‘featured image’. This is unique to each post. A fallback image on the other hand need not be unique to the post and can be a generic image. This image can be used in-case an article does not have a featured image.

Example of a fallback image is as follows:

Optimizing Images for Facebook: To get a bigger image in your content preview, Facebook suggests that you must use an image which is a minimum of 600 x 315 pixels in dimensions. If you use images that are a minimum of 600 x 315 pixels you will get a preview that looks as follows:

If your image is smaller, then it is cropped to a image with dimensions of 158 x 158 pixels and the preview generated is as follows:

So if you are using a smaller fallback image, keep its dimensions around 200 x 200 pixels.

4.) fb:admins:

The fb:admins is an optional meta tag that allows you to add your facebook user ID so you can get insights for your domain as described here in the facebook domain insights page.

What Are Twitter Cards?

Twitter cards is similar to ‘og tags’ except that it is specific to twitter. Here are some important twitter cards that you can use on your website.

1.) twitter:card:

The twitter:card meta tag allows you to define your content type and is similar to og:type. Here are the different content types that twitter allows:

• Summery Card and Summery Card with large image: This is the default card and is suitable for a content blog. The ‘summery card’ can be used for smaller images whereas the ‘summery card with large image’ can be used to display a large image.
• Photo Card: This card can be used to display a single photo.
• Gallery Card: This card can be used to display a collection of four photos.
• App Card: This card can be used to display details of a mobile app with direct download.
• Player Card: This card can be used to display a video, audio or media file.
• Product Card: This card can be used to display product information.

Here is the format of the twitter:card meta tag:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">

If you want to produce a large image display for your blog post, the tag would be as follows:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">

2.) twitter:url, twitter:title and twitter:description

The twitter:url, title and description tags can be used to define the URL, title and description of a webpage. The good thing is that you need not define these meta tags separately for twitter as twitter can use the og tags as a fallback. So if you have already defined your og:title, og:url and og:desription tags, you need not define them again for twitter.

Here are the og:tags that twitter uses as a fallback:

Object	Twitter Tag	Fallback OG Tag
Content Title	twitter:title	og:title
Content Description	twitter:description	og:description
Content URL	twitter:url	og:url
Image Source	twitter:image:src	og:image

3.) twitter:image:src:

The twitter:image:src meta tag defines the URL of the image that needs to be used while displaying the content summery. As mentioned above, this card uses the og:image tag as a fallback. So if you have defined the og:image tag, you need not define this again.

The size of image displayed in this case is decided by the twitter:card tag as mentioned before. Use ‘summery’ for a smaller image and ‘summary_large_image’ for a larger image.

Note: The images will only work if your website is white-listed for twitter cards. To get your site white-listed, check out this URL: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

4.) twitter:site

The twitter:site is an optional meta tag that allows you to add your twitter username so you can check twitter card analytics.

Adding FB Open Graph Meta Tags And Twitter Cards To Your WordPress Blog

Now that we have had a rough look at the various tags that can be used, let’s see how we can add these tags to our wordpress site without using a plugin:

Step 1: Open your theme’s functions.php file. You can also do this by logging in to your wordpress dashboard and then clicking ‘Appearance > Editor’ and then selecting the functions.php file from the right panel.

Step 2: Add the following code to your functions.php file. This code adds the OG tags and Twitter Cards to the homepage and single post pages of your site.

function og_metatags() {
global $post;
 
if(is_single() || is_home() || is_front_page()) {
        
/** Make necessary edits here **/
$og_type_homepage = "website"; //Content type of the homepage
$og_type = "article"; //Content type of blog posts. Change this to use a different a content type if needed. Eg: profile.
$fallbackimage = ""; //Add the URL of your fallback image between the quotes or leave it blank if you do not want to use one.
$twitter_username = ""; //Add your twitter username here between the quotes or leave it blank. Eg: @twitterusername.
$twitter_card = "summery"; //Change "summery" to "summary_large_image" if you want to use large image.
$fb_admin = ""; //Add your facebook ID here between quotes or leave blank if you do not want to use one.
		
/* Generate post excerpt using custom field if present */
if(get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'description', true )) { 
	$og_des = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'description', true ); } 
/* If custom field is not present, generate excerpt from post content */
if(!get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'description', true )){   
	$og_des = strip_tags($post->post_content);
	$og_des = strip_shortcodes($og_des);
	$og_des = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\t"), ' ', $og_des); 
	$og_des = substr($og_des, 0, 155);
	$og_des = $og_des.'...';}
        ?>
<meta property="og:url" content="<?php if(is_home() || is_front_page()){echo home_url();}else{the_permalink();} ?>"/>  
<meta property="og:title" content="<?php if(is_home() || is_front_page()){bloginfo();}else{single_post_title('');} ?>" />  
<meta property="og:description" content="<?php if(is_home() || is_front_page()){bloginfo(description);}else{echo $og_des;} ?>" />   
<meta property="og:type" content="<?php if(is_home() || is_front_page()){echo $og_type_homepage;}else{echo $og_type;} ?>" />
<?php if( is_single() && has_post_thumbnail($post->ID) ) :?>
<meta property="og:image" content="<?php $featured_img = wp_get_attachment_image_src(get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), 'full', false); echo $featured_img[0]; ?>" />
<?php endif; ?>
<?php if(trim($fallbackimage) !== "") :?>
<meta property="og:image" content="<?php echo trim($fallbackimage); ?>" />
<?php endif; ?>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="<?php bloginfo(); ?>" />
<?php if(trim($fb_admin) !== "") :?>
<meta property="fb:admin" content="<?php echo trim($fb_admin); ?>" />
<?php endif; ?>
<meta name="twitter:card" content="<?php echo $twitter_card; ?>">
<?php if(trim($twitter_username) !== "") :?>
<meta name="twitter:site" content="<?php echo trim($twitter_username); ?>" /> 
<?php endif; ?>
			
	<?php
    } else {
        return;
    }
}
add_action('wp_head', 'og_metatags', 4);

Step 4: This step involves adding proper doctype to our html header. To do this, add the following to your functions.php page.

/*Adding og prefix*/
function og_tag_prefix($tagdata) {
	if(is_home() || is_front_page() || is_single())
	$tagdata .= ' prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#"';
	return $tagdata; 
}
add_filter('language_attributes', 'og_tag_prefix');	

The above code will generate the following output to your opening HTML tag on the single posts pages and the homepage:

<html lang="en-US" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#">

This doctype declaration tells facebook and other platforms that our site uses og tags.

Step 5: Save and FTP the functions.php file or click ‘Update’ in-case you are using wordpress dashboard to make the edits.

Code Explanation

Here is a brief explanation of the code:

Section 1: Defining Variables

/** Make necessary edits here **/
$og_type_homepage = "website"; //Content type of the homepage
$og_type = "article"; //Content type of blog posts. Change this to use a different a content type if needed. Eg: profile.
$fallbackimage = ""; //Add the URL of your fallback image between the quotes or leave it blank if you do not want to use one.
$twitter_username = ""; //Add your twitter username here between the quotes or leave it blank. Eg: @twitterusername.
$twitter_card = "summery"; //Change "summery" to "summary_large_image" if you want to use large image.
$fb_admin = ""; //Add your facebook ID here between quotes or leave blank if you do not want to use one.

This section of the code is about defining variables that will be used in the code as output. Currently the og:type of the homepage is set to ‘website’ and that of single post pages is set to ‘article’. You can change these if you want.

If you want to use a fallback image as already discussed in this article, upload your image by logging in to your wordpress dashboard and then clicking on ‘Media > Add New’. Upload your image from there by clicking ‘Select File’. Once uploaded go to ‘Media > Library’, click on the uploaded image and get the URL of the image from the URL section displayed in the right panel. Now add the URL between the quotes as follows:

$fallbackimage = "http://sitename.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/image.jpg";

If you leave this blank the fallback image og tag will not be generated.

If you want to use your twitter username and facebook ID, add them between the quotes. These are optional, so if you leave them blank, these tags will not be generated.

Section 2: Post Excerpt

/* Generate post excerpt using custom field if present */
if(get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'description', true )) { 
	$og_des = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'description', true ); } 
/* If custom field is not present, generate excerpt from post content */
if(!get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'description', true )){   
	$og_des = strip_tags($post->post_content);
	$og_des = strip_shortcodes($og_des);
	$og_des = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\t"), ' ', $og_des); 
	$og_des = substr($og_des, 0, 155);
	$og_des = $og_des.'...';}

Here we check if a custom field named ‘description’ is set and if yes, save its value to a variable for output later for the og:description tag. If not set, a 155 word auto excerpt will be generated using the post content which will be used for the output.

If you would like to use a custom og description for your posts, do the following:

Step 1: Login to your wordpress dashboard and open the post you want to add a custom description for.

Step 2: Now scroll down to the ‘Add New Custom Field’ section and click ‘Enter New’ to add a new custom field.

Step 3: Enter the text ‘description’ in the ‘Name’ field and your custom description in the ‘Value’ field.

Step 4: Click ‘Add custom field’.

Once you do this, a custom field named ‘description’ will be set and this custom description will be used in the output for og:description tag for this particular post. If this field is empty a 155 word excerpt will be auto generated and used instead. This is the same technique we used for generating custom meta description tags.

Section 3: Output

For the output we first check if the current page is the homepage of the site or a single posts page. If it the homepage, the following tags will be generated:

<meta property="og:url" content="http://sitename.com"/>  
<meta property="og:title" content="Your blog's Site Title" />  
<meta property="og:description" content="Your blog's Tagline" />   
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://sitename.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/fallbackimage.jpg" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Your blog's Site Title" />
<meta property="fb:admin" content="3434433" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summery">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@twitterusername" /> 

Please note that the og:title for the homepage is generated using the ‘Site Title’. This is the same ‘Site Title’ that you entered in your wordpress dashboard under ‘Settings > General > Site Title’. Similarly the og:description is generated using the ‘Tagline’ which is here ‘Settings > General > Tagline’.

The image used for the homepage is the fallback image or the default image discussed earlier. If you do not add a fallback image, the og:image tag will not be generated.

If it is the single posts page, the following tags will be generated:

<meta property="og:url" content="http://sitename.com/url-of-your-post/" />  
<meta property="og:title" content="The title of your post." />  
<meta property="og:description" content="Custom description set using custom field or a 155 word description generated using the page content as mentioned in 'Section 3: Post Excerpts' above." />   
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://sitename.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/featured-image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://sitename.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/fallbackimage.jpg" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Your blog's Site Title" />
<meta property="fb:admin" content="3434433" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summery">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@twitterusername" /> 

As you can see, there are two og:image tags that are being generated. One tag is the ‘featured image’ and another the ‘fallback image’. If the post does not have a featured image, only the fallback image will be used.

Validation

Once you add the code to your site, it is important that you validate the output to ensure everything is working fine. Both facebook and twitter offer debug tools wherein you can enter the URL of a webpage to check if the tags are being generated properly. The links are as follows:

Facebook OG Tag Debugger: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
Twitter Card Validator: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

Please note that these tools will only work if you are logged in.

Alternatively, you can also check the HTML source of your webpages to see if the tags have been generated properly. To view the source of a webpage, load it in your browser, right click on an empty space and select ‘View Source’. Now check the head section of the source to see if your tags are being generated properly.

Ever seen a road sign that says – STOP! Road Blocked!

That’s exactly what a Nofollow tag tells Google (Or to be more precise – Googlebot).

When you add NoFollow to a link, you tell google not to crawl (follow) that link.

You also tell Google that “Even though I have added a link to this website, I don’t necessarily trust this website. I don’t vouch for this website.”

Therefore, when Google (or any other search engine) sees a NoFollow link,

1. It does not crawl the link. (Here’s an experiment proving this)
2. It discards the link – does not give it any SEO value.

In other words, a link with a nofollow is worthless from the SEO perspective.

Yes, a human visitor can still click the link and visit your site. But Googlebot (and other search engine bots) won’t.

Here’s how a nofollow attribute looks like (on a link level):

<a href="http://sitename.com" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>

 

Note: NoFollow can be added on a link level (for individual links) and on a page level (all links on a particular page). Will discuss this further in this article.

NoFollow Can Be Applied To Both Internal And External Links

Internal links are links within the same website.

For example, if Website-A links to another page within Website-A, then that’s an internal link.

External links are links to other (external) websites.

For example, if Website-A links to Website-B, we can say that Website-A has an External link to Website-B. From Website-B’s perspective, we say, Website-B has a Backlink or Inbound link from Website-A.

A NoFollow attribute can be added to both internal as well as external links.

Different Ways Of Adding A NoFollow Tag

Before we learn how to identify a nofollow link, we need to learn the different ways to add a nofollow link.

As mentioned earlier, a NoFollow tag can be added on a link level (for individual links) and on a page link (all links on a page will be nofollowed).

1.) Link Level NoFollow: You can add NoFollow to individual links on a page. For example, a page might have 20 links and out of them 2 links use the NoFollow tag.

Here’s how the HTML looks like:

<a href="http://sitename.com" rel="nofollow" >Link Text</a>

 

For more details visit this link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569

2.) Page Level NoFollow: You can add NoFollow to an entire page. In this case, all links on a given page are automatically NoFollowed. If a page has 20 links, all 20 links (both internal and external links) will be NoFollowed.

To add a page level NoFollow, a Robots meta tag needs to be added within the ‘head‘ tags (<head></head>) of that particular page.

The HTML code for the Robots meta tag is follows:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW">

If a page has this Meta tag within it’s head tags, all links on the page will be automatically NoFollowed.

For more details visit this link: http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

Is It NoFollow Tag Or Attribute?

To be politically correct, when a NoFollow is applied on a link level it is called a NoFollow Attribute and when a NoFollow is applied on a Page Level it is called the NoFollow tag.

How To Check If A Link Is Nofollowed?

You cannot simply look at a link and tell if it is ‘Followed’ or ‘NoFollowed’. You will either need to check the’HTML source’ of the page or do it the easy way by installing a SEO tool bar.

There are tons of free SEO Toolbars available for all browsers.

For instance, if you are using Chrome, you can install Nofollow by Igorware. This Chrome extension will automatically highlight all nofollowed links on a particular page.

If you do not want to install any toolbar you can check for Nofollow links manually by viewing the HTML source of a page.

Here are the steps to do this:

Step 1.) Visit the page: Open the page (that has the link you want to check), in your browser.

Step 2.) View the HTML source of the page: If you are on a windows machine simply click CTRL + U (Press ‘CTRL‘ key first and while holding it, press the ‘U‘ alphabet key.) on your keyboard.

Or, you can also right click anywhere on the page (using your mouse) and select ‘View source’ from the drop down menu.

Step 3.) Find your link: Once you are on the HTML source page, use your browser’s Search/Find function to search within the page for your link.

You can access your browser’s Search/Find function by clicking CTRL + F on your keyboard. Once the search box opens enter the URL of your website, eg: sitename.com and tap the ENTER key on your keyboard, until your link is highlighted on the HTML page. Refer image below:

Step 4.) See if your link has a NoFollow attribute: Check the HTML code of your link to see if a NoFollow tag is present. In the image above, you can easily tell that the link has a nofollow tag.

Step 5.) Check if the page has a NoFollow tag: You might also want to see if the page has a NoFollow meta tag present. As discussed earlier, a NoFollow can also be added on a page level.

To check for the NoFollow meta tag, open the HTML source of the page and look within the ‘head‘ tags (<head></head>) for presence of the tag as shown in the image below. The head tags are located towards the top of the page.

As you can see from the above image, a NoFollow tag is present.

Difference Between NoFollow And DoFollow Links

A DoFollow link is simply a link that does not have the NoFollow tag.

Here’s an example of a DoFollow link:

<a href="http://sitename.com">Link Text</a>

 

Now, here’s the same link with NoFollow added:

<a href="http://sitename.com" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>

 

By default, all links are DoFollow.

DoFollow Links Are Viewed As Trust Votes, NoFollow Links Are Not

You see, Google crawls the web (millions of websites) by following links (also known as hyperlinks).

When Google sees many different websites linking to a particular website, it values the website that much more.

Google views these links (DoFollow links) as ‘Trust Votes‘.

For example, if Website-A links to Website-B. Google takes this as Website-A issuing a ‘Trust Vote’ to website-B.

But if Website-A links to Website-B using a NoFollow link, Google does not see this as ‘Trust Vote’. Hence the link from Website-A does not add any value to ‘Website-B‘ from Google’s perspective.

Now, Google uses links (Trust Votes) as one of its most important ranking factors. In other words, sites with many Dofollow links from other sites will be favored to rank higher in Google’s search results.

Here’s an analogy: if many roads (links) lead to a particular destination, then that destination must be very popular as it is well connected (well linked). Right?

In a similar fashion, websites that are well linked are considered more popular and hence viewed favorably by Google (and other search engines).

Will NoFollow Backlinks Negatively Affect My Website?

No, NoFollow backlinks will not negatively effect your website. And No, your site will not be penalized because of that.

The only thing is that, the link will not add any value to your site from the SEO perspective.

Why Did Google Introduce The NoFollow Tag?

NoFollow tag was introduced to reduce link spamming (and thereby gaming Google’s ranking system).

As I said above, Google uses backlinks as an important ranking factor. This is because Google looks at a backlink as a ‘Trust Vote’. A Trust Vote should be unbiased, it should be given because you truly trust/value a website.

But not all links are created equal.

For example, I could participate in a forum and add my link in the forum signature. If I do that, my links will automatically appear each time I post in the forum. Now, does the forum ‘link’ to me because it values and trusts my site? Not at all, this is because the link was added by me and not the forum.

Before the NoFollow tag was introduced, Google had no other option than to consider this link as a ‘Trust Vote’ from the forum. But now, the forum can add a NoFollow tag to all outgoing links telling Google that these links are user generated and they don’t necessarily vouch for these links.

Various Uses Of The NoFollow Tag/Attribute

You can use the NoFollow attribute on the following types of links:

1. User generated links – Comment links, forum links etc.
2. Sponsored links (paid links, paid banners etc.)
3. Affiliate links – link to affiliate sites.
4. Temporarily redirected links.
5. Low quality internal links, like a link to your ‘login page’.
6. Block robots from crawling links on a page.

Drawback Of The NoFollow Tag/Attribute

The one major drawback of the NoFollow tag is that it can be added to natural links given out of genuine intent.

Let’s say, there is a forum and someone adds an extremely useful website link to a discussion. Most people on the thread find this link useful. What could be more organic than a link like this? The link was added not with the intent of promotion but purely because the user found the link useful. This is the best example of a natural link given out of genuine intent.

But irrespective of this, the link will be nofollowed because the forum automatically NoFollows all the links.

There is also a possibility that someone copies a paragraph or two from a website, pastes it on a forum and links back to the website as as the original source, but the link is NoFollowed. The website gets no SEO credit.

These are fine examples of how 100% natural links can have the NoFollow tag and hence get completely devalued.

Verify Your Website For Google Webmaster Tools/Struggling to verify your WordPress blog with Google webmaster tools (search console)? Here is a super simple method using which you can verify your site within five minutes right within your WordPress dashboard!

So let’s begin:

Verify Your Website For Google Webmaster Tools

1: Create A Child Theme (Optional)

This first step is optional but is highly recommended.

Here’s why..

You see, Google wants to make sure that you own the website that you want to add to webmaster tools. For this, Google wants you to verify your ownership using a few different options. One of the easiest options, is to verify using HTML tags. This method requires you to add a Meta Tag to the head section of your website.

To do that, you will need to edit your theme’s functions.php file.

Even though you can edit your theme’s functions.php file, it is a good practice to avoid editing your main theme. This is because, if the main theme updates itself, all changes you made to it will be over written. In other words, you will need to re-add the Meta tags to your blog’s head section by editing your theme’s functions.php file.

To avoid this, you can create a child theme which acts as a subsidiary to your main theme and then edit that child theme instead. This way, all your edits remain intact irrespective of theme updates.

The simplest way to generate a child them for your main theme is to install the ‘Child theme generator‘ plugin by Serafino Corriero.

Here are the steps to add and configure the plugin to create a child theme:

Step 1: Login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Plugins > Add New (left panel of your dashboard) and search for ‘Child theme generator‘. Make sure that the author name is ‘Serafino Corriero’.

Step 2: Install and activate the plugin.

Step 3: Go to ‘Settings > Child-Theme Gen‘ (From the left panel).

Step 4: Your current theme will automatically be selected. Simply enter a name for your child theme and click ‘Create new child theme‘.

Step 5: Check the ‘Activate child-theme‘ checkbox and click ‘Finished‘.

That’s about it. You have now created a child theme for your main theme.

Note: As mentioned earlier, if you do not want to install a child theme, no worries. You can skip this step and proceed to step 2.

2: Add Your Website In Google Webmaster Tools

Here are the steps to do this:

Step 1.) Login to Google search console.

Step 2.) Enter your complete website URL and click ‘Add a property‘.

Note: A simple way to find your correct website URL is to open a browser and visit your website by going to ‘sitename.com’ (replace sitename.com with your website url). Once your website loads, copy the website URL in the browser window and paste it in the space provided.

Step 3.) On the verification page, click on ‘Alternate Methods‘ tab.

Step 4.) Select ‘HTML Tag‘ as your verification method.

Step 5.) Copy the meta tag that appears.

3: Add The Meta Tag To Your WordPress Blog

The final step is to add the meta tag to your wordpress blog. Here are the steps to do this:

Step 1: In your wordpress dashboard, go to Appearance > Editor.

Step 2: Click on ‘Theme Functions (functions.php)‘ file from the left panel.

Step 3: Copy and paste the following code to your functions.php file:

function orweb_add_gsc_meta_tag(){
if( ! is_home() || ! is_front_page() ) return;
	#replace your meta tag below
	echo '<meta name="google-site-verification" content="BVmbiuY" />';	
}
add_action( 'wp_head', 'orweb_add_gsc_meta_tag' );

Important Note: Make sure to replace your meta tag in the code!

4: Click ‘Update file‘.

4: Verify Your Site

Now that you have added the meta tag, you can easily verify your site.

Simply, go back to Google search console, make sure that ‘HTML tags’ under ‘Alternate Methods’ is selected. Scroll down and click the ‘Verify‘ button.

That’s it, you have now verified your site with Google webmaster tools!

You should be able to see your site data within a few days of adding your website.

There can be a variety of reasons why you might want to track your outbound link clicks. For instance, you might be selling affiliate products and want to see which affiliate links on which pages of your site receive the maximum clicks.

There are many tools available that can help you track your link clicks, but the easiest way to do it is using Google Analytics (GA) and Google Tag manager (GTM).

Let’s quickly find out what Tag Manager (GTM) is and then we will look at a quick tutorial on implementing link tracking on your site.

Track Outgoing Link Clicks Using Google Tag Manager

What Is Google Tag Manager?

Simply put, Google Tag Manager (GTM), helps you manage all your website tags from a single location.

What are website tags? Well, they are code snippets used to track visitor behavior or add other functionalities to a website.

For example, when you sign-up for Google Analytics, you are required to paste a tag (code snippet) within the head section of your website.

Another example would be your social media plugin. When you sign-up for a service like ‘Add-This’ that allows you to add Social Sharing buttons to your site, you are required to add another code snippet to your site for this service to work.

These are just some of the examples why you might want to add tags to your website.

Now, won’t it be great if you could manage all these tags from one centralized location rather than editing your HTML code each time to add a tag?

That’s where, Google Tag Manager comes in.

You can add all your tags using Tag manager without having to edit your website code. In addition to that, you can also control when these tags are loaded/fired.

For example, you can load a tag only on certain pages while blocking them on others.

In other words, you can set a tag to load only if certain condition(s) are met.

Tracking Outbound Link Clicks Using Google Tag Manager And Google Analytics

We are going to track visitor clicks on external links using Tag manager and then record each ‘link click’ as an ‘event’ in Analytics.

You will be able to see a complete report of all outbound link clicks in your Google Analytics account under Behavior > Events.

You will be able to see the following details:

• URL of the outbound link.
• The anchor text of the link.
• Total number of clicks received in a set period.
• The URL of your page from where the click was made.

So let’s get started:

1: Install Google Tag Manager to your site

In order to track outbound link clicks, you need to first install Google Tag Manager on your site. Plus, you also need to have Google Analytics installed.

Here are the steps to add Google Tag Manager to your site:

Step 1.) Login to your Google Account (Gmail, Adwords, Adsense or Analytics account.) and visit this URL: https://tagmanager.google.com

Step 2.) You should be presented with the ‘Add a New Account‘ page (under the ‘Admin’ tab).

Step 3.) Add a ‘Account Name‘ and click ‘Continue‘. (You can simply add your website name as the account name)

Step 4.) Add your website URL in the ‘Setup Container‘ field. E.g. : sitename.com

Step 5.) Under ‘Where to Use Container‘, select ‘Web‘.

Step 6.) Now click the ‘Create‘ button.

Step 7.) Agree to the ‘Terms and Conditions’.

You should now be presented with two different code snippets.

If you are using WordPress, open your theme’s ‘header.php‘ file and copy the first code and paste it right after the opening head (<head>) tag.

The second code needs to be pasted right after the opening body (<body>) tag.

Note: You can do this directly from within your wordpress dashboard, by going to ‘Appearance > Editor‘ and clicking on ‘header.php‘ link from the right sidebar.

2: Activate Built-in Click Variables

Variables in Tag Manager are values that can be set and reused whenever required.

GTM has both ‘Built in variables’ and ‘User Defined Variables’.

We first need to activate a few Built-in ‘click variables’ so we can track the URL of the link clicked and the anchor text.

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1.) In Google Tag Manager, click on ‘Variables‘ link located in the left panel and then click the ‘Configure‘ button under the ‘Built-in Variables’ section.

Step 2.) From the side menu that pop’s out, Scroll down and ensure that ‘Click URL‘ and ‘Click Text‘ under ‘Clicks‘ are checked.

Here’s what these variables contain:

• Click URL: Contains the URL of the link clicked.
• Click Text: Contains the anchor text of the link clicked.

3: Add your Google Analytics ID as a user-defined variable

We now need to create a new variable that contains your analytics tracking id. This variable can then be reused for all your tags.

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1.) Go back to ‘Variables‘, scroll down and click ‘New‘ under the ‘User-Defined Variables‘ section.

Step 2.) Name this variable appropriately. E.g. : ‘Sitename.com – Analytics ID‘. Replace ‘Sitename.com’ with your domain name.

Step 3.) Now click the ‘pencil’ icon to bring out the ‘Choose variable type‘ menu.

Step 4.) Scroll down and select the ‘Google Analytics Settings‘ option.

Step 5.) Enter your Analytics tracking ID here and click ‘Save‘.

Note: You can get your tracking ID by following these steps:

• Log into your Google Analytics account.
• Select your account.
• Go to your admin panel by clicking on the gear icon you see at the bottom left of the screen.
• Under ‘Property‘ click on ‘Tracking info‘ and then click ‘Tracking code‘.
• You should now be able to see your tracking ID.

4: Deploy Google Analytics via Tag Manager (Optional)

If you already have the Google Analytics code installed on your site, you can skip this step.

But if you want, you can remove the Analytics code from your site and then re-deploy it through ‘Tag Manager‘. This is a recommended step.

Here’s how you can do that:

Step 1.) Remove the Analytics code from your site. If you are using wordpress, you can edit your header.php file and remove the code.

Step 2.) Go to Tag Manager and click on ‘Add a New Tag‘.

Step 3.) Click on the ‘Tag Configuration‘ screen and select ‘Universal Analytics‘.

Step 4.) Set the Track Type as ‘Page View‘.

Step 5.) In Google Analytics Settings – Select ‘Analytics Tracking ID‘ variable that you created in Step 3.

Step 6.) Under ‘Triggering‘, select ‘All Pages‘.

5: Create a Trigger

A trigger tells GTM when to load a particular tag.

In our case, the trigger needs to be an outbound link click since we want to track outbound links.

To create this trigger, do the following:

Step 1.) Click on ‘Triggers‘ from the left panel, and click the ‘New‘ button.

Step 2.) Name your trigger appropriately. Something like ‘Sitename.com – Outbound Link Click‘ should be good.

Step 3.) The ‘trigger configuration’ screen will now appear. Click on this screen to bring the edit options.

Step 4.) This will bring up the ‘Choose trigger type‘ screen. Click on the ‘Just Links‘ option.

Step 5.) Select ‘Some Link Clicks‘ from under the ‘This Trigger Fires On‘ option.

From the drop down, select ‘Click URL > Does Not Contain > Sitename.com‘

Make sure to replace ‘Sitename.com’ with your domain name.

We need to add this filter because we only want to count the outbound/external links and discount internal link clicks.

Step 6.) Once done, make sure to click the ‘Save‘ button, to save this trigger.

6: Create a Tag

Now we need to create a Tag that fires when the above trigger is activated.

In other words, the Tag will load when someone clicks on an outbound link on your site. It won’t load if someone clicks on an internal link.

To create a tag, do the following:

Step 1.) Click on the ‘Tags‘ link from the left panel.

Step 2.) Click ‘New‘ to create a new Tag.

Step 3.) Name your tag appropriately. Something like ‘Sitename.com – Track Outbound Links‘ should be good.

Step 4.) Click on the ‘Tag configuration‘ box and select ‘Universal Analytics‘ from the menu that appears.

Step 5.) Under ‘Tag Type‘ select ‘Event‘ from the drop down menu and add the following:

• Track Type: Event
• Category: Outbound Link Clicks
• Action: {{Click URL}}
• Label: {{Page URL}}
• Non Interaction Hit: False

Step 6.) Scroll down and under the ‘Google Analytics Settings‘, select the ‘Analytics tracking id‘ variable that you created earlier.

Step 7.) Scroll down to reach the ‘Triggering‘ menu. Click on it and from the ‘Choose a trigger‘ menu, select the trigger that you created earlier in point 5.

Step 8.) Click the ‘Save‘ button to save all changes.

7: Testing if everything works

To check if everything is working properly, do the following:

Step 1.) click on the ‘Preview‘ button. (Located on the top right hand corner, right next to the ‘Publish’ button.)

Step 2.) Now visit any page on your site (in the same browser) and you should be able to see the ‘Google Tag Manager’ console appear at the bottom of the page.

Step 3.) If you installed Google Analytics via Tag Manager, you should be able to see the ‘Analytics’ tag, under the ‘Tags Fired On This Page‘ sub-heading.

Step 4.) To check if the outbound links are being tracked, click on an outbound link on your page. Press the ‘CTRL‘ key while clicking so you stay in the same browser tab.

Step 5.) You should now be able to see a new link ‘gtm.linkclick‘ appear under ‘Summery‘. Click on this link and you should see your tag (the tag you created) under the ‘Tags Fired on This Event‘ heading.

Step 6.) Click on the ‘Variables‘ tab to see all the variables associated with this tag. You can use any of these variables in your tag configuration.

As as example, the ‘Click Text‘ variable contains the ‘Anchor text‘ of the link. If you want to see this information in Google Analytics, then you can add this when creating your Tag.

Go to ‘Tags‘ and click on the ‘Outbound link click‘ tag that you created. Under ‘Value‘ you can add the Click Text.

Another way to test if your tags are working is through Google Analytics Real time reports.

Here’s how to do that:

Step 1.) Login to your Google Analytics and click on ‘Real-Time’ from the left panel.

Step 2.) Now click on ‘Events‘ under ‘Real-Time‘.

Step 3.) Go to your site and click on a few outbound links.

Step 4.) Come back to Google Analytics Real-Time > Events and see if these events are being tracked.

8: Publishing your tag

The final step is to publish your tag.

Click on the ‘Submit‘ button (located top right next to ‘preview’ button). You will be asked to add a name and description. You can enter the name and details of your tag in the description. Once done, click the ‘Publish‘ button.

Your changes will be live once the publish button is clicked.

All your outbound link click stats would now be recorded in Google Analytics. You should be able to see these stats after a couple of days of installing the tag.

Note: Remember that you need to click Submit and Publish each time you make changes to any of your tags/triggers/variables. There is only a single Submit and Publish button for all changes.

Check under the ‘Versions’ tab to see all your live tags.

9: Checking your stats in Google Analytics

To see your stats do the following:

Step 1.) Login to Google Analytics.

Step 2.) Click on ‘Behaviour > Events > Overview‘ from the left panel.

Step 3.) Check to see if you are able to see your tag under the ‘Event Category’ section. It will be displayed with the same name (Outbound Link Clicks) you entered in the ‘Category’ field while creating your tag in point 6.

Step 4.) Click on the ‘Outbound Link Clicks’ Event Category to see details reports.

Step 5.) Click on ‘Event Action’ to see the outbound link URL and ‘Event Label’ to see which page on your site the link was on along with the anchor text of the link.

Step 6.) You can view both reports on the same page by clicking on ‘Secondary dimension’ and then selecting ‘Event Lable’. Now your outbound link will be displayed along with your Page URL. The number of events represent the total number of clicks.

Quick And Easy SEO Tool/This article is for the ‘Quick And Easy SEO Tool’ which is now available for download. You can check out the plugin on this page:

I developed this plugin with simplicity in mind and I am really happy with how it has turned out.

Quick And Easy SEO Tool – You Must Know for Begin A Website

So Why Another SEO Plugin?

There are quite a few SEO plugins available for wordpress and some are actually pretty good. But what I found was that most plugins available today are bulky and come loaded with functionalities that have nothing to do with SEO.

I wanted to come up with a light weight plugin that only does what is required – it fixes SEO issues in wordpress.

What Does The Plugin Do?

What the plugin does can be divided into the four parts as follows:

1.) Adds Robots meta tags

Adds the Robots Noindex/Follow meta tag to the following pages:

• Adds Noindex to search and 404 pages.
• Adds Noindex to all date archives – daily, monthly and yearly archives.
• Adds Noindex to author archives.
• Adds Noindex to media attachment pages.
• Adds Noindex to tag archives from page 2 onward.
• Adds Noindex to category archives from page 2 onward.
• Adds Noindex to homepage archives from page 2 onward.

2.) Adds Next/Prev Rel tags to archive pages

Adds the rel=’next’ and rel=’prev’ tags to all paginated archives and to single posts where pagination is present.

• Add rel=’next’ and rel=’prev’ tag to all archive pages (date, category, tag, author, homepage) including custom taxonomies.
• Add rel=’next’ and rel=’prev’ tag to paginated single posts (Posts paginated using the <!–Nextpage–> tag)

This tag tells Google that these pages are part of a paginated sequence. Here’s what Google has to say about these tags.

3.) Removes unwanted tags from wordpress head section

WordPress by default adds a lot of tags in the head section that are unnecessary. This plugin removes some of these tags. The tags removed include the following:

• Next/Prev tag from single post pages
• Shortlink tag
• WLW tag
• WP Generator tag
• Regular feed and comment feed tags
• XMLRPC tag

4.) Adds custom title tag & meta description tag meta boxes

Adds custom title tag and meta description tag meta boxes for all single posts, pages and custom post types like Woocommerce pages. Using these boxes, you can easily add custom title tags and meta description tags for your posts and pages.

5.) Adds canonical tags for archive pages

WordPress automatically adds canonical tag for all single post pages. Therefore, the plugin adds Canonical tags only for the archive pages. This includes the homepage archive pages.

Note: This plugin comes pre-configured, but you can override the configurations at any time by going to the plugin settings page which is located under ‘Settings > Quick & Easy SEO Tool‘ in you wordpress dashboard.

6.) Adds OG tags (optional)

Adds important OG tags like OG Image, OG URL, OG Locale, OG title, OG description, OG date published and OG date updated to all posts and pages.

7.) Optimizes Woocommerce pages

Optimizes Woocommerce pages if Woocommerce plugin is installed.

What The Plugin Does Not Do

This plugin does not add the following functionalities that are quite standard with other SEO plugins:

1.) Does not add XML sitemap: Again a sitemap is not a requirement unless you are running a massive site. Google has confirmed time and again that having a sitemap will not automatically give more value to your site in their search engine. The only thing a sitemap does is help Google index your site more efficiently.

So if you want to add a sitemap, I recommend using the Google sitemap plugin by Arne Brachhold.

2.) Does not add webmaster tool verification: If you want to verify your site with Google or Bing webmaster tools, there is an extremely simple way to do this. Here’s a tutorial I wrote on how you can do this on your own.

So apart from these three features, everything else is included in the plugin.

Explanation For Various Settings

The plugin comes with a single settings page and is auto-configured. But if you want, you can make changes to the settings easily.

Let’s look at these settings:

1.) Robots Meta Tag Settings

This is how the settings page looks like for this section:

1.) Search Pages: Adds a robots ‘Noindex’ meta tag to all WordPress generated search pages. If you use default WordPress search box on your site, this will help keep the search pages out of the Google index.

The following meta tag will be added to the head section of all search pages:

<meta name='robots' content='noindex,follow'>

Note: The Noindex/Follow tag informs the search engines that it is okay to follow the links on the page, but do not index the page or display the page in your search engine results.

The default setting for this is: NoIndex/Follow

2.) 404 Pages: Adds a robots ‘Noindex’ meta tag to all 404 error pages. In other words, pages that do not exist.

The default setting for this is: NoIndex/Follow

3.) Media Attachment Pages: Adds a robots ‘Noindex’ meta tag to all media attachment pages.

When you upload an image to the wordpress Media Library, it auto-generates a new page for the image.

Because the page has only an image and no other content, this can be viewed as a low value page by Google. Therefore, it is recommended to add a Noindex tag to these pages.

The default setting for this is: NoIndex/Follow

4.) Date Archives: Adds a robots ‘Noindex’ meta tag to all date archives.

WordPress auto generates three types of date archives – daily, monthly and yearly. Since these pages only contain links segregated based on the date, they add little to no value. It is best to add a ‘Noindex’ tag to these pages which is what the plugin does.

The default setting for this is: NoIndex/Follow

5.) Author Archives: Adds a robots ‘Noindex’ meta tag to all author archives.

If you are a single author blog, your author archive will be exactly same as your homepage archive. Therefore it is recommended to add a Noindex to these archive pages which is what the plugin does.

The default setting for this is: NoIndex/Follow

6.) Category Archives: Adds a robots ‘Noindex’ meta tag to all category archives from the 2nd page onward.

If your category has pagination it is a recommended practice to add a ‘Noindex’ tag from the 2nd page onward so only the first page is indexed.

For example, let’s say you have 100 articles in a category and your category page is set to display 20 articles per page (as per the value you set in Settings > Reading ). This means, there will be four pages that will be generated as follows:

http://example.com/category/name/
http://example.com/category/name/page/1/
http://example.com/category/name/page/2/
http://example.com/category/name/page/3/

This plugin will add a ‘Noindex/Follow’ tag to Page 2, 3 and 4. It will not add Noindex/Follow to the first page.

This way, all these sub-pages will not be indexed by Google. The links will be followed, but the pages won’t be indexed.

You have the option to change the default setting as shown in the image below:

The default setting for this is: NoIndex/Follow from 2nd page onward

7.) Tag Archives: Adds a robots ‘Noindex’ meta tag to all tag archives from the 2nd page onward.

Similar to the category archives, the plugin will add a ‘Noindex/Follow’ tag to all the tag archives, from the 2nd page onward.

The default setting for this is: NoIndex/Follow from 2nd page onward

8.) Homepage Archives: Adds a robots ‘Noindex’ meta tag to all homepage archives from the 2nd page onward.

If you are displaying the latest posts on your homepage, it will have pagination. It a recommended practice to add ‘Noindex’ all paginated index pages.

The default setting for this is: NoIndex/Follow from 2nd page onward

2.) Remove Unwanted Tags From WordPress Head Section

This section gives you the option to remove unwanted tags from the wordpress head section. The following tags are removed by default:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Comments Feed" href="#" />
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="xmlrpc.php?rsd" />
<link rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="wlwmanifest.xml" />
<link rel='prev' title='#' href='#' />
<link rel='next' title='#' href='#' />
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 4.1.1" />
<link rel='shortlink' href='#' />
<link rel='index' title='#' />
<link rel='start' title='#' />

This is how the options page looks like for this setting:

3.) Add Next/Prev Rel Tags to Archive Pages

By default the plugin adds the rel=’next’ and rel=’prev’ tags to all archive pages. This includes, the date, author, category, tag and homepage archives. This also includes any custom post type archives generated by plugins like Woocommerce.

Using this tag tells Google that the archive pages are part of a paginated sequence. This way you can stay clear of any duplicate content penalty.

To learn more about these tags, check out Google official documentation here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

In addition to the archive pages, the plugin also adds these tags to paginated single post pages. In other words, if a single articles is split into smaller sections/pages, each page will have these tags added.

This is only applicable if you are splitting any of your single post articles using the <!–Nextpage–> tag.

Here’s how the settings page for this option looks like:

4.) Add Custom Title Tag & Meta Description Meta Box

The plugin automatically adds a custom title tag and meta description tag boxes to all single post pages – this includes custom post type pages.

If you add a custom title tag, your custom title tag will be used, if not, the regular title tag generated by WordPress will be used. WordPress automatically converts the heading of your article as the title tag.

Similarly, if you do not add a custom meta description tag, no meta description tag will be added. Some plugins tend to take the first few lines of your content and convert that into the meta description tag. But this is of little to no use as Search engines are clever enough to do this on their own.

Meta description only makes sense when it is custom written. Make sure to keep your meta description under 155 characters.

If you do not want these boxes added, you can remove them from the settings section.

Here’s how the settings page for this option looks like:

Checking If The Plugin Works

After activating the plugin, it is a good practice to check if all tags are being added properly.

To do this, you will need to view the ‘HTML source’ of your single posts and archive pages.

To check HTML source of a page, simply open the page in your favorite browser. Now click ‘CTRL + U‘ (Press the CTRL key and then press the ‘U’ key while keeping the CTRL key pressed.) in your keyboard. This should open the HTML source of the page for Firefox, Chrome and IE. For Mac users, press CMD(Command) key instead of the CTRL key.

Another way is to right click somewhere on the page and then select ‘View Source’ or ‘View Page Source’.

Now let’s look at a few examples on how to check if the plugin works:

Example 1: Let’s check the tags added to your website’s homepage.

Open your blog’s homepage and check the HTML source.

You should be able to see the canonical tag. You should also be able to see the ‘next’ tag if pagination is present as shown in the image below.

As you can see, the tags added by this plugin are surrounded by the plugin name (<– Added by quick and easy seo –>) for each identification.

If pagination is present, open the 2nd page. On the 2nd paginated page, you should be able to see the ‘prev’ tag and the ‘Noindex’ robots meta tag. You will also see the ‘next’ tag is further pagination is present. If further pagination is not present, the ‘next’ tag will not be visible:

Example 2: Let’s check your category archive pages to see if the tags have been added.

Open one of your category archive pages, and check the HTML source.

You should be able to see the canonical tag and the rel=’next’ tag if pagination is present as shown in the image below:

If pagination is present, check your archive’s 2nd page and see if either the ‘prev’ and/or ‘next’ tags are present.

Please note that the rel=’next’ and rel=’prev’ tags will only be added if there is pagination present. If not, only the canonical tag will be added.

Example 3: Let’s check the custom title tag and meta description tag feature for single posts.

Edit one of your single posts in your wordpress admin panel, and enter a custom title tag for the post, similarly, add a custom meta description tag.

Click on the ‘Update‘ button so the post is updated.

Now open this page in your browser and view the HTML source.

You should be able to see the meta description tag within the ‘Added by quick and easy seo’ comments.

Similarly, the title tag should reflect the custom title tag that you entered.

Example 4: Let’s check a 404 page to see if ‘Noindex’ tag is present.

Simply open a non-existent URL on your site. Eg: http://yoursite.com/non-existent

You should get a 404 page does not exist error. Check the HTML source of this page and you should be able to see a Robots Noindex tag as shown in the image below:

This way, you can check any page on your blog to see if the required tags are being added.

FAQs About The Plugin

Q 1: Does the plugin add canonical tags?
Yes, the plugin does add canonical tags, but only to archive pages (eg: category pages). This is because, WordPress automatically adds canonical tags to all other single post pages.

Q 2: Does the plugin fix all SEO related issues with WordPress?
Yes, the plugin fixes all known SEO issues. It does not try to fix things that are already fixed and does not attempt to add functionalities that are an overkill and not required in most cases.

Q 3: Will the plugin slow down my site?
Not in the least. This plugin only adds the bare minimum tags required to make your site SEO friendly and hence is very fast.

Q 4: Has the plugin been tested with multi-site?
No, the plugin has not been tested with multi-site.

Q 5: What makes this plugin stand apart?
The fact that it was built with simplicity in mind and is extremely simple to configure and manage.

If you have any further questions feel free to leave it in the comments below and I will reply immediately.

How To Make Website – 28 Technical Concepts You Must Know/Even though it is perfectly fine to focus on writing and leave the technical aspects to a webmaster, it is always good to develop knowledge about some important concepts as your blogging career advances.

This is especially important if you intent to host your own blog using WordPress.

Keeping this in mind, here are some important concepts covered in the most easy to understand way. Knowing these concepts will help you strengthen your foundation so you can easily build upon it.

So let’s get started:

How To Make Website – 28 Technical Concepts You Must Know

1.) What’s The Difference Between A Domain Name, Webpage, Website And URL?

Here’s what each of them represents:

a.) Domain name: A domain name is simply your website name. An address using which people can access your website. It is also know as the ‘host name‘ or the ‘site name‘.

A domain name is connected to a web hosting account using name-servers (DNS – Domain Name-servers) . The name server tells the browser (Chrome, Firefox etc.), which hosting account the files belonging to a domain name are located at. This way, when someone types in your domain name in his/her browser, they get access to your website files (blog content).

b.) Website: A website is a collection of web pages. The term ‘Website’ is used to denote an entire site with all the web pages and the homepage.

c.) Web page: A web page is any single page within a website. Eg: http://sitename.com/new-page.php

d.) URL: The URL (uniform resource locator) specifies the location of a particular webpage in the server.

Example of a URL: ‘http://sitename.com/new-page.php’

A URL contains three elements,

• the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP or HTTPS).
• the host name (Domain name).
• and the file name.

In addition to these, a URL can be loaded with or without a ‘WWW‘.

WWW version: http://www.sitename.com
Non-www version: http://sitename.com

This is why it is advised to redirect the WWWversion of your site to the non-WWW version so as to not have two pages with the same content.

Note: The domain name of a website is also a URL. In-case of the domain name, the file name is either index.php or index.htm or index.html

When you type in a domain name, the index file present in the server is what loads.

E.g. : http://sitename.com/index.php

The index.php is generally not visible in the browser.

e.) Homepage: The homepage of a website is the first page on that site. It is the page that loads when you go to the domain name of the website. (Eg: http://www.sitename.com/)

Also known as the Frontpage or the ‘Index Page’.

f.) Sub-domain: A sub domain is a domain which is part of the main domain.

E.g.: blog.sitename.com

In this example, sitename.com is the main domain and blog.sitename.com is the sub domain.

Note: Website, webpage, URL and domain name are generally used interchangeably.

2.) What Is HTTP And HTTPS

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. It’s a protocol that defines how information is transmitted between web servers and browsers. HTTP is an insecure protocol and it allows for information to be transferred without encryption. This means, passwords transmitted using HTTP can be stolen.

HTTPS on the other hand is a secure protocol that transmits information in an encrypted way.

3.) What Is A Web Hosting Server?

A hosting server is like a computer that stores your website’s files, images and other media and makes them accessible online.

When someone visits your website through a web browser like Chrome, Firefox or IE, the hosting server, sends them the requested HTML file/media for viewing. So a server pretty much needs to be online 24/7 (also known as Uptime).

A server can run on a windows operating system or the Linux operating system. Linux is Open source and free.

Linux servers use,

• Linux as the operating system.
• Apache as the web server software. (Sometimes Litespeed or Nginx)
• MySQL as the database management system (or database server).
• PHP as the programming language. (Sometimes Perl or Python)

You need a Linux server to run WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and other PHP based Content management systems.

4.) What Is An IP Address?

An IP address is a numeric representation of a domain name.

Every domain name has an IP address associated with it. It is just that it works in the background and hence is not visible to us.

Your hosting provider allocates an IP address to be associated with your domain name. If you are on shared hosting, it will be a shared IP. But you can always buy a dedicated IP from your hosting provider.

Shared IP: When you are on a shared IP, a single IP is used to represent various domain names.

Dedicated IP: A dedicated IP, a single IP is associated with one domain name. If you have a dedicated IP from your hosting provider, you can load your website by visiting the IP in your web browser.

For example, you can visit Google.com by visiting this IP: 216.58.194.78

To check which IP address is associated with your domain name, visit this tool: https://www.site24x7.com/find-ip-address-of-web-site.html

5.) What Is Cpanel And WHM?

CPanel is a popular control panel offered by all Linux web hosting providers. Cpanel allows you to manage your hosting account. If you are on a Linux web hosting server, chances are that you have access to Cpanel.

To login securely to your Cpanel, simply go to the following URL:

https://sitename.com/cpanel (replace ‘sitename.com’ with your domain name)

You can get the Login ID and Password from your web hosting provider if they have not already supplied you with the same.

WHM (Web hosting manager) on the other hand is an extension of Cpanel. It allows you to manage many different Cpanel accounts. WHM is available to you on a reseller hosting account, or a VPS or dedicated server.

If you are on a shared hosting, you will only have access to Cpanel.

6.) What Are MySql Databases?

MYSQL is an open source database management system. It allows for a structured way to storing and retrieving data.

Most Linux servers come pre-installed with a MYSQL database.

Your hosting company will have allocated at-least one database with your account. Some plans even give you access to unlimited databases.

As an example, check out the shared hosting plan offered by Hawkhost – the basic plan includes unlimited databases.

You only need one database per domain name to work with a CMS like WordPress.

A database is part of the overall web sever space allocated to you. So your hosting space includes the ‘server space’ + ‘MYSQL database space’.

Web Server Space: Static content like HTML pages, wordpress installation files, CSS stylesheets, Javascript and images reside in the web server. The web server can interact with the database server.

MYSQL Database Server: This is where your website content and other data is saved neatly arranged in tables.

7.) What Is PHPMYadmin?

PHPmyadmin is a graphical user interface that allows you to admisnister your MYSQL database. You can also manually download and backup your database using PHPMyadmin.

PHPmyadmin is available with every Cpanel account.

8.) What Is Public_HTML?

Most servers running a Linux OS with CPanel as their control panel, will have a ROOT directory named ‘public_HTML‘.

As the name suggests, any file that you save under the ‘Public_html’ folder/directory (also known as the ROOT directory), will be publically viewable. You can block a file from getting viewed by changing its permissions.

For example, if I save a file named ‘laptop.php’ in the public_HTML folder, then I will be able to view this page in my browser by going to the following URL:

http://sitename.com/laptop.php

In order to block this page from being viewed, I will need to change the permissions of this page using FTP or Cpanel.

9.) What Is FTP And How Do I FTP To My Server (Securely)?

FTP is a medium to transfer files from your computer to your hosting server.

Think of FTP as a ship that transfers goods from one port to another.

To transfer files via FTP, you need a FTP Client (FTP software) like Filezilla or WinSCP.

Using this software, you can simply upload files from your computer to your server and vise versa (download files from the server to your computer).

For example, you can upload files into your Public_HTML (as discussed above) folder so they can be viewed online.

But FTP is an insecure mode of transferring files. FTP does not encrypt your data, hence your server username, password and the data you are transferring is open for anyone to intercept and read.

A better mode of transferring files is to use SFTP (SSH FTP or simply Secure FTP). SFTP works exactly similar to FTP, except that it connects to a secure port on your server.

FTP programs like Filezilla and WinSCP also allow you to transfer files via SFTP.

Remember that you cannot FTP to a MYSQL database. You can only FTP into a web directory.

Note: FTP is the general term used to represent both FTP and SFTP.

10.) What Are The Alternatives To FTP?

As few other options that can be used to add/edit your server files are as follows:

a.) Accessing files via Cpanel’s File manager: Cpanel offers you an option to open your site’s files via Cpanel’s filemanager.

You can edit individual files directly or upload files from your computer.

To do this, simply login to your Cpanel and go to ‘File Manager’.

b.) SSH: SSH (Secured Shell) allows you to connect to your server securely using a command line interface. A popular SSH client is Putty.

SSH is only recommended for advanced users as it requires you to use command line.

c.) Using a CMS: A CMS (Content management system) like WordPress, automatically adds/updates files to your server without you having to use FTP. You will need FTP though to add/edit some files like .htaccess, robots.txt etc.

So as you can see, learning how to FTP can be highly beneficial for you in the long run as you can reduce to need to depend on your webmaster for minor file updates.

11.) What Is .Htaccess File?

Simply put, a .htaccess is a configuration file. It can be placed within a directory or folder.

The .htaccess file placed within the root directory (Public_HTML), controls the entire website.

Before loading a website, the web server first reads the .htaccess file and checks if there are any rules that it needs to follow.

For example, you might want to block a certain directory from access. If you add a rule to block the directory in .htaccess, the server will not allow anyone to access it.

Similarly, you might want to redirect one URL to a new URL. You can write a rule for that in .htaccess too.

Here are some things you can do with .htaccess:

• Block/Allow access to a file, folder or directory.
• Block/Allow certain IP addresses to access your website.
• Redirect website, directory, folder or file to a different location.
• Redirect HTTP version to HTTPS version of a website.
• Redirect WWW to non-WWW and vise versa.
• Password protect a file/folder/directory.

12.) What Is HTML, CSS, PHP And JS

a.) HTML: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a language used to markup (tag) content to add style and other functions to a web page. A web browser reads the markup, and styles the web page accordingly before displaying it.

For example: To bold a text, you can surround the text with HTML bold tags as follows:

<b>This text will be bolded</b>

b.) CSS: CSS (Cascading style sheets) works in tandem with HTML to style the text, images and layout of a web page. It helps reduce redundancy. You can use one CSS style sheet to style all pages on an entire website.

c.) PHP: PHP is a scripting language that can be used to generate dynamic and interactive web pages. PHP can also be used to connect and make changes to your MYSQL database. It can get data from a database and create pages dynamically.

Example: You can add a quiz to your website, store the answers in the database and then generate an overall ranking to be displayed to the user.

d.) Javascript: Javascript can be used to alter HTML elements. Javascript is generally used to add interactive elements to a HTML page.

Example, a drop down menu appears when a user places a cursor on a link.

e.) Ajax: A technology used to create changes to a page without actually reloading it.

Example: When you submit a contact form, the contact form goes away and you get a ‘Thank you message‘ without the page reloading. If there was no Ajax used, the page would reload before displaying the message.

13.) What Is The HTML Source Of A Page And How To View It?

Looking at the HTML source is like looking at the skeleton of a web page. It shows you the page with all the HTML tags, styles and javascripts.

You can look at the HTML source of any webpage and on any browser using the following short keys: CTRL + U.

14.) What Is Fixed, Fluid And Responsive Layout?

These are different ways of using CSS to design the layout of a website.

a.) Fixed Layout (Static Layout): The layout of the website remains fixed irrespective of the resolution of the screen it is viewed on.

For example: You can view the website on different devices – like your computer, laptop, tablet and smartphone, but it will render with the same fixed width. This means, you will have to use side scrolling to see some parts of the website on a smaller device like a smart phone.

b.) Fluid Layout (Liquid layout): A fluid layout automatically resizes itself (resizes the width) to fit the screen. This means, on a smartphone a fluid layout will shrink down to fit the screen and hence the text size would automatically become small and unreadable. In this case, you will need to magnify the text portion of the site to read it.

c.) Responsive Layout: A responsive layout changes itself based on the screen resolution in such a manner that the readability of the site remains the same on all devices. For example, on a smartphone, a responsive site will automatically drop down its sidebar and make the content take up 100% of the screen width. This way the text does not shrink down like in case of a fluid layout.

A responsive layout achieves this by using ‘Media Queries’. Media Queries are set in the CSS of the site. Changes are made to the style (CSS) of the site based on the screen resolution (screen size).

Mobiletest.me offers a great tool to check how your responsive site renders in different mobile screens.

Google gives extra preference to sites that are responsive in their mobile search results. In other words, if someone searches for a keyword in his/her mobile then responsive sites will be given higher preference in the mobile SERPs (Search engine results page).

You can take the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to see if or not Google thinks your website is fully responsive.

d.) Mobile site: Some websites have a different mobile site designed specifically for mobile users. This means, they have a regular version of the website (desktop version) and then a mobile version. These sites use redirection to redirect traffic to a mobile website when someone visits the site using a mobile.

e.) AMP: AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an initiative taken by Google to increase the page loading speed of websites in Mobile phones. An AMP website is similar to having a separate ‘Mobile site’.

So by using AMP, a site owner can have three separate versions of his website – a regular (desktop) version which may or may not be responsive, a mobile site and an AMP site. AMP is still in its nascent stages.

15.) What Is A Hyperlink, Internal Link, External Link And A Backlink?

a.) Hyperlink: A ‘hyperlink’ links one document on the web to another. You can click the hyperlink on one document to reach the linked document.

In HTML, the ‘a href’ tag is used to create a hyperlink.

An example is as follows:

<a href="http://sitename.com/contact-page.php">Click here to Contact me</a>

In the above example, ‘Click here to contact me‘ is the anchor text and clicking on the anchor text will take you to the contact page which is http://sitename.com/contact-page.php

b.) Anchor text: As shown in the example above, an anchor text is the clickable text that takes you to the linked URL.

c.) Internal link: An internal link is a link that links to other ‘webpages/URLs’ within the website.

d.) External link: An external link is a link that links to a ‘webpage/URL’ on another website.

e.) Backlink: If Website-A links to Website-B, Website-B is said to have a backlink from Website-A. Website-A on the other hand has an ‘external link’ to Website-B.

16.) What Is Googlebot And How Does Google Index The Web?

Google is a search engine that displays a list of websites that it thinks relate closely to the search being conducted. Results are generally displayed in a fraction of a second.

To display these results so quickly, Google indexes the entire web (all websites present on the internet) and stores the information in a database.

When someone makes a search in Google.com, Google simply accesses this database and displays the results. The results are arranged based on an algorithm (ranking algorithm) that ranks websites in terms of relevancy and quality.

Google uses a program to index the web. This program indexes the web by following links (hyperlinks). This program is also known as Googlebot.

So in general terms, we can say that Googlebot crawls and indexes the web by following links. It follows internal links to index a single website and follows external links to reach other websites. So on and so forth.

When Googlebot crawls a website, it only sees the HTML code of the website. This is the code you can find by viewing the HTML source of a page as discussed above.

17.) What Is The Robots.Txt, Robots Meta Tag And NoFollow Attribute?

a.) Robots.txt: As a website owner, you can use the Robots.txt file to instruct robots which pages on your site to crawl and which ones to avoid.

This file typically resides in the root (Public_HTML) of your site, but just like the .htaccess file, you can put this file in any directory. The Robots.txt file in the Root directory (Public_HTML) governs the entire site.

b.) Robots Meta Tag: A Robots meta tag can be added in the section of a page to instruct Googlebot and other search engine bots if or not to crawl/index the page.

Here’s how the tag looks:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

The above meta tag instructs Robots, not to index the page and not to follow links on the page. This is similar to adding a NoFollow attribute to all links on the page.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

The above meta tag instructs Robots to not index the page but follow links on the page.

c.) NoFollow Attribute: A nofollow attribute can be added to individual links instructing bots not to follow the link.

18.) What Is A SERP?

SERP is the ‘Search engine results page’ of a search engine.

When you conduct a search in Google, the results displayed form a part of the SERPs.

SERPs contain both organic results as well as paid results.

a.) Organic results: Free results that Google ranks based on its ranking algo.

b.) Paid/Sponsored results: Paid results work on a CPC (cost per click) model and are displayed as per an auction. Sites paying a higher amount per click are displayed higher. Paid results are generally displayed on top and bottom of organic results and in the sidebar. Paid results are part of Google’s search Ad Network that can be brought via their Adwords program.

Note: Results displayed in a mobile phone are known as Mobile SERPs.

19.) What Is SEO – Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is the process of optimizing your website so it ranks higher in search engines like Google and thereby attracts more organic/free traffic.

SEO can be split into two parts:

a.) On-site optimization: Optimizing your website to make it more search engine friendly. Eg: Adding informative title tags, meta tags and alt tags, removing duplicate content, removing bad quality pages, writing good quality content, adding internal links etc.

b.) Off-site optimization: Offsite optimization involves building backlinks to your site’s pages and thereby increasing the site’s authority.

c.) Social media optimization: Social media optimization/marketing involves marketing your site using social media like Facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest etc. The basic idea is to generate awareness, get more followers, get more shares/likes and there by more traffic.

20.) What Is Google Search Console?

Google search console (formerly webmaster tools) is a free service by Google that helps you monitor and optimize your website to perform better in Google’s search results.

Here are some things you can do with Google search console:

• You can check if your site has duplicate title/meta tags.
• Check and monitor backlinks to your site.
• Monitor your organic traffic and rankings in Google search results.
• Check if your site has mobile usability errors.
• Check if your site has crawl errors – if you are blocking Googlebot from crawling pages.
• Test your Robots.txt file.
• Add structured data.

You can register your site for Google search console by going here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Bing offers a similar service known as Bing Webmaster tools.

21.) What Is Google Analytics And How Is It Different From Google Search Console?

Google Analytics is another free service offered by Google (that has a paid upgrade) that allows you to track your website visitors.

Here’s what you can do with Analytics:

• Track real time visitors to your site.
• Track traffic sources – where you visitors are arriving from.
• Get audience overview – demographics, interests, language, location of your site visitors.
• Find out technology used by your visitors – browser, operating system, system type (computer, tablet or mobile).
• Track traffic from social media like Twitter, Facebook etc.
• Track User flow – how a user navigates your website.
• Track popular landing pages and common exit pages.
• Track visitor behavior – eg: Which link did the visitor click on?
• Track conversions.
• Track page load speeds, bounce rate etc.
• Get Google Adsense insights – Pages earning maximum revenue, CTR etc.

You have the option to integrate Google search console with analytics to view data within a single program.

22.) What Is Google Adsense?

Adsense is a program by Google that allows publishers (site owners like you and me) to publish Ads on their site and thereby make money. The Ads are mostly Pay Per Click – so you get paid if a visitor clicks on the Ad. Though, even CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) Ads are also available where you get paid a certain amount for every thousand impressions for the Ad.

23.) What Is Google Adwords?

Adwords is a program by Google that allows advertisers (businesses as well as individuals) to purchase ads on the Google network – the search network and the display network.

a.) Search network: The search network consists mainly of Google search (and some subsidiaries like Ask.com and AOL.com). Paid text Ads displayed on the search results page (SERP) consist of the search network ads.

b.) Display network: The display network consists of all sites that run Adsense ads on their site. Display network supports both text as well as banner/Rich Media Ads.

Advertisers have the option to restrict their ads to the Search network alone or extend it to the display network.

Adwords and Adsense both work in tandem.

24.) What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a PHP application that uses a MYSQL database to manage your website content.

When you login to your wordpress dashboard and publish an article, the article gets saved in the MYSQL database.

When a visitor requests a particular article, wordpress retrieves this article from the database and sends it to the server, and then the server displays the article on the visitor’s browser.

WordPress uses the database to store content in a structured manner. The database helps wordpress display content dynamically when requested.

25.) What’s The Difference Between WordPress.Org And WordPress.Com?

WordPress.com is a self hosted platform. It’s a free service that lets you create a blog under their domain name as a sub domain. Eg: blog-name.wordpress.com

If you want to run a blog under your own domain name, you will need to pay wordpress.com to host it for you which is not worth it.

WordPress.org on the other hand is just a blog software that you can download for free and upload to your server and then start blogging from there.

So more often than not, when someone mentions wordpress, they mean WordPress.org.

26.) What’s The Best Alternative To WordPress?

The best alternative to WordPress is Blogger(Blogspot) which is a free service offered by Google.

The best part about blogger is that you can run a site under your own domain name for free on blogger. All the technical side of running a website including web hosting, server security, spam blocking, software updates, backups is taken care of by Blogger.

You are also free to run ads and monetize your blog. That makes blogger the perfect alternative to wordpress for someone who does not want to deal with the technical aspects.

27.) Where Does WordPress Save My Website Files?

The actual WordPress installation files are stored in the webserver, under a folder named ‘Public_HTML‘ (‘WWW’ in some cases). But all your posts, pages, categories, tags etc. are stored in the MYSQL database.

a.) Public_HTML folder on the Web Server: All your images, media, WordPress installation files, WordPress theme files, plugin files, CSS, JS, robots.txt, .htaccess files are stored in your web server.

b.) MYSQL Database: All your posts, pages, categories, tags, archives and comments are stored in the database.

This is why, when you back-up your wordpress files, you need to take a back-up of your wordpress database plus you also need to take a back-up of your images/media and theme files under the wp-content folder.

Back-up programs generally take a backup of both of these and zip them up into a single tar or zip file.

28.) Different Ways To Back Up Your WordPress Installation

As mentioned before, to back up wordpress, you need to back up the following:

1.) Your MYSQL database.
2.) Your UPloads folder. (This folder contains your images)
3.) Your Themes Folder (If required)
4.) Your Plugins Folder or Specific Plugins (If required)

You have three options to back-up your site:

a.) Back it up manually: To back up your MYSQL database, login to your cpanel, and go to PHPMYAdmin.
You can back up your uploads and themes folder by downloading all files via FTP. Takes time.

b.) Back up using SSH: You can download the entire content as a .zip file using SSH and then download the zip file to your computer.

c.) Use a plugin: You can use a plugin like updraft plus to do the backup for you.

So that covers a wide range of technical aspects related to web hosting and running a website. If you have any queries, feel free to leave in the comments.

How to Maintain a Healthy WordPress Website/Maintaining a healthy WordPress is fundamentally important for every website manager. From optimization tips to security, to maintenance, running updates, and lots more, we need to implement best practices to be sure we are free from hackers, stay safe and healthy.

Fortunately, the release of WordPress 5.3, came with some great features and improvements for the WordPress CMS Being the most popular CMS today. We will in this post examine some basic tips necessary to keep your WordPress website healthy and conclude with the new features of WordPress 5.3.

Your WordPress site health will be based on tests your WordPress website passes successfully. If you pass all of them, your score would be 100%. As it focuses on ensuring that your site is up to date, healthy, and secure, the Site Health Score is, undoubtedly, something that will help make the web better.

How to Check Website Health with WordPress Site Health Tool?

Checking your website health is now super easy. It does not require any plugin. You just need to go to Dashboard > Tools > Site Health. You will see the overall site health status in percentage. The tool checks your website health and shows the result in the following categories.

1. Site Health Status
2. Site Health Info

You just have to switch between the tabs to see the status and get the information.

Site Health Status

The Site Health Status shows critical information about your WordPress configuration and items that require your attention. If there’s anything that requires improvements shown on the Site Health Status page, The Site Health tool checks the issues in 2 major categories.

• Performance – WordPress & PHP version, SQL server, required, and recommended PHP modules are installed, UTF8MB4 support, scheduled events, HTTP requests, REST API, and loopback requests.
• Security – Active themes and plugins, HTTPs connection, secure communication, debug mode off, communication with WordPress.org, and background updates status.

The tool gives you site health status in 3 different layers.

• Critical Issues – Shows the number of critical issues found. Marks issues with category namely security or performance than say what to do about them.
• Recommended improvements – Shows all the recommendations to improve site health and gives instructions on how to address them individually.
• Passed Tests – Displays the number of items with no issues and shows all items in detail.

Is Site Health Score Percentage Actually Important?

The simple and straight answer to this will be yes! You will find out that most of the tests your website will have to pass for a good site health score are performance and security related. So, passing the site health test simply means you are up-to-date with security and performance for your WordPress website. Most people would like their website to run smoothly and be as likable as possible. Seeing a 100% score will give you the reassurance that your WordPress website is performing exceptionally well.

We are aware that people are naturally highly competitive and will strive for the precious 100% score. Because of that, we decided to share some tips on how to get that perfect score on your website. In fact, this goal is not as hard to accomplish, as some may expect. So, let’s get on with the guide!

Update Your WordPress Version

The first test your WordPress website must pass is the update test. It is important that you maintain a healthy WordPress website by keeping up with the latest updates. That simply means you have to be running the latest version. It is extremely important that you ensure you are run the latest version of WordPress. Please note that prior to performing the actual update of your WordPress platform, it is important that you ensure a full backup of the current website is performed.

To proceed with the actual upgrade, you will have to log into the WordPress Dashboard, go to Update (Dashboard → Update), and then click on the “Update Now” button. After doing that, make sure you don’t click back or try reloading the page. Usually, you would only need to wait a few seconds. Also, keep note that your website will be in maintenance mode during the time your WordPress version is being updated.

Following the installation of WordPress 5.2, go to Tools → Site Health to check your score.

When you go there, you will see that this tool helps you a lot in your way to the perfect score. You will be able to see not only your current score but also all the recommended improvements. Additionally, you can check out every test that your website has already passed.

We’ve managed to get these awesome 100% score, and we will help you accomplish it for your website. It’s fairly easy.

Keep Only One Default Theme

We strongly advice that you keep only the latest of the default themes, which currently is “Twenty Nineteen.”

Follow that by cleaning up all unused themes and plugins. To remove a theme, your path to go would be Dashboard → Appearance → Themes. Continue with finding the theme for deletion and hovering over it. You will see a “Theme Details” button. Click on that button and a window with info and options about that particular theme will be opened. At the bottom right corner is the “Delete” button. You know what to do from there.

Note that when a theme is currently active, there won’t be a button for its removal.

Keep all Plugins and Themes Up To Date

The main reason to keep every theme and plugin up to date is to avoid hacker attacks. Ultimately, those would lead to your website going down. Also, Google would begin warning all potential visitors, saying that your website could be hacked. Since you don’t want downtimes and you want visits on your site, we recommend that you take the time and update all active plugins and themes.

Run-on The Latest PHP Version

As at the time of writing this ost, PHP 7.3 is the highest level available. However, we strongly recommend that you always use PHP’s most current version. There are some things that also need to be mentioned on why you should upgrade to the latest PHP version:

• WordPress 5.2 checks whether your current and most secure version of PHP is the latest possible. If that’s not the case, one of the Site Health suggestions will be to update PHP
• Note that if your site is still on a 5.x version of PHP, it’s highly vulnerable and could get hacked; If we compare PHP 7.3 with its 5.6 version, we see that version 7.3 handles almost three times the requests of 5.6; Currently, most of the plugins work only if the latest PHP version is installed, which is one more reason for an update.

Use a Stable and Supported Version of a Database Management System

This is also very important. Fortunately, at Todhost, we support MySQL 5.6+, which supports UTF 8 Unicode. The UTF 8 is to make sure that your website can store text content that is non-English, in addition to some other strings (e.g., emoticons) without the risk of unexpected issues.

Use HTTPS for your WordPress Site

It is recommended that your entire website should be running on the secured https mode. Keep in mind that HTTPS requires a valid SSL certificate to be issued for your site. Fortunately again, at Todhost, we offer free SSL support for all clients with no additional costs for Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates. Thanks to our integration with Let’s Encrypt, you can easily enable and issue Free SSL certificates right from within the cPanel section of your website. To do so, you should go to Client Area → cPanel → Let’s Encrypt.

All that remains is to click on +issue for your chosen site:

But why does HTTPS really matter? Last year Google had announced a project that would improve the overall web security via encouraging all site owners to make the necessary switch from HTTP to HTTPS. As part of the plan, their popular Chrome (web browser) would mark all unencrypted websites as “Not Secure” starting July 2018. This, of course, had a great impact on site traffic given that a security warning undoubtedly introduces uncertainty and hesitation among site visitors.

Even if you do not bring much attention to the security of your site, Google definitely does. HTTPS has been sometimes described as just a minor Google ranking factor when it comes to organic internet search algorithms but we have found that it can have severe impact on site raning when not taken seriously. It’s more often seen in the form of a “site quality” score, alongside many other factors, such as page speed and mobile responsiveness. There are multiple different “best security” practices and enhancements that are implemented for ensuring a website is locked down.

Nevertheless, padlocking your site still would not be enough to ensure the automated redirection of your HTTP traffic to the secured HTTPS version of your site. Eventually, people will find their way in reaching your website over HTTP://. For that reason, we strongly recommend the use of HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), instead of the HTTPS option. Doing that will help you avoid cookie hijacking, SSL protocol attacks, SSL stripping, as well as other attempts to bypass your SSL protection. Here comes the best part – you exponentially improve your overall SSL rating with Tod host.

Have Cron Job Enabled

Site Health checks for running scheduled events. WordPress uses Cron Job wp-cron.php task scheduler to periodically check for updates to plugins, themes and WordPress itself. It is also what makes sure to publish scheduled posts on time. It does that in the background.

What happens if WP-Cron unexpectedly stops working? Not to worry! There is a plugin with the name of “WP-Cron Status Checker”, which is quite handy.

Turn Off WordPress Debugging

Debug mode is often enabled for gathering additional details about an error or site failure but may contain some sensitive information that should not be available on a publicly available website. Removing the debugger would prevent any leaking of personal server information. Go in wp-config.php. The default setting there is for WP_DEBUG to be set to false. Go ahead and double-check. In case it’s not – make it so define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, false ).

Do not Disable Rest API

The REST API is one way WordPress, and other applications, communicate with the server. One example is the block editor screen, which relies on this to display, and save, your posts and pages. Disabling Rest API would make WordPress function inadequately. There are certain Android apps that also require the Rest API to be enabled.

Make Sure Required PHP Modules are Installed

PHP Modules and extensions are additional libraries that extend the functionality of the PHP programming language. WordPress recommends several PHP modules to be installed for optimal performance.

You can find a list of extensions on the WordPress website. Some of these extensions are required and others are recommended but not necessary.

Now, how do you install a missing module?

You will need to ask your hosting providers to install these extensions for you. Some web hosting providers allow you to install them from hosting dashboard (look for PHP PEAR Packages). However, you would still need to configure them in php.ini file which may not be easier for beginners.

Disable WordPress Debug Mode

WordPress comes with a built-in debug mode which allows you to see if a plugin, theme, or custom code is throwing some errors. This feature is intended to be used by developers or advanced users.

It is not recommended to turn on the WordPress debug mode for a live website. It may show warnings and notices in the WordPress admin area which affect user experience.

Do not Disable Background Updates

Background updates are more important than a lot of people would think. They ensure that WordPress can auto-update if a security update is released for the version you are currently using. Disabling them is one of the things that put your WordPress website at a greater risk of being hacked.

Make Sure WordPress Can Run Scheduled Jobs

Your WordPress website needs to perform scheduled tasks like checking for updates. These tasks use a system called cron jobs.

Sometimes your hosting environment may block them from running or you may accidentally end up stopping WordPress cron jobs.

You need to make sure that WordPress can run these scheduled tasks to improve your site health score.

WordPress 5.2 Comes With New Features Enhancing Site Health

WordPress 5.2 “ was officially released on May 7, 2019, and is available for download on the official WordPress website.

In all fairness, this version comes with a lot of features, the biggest one being the new Site Health check tool which will help educate users and give developers the essential information they need. Other improvements include PHP error protection (fewer white screens of death), block editor improvements, new dashicons and emojis, and various developer and accessibility updates.

The WordPress team, captues the great features and performance improvements in its description:

• WordPress 5.2 gives you even more robust tools for identifying and fixing configuration issues and fatal errors. Whether you are a developer helping clients or you manage your site solo, these tools can help get you the right information when you need it.
• This is the second major release since the launch of the WordPress block editor (AKA Gutenberg) in WordPress 5.0. Below we’ll dive into all the new improvements and the most important changes you will find with this latest WordPress .2 release.

Site Health Info Page

This is a very interesting part of the website health feature. All you have to do is switch tabs to this page and you will get detailed information about the configuration of your WordPress

Information such as:

• PHP version your site is using
• your memory limit
• Is your site HTTPS?
• Even your server and database information

This is where you can easily get debugging information that is used for troubleshooting. So if something goes wrong you just copy the information form this page and send it to your hosting or support team.

Site Health Check

The first site health check features came in WordPress 5.1 when they added PHP version compatibility checks for plugins and themes. In WordPress 5.2, they’ve added a completely new tool which comes with two new pages to help debug common issues due to server and software configurations, PHP versions, etc.

Under “Tools” → “Site Health” there is a new page called “Status.” The site health check shows critical information about your WordPress configuration and items that require your attention.

One thing you’ll probably notice is that they’ve added a percentage score grade at the top of the page based on how many tests your site passes. Some aren’t happy about this and there is a discussion among developers (Ticket #47046) of whether or not a grading system should exist. The main reason is that scores sometimes create additional problems as users are obsessed with scoring 100%.

However, a check for things like inactive plugins and themes is important. This is because many don’t realize that simply because something isn’t active on your WordPress site doesn’t mean someone can’t execute the code if they browse directly to it. Therefore, in order to keep your WordPress site secure, it’s recommended to completely remove inactive themes and plugins if they aren’t being used.

The tests in the new Site Health tool includes checks for the following performance and security-related items:

Performance Checks

• Latest WordPress version
• Up to date version of PHP
• Up to date SQL server
• Required and recommended PHP modules are installed
• UTF8MB4 is supported
• Scheduled events
• Working HTTP requests
• REST API available
• Can perform loopback requests

Security Checks

• Only running active themes
• Up to date plugins
• HTTPs connection
• Secure communication
• Debug mode off
• Can communicate with WordPress.org
• Background updates are working

Site Health Info

Under “Tools” → “Site Health” there is another new page called “Info.” This is a place to find helpful debugging information about your WordPress site’s configuration which you can share with developers, hosting providers, etc. There is a handy “Copy site info to clipboard” button which allows you to easily grab the information and paste it into a text file to share with a third-party.

The Site Health Info page contains hundreds of different data points about your WordPress site. Without a doubt, this new page will help developers get the information they need from users faster.

Here’s just a snapshot of some of the awesome and very helpful details you can quickly see.

• WordPress – WordPress version, site language, user language, Home URL and Site URL, permalink structure, multisite check, number of users.
• Directories and Sizes – WordPress directory location, size, upload location and size, theme location and size, plugin location and size, database size, total installation size.
• Active Theme – Name of theme, version, author, author website, parent theme, theme features, theme directory location.
• Must Use Plugins – Details of any must use plugins currently running, version numbers, and author names.
• Active Plugins – Active plugins running, version numbers, and author names.
• Media Handling – Active editor, ImageMagick version number, string, resource limits, GD version, Ghostscript version.
• Server – Server architecture (such as Linux, Windows, etc.), Web server (such as Nginx or Apache), PHP version, PHP SAPI, PHP max input variables, time limit, memory limit, max input time, upload max filesize, post max size, cURL version, SUHOSIN status, Imagick library status, .htaccess rules.
• Database – Extension, server version, client version, database user, host, name, prefix.
• WordPress Constants – ABSPATH, WP_HOME, WP_SITEURL, WP_CONTENT_DIR, WP_PLUGIN_DIR, WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT, WP_DEBUG, WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY, WP_DEBUG_LOG, SCRIPT_DEBUG, WP_CACHE, CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS, COMPRESS_SCRIPTS, COMPRESS_CSS, WP_LOCAL_DEV.
• Filesystem Permissions – Check against the following directories to see if they are writable. Main WordPress directory, wp-content directory, uploads directory, plugins directory, themes directory, must use plugins directory.

PHP Error Protection

WordPress 5.1 was originally scheduled to introduce a new feature called “fatal error protection” which would protect from the WordPress white screen of death while updating PHP. However, due to several critical flaws, this feature was delayed. It has now been included in WordPress 5.2.

With this protection, WordPress will recognize when a fatal error occurs and pause the offending theme or plugin in the WordPress admin dashboard so that you’ll still be able to log into the backend of your site and (hopefully) fix the problem. For less tech-savvy users, this is a great new feature.

However, we always still recommend using a staging environment when testing out a new version of PHP.

If your site experiences issues while upgrading PHP versions, you will still be able to log into the backend to fix the problem.

On the backend, you will see a message letting you know that your WordPress site is currently in recovery mode and that there may be an error with a theme or plugin.

Miscellaneous Developer Updates

WordPress 5.2 comes with improvements for developers; everything from improvements to the block editor and privacy policy pages, a new WordPress hook, updates to the coding standard, and more.

Block Editor Improvements

There were dozens of improvements made to the block editor (Gutenberg) that is shipping with WordPress 5.2.  Here are a few:

• In 5.0, WP_Screen::is_block_editor() was introduced to allow developers to conditionally execute code depending on whether the block editor is being loaded. However, there were some issues with this that have now been fixed in WordPress 5.2.
• Media and text blocks got enhanced.
• Image and block resizers are much better than before.
• There were performance improvements made in terms of loading time.

PHP Coding Standard Updates

WordPress now officially recommends running PHP 5.6 or higher with your hosting provider.

With WordPress 5.2, this means developers can take advantage of new coding standards such as namespaces, anonymous functions, short array syntax, short ternary syntax, and assignments with conditionals. If you’re a developer and have already been running on PHP 7 or higher for a while now, this might not impact you, but it’s good to see WordPress making updates.

Privacy Updates

WordPress 5.2 brings several improvements for developers working with Privacy Policy pages and data exports.

The first is four new helpers which will make customizing the privacy policy page easier:

• New function: is_privacy_policy()
• A new theme template file: privacy-policy.php
• New body class: .privacy-policy
• New menu item class: .menu-item-privacy-policy

The second change is in regards to data exports:

User Data exports no longer use a hardcoded list, but now use the default list of allowed tags in wp_kses(). New filtering is now available as well.

Improvements for Writing JavaScript

With the addition of web pack and Babel configurations, developers won’t have to worry about setting up complex build tools to write modern JavaScript. Read more about JavaScript improvements.

New Body Tag Hook

WordPress 5.2 adds a new wp_body_open() hook, which lets themes support injecting code right at the beginning of the <body> element. The WordPress team encourages theme developers to start using this. Read more about some of the other miscellaneous developer updates.

New Emojis and Dashicons

In terms of visual updates, WordPress 5.2 has new emojis and dash icons. In WordPress 5.2 the latest version of Twemoji, 12.0.1, was added. Version 12 includes 230 new emojis, including accessibility emojis and our personal favorite, the Sloth.

New Dashicons

Dashicons are used to prettify your WordPress admin dashboard. It was definitely time for an update as they haven’t changed since WordPress 4.5. WordPress 5.2 has 13 new icons, including Instagram, a suite of icons for BuddyPress, and rotated Earth icons for global inclusion. WOFF 2.0 font file format has also been added.

Notable Accessibility Changes

Along with WordPress 5.2 comes a number of changes working together to improve contextual awareness and keyboard navigation flow for those using screen readers and other assistive technologies.

• Post formats are now in list tables.
• New link markup on the WordPress admin bar submenu.
• The currently viewed archive in the archive dropdown widget is now pre-selected.
• A new media view was added to the media library.
• Headings were added to the data tables on the Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data pages.
• The alt text field is now the first field displayed in the media modal.

Security Enhancements

Ticket #39309 was opened in 2017 describing a security issue with the WordPress infrastructure. Basically, if someone was able to compromise api.wordpress.org, they could issue fake updates and take control of user’s WordPress sites.

Therefore, as of WordPress 5.2, it now checks for the existence of a x-content-signature header. If one isn’t found, it falls back to a signature file. Regardless of the method, the update packages are now digitally signed using Ed25519 and are base64-encoded.

Final Words

We hope our si,ple guide can do the trick and lead you to the desirable 100% site health status. Remember that this score is not just the ultimate. The perfect Site Health Score is composed of elements that were always important. The thing that changed in WordPress 5.2 was making people more aware of how to take proper care of their websites.

WordPress Plugin A- Z/Speed up your internet speed on your LAN. This python script will increase your internet speed by eliminating access to the default gateway for anyone on your LAN. This script regularly checks which all hosts are online using Nmap. After that, it stops anyone from getting access to default gateway by doing an arp spoofing attack. So basically what happens is everyone on the LAN is in Denial of Service(DOS) except you. That how you can use up all of the bandwidth for yourself.

This script also has a facility of excluding ip addresses those whom you do not wanna block access. Also you can specify the interface on which you are connected to. By default the interface is ‘eth0’.

WordPress Plugin A- Z, Website Page Speed Up

Page Caching Plugins

• WP Fastest Cache – This plugin creates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog.
• WP Super Cache – This plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
• Comet Cache – If you care about the speed of your site, Comet Cache is one of those plugins that you absolutely MUST have installed Comet Cache takes a real-time snapshot (building a cache) of every Page, Post, Category, Link, etc.
• Cache Enabler – The Cache Enabler plugin creates static HTML files and stores them on the servers disk.
• Simple Cache – Simple Cache was constructed after getting frustrated with the major caching plugins available and building sites with developer-only complex caching solutions that get millions of page views per day.
• Gator Cache – Gator Cache is an easy to manage page cache for WordPress. Once installed, it automatically updates new and updated content in your cache.
• Vendi Cache – Vendi Cache takes your slow database-driven pages and turns them into very fast static HTML files.
• SG Optimizer – This plugin is designed to link WordPress with the SiteGround Performance services.
• WP Rocket – Your website at lightspeed.
• W3 Total Cache Fixed – A community-driven build of W3 Total Cache. The aim is to continuously incorporate fixes, improvements, and enhancements over the official WordPress release of W3 Total Cache.
• WP-FFPC – WP-FFPC is a cache plugin for WordPress.
• Cachify – Cachify optimizes your page loads by caching posts, pages and custom post types as static content.
• Batcache – Batcache uses Memcached to store and serve rendered pages.
• Hyper Cache – Hyper Cache is a cache plugin specifically written to get the maximum speed for your WordPress site.
• Powered Cache – Comprehensive caching and performance plugin for WordPress.
• WP Spider Cache – WP Spider Cache is your friendly neighborhood caching solution for WordPress. It uses Memcached to store both objects & page output.
• Redis Page Cache for WordPress – A Redis-backed full page caching plugin for WordPress, extremely flexible and fast. Requires a running Redis server and the PHP Redis PECL extension.
• Varnish Caching – Complete WordPress Varnish Cache 3.x/4.x integration.
• WordPress Cache and CDN – Fast, easy to use cache for WordPress with option for up-to 3 separate CDN’s – for js, css & images from 3 providers.
• Breeze – Breeze is a WordPress cache plugin with extensive options to speed up your website. All the options including Varnish Cache are compatible with Cloudways hosting.
• Varnish Caching – WordPress Varnish Cache integration.
• Pantheon Advanced Page Cache – Automatically clear related pages from Pantheon’s Edge when you update content. High TTL. Fresh content. Visitors never wait.
• WP LCache – Supercharge your WP Object Cache with LCache, a persistent, performant, and multi-layer cache library.
• LiteSpeed Cache – WordPress plugin to connect to LSCache on LiteSpeed Web Server.
• Project Nami Blob Cache – External full page caching for WordPress.
• WOT Cache – WordPress Optimization Tool & Cache.
• Swift Performance Lite – Boost your WordPress site.
• CodeDragon SmartCache – An intelligent site performance and caching optimization facility for WordPress. It offers super-fast, adaptive minification, GZIP compression, browser caching, database performance improvements, and more.
• WP Performance – WP Performance Optimizer.
• Pegasus Accelerator WP – The Pegasaas Accelerator WP plugin interfaces with the Pegasaas API to optimize a website for Web Performance and Google PageSpeed.
• WPCacheOn – Simple and powerful cache plugin for WordPress. Install and activate, that simple, your website is already loading faster.
• GhostBird WP – The WordPress performance and security plugin for humans.
• NitroPack – A site performance optimization plugin.
• ezCache – EzCash is an easy and innovative cache plugin that will help you significantly improve your site speed.

Object Caching Plugins

• WP Redis – For sites concerned with high traffic, speed for logged-in users, or dynamic pageloads, a high-speed and persistent object cache is a must.
• Redis Object Cache – A persistent object cache backend powered by Redis. Supports Predis, PhpRedis (PECL), HHVM, replication, clustering and WP-CLI.
• Memcached Redux – Changes the famous Memcached WP Object Cache backend to actually use the Memcached class (not the Memcache class).
• Fork of Memcached Redux – The real Memcached (not Memcache) backend for the WP Object Cache.
• Memcached – Memcached backend for the WP Object Cache.
• Memcached Is Your Friend Updated – Memcached via PHP Memcache or Memcached Class Support for WordPress with fixes for compatibility.
• APCu Object Cache Backend – Using this Plugin WordPress is able to store certain regular used elements into a persistent cache.
• FOCUS Cache – A File-based Object Cache that is Utterly Slow. Persistenly caches WP_Cache objects in the file system. Can really help speed up a site that has fast disk access and slow database access.
• php memcacheadmin – Graphic stand-alone administration for memcached to monitor and debug purpose.
• Tiny Cache – Cache post content, translations and nav menu output in persistent object cache.
• WP Redis Cache – Cache WordPress using Redis, the fastest way to date to cache WordPress.
• Transient Page Flush – Adds a page specific transient flush button to Debug Bar.
• Use Memcached – Adds memcached support for WP_Object_Cache.

Fragment Caching Plugins

• Fragment Cache – Fragment Cache is a WordPress plugin for partial and async caching of heavy front-end elements. It currently supports caching navigation menus, widgets, and galleries.
• Blunt Cache – Blunt Cache is a persistent fragment and object cache for those of us that cannot use full page caching.
• ShortCache – A shortcode fragment cache plugin.
• PJ Fragment Cache – Fragment caching with storage support for transients, object cache and object metadata.

Browser Caching Plugins

• Speed Up – Browser Caching – This small plugin (10 Kb) enables browser caching in your Apache web server and help browser to cache a local copy of static files and improve page load times.
• WP Performance Score Booster – This plugin speed-up page load times and improve website scores in services like PageSpeed, YSlow, Pingdom and GTmetrix.

Minification Plugins

• Autoptimize – Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It concatenates all scripts and styles, minifies and compresses them, adds expires headers, caches them, and moves styles to the page head and can move scripts to the footer.
• Autoptimize criticalcss.com power-up – Let Autoptimize and CriticalCSS unleash your site performance and make it appear better than anyone in search results.
• WP Roids – Fast AF caching! Plus minifies your site’s HTML, CSS & Javascript.
• Minit – Combine CSS files and Javascript files into single file in the correct order. Use the latest modified time in filename generation to ensure freshness. Load all external Javascript files asynchronously.
• Minit Pro – Add additional functionality to the Minit plugin of Kaspars Dambis.
• WP-Concatenator – CSS concatenation of individual style files into one resource request.
• Advanced performance – This plugin adds several performance improvements to your WordPress site.
• CSS Optimization – Advanced CSS optimization toolkit. Critical CSS, minification, concatenation, async loading, advanced editor, CSS Lint, Clean CSS (professional), beautifier and more.
• Javascript Optimization – Advanced Javascript optimization toolkit. Minify, concat/merge, async loading, advanced editor, ES Lint, UglifyJS (professional), beautifier and more.
• HTML Optimization – Advanced HTML optimization toolkit. Minify, code optimization, search & replace, strip comments and more.
• Merge + Minify + Refresh – Merge/Concatenate & Minify CSS & JS.
• Minify HTML – Tactfully minifies HTML output and markup to remove line breaks, whitespace, comments, and other code bloat to cleanup source code and improve speed.
• Featherlight HTML Minify – A featherlight plugin that Minifies HTML output for a faster loading website.

CDN Integration Plugins

• CDN Enabler – A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of distributed edge servers, which accelerate your content around the globe. The main benefits of a CDN are scalability, reliability and performance.
• Cloudflare – The easiest way to setup Cloudflare for your WordPress site.
• Cloudflare Page Cache – Cache HTML pages on the Cloudflare CDN when used with the page cache Worker.
• Easy Speedup – Easy Speedup enables advanced and very aggressive cloud based optimizations for your website including, global edge delivery, image optimization, WebP conversion, cross-origin cache sharing, aggressive compression, CSS and JS minification, immutable browser caching, and more.
• Fastly – Using this plugin means you won’t have to purge content in Fastly when you make changes to your WordPress content. Purges will automatically happen with no need for manual intervention.
• Purgely – Purgely manages caching and purging behavior for WordPress sites using the Fastly edge caching services. The plugin sets up default behaviors based on best practices for WordPress websites.
• DreamSpeed CDN – This plugin will automatically copy images, videos, documents, and any other media added through WordPress’ media uploader to DreamSpeed.
• Full Site Cache for KeyCDN – This plugin can help you to use KeyCDN on your WordPress, not only your Media and CSS, but also all HTML page.
• Full Site Cache for CloudFront – If you blog are using CloudFront on the main WordPress domain and you want to cache HTML page for not logged in user.
• Cloudinary – With Cloudinary, all your images are automatically uploaded, normalized, optimized and backed-up in the cloud instead of being hosted on your servers.
• Photon – Photon is an image acceleration and editing service for sites hosted on WordPress.com or on Jetpack-connected WordPress sites. That means less load on your host and faster images for your readers.
• ILAB Media Tools – ILAB Media Tools are a suite of tools designed to enhance media handling in WordPress in a number of ways.
• WP Offload S3 – ILAB Media Tools are a suite of tools designed to enhance media handling in WordPress in a number of ways.
• DADI CDN – A self-hosted, just-in-time asset manipulation and delivery application, providing a complete content distribution/delivery solution.
• Tachyon – Tachyon is an image resizing processor built to be used with accelerates your WordPress website Amazon S3 as the image backend and sits behind a CDN such as Cloudflare.
• Timber with Jetpack Photon – Make the Timber plugin work with Jetpack’s Photon. Once installed, all TimberImages use Photon as a CDN and for image manipulation (eg. resize).
• wp wpDone website content accelerator – Accelerates your WordPress website.
• Dynamic CDN – Dynamic CDN for front-end assets.
• Thumbor – Thumbor is an open-source photo thumbnail service. This plugin connects to it.
• Tiny CDN – Use an origin pull CDN with very few lines of code.
• CDN Linker – Modifies links pointing to wp-content and/or wp-includes (or whatever you configure) by replacing your ‘blog_url’ with a custom one. Enables you to pull static files, such as images, CSS or JS, from a different host, mirror or CDN.
• C3 Cloudfront Cache Controller – This is simple plugin that clear all cloudfront cache if you publish posts.
• Beaver Builder + Amazon S3 – Ensures compatibility between Beaver Builder and Human Made’s S3 Uploads plugin.
• Sunny – Automatically purge Cloudflare cache, including cache everything rules.
• WP-Stateless – Stores and serves WordPress media files directly from Google Cloud Storage.
• WP Azure offload – Automatically copies media to Azure storage and deliver using CDN.
• Cloudflare – Easily connect your WordPress website to CloudFlare’s free optimization features, including one-click options to purge cache and enable ‘dev’ mode.
• CloudFront Page Cache CDN – Low cost and high-performance page cache based on Amazon’s CloudFront CDN for international SEO. CloudFront provides international fast website speed and dedicated geographic IP’s for local SEO advantage.
• WordPress CDN and Image Hosting Plugin – Sirv – Instantly resize or crop images to any size. Add watermarks, titles, text and image effects. Embed them as images, galleries, zooms or 360 spins. Serve them from the fast CDN. Responsive, to perfectly fit the screen. Use the “Add Sirv Media” button on posts and pages.
• Google Cloud CDN Page Cache – Low cost and high performance international page cache based on Google Cloud CDN.
• WP Godspeed – One-click CDN – The premiere free CDN plugin for WordPress.
• CDNsun – Integrates any Content Delivery Network (CDN) into WordPress.
• ImageBoss – Content-aware image resizing, cropping, compression, cache and CDN. All web development best practices, hassle-free in one simple and powerful API.
• DigitalOcean Spaces Sync – This WordPress plugin syncs your media library with DigitalOcean Spaces Container.
• Medianova CDN – Integrate our Content Delivery Network(CDN) into your WordPress site.
• Cloudflare Stream Video – Cloudflare Stream Video is an easy-to-use, affordable, on-demand video streaming platform. Stream seamlessly integrates video storage, encoding, and a customizable player with Cloudflare’s fast, secure, and reliable global network, so that you can spend less time managing video delivery and more time building and promoting your product.
• Statically – Free CDN to optimize your static assets such as images, CSS or JavaScript files.

Image Optimization Plugins

• EWWW Image Optimizer – The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.
• EWWW Image Optimizer Cloud – The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.
• TinyPNG – Make your website faster by optimizing your JPEG and PNG images. This plugin automatically optimizes all your images by integrating with the popular image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG.
• Imagify – Speed up your website with lighter images without losing quality.
• ImageRecycle – ImageRecycle is an automatic Image and PDF content optimizer for WordPress website.
• ShortPixel Image Optimizer – Increase your website’s SEO ranking, number of visitors and ultimately your sales by optimizing any image or PDF document on your website.
• Kraken.io – This plugin allows you to optimize and resize new and existing WordPress image uploads through Kraken.io Image Optimizer’s API.
• Optimus – Optimus reduces the file size of uploaded media files automatically. Depending on the image and format, reductions in size of up to 70% are possible.
• WP ImageEngine Responsive Image Resizer – WP ImageEngine is an intelligent image CDN for optimizing, compressing and resizing images.
• Image Compression and optimization – Optimize your Images as well as Image Compression of upto 80%. Also resize images on upload to help reduce storage and bandwidth before compressing.
• Media Cleaner – Clean your Media Library from the media which aren’t used in any of your posts, gallery and so on.
• ImageLint – One-stop hassle-free no-config ImageLint WordPress integration.
• FAF Optim – Optimize images of your WordPress media storage.
• Media Deduper – Save disk space and bring some order to the chaos of your media library by removing and preventing duplicate files.
• WP Smush – Reduce image file sizes, improve performance and boost your SEO using the free WordPress Smush API.
• JPG, PNG Compression and Optimization – WP Image Compression is a quick and easy way to not only resize your images, but compress them as well for optimum performance going forward.
• Resizefly – Dynamically resize your images on the fly.
• WP Google PageSpeed Image Optimizer Lite – This plugin will optimize your images exactly like Google Pagespeed Insights.
• Image Optimizer WD – WordPress Image Optimizer – Image Optimizer WordPress plugin enables you to resize, compress and optimize PNG, JPG, GIF files while maintaining image quality.
• WP Compress – Image Optimizer – Compress and optimize images to shrink file size, improve load times and boost PageSpeed scores in just one click using WP Compress image optimization.
• Auto Cloudinary – Super simple Cloudinary auto-upload implementation for WordPress.
• Fly Dynamic Image Resizer – Dynamically create image sizes on the fly.
• Auto remove Attachments – Autoremove Attachments helps you keep your media library clean by deleting all media files attached to a post when that post is permanently removed from your system.
• Dynamic Image Resizer – Generates image sizes only when needed, instead of the 404 page.
• Image Optimize Command – Easily optimize images using WP CLI.
• Just Image Optimizer – Compress image files, improve performance and boost your SEO rank using Google Page Speed Insights compression and optimization.
• Octify Image Compression – Octify Image Compression for WordPress.
• WP Image Optimizer – Reduce image file sizes and improve website performance using Linux littleutils image optimizers within WordPress.
• tiny.pictures Image CDN – Scales and optimizes your images using the tiny.pictures image processing service in the cloud and delivers them through worldwide CDN nodes.
• Piio – Powerful Image Compressor, Optimization and Delivery – Generates responsive and optimized images, so you don’t have to.
• Resize Image After Upload – Automatically resize uploaded images to within specified maximum width and height. Also has option to force recompression of JPEGs.
• Image optimization & Lazy Load by Optimole – Complete handling of your website images.
• MegaOptim Image Optimizer – MegaOptim is image compression plugin that optimizes your images in the cloud using intelligent image compression methods to save as much space as possible while keeping the quality almost identical. It’s compatible with NextGen Gallery, MediaPress, WP Retina 2x and many other gallery plugins.
• Stop Generating Image Sizes – So, it creates multiple sizes of an image while uploading? Here is the solution.
• ShortPixel Adaptive Images – Display properly sized, smart cropped and optimized images on your website. Images are processed on the fly and served from our CDN.
• Pixelerate Image CDN – Integrate the Pixelerate Image Optimization and CDN into your WordPress website.
• Regenerate thumbnails and delete unused thumbnails – Regenerate thumbnails and delete unused.
• Warp Imagick – Optimize (jpeg) media images/thumbnails to reduce file size.
• WebP Express – Serve autogenerated WebP images instead of jpeg/png to browsers that supports WebP. Works on anything (media library images, galleries, theme images etc).
• Robin image optimizer – Optimize images without losing quality, speed up your website load, improve SEO and save money on server and CDN bandwidth.
• Scale Large Image Threshold – Control scaling of big images in WordPress using big_image_size_threshold filter. Image will be scaled forcefully when it will reach this threshold. Useful to control large images in WordPress.
• Crush.pics – Image Compression and Optimization – Image Compression and Optimization using Crush.pics API.
• Image CDN – WordPress CDN Plugin – Optimize your WordPress site with ImageEngine or another Image CDN (or any other Content Delivery Network).
• Abraia – Bulk optimize your WordPress images with Abraia.

Lazy Loading Plugins

• Rocket Lazy Load – Lazy Load displays images on a page only when they are visible to the user. This reduces the number of HTTP requests mechanism and improves the loading time.
• Lazy Load – Lazy Load displays images on a page only when they are visible to the user. This reduces the number of HTTP requests mechanism and improves the loading time.
• Lazy Load XT – Lazy load images, YouTube and Vimeo videos, and iframes using Lazy Load XT.
• Progressive Lazy Load – An example of my “Progressive Lazy Load” technique in WordPress using vanilla Javascript.
• Lazy Load for Videos – This plugin improves page load times and increases your Google PageSpeed Score. It replaces embedded Youtube and Vimeo videos with a clickable preview image.
• Disqus Conditional – DCL is an advanced version of Disqus Commenting System, with which experience the boosted page loading speed difference.
• Lazy Facebook Comments – Use Facebook comments system in your website without slowing down your website.
• Lazy Load for Comments – Lazy load WordPress default commenting system without any complex configurations.
• Velocity – Velocity is a WordPress plugin for lazy loading video and audio embedded media – it’s an alternative loading method to the standard YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud iframe embeds.
• BJ Lazy Load – Lazy image loading makes your site load faster and saves bandwidth.
• Image Preloading – Similar to DNS prefetching, image preloading/prefetching with JavaScript to get faster page loading experience.
• Easy Lazy Loader – Lazy load images, iframes, videos and audios to improve page load times.
• WordPress Image Preload – A modern lazyload / image preload plugin based on Intersection Observer.
• LH CSS Lazy Load – Lazy load non critical css.
• Crazy Lazy – Lazy load images. Simple to use: Activate, done. Search engine and noscript user friendly.
• QazyWP – Image Lazy Loader – Lazy Load Images in WordPress – Built off Narayan Prusty’s Qazy library.
• Lazy Load Optimizer – Lazy loading images to speed up sites page load speed.
• WordPress Accelerate – Speed Optimizations for WordPress websites.
• Picanto – Instantly, automatically and painlessly make your website faster by reducing image payload and lazy loading them.
• LH Native Lazy Loading – Automatically add the new loading attribute to images and iframes within your content to support native lazy loading.
• SARVAROV Lazy Load – Lazy Load all your images, videos and iframes in just one click. Make your blog faster and look better with blurred LQIP and primary color placeholder.
• Native Lazyload + Polyfill – Adds native lazyloading to all images and iframes (embeds), also wraps them in and adds a polyfill to make it work in all browsers.
• Native Lazyload – Lazy-loads media using the native browser feature.
• Flying Images – High-performance Native Image Lazy Loading.
• Lazy Images Without Jetpack – Speed up your site and create a smoother viewing experience by loading images as visitors scroll down the screen, instead of all at once. Based on Lazy Images module, from Jetpack plugin.
• Regenerate Thumbnails Advanced – Regenerate thumbnails fast and easy while removing unused thumbnails of existing images; very useful when changing a theme.

Reduce HTTP Requests on Load Plugins

• Heartbeat Control – Allows you to easily manage the frequency of the WordPress heartbeat API with just a few dropdowns.
• Disable Emoji – This plugin disables the new WordPress emoji functionality.
• Disable Emojis – Completely disables both the old and new versions of WordPress emojis, removes the corresponding javascript calls, and improves page loading times.
• Emoji Settings – Emoji Settings adds an option within your Writing Settings page to disable or enable emojis.
• Compressed Emoji – WordPress emoji comes from s.w.org and they are not optimized well, Compressed Emoji fixes this problem.
• Disable Embeds – Disable Embeds
• Disable Custom CSS – This plugin automatically disables frontend database query for Custom CSS and Customizer section for setting Custom CSS, without need to manually choose any setting or option.
• Plugin Organizer – This plugin allows you to do the following, change the order that your plugins are loaded, selectively disable plugins by any post type or WordPress managed URL, and adds grouping to the plugin admin age.
• Query Strings Remover – Query Strings Remover removes query strings from your static resources like CSS and JavaScript files.
• WP Asset CleanUp – There are often times when you are using a theme and a number of plugins that are enabled and run on the same page.
• WP Disable – Reduce HTTP requests – Disable Emojis, Disable Gravatars, Disable Embeds and Remove Querystrings. Added support to disable pingbacks, disable trackbacks, close comments after 28 days, Added the ability to force pagination after 20 posts, Disable WooCommerce scripts and CSS on non WooCommerce Pages, Disable RSS, Disable XML-RPC, Disable Autosave, Remove Windows Live Writer tag, Remove Shortlink Tag, Remove WP API from the header.
• Only Load Scripts and Styles if a shortcode is present – Only load scripts and styles if a specific shortcode is present in the content when the page/post is saved.
• Complete Analytics Optimization Suite (CAOS) – Only load scripts and styles if a specific shortcode is present in the content when the page/post is saved.
• Gonzales – This plugin allows you to get rid of CSS and JavaScript files that are simply useless. Less is better, right? One of the biggest problem of modern websites is page weight.
• WPtimize – WPtimize is optimization and cleanup plugin for WordPress that clean up all the unnecessary tags and scripts from your WordPress header and optimize your code for faster loading page speed, security and performance.
• WP Load List – When you are trying to speed up your site, minifying CSS and JS files can really gain you some speed but can also break your site. This plugin allows you to get a full list of all CSS and JS files loading on each page so you can use this list to target the files you must avoid minifying.
• Plugin Logic – Activate plugins on pages only if they are really needed.
• Code Snippets WP Speed Up – Code Snippets for WordPress speed up which can be imported into the plugin.
• WP FastClick – WP FastClick plugin remove click delays on browsers with touch UIs.
• WP Head Optimizer – This plugin allow you to remove unnecessary tags, URLs, scrips and many more additional things from your WordPress header to speed up site loading time and hide some details form visitors for security purpose.
• Disable XML-RPC – Completely disables all XML-RPC related functions in WordPress including pingbacks and trackbacks, and helps prevent attacks on the xmlrpc.php file.
• Machete – Machete is a lean and simple suite of tools that solve common WordPress annoyances: cookie bar, tracking codes, header cleanup.
• Disable User Gravatar – Stops WordPress from automatically grabbing the users’ gravatar with their registered email.
• Slim WordPress – Send your site on a diet and remove unnecessary WordPress features.
• Smart WordPress – Optimize the caching behavior of your Website the easy way and reload pages only if something has been changed.
• Fast WordPress – Speed Up your WordPress page the easy way and optimize your site’s assets.
• Lean WP – Lean WP does a great job cleaning up the WordPress backend (Dashboard) and frontend.
• Disable Author Pages – Disable the author pages in WordPress and redirect to the homepage.
• Simple DNS Prefetch – This plugin controls the DNS prefetch settings.
• Complete Analytics Optimization Suite (CAOS) – A plugin that allows you to completely optimize Google Analytics for your WordPress Website: host analytics.js locally, keep it updated using wp_cron(), anonymize IP, disable tracking of admins, place tracking code in footer, and more.
• Cache External Scripts – This plugin allows you to cache the Google Analytics JavaScript file to be cached for more than 2 hours.
• WordPress WPO Tweaks – Several WPO Optimisations to Speed Up WordPress and get better results in Google PageSpeed, GTMetrix and Pingdom Tools.
• Webcraftic Disable Comments – Allows administrators to globally disable comments on their site. Comments can be disabled for individual record types.
• Webcraftic Clearfy – disable unused features – Disables unused WordPress features, improves performance, and increases SEO rankings, using Clarify, which makes WordPress very easy.
• Remove jQuery Migrate – This plugin removes the jQuery Migrate script from the front end of your site.
• Remove Emoji Styles & Scripts – If you do not want or need Emoji it is best to remove/dequeue Emoji styles and scripts for better performance.
• Disable Embeds – Disables both external and internal embedding functions to avoid slow page render, instability and SEO issues, and to improve overall loading speed.
• Native Performance – Native Performance is an all-in-one complement that integrates, in a complete and robust core, a set of tools for the solution of common errors, optimization, performance and much more.
• Disable WordPress Events and News Dashboard Widget – Disable WordPress Events and News widget from the dashboard.
• Dismiss “Welcome” Nag Dashboard Widget – Dismiss Welcome Panel nag, dashboard widget, when is activated, or automatically, if it is in mu-plugins directory.
• EVE Dynamic Prerender – This WordPress plugin creates and injects into HTML head a Dynamic Prerender Meta Tag. The system stores users navigational paths inside the database e retrieve the most common next visited page as a prerender meta tag. If the plugin doesn’t has data for the next probable page, it will show a prerender to the homepage.
• Webcraftic Assets Manager – Increase the speed of the pages by disabling unused scripts (.JS) and styles (.CSS). Make your website reactive.
• WP Widget Disable – Disable Sidebar and Dashboard Widgets with an easy to use interface. Simply use the checkboxes provided under Appearance -> Disable Widgets and select the Widgets you’d like to hide.
• WP YouTube Video Optimizer – Embed multiple YouTube videos using a simple shortcode.
• Above The Fold Optimization – Above the fold optimization toolkit that enables to achieve a Google PageSpeed 100 Score. Supports most optimization, minification and full page cache plugins.
• Disable jQuery Migrate – Easily prevent the jQuery migrate script that is included with WordPress core from being loaded to slim down source code (for advanced users only).
• Header Cleanup – Cleans up most of the unnecessary junk meta included by default in the WordPress header including generator, RSD, shortlink, previous and next, etc.
• Web Font Optimization – Advanced Web Font optimization toolkit. Font Face API, Web Font Observer, Google Font Loader, Critical CSS, async and timed font rendering and more.
• Disable Admin-AJAX – Completely disables frontend access to admin-ajax.php regardless of Heartbeat settings, to avoid unwanted AJAX calls and vastly improve performance.
• Scripts To Footer – Moves scripts to the footer to decrease page load times, while keeping stylesheets in the header. Requires that plugins and theme correctly utilizes wp_enqueue_scripts hook. Can be disabled via a checkbox on specific pages and posts.
• WP-Tweaker – WordPress automatically provides some features that not every blogger really needs.
• Speed Demon – A powerful bundle of lightweight tools and settings that drastically improve the loading speed of WordPress by reducing bulk and improving efficiency.
• Self-Hosted Google Fonts – Automatically self-host your Google Fonts – works with any theme or plugin.
• Redirect Gravatar requests – All requests to load an avatar from gravatar.com are redirected to a local image, preventing Gravatar from potentially gathering data about your site’s visitors.
• Speed Booster Pack – Speed Booster Pack helps you improve your page loading speed and get higher scores on speed test services like GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed or WebPageTest.
• Better Speed – Improve the loading speed of your website by removing bloat and unused features.
• WP Toolbelt – More features, fast.
• WP PLC Swissknife – One place swiss knife for WordPress. Increase WordPress Security and Performance.
• Optenhanse – A unique plugin for Optimizing, Enhancing and Securing your WordPress website.
• Flying Scripts by WP Speed Matters – Flying Scripts by WP Speed Matters.
• Speed Booster By Melotheme – Easy WordPress website Speed & Performance optimization with one click.

Database Optimization Plugins

• WP-Optimize – WP-Optimize is an effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency.
• WP-Sweep – WP-Sweep allows you to clean up unused, orphaned and duplicated data in your WordPress. It also optimizes your database tables.
• Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Host your Google Analytics javascript-file (analytics.js) locally and keep it updated using wp cron.
• Plugins Garbage Collector – Plugins Garbage Collector scans your WordPress database and shows the tables beyond of core WordPress installation.
• Delete Expired Transients – Delete old, expired transients from WordPress wp_options table.
• Advanced Database Cleaner – Clean database by deleting unused data such as ‘old revisions’, ‘old drafts’, ‘orphan options’, etc. Optimize database and more.
• Add Index To Autoload – This tool will speed up your database queries by adding an index to the autoload field.
• Clean Up Optimizer – Clean Up Optimizer is a Superlative High Quality WordPress Plugin which not only allows you to clean and optimize the WordPress Database but also performs other vast functions.
• Dedicated Transients – WordPress plugin to re-route transient storage to dedicated tables.
• Transient Cleaner – Housekeep expired transients from your options table.
• PJ Transient Cleaner – Cleans expired transients behind the scenes.
• Servebolt Optimizer – A plugin that checks and implements Servebolt Performance best practises for WordPress.
• Delete Expired Transients – Deletes all expired transients upon activation and on a daily basis thereafter via WP-Cron to maintain a cleaner database and improve performance.
• Yoast SEO Cleaner – Cleans up your WP options table by removing Yoast SEO “_cache_validator” entries.
• Yoast SEO Cleaner – WPS Cleaner cleans the database and WordPress.
• Custom Post Type Cleanup – Detect and delete posts from custom post types that are no longer in use.
• Cleanup Duplicate Meta – Checks for and deletes duplicate Post and/or User Meta entries in the database tables.
• HTML Pages – Create pure HTML pages without any of the WordPress code.

Slow Query and Debugging Plugins

• Query Monitor -Query Monitor is a debugging plugin for anyone developing with WordPress.
• Debug Bar – Adds a debug menu to the admin bar that shows query, cache, and other helpful debugging information.

NGNIX and Varnish Control Plugins

• Ngnix Helper – Add greater control for purging NGNIX cache if using for page caching.
• Varnish HTTP Purge – Varnish HTTP Purge sends a PURGE request to the URL of a page or post every time it it modified.
• WP Super Cache nginx.conf example – Example configuration for Nginx and WordPress with WP Super Cache plugin.
• Rocket-Nginx – Rocket-Nginx is a Nginx configuration for the WordPress cache plugin WP-Rocket.
• WPBase Cache – Plugin is developed to optimize wordpress deployment on varnish + nginx + php-fpm + php-apc server stack using three type of caches full page cache, db cache and opcode cache.
• Nginx Cache – Purge the Nginx cache (FastCGI, Proxy, uWSGI) automatically when content changes or manually within WordPress.

Caching Helping Plugins

• WP Rocket Helpers – This repository hosts a number of helper plugins that target some specific use cases for WP Rocket.
• WP Rocket Static Resources List – List the CSS and JS files loaded on a WordPress page.
• WP-Rocket Background Cache – This plugin will defer all cache pre-loading to wp-cron. If a page request comes and a page is not cached yet, wp-rocket will be disabled.
• WP Rocket Footer JS – Unofficial WP-Rocket addon to force all JS both external and inline to the footer
• WP Rocket ASYNC CSS – This plugin will combine all inline and external CSS in the order found on the page and save it to WP-Rocket’s cache folder as a new file.
• WP Rocket Disable Cache for Members – Unofficial WP-Rocket addon to disable cache from being saved for members, but still be enabled.
• VIP Performance Plugin – A plugin that helps every site benefit from the performance features built into WordPress.com VIP.
• Inside Menu Cache – Easily cache rendered menus using the Transients API.
• WP Static HTML Output – This plugin produces a static HTML version of your wordpress install, incredibly useful for anyone who would like the publishing power of wordpress but whose webhost doesn’t allow dynamic PHP driven sites.
• DB Cache Reloaded Fix – The fastest cache engine for WordPress, that produces cache of database queries with easy configuration.
• OPcache Dashboard – As you know, OPcache has no management page. This plugin offers you the OPcache dashboard designed for WordPress.
• WP REST API Cache – Enable caching for WordPress REST API and increase the speed of your application.
• Warm Cache – Crawls your website-pages based on any XML sitemap. If you have a caching plugin this will keep your cache warm.
• Cache Buddy – Minimizes the situations in which logged-in users appear logged-in to WordPress, which increases the cacheability of your site.
• Inside Translation Cache – Improves site performance by caching translation files using the WordPress object cache.
• Batcache Manager – Batcache manager is a drop-in solution, that adds cache clearing the popular caching Batcache plugin by Automattic. This plugin is based on the work by Andy Skelton and expands upon it, clearing archive pages, author pages and feeds.
• Advanced Nav Cache – Cache wp_nav_menu output in object cache.
• Advanced Comment Cache – A plugin to force caching of comments in wp_comment_query.
• Clear cache for Timber – Clear cache for Timber and Twig caching.
• Cache Enabler rebuild cache Based on sitemap.xml – According to sitemap.xml rebuild cache in Cache Enabler.
• Object Cache Flusher Button – This plugin adds a button to the adminbar that simply flushes the object cache.
• Analytics For Cloudflare – This is a WordPress plugin to connect your WordPress dashboard to your CloudFlare account to display some key analytics data.
• Hyperdrive – The fastest way to load pages in WordPress.
• oEmbed Cache Clear – With this plugin you can clear the cached oEmbed responses that WordPress saves for outgoing (oEmbed-Provider) links in posts and pages.
• Cache Blocks – Cache blocks.
• WP Engine Advanced Cache – This plugin works to increase cache time across the board, and gives a smarter way to purge the cache.
• Shin’s Pageload Magic – A lightweight WordPress plugin that dramatically boosts your page’s render speed.
• LH HTTP/2 Server Push – HTTP/2 Server Push Optimization for JavaScript and CSS resources enqueued in the page.
• Async JavaScript – Async JavaScript adds a ‘async’ or ‘defer’ attribute to scripts loaded via wp_enqueue_script.
• PageSpeed Purge Button – One-click PageSpeed cache purging using an admin bar button.
• Cache Version – Adds a version number (a timestamp) of all content that can be used in cache keys.
• FacetWP Cache – Caching support for FacetWP.
• Far Future Expiry Header – This plugin will add a “far future expiration” date for various file types to improve site performance.
• Clear Sucuri Cache – Simply clears whole Sucuri cache. Clear is done from the wp-admin panel or plugin’s page.
• WP Rocket User Role – Restrict WP Rocket settings access to super admins.
• Hummingbird – Hummingbird zips through your site finding new ways to make it load faster, from file compression and minification to browser caching because when it comes to page speed, every millisecond counts.
• Cache Sniper for Nginx – Purge the Nginx FastCGI Cache within WordPress on a global or per-page basis.
• Purge Varnish Cache – This plugin provides integration between your WordPress site and Varnish Cache to purge cache objects automate/manually.
• WP Rocket Disable Cache for Members – Unofficial WP-Rocket addon to disable cache from being saved for members, but still be enabled.
• WP Critical CSS – Use the CriticalCSS.com web service to automatically create the required CSS for above the fold.
• Multisite Support for WP Rocket – Plugin to enable WP-Rocket to be managed in multisite.
• FV Gravatar Cache – Speeds up your website by making sure the Gravatars are stored on your website and not loading from the gravatar server.
• ACF Simple Cache – Boost ACF speed by enabling JSON caching.
• Widget Output Cache – Caches widget output in the WordPress object cache.
• Beaver Builder Cache Helper – This plugin will clear various caches when layouts and templates are saved. It also clears the cache when WordPress finishes updating plugins and themes. The plugin also defines the DONOTCACHEPAGE constant when the builder is active, this is respected by most cache plugins.
• Flush Opcache with Varnish – Automatically flush the PHP opcache when you click the “Purge Cache” button created by Varnish HTTP Purge.
• Rest API Cache – Boost your application speed by caching the WordPress REST API.
• WP Super Cache Cleaner – Ajax-based Clear cache for WP super cache, with this you can clear WP super cache from any place in WordPress dashboard without leaving the present page.
• Requested! – Force browsers to load the most recent file if modified.
• WP-Cache Remember – Helper for the WordPress object cache and transients.
• Cache-control by Cacholong – Automates purging of Nginx Pagespeed cache and Nginx FastCGI cache on your Nginx server(s).
• HTTP/2 Optimization – Advanced HTTP/2 optimization toolkit. HTTP/2 Server Push, Service Worker based Cache-Digest and more.
• Cache-Control – Configurable HTTP Cache-Control headers for webpages generated by WordPress.
• Next Page Caching – Speed up the loading of the NEXT page your visitors will go to.
• Merge + Minify + Refresh Clear Caches – Clears popular caching plugins when the Merge + Minify + Refresh cache is updated.
• Better Resource Hints – Easy preloading, prefetching, and HTTP/2 server pushing for your CSS and JavaScript.
• Real IP and Geo for Cloudflare – Saves and displays visitors’ real IP and location, instead of Cloudflare’s.
• Autoclear Autoptimize Cache – A companion plugin for Autoptimize that automatically clears cache if it grows larger then selected size.
• WP Rocket LoadCSS – WordPress plugin to quickly modify php output with appropriate loadCSS syntax.
• Static Menus – Save WordPress menus as static files for faster page loading times.
• Quicklink for WordPress – Faster subsequent page-loads by prefetching in-viewport links during idle time.
• WP Admin Cache – The first cache plugin for WordPress admin area.
• Admin UI Cleaner – Cleanup WordPress admin area.
• Flying Pages – Load inner pages instantly, intelligently.
• WP FOFT Loader – Implements and automates Zach Leatherman’sCritical FOFT with Data URI.
• API Cache Pro – A simple plugin to cache WP Rest API Requests.
• OPcache Manager – OPcache statistics and management right in the WordPress admin dashboard.

WP-CLI Commands and Packages

• WP Orphans – Locate and remove orphaned media from the WordPress media library.
• wp transient – Adds, gets, and deletes entries in the WordPress Transient Cache.
• wp db optimize – Optimizes the database.
• wp-cache flush – Flushes the object cache.
• wp media – Imports files as attachments, regenerates thumbnails, or lists registered image sizes.
• wp media regenerate – Regenerates thumbnails for one or more attachments.
• EWWW IO via WP-CLI – EWWW Image Optimizer features a WP-CLI extension that allows you to optimize your images “en masse”.

Performance Benchmarking Sites

• WebPageTest – Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more.
• KeyCDN Site Speed Test – A page speed test that includes a waterfall breakdown and the website preview. Select any of the 14 test locations.
• KeyCDN Performance Test – A free online web performance test. Query a single asset from 14 test locations.
• Sucuri Load Time Tester – How fast is your site? You can test here the performance of any of your sites from across the globe.
• GTmetrix – Start optimizing your site! GTmetrix provides explanations for each recommendation, and gives you actionable advice.
• Pingdom – Enter a URL to test the load time of that page, analyze it and find bottlenecks.

Load Impact Tools

• Locust – Scalable user load testing tool written in Python.
• Bees with Machine Guns! – A utility for arming (creating) many bees (micro EC2 instances) to attack (load test) targets (web applications).
• Iago – A load generator, built for engineers.
• k6 – A modern load testing tool, using Go and JavaScript.
• Apache JMeter – Apache JMeter is a 100% pure Java application designed to test and measure performance. It may be used as a highly portable server benchmark as well as a multi-client load generator.
• Artillery – Artillery is a modern, powerful, easy-to-use load-testing toolkit. Artillery has a strong focus on developer happiness & ease of use, and a batteries-included philosophy.
• Serverless Artillery – Combine serverless with artillery and you get serverless-artillery (a.k.a. serverless-artillery) for an instant, cheap, and easy performance testing at scale.
• Gatling – Gatling is a stress tool. Development is currently focusing on HTTP support.
• Siege – Siege is an open-source regression test and benchmark utility. It can stress test a single URL with a user-defined number of simulated users, or it can read many URLs into memory and stress them simultaneously.
• Tsung – Tsung is a multi-protocol distributed load testing tool.
• Work – Work is a modern HTTP benchmarking tool capable of generating significant load when run on a single multi-core CPU. It combines a multithreaded design with scalable event notification systems such as epoll and kqueue.
• Boom2 – Like Boom, but based on Molotov.
• Vegeta – Vegeta is a versatile HTTP load testing tool built out of a need to drill HTTP services with a constant request rate. It can be used both as a command line utility and a library.

New Relic Plugins

• Midsize NewRelic – Better WordPress data for New Relic, with WooCommerce support.
• New Relic Reporting for WordPress – New Relic APM reports for WordPress
• New Relic Browser by rtCamp – New Relic Browser Monitoring plugin.

NGNIX Configs

• Browser caching rules for NGNIX and expire headers – Browser caching rules for NGNIX and expire headers being set.
• Enabling Gzip compression in NGNIX – Enabling Gzip compression in NGNIX.
• NGNIX Modules – Forked community NGNIX modules.
• NGINX Amplify Agent – The NGINX Amplify Agent is a Python application that provides system and NGINX metric collection.
• Nginx WordPress Configurations – TNginx-only, Apache-free configurations for WordPress with PHP-FPM, FastCGI cache, SSL, security settings, .webp support, and phpMyAdmin (just in case!). Mix and match the .conf files for your preferred configuration and traffic needs.

Apache Configs

• Browser caching rules, mod_deflate and expires – Browser caching rules for Apache, mod_deflate and expire headers being set.
• mod_expires example – mod_expires examples for most common file types.

Varnish Configs

• Varnish 4 VCL for WordPress – Varnish 4 VCL configuration for WordPress. Also allows purging.
• Example VCL file for Varnish – Update to work with Varnish 4.
• Install + Configure Varnish 3 Cache with NGNIX for WooCommerce Speed – Varnish is one of the best WooCommerce caching solutions I have tried. I’ve managed to get WooCommerce shop load times under 1 second.
• Cache AJAX GET Requests in Varnish – Possibility to cache admin-ajax GET requests.
• Gzip in Varnish – Set to Gzip, deflate or remove entirely in Varnish.
• How to check if chosen Varnish cache size is ideal – You can monitor how much of the maximum cache size (512 MB in this case) that Varnish has allocated by running varnishstat. Then look for the output lines “bytes allocated” and “bytes free”.

Further Reading

• WordPress Performance – Breaking It Down by HTTP Requests – WordPress can be a tricky beast as they say when it comes to web performance. Especially if you are comparing it against others running static sites.
• Cloudflare Cache WordPress Posts and Pages Guide – Cloudflare helps speed up WordPress and WooCommerce sites all around the world. Powered by more than 100 datacenters globally, Cloudflare’s CDN and security is a great addition to any web site.
• 18 Tips on How to Speed Up WordPress – WordPress is an amazing CMS platform, but it can also be quite slow if not optimized correctly. In this guide, we will show you how to speed up WordPress by sharing our web performance strategies and recommendations.
• 15 Website Speed Test Tools for Analyzing Web Performance – That is why it is important to take advantage of the many free website speed test tools available out there so you can achieve optimal performance.
• Batch Optimize JPG Lossy Linux Command Line with jpeg-recompress – Optimizing your images can feel like black magic sometimes. The safest JPG compression is lossless meaning no quality loss (guide), lossy compression has far superior space savings.
• Cache AJAX GET Requests with Cloudflare and Varnish – AJAX requests are typically used to provide dynamic content on WordPress sites and bypass cache. I have already shown how to Cache AJAX requests with Varnish to bypass PHP and MySQL for AJAX processing by storing the cache in Varnish.
• How to Diagnose High Admin-Ajax Usage on Your WordPress Site – A very common scenario when dealing with WordPress is diagnosing high admin-ajax.php usage. If you have been working with WordPress for a while, you have most likely encountered this when running speed tests or checking your server access logs.
• How to Enable GZIP Compression in WordPress – To achieve fast load times on your WordPress site, decreasing the size of your pages is crucial. This can mean the difference between a site that loads in under 1 second and one that feels like its crawling.
• How to Fix “Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding Header” Warning – Are you seeing the “Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding Header” warning in Pingdom, GTmetrix, or Google PageSpeed Insights on your WordPress site? This is an HTTP header and should be included on every origin server response, as it tells the browser whether or not the client can handle compressed versions of the content.
• WordPress Cache Enabler Plugin – The WordPress Cache Enabler plugin is a lightweight caching plugin that creates static HTML files and stores them on your web server. This means that a static HTML file will be delivered whenever possible to provide users with the response data that would otherwise involve the resource-intensive process of using the WP core, plugins, and database.
• Setting Up WooCommerce Cache – WordPress caching plugins are a popular choice when looking for ways to improve page load times.
• Configuring caching plugins Excluding pages from the cache for WC – If using caching plugins (such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache), make sure you exclude the following pages from the cache through their respective settings panels.
• [A Guide on Web Font Optimization in WordPress] – Web fonts are a staple of modern web design and used by the overwhelming majority of WordPress websites. Optimizing the use and delivery of web fonts is critical because poorly optimized web fonts can bog down the performance of your website.
• Troubleshooting slow page speed on your WordPress site – If you think that your WordPress pages are loading slowly, it is time to do some troubleshooting to improve the page speed. Do not wait in doing the troubleshooting and let your site’s success be its downfall.
• What is hit-for-pass in Varnish – There is a term in Varnish Cache that every Varnish Cache user should know: “Hit for pass”. Like other Varnish Cache terms, it is not self-explanatory and in order to understand what it is you’ll need to understand some of the mechanics of the caching.
• 10 Varnish Cache mistakes and how to avoid them – Caching an object with a Set-Cookie header can have devastating effects, as any client requesting the object will get that same cookie set.
• How do I enable HTTP/2 Server Push in WordPress – HTTP/2 Server Push allows a website to push content to a browser, without having to wait for the HTML of one page to render first.
• Get to know New Relic Reporting for WordPress – New Relic is a SaaS product that offers application performance monitoring (APM), which provides developers with real-time data for use in proactive diagnostics as well as debugging. This data—including basic information about WordPress hooks, plugins, and themes—can be queried and visualized using the New Relic Insights dashboard.

Website Page Speed Up Plugin and Tools/Speed up your internet speed on your LAN. This python script will increase your internet speed by eliminating access to the default gateway for anyone on your LAN. This script regularly checks which all hosts are online using Nmap. After that, it stops anyone from getting access to default gateway by doing an arp spoofing attack. So basically what happens is everyone on the LAN is in Denial of Service(DOS) except you. That how you can use up all of the bandwidth for yourself.

This script also has a facility of excluding ip addresses those whom you do not wanna block access. Also you can specify the interface on which you are connected to. By default the interface is ‘eth0’.

Awesome Website Page Speed Up Plugin and Tools

Page Caching Plugins

• WP Fastest Cache – This plugin creates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog.
• WP Super Cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
• Comet Cache – If you care about the speed of your site, Comet Cache is one of those plugins that you absolutely MUST have installed Comet Cache takes a real-time snapshot (building a cache) of every Page, Post, Category, Link, etc.
• Cache Enabler – The Cache Enabler plugin creates static HTML files and stores them on the servers disk.
• Simple Cache – Simple Cache was constructed after getting frustrated with the major caching plugins available and building sites with developer-only complex caching solutions that get millions of page views per day.
• Gator Cache – Gator Cache is an easy to manage page cache for WordPress. Once installed, it automatically updates new and updated content in your cache.
• Vendi Cache – Vendi Cache takes your slow database-driven pages and turns them into very fast static HTML files.
• SG Optimizer – This plugin is designed to link WordPress with the SiteGround Performance services.
• WP Rocket – Your website at lightspeed.
• W3 Total Cache Fixed – A community-driven build of W3 Total Cache. The aim is to continuously incorporate fixes, improvements, and enhancements over the official WordPress release of W3 Total Cache.
• WP-FFPC – WP-FFPC is a cache plugin for WordPress.
• Cachify – Cachify optimizes your page loads by caching posts, pages and custom post types as static content.
• Batcache – Batcache uses Memcached to store and serve rendered pages.
• Hyper Cache – Hyper Cache is a cache plugin specifically written to get the maximum speed for your WordPress site.
• Powered Cache – Comprehensive caching and performance plugin for WordPress.
• WP Spider Cache – WP Spider Cache is your friendly neighborhood caching solution for WordPress. It uses Memcached to store both objects & page output.
• Redis Page Cache for WordPress – A Redis-backed full page caching plugin for WordPress, extremely flexible and fast. Requires a running Redis server and the PHP Redis PECL extension.
• Varnish Caching – Complete WordPress Varnish Cache 3.x/4.x integration.
• WordPress Cache and CDN – Fast, easy to use cache for WordPress with option for up-to 3 separate CDN’s – for js, css & images from 3 providers.
• Breeze – Breeze is a WordPress cache plugin with extensive options to speed up your website. All the options including Varnish Cache are compatible with Cloudways hosting.
• Varnish Caching – WordPress Varnish Cache integration.
• Pantheon Advanced Page Cache – Automatically clear related pages from Pantheon’s Edge when you update content. High TTL. Fresh content. Visitors never wait.
• WP LCache – Supercharge your WP Object Cache with LCache, a persistent, performant, and multi-layer cache library.
• LiteSpeed Cache – WordPress plugin to connect to LSCache on LiteSpeed Web Server.
• Project Nami Blob Cache – External full page caching for WordPress.
• WOT Cache – WordPress Optimization Tool & Cache.
• Swift Performance Lite – Boost your WordPress site.
• CodeDragon SmartCache – An intelligent site performance and caching optimization facility for WordPress. It offers super-fast, adaptive minification, GZIP compression, browser caching, database performance improvements, and more.
• WP Performance – WP Performance Optimizer.
• Pegasus Accelerator WP – The Pegasaas Accelerator WP plugin interfaces with the Pegasaas API to optimize a website for Web Performance and Google PageSpeed.
• WPCacheOn – Simple and powerful cache plugin for WordPress. Install and activate, that simple, your website is already loading faster.
• GhostBird WP – The WordPress performance and security plugin for humans.
• NitroPack – A site performance optimization plugin.
• ezCache – EzCash is an easy and innovative cache plugin that will help you significantly improve your site speed.

Object Caching Plugins

• WP Redis – For sites concerned with high traffic, speed for logged-in users, or dynamic pageloads, a high-speed and persistent object cache is a must.
• Redis Object Cache – A persistent object cache backend powered by Redis. Supports Predis, PhpRedis (PECL), HHVM, replication, clustering and WP-CLI.
• Memcached Redux – Changes the famous Memcached WP Object Cache backend to actually use the Memcached class (not the Memcache class).
• Fork of Memcached Redux – The real Memcached (not Memcache) backend for the WP Object Cache.
• Memcached – Memcached backend for the WP Object Cache.
• Memcached Is Your Friend Updated – Memcached via PHP Memcache or Memcached Class Support for WordPress with fixes for compatibility.
• APCu Object Cache Backend – Using this Plugin WordPress is able to store certain regular used elements into a persistent cache.
• FOCUS Cache – A File-based Object Cache that is Utterly Slow. Persistenly caches WP_Cache objects in the file system. Can really help speed up a site that has fast disk access and slow database access.
• php memcacheadmin – Graphic stand-alone administration for memcached to monitor and debug purpose.
• Tiny Cache – Cache post content, translations and nav menu output in persistent object cache.
• WP Redis Cache – Cache WordPress using Redis, the fastest way to date to cache WordPress.
• Transient Page Flush – Adds a page specific transient flush button to Debug Bar.
• Use Memcached – Adds memcached support for WP_Object_Cache.

Fragment Caching Plugins

• Fragment Cache – Fragment Cache is a WordPress plugin for partial and async caching of heavy front-end elements. It currently supports caching navigation menus, widgets, and galleries.
• Blunt Cache – Blunt Cache is a persistent fragment and object cache for those of us that cannot use full page caching.
• ShortCache – A shortcode fragment cache plugin.
• PJ Fragment Cache – Fragment caching with storage support for transients, object cache and object metadata.

Browser Caching Plugins

• Speed Up – Browser Caching – This small plugin (10 Kb) enables browser caching in your Apache web server and help browser to cache a local copy of static files and improve page load times.
• WP Performance Score Booster – This plugin speed-up page load times and improve website scores in services like PageSpeed, YSlow, Pingdom and GTmetrix.

Minification Plugins

• Autoptimize – Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It concatenates all scripts and styles, minifies and compresses them, adds expires headers, caches them, and moves styles to the page head and can move scripts to the footer.
• Autoptimize criticalcss.com power-up – Let Autoptimize and CriticalCSS unleash your site performance and make it appear better than anyone in search results.
• WP Roids – Fast AF caching! Plus minifies your site’s HTML, CSS & Javascript.
• Minit – Combine CSS files and Javascript files into single file in the correct order. Use the latest modified time in filename generation to ensure freshness. Load all external Javascript files asynchronously.
• Minit Pro – Add additional functionality to the Minit plugin of Kaspars Dambis.
• WP-Concatenator – CSS concatenation of individual style files into one resource request.
• Advanced performance – This plugin adds several performance improvements to your WordPress site.
• CSS Optimization – Advanced CSS optimization toolkit. Critical CSS, minification, concatenation, async loading, advanced editor, CSS Lint, Clean CSS (professional), beautifier and more.
• Javascript Optimization – Advanced Javascript optimization toolkit. Minify, concat/merge, async loading, advanced editor, ES Lint, UglifyJS (professional), beautifier and more.
• HTML Optimization – Advanced HTML optimization toolkit. Minify, code optimization, search & replace, strip comments and more.
• Merge + Minify + Refresh – Merge/Concatenate & Minify CSS & JS.
• Minify HTML – Tactfully minifies HTML output and markup to remove line breaks, whitespace, comments, and other code bloat to cleanup source code and improve speed.
• Featherlight HTML Minify – A featherlight plugin that Minifies HTML output for a faster loading website.

CDN Integration Plugins

• CDN Enabler – A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of distributed edge servers, which accelerate your content around the globe. The main benefits of a CDN are scalability, reliability and performance.
• Cloudflare – The easiest way to setup Cloudflare for your WordPress site.
• Cloudflare Page Cache – Cache HTML pages on the Cloudflare CDN when used with the page cache Worker.
• Easy Speedup – Easy Speedup enables advanced and very aggressive cloud based optimizations for your website including, global edge delivery, image optimization, WebP conversion, cross-origin cache sharing, aggressive compression, CSS and JS minification, immutable browser caching, and more.
• Fastly – Using this plugin means you won’t have to purge content in Fastly when you make changes to your WordPress content. Purges will automatically happen with no need for manual intervention.
• Purgely – Purgely manages caching and purging behavior for WordPress sites using the Fastly edge caching services. The plugin sets up default behaviors based on best practices for WordPress websites.
• DreamSpeed CDN – This plugin will automatically copy images, videos, documents, and any other media added through WordPress’ media uploader to DreamSpeed.
• Full Site Cache for KeyCDN – This plugin can help you to use KeyCDN on your WordPress, not only your Media and CSS, but also all HTML page.
• Full Site Cache for CloudFront – If you blog are using CloudFront on the main WordPress domain and you want to cache HTML page for not logged in user.
• Cloudinary – With Cloudinary, all your images are automatically uploaded, normalized, optimized and backed-up in the cloud instead of being hosted on your servers.
• Photon – Photon is an image acceleration and editing service for sites hosted on WordPress.com or on Jetpack-connected WordPress sites. That means less load on your host and faster images for your readers.
• ILAB Media Tools – ILAB Media Tools are a suite of tools designed to enhance media handling in WordPress in a number of ways.
• WP Offload S3 – ILAB Media Tools are a suite of tools designed to enhance media handling in WordPress in a number of ways.
• DADI CDN – A self-hosted, just-in-time asset manipulation and delivery application, providing a complete content distribution/delivery solution.
• Tachyon – Tachyon is an image resizing processor built to be used with accelerates your WordPress website Amazon S3 as the image backend and sits behind a CDN such as Cloudflare.
• Timber with Jetpack Photon – Make the Timber plugin work with Jetpack’s Photon. Once installed, all TimberImages use Photon as a CDN and for image manipulation (eg. resize).
• wp wpDone website content accelerator – Accelerates your WordPress website.
• Dynamic CDN – Dynamic CDN for front-end assets.
• Thumbor – Thumbor is an open-source photo thumbnail service. This plugin connects to it.
• Tiny CDN – Use an origin pull CDN with very few lines of code.
• CDN Linker – Modifies links pointing to wp-content and/or wp-includes (or whatever you configure) by replacing your ‘blog_url’ with a custom one. Enables you to pull static files, such as images, CSS or JS, from a different host, mirror or CDN.
• C3 Cloudfront Cache Controller – This is simple plugin that clear all cloudfront cache if you publish posts.
• Beaver Builder + Amazon S3 – Ensures compatibility between Beaver Builder and Human Made’s S3 Uploads plugin.
• Sunny – Automatically purge Cloudflare cache, including cache everything rules.
• WP-Stateless – Stores and serves WordPress media files directly from Google Cloud Storage.
• WP Azure offload – Automatically copies media to Azure storage and deliver using CDN.
• Cloudflare – Easily connect your WordPress website to CloudFlare’s free optimization features, including one-click options to purge cache and enable ‘dev’ mode.
• CloudFront Page Cache CDN – Low cost and high-performance page cache based on Amazon’s CloudFront CDN for international SEO. CloudFront provides international fast website speed and dedicated geographic IP’s for local SEO advantage.
• WordPress CDN and Image Hosting Plugin – Sirv – Instantly resize or crop images to any size. Add watermarks, titles, text and image effects. Embed them as images, galleries, zooms or 360 spins. Serve them from the fast CDN. Responsive, to perfectly fit the screen. Use the “Add Sirv Media” button on posts and pages.
• Google Cloud CDN Page Cache – Low cost and high performance international page cache based on Google Cloud CDN.
• WP Godspeed – One-click CDN – The premiere free CDN plugin for WordPress.
• CDNsun – Integrates any Content Delivery Network (CDN) into WordPress.
• ImageBoss – Content-aware image resizing, cropping, compression, cache and CDN. All web development best practices, hassle-free in one simple and powerful API.
• DigitalOcean Spaces Sync – This WordPress plugin syncs your media library with DigitalOcean Spaces Container.
• Medianova CDN – Integrate our Content Delivery Network(CDN) into your WordPress site.
• Cloudflare Stream Video – Cloudflare Stream Video is an easy-to-use, affordable, on-demand video streaming platform. Stream seamlessly integrates video storage, encoding, and a customizable player with Cloudflare’s fast, secure, and reliable global network, so that you can spend less time managing video delivery and more time building and promoting your product.
• Statically – Free CDN to optimize your static assets such as images, CSS or JavaScript files.

Image Optimization Plugins

• EWWW Image Optimizer – The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.
• EWWW Image Optimizer Cloud – The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.
• TinyPNG – Make your website faster by optimizing your JPEG and PNG images. This plugin automatically optimizes all your images by integrating with the popular image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG.
• Imagify – Speed up your website with lighter images without losing quality.
• ImageRecycle – ImageRecycle is an automatic Image and PDF content optimizer for WordPress website.
• ShortPixel Image Optimizer – Increase your website’s SEO ranking, number of visitors and ultimately your sales by optimizing any image or PDF document on your website.
• Kraken.io – This plugin allows you to optimize and resize new and existing WordPress image uploads through Kraken.io Image Optimizer’s API.
• Optimus – Optimus reduces the file size of uploaded media files automatically. Depending on the image and format, reductions in size of up to 70% are possible.
• WP ImageEngine Responsive Image Resizer – WP ImageEngine is an intelligent image CDN for optimizing, compressing and resizing images.
• Image Compression and optimization – Optimize your Images as well as Image Compression of upto 80%. Also resize images on upload to help reduce storage and bandwidth before compressing.
• Media Cleaner – Clean your Media Library from the media which aren’t used in any of your posts, gallery and so on.
• ImageLint – One-stop hassle-free no-config ImageLint WordPress integration.
• FAF Optim – Optimize images of your WordPress media storage.
• Media Deduper – Save disk space and bring some order to the chaos of your media library by removing and preventing duplicate files.
• WP Smush – Reduce image file sizes, improve performance and boost your SEO using the free WordPress Smush API.
• JPG, PNG Compression and Optimization – WP Image Compression is a quick and easy way to not only resize your images, but compress them as well for optimum performance going forward.
• Resizefly – Dynamically resize your images on the fly.
• WP Google PageSpeed Image Optimizer Lite – This plugin will optimize your images exactly like Google Pagespeed Insights.
• Image Optimizer WD – WordPress Image Optimizer – Image Optimizer WordPress plugin enables you to resize, compress and optimize PNG, JPG, GIF files while maintaining image quality.
• WP Compress – Image Optimizer – Compress and optimize images to shrink file size, improve load times and boost PageSpeed scores in just one click using WP Compress image optimization.
• Auto Cloudinary – Super simple Cloudinary auto-upload implementation for WordPress.
• Fly Dynamic Image Resizer – Dynamically create image sizes on the fly.
• Auto remove Attachments – Autoremove Attachments helps you keep your media library clean by deleting all media files attached to a post when that post is permanently removed from your system.
• Dynamic Image Resizer – Generates image sizes only when needed, instead of the 404 page.
• Image Optimize Command – Easily optimize images using WP CLI.
• Just Image Optimizer – Compress image files, improve performance and boost your SEO rank using Google Page Speed Insights compression and optimization.
• Octify Image Compression – Octify Image Compression for WordPress.
• WP Image Optimizer – Reduce image file sizes and improve website performance using Linux littleutils image optimizers within WordPress.
• tiny.pictures Image CDN – Scales and optimizes your images using the tiny.pictures image processing service in the cloud and delivers them through worldwide CDN nodes.
• Piio – Powerful Image Compressor, Optimization and Delivery – Generates responsive and optimized images, so you don’t have to.
• Resize Image After Upload – Automatically resize uploaded images to within specified maximum width and height. Also has option to force recompression of JPEGs.
• Image optimization & Lazy Load by Optimole – Complete handling of your website images.
• MegaOptim Image Optimizer – MegaOptim is image compression plugin that optimizes your images in the cloud using intelligent image compression methods to save as much space as possible while keeping the quality almost identical. It’s compatible with NextGen Gallery, MediaPress, WP Retina 2x and many other gallery plugins.
• Stop Generating Image Sizes – So, it creates multiple sizes of an image while uploading? Here is the solution.
• ShortPixel Adaptive Images – Display properly sized, smart cropped and optimized images on your website. Images are processed on the fly and served from our CDN.
• Pixelerate Image CDN – Integrate the Pixelerate Image Optimization and CDN into your WordPress website.
• Regenerate thumbnails and delete unused thumbnails – Regenerate thumbnails and delete unused.
• Warp Imagick – Optimize (jpeg) media images/thumbnails to reduce file size.
• WebP Express – Serve autogenerated WebP images instead of jpeg/png to browsers that supports WebP. Works on anything (media library images, galleries, theme images etc).
• Robin image optimizer – Optimize images without losing quality, speed up your website load, improve SEO and save money on server and CDN bandwidth.
• Scale Large Image Threshold – Control scaling of big images in WordPress using big_image_size_threshold filter. Image will be scaled forcefully when it will reach this threshold. Useful to control large images in WordPress.
• Crush.pics – Image Compression and Optimization – Image Compression and Optimization using Crush.pics API.
• Image CDN – WordPress CDN Plugin – Optimize your WordPress site with ImageEngine or another Image CDN (or any other Content Delivery Network).
• Abraia – Bulk optimize your WordPress images with Abraia.

Lazy Loading Plugins

• Rocket Lazy Load – Lazy Load displays images on a page only when they are visible to the user. This reduces the number of HTTP requests mechanism and improves the loading time.
• Lazy Load – Lazy Load displays images on a page only when they are visible to the user. This reduces the number of HTTP requests mechanism and improves the loading time.
• Lazy Load XT – Lazy load images, YouTube and Vimeo videos, and iframes using Lazy Load XT.
• Progressive Lazy Load – An example of my “Progressive Lazy Load” technique in WordPress using vanilla Javascript.
• Lazy Load for Videos – This plugin improves page load times and increases your Google PageSpeed Score. It replaces embedded Youtube and Vimeo videos with a clickable preview image.
• Disqus Conditional – DCL is an advanced version of Disqus Commenting System, with which experience the boosted page loading speed difference.
• Lazy Facebook Comments – Use Facebook comments system in your website without slowing down your website.
• Lazy Load for Comments – Lazy load WordPress default commenting system without any complex configurations.
• Velocity – Velocity is a WordPress plugin for lazy loading video and audio embedded media – it’s an alternative loading method to the standard YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud iframe embeds.
• BJ Lazy Load – Lazy image loading makes your site load faster and saves bandwidth.
• Image Preloading – Similar to DNS prefetching, image preloading/prefetching with JavaScript to get faster page loading experience.
• Easy Lazy Loader – Lazy load images, iframes, videos and audios to improve page load times.
• WordPress Image Preload – A modern lazyload / image preload plugin based on Intersection Observer.
• LH CSS Lazy Load – Lazy load non critical css.
• Crazy Lazy – Lazy load images. Simple to use: Activate, done. Search engine and noscript user friendly.
• QazyWP – Image Lazy Loader – Lazy Load Images in WordPress – Built off Narayan Prusty’s Qazy library.
• Lazy Load Optimizer – Lazy loading images to speed up sites page load speed.
• WordPress Accelerate – Speed Optimizations for WordPress websites.
• Picanto – Instantly, automatically and painlessly make your website faster by reducing image payload and lazy loading them.
• LH Native Lazy Loading – Automatically add the new loading attribute to images and iframes within your content to support native lazy loading.
• SARVAROV Lazy Load – Lazy Load all your images, videos and iframes in just one click. Make your blog faster and look better with blurred LQIP and primary color placeholder.
• Native Lazyload + Polyfill – Adds native lazyloading to all images and iframes (embeds), also wraps them in and adds a polyfill to make it work in all browsers.
• Native Lazyload – Lazy-loads media using the native browser feature.
• Flying Images – High-performance Native Image Lazy Loading.
• Lazy Images Without Jetpack – Speed up your site and create a smoother viewing experience by loading images as visitors scroll down the screen, instead of all at once. Based on Lazy Images module, from Jetpack plugin.
• Regenerate Thumbnails Advanced – Regenerate thumbnails fast and easy while removing unused thumbnails of existing images; very useful when changing a theme.

Reduce HTTP Requests on Load Plugins

• Heartbeat Control – Allows you to easily manage the frequency of the WordPress heartbeat API with just a few dropdowns.
• Disable Emoji – This plugin disables the new WordPress emoji functionality.
• Disable Emojis – Completely disables both the old and new versions of WordPress emojis, removes the corresponding javascript calls, and improves page loading times.
• Emoji Settings – Emoji Settings adds an option within your Writing Settings page to disable or enable emojis.
• Compressed Emoji – WordPress emoji comes from s.w.org and they are not optimized well, Compressed Emoji fixes this problem.
• Disable Embeds – Disable Embeds
• Disable Custom CSS – This plugin automatically disables frontend database query for Custom CSS and Customizer section for setting Custom CSS, without need to manually choose any setting or option.
• Plugin Organizer – This plugin allows you to do the following, change the order that your plugins are loaded, selectively disable plugins by any post type or WordPress managed URL, and adds grouping to the plugin admin age.
• Query Strings Remover – Query Strings Remover removes query strings from your static resources like CSS and JavaScript files.
• WP Asset CleanUp – There are often times when you are using a theme and a number of plugins that are enabled and run on the same page.
• WP Disable – Reduce HTTP requests – Disable Emojis, Disable Gravatars, Disable Embeds and Remove Querystrings. Added support to disable pingbacks, disable trackbacks, close comments after 28 days, Added the ability to force pagination after 20 posts, Disable WooCommerce scripts and CSS on non WooCommerce Pages, Disable RSS, Disable XML-RPC, Disable Autosave, Remove Windows Live Writer tag, Remove Shortlink Tag, Remove WP API from the header.
• Only Load Scripts and Styles if a shortcode is present – Only load scripts and styles if a specific shortcode is present in the content when the page/post is saved.
• Complete Analytics Optimization Suite (CAOS) – Only load scripts and styles if a specific shortcode is present in the content when the page/post is saved.
• Gonzales – This plugin allows you to get rid of CSS and JavaScript files that are simply useless. Less is better, right? One of the biggest problem of modern websites is page weight.
• WPtimize – WPtimize is optimization and cleanup plugin for WordPress that clean up all the unnecessary tags and scripts from your WordPress header and optimize your code for faster loading page speed, security and performance.
• WP Load List – When you are trying to speed up your site, minifying CSS and JS files can really gain you some speed but can also break your site. This plugin allows you to get a full list of all CSS and JS files loading on each page so you can use this list to target the files you must avoid minifying.
• Plugin Logic – Activate plugins on pages only if they are really needed.
• Code Snippets WP Speed Up – Code Snippets for WordPress speed up which can be imported into the plugin.
• WP FastClick – WP FastClick plugin remove click delays on browsers with touch UIs.
• WP Head Optimizer – This plugin allow you to remove unnecessary tags, URLs, scrips and many more additional things from your WordPress header to speed up site loading time and hide some details form visitors for security purpose.
• Disable XML-RPC – Completely disables all XML-RPC related functions in WordPress including pingbacks and trackbacks, and helps prevent attacks on the xmlrpc.php file.
• Machete – Machete is a lean and simple suite of tools that solve common WordPress annoyances: cookie bar, tracking codes, header cleanup.
• Disable User Gravatar – Stops WordPress from automatically grabbing the users’ gravatar with their registered email.
• Slim WordPress – Send your site on a diet and remove unnecessary WordPress features.
• Smart WordPress – Optimize the caching behavior of your Website the easy way and reload pages only if something has been changed.
• Fast WordPress – Speed Up your WordPress page the easy way and optimize your site’s assets.
• Lean WP – Lean WP does a great job cleaning up the WordPress backend (Dashboard) and frontend.
• Disable Author Pages – Disable the author pages in WordPress and redirect to the homepage.
• Simple DNS Prefetch – This plugin controls the DNS prefetch settings.
• Complete Analytics Optimization Suite (CAOS) – A plugin that allows you to completely optimize Google Analytics for your WordPress Website: host analytics.js locally, keep it updated using wp_cron(), anonymize IP, disable tracking of admins, place tracking code in footer, and more.
• Cache External Scripts – This plugin allows you to cache the Google Analytics JavaScript file to be cached for more than 2 hours.
• WordPress WPO Tweaks – Several WPO Optimisations to Speed Up WordPress and get better results in Google PageSpeed, GTMetrix and Pingdom Tools.
• Webcraftic Disable Comments – Allows administrators to globally disable comments on their site. Comments can be disabled for individual record types.
• Webcraftic Clearfy – disable unused features – Disables unused WordPress features, improves performance, and increases SEO rankings, using Clarify, which makes WordPress very easy.
• Remove jQuery Migrate – This plugin removes the jQuery Migrate script from the front end of your site.
• Remove Emoji Styles & Scripts – If you do not want or need Emoji it is best to remove/dequeue Emoji styles and scripts for better performance.
• Disable Embeds – Disables both external and internal embedding functions to avoid slow page render, instability and SEO issues, and to improve overall loading speed.
• Native Performance – Native Performance is an all-in-one complement that integrates, in a complete and robust core, a set of tools for the solution of common errors, optimization, performance and much more.
• Disable WordPress Events and News Dashboard Widget – Disable WordPress Events and News widget from the dashboard.
• Dismiss “Welcome” Nag Dashboard Widget – Dismiss Welcome Panel nag, dashboard widget, when is activated, or automatically, if it is in mu-plugins directory.
• EVE Dynamic Prerender – This WordPress plugin creates and injects into HTML head a Dynamic Prerender Meta Tag. The system stores users navigational paths inside the database e retrieve the most common next visited page as a prerender meta tag. If the plugin doesn’t has data for the next probable page, it will show a prerender to the homepage.
• Webcraftic Assets Manager – Increase the speed of the pages by disabling unused scripts (.JS) and styles (.CSS). Make your website reactive.
• WP Widget Disable – Disable Sidebar and Dashboard Widgets with an easy to use interface. Simply use the checkboxes provided under Appearance -> Disable Widgets and select the Widgets you’d like to hide.
• WP YouTube Video Optimizer – Embed multiple YouTube videos using a simple shortcode.
• Above The Fold Optimization – Above the fold optimization toolkit that enables to achieve a Google PageSpeed 100 Score. Supports most optimization, minification and full page cache plugins.
• Disable jQuery Migrate – Easily prevent the jQuery migrate script that is included with WordPress core from being loaded to slim down source code (for advanced users only).
• Header Cleanup – Cleans up most of the unnecessary junk meta included by default in the WordPress header including generator, RSD, shortlink, previous and next, etc.
• Web Font Optimization – Advanced Web Font optimization toolkit. Font Face API, Web Font Observer, Google Font Loader, Critical CSS, async and timed font rendering and more.
• Disable Admin-AJAX – Completely disables frontend access to admin-ajax.php regardless of Heartbeat settings, to avoid unwanted AJAX calls and vastly improve performance.
• Scripts To Footer – Moves scripts to the footer to decrease page load times, while keeping stylesheets in the header. Requires that plugins and theme correctly utilizes wp_enqueue_scripts hook. Can be disabled via a checkbox on specific pages and posts.
• WP-Tweaker – WordPress automatically provides some features that not every blogger really needs.
• Speed Demon – A powerful bundle of lightweight tools and settings that drastically improve the loading speed of WordPress by reducing bulk and improving efficiency.
• Self-Hosted Google Fonts – Automatically self-host your Google Fonts – works with any theme or plugin.
• Redirect Gravatar requests – All requests to load an avatar from gravatar.com are redirected to a local image, preventing Gravatar from potentially gathering data about your site’s visitors.
• Speed Booster Pack – Speed Booster Pack helps you improve your page loading speed and get higher scores on speed test services like GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed or WebPageTest.
• Better Speed – Improve the loading speed of your website by removing bloat and unused features.
• WP Toolbelt – More features, fast.
• WP PLC Swissknife – One place swiss knife for WordPress. Increase WordPress Security and Performance.
• Optenhanse – A unique plugin for Optimizing, Enhancing and Securing your WordPress website.
• Flying Scripts by WP Speed Matters – Flying Scripts by WP Speed Matters.
• Speed Booster By Melotheme – Easy WordPress website Speed & Performance optimization with one click.

Database Optimization Plugins

• WP-Optimize – WP-Optimize is an effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency.
• WP-Sweep – WP-Sweep allows you to clean up unused, orphaned and duplicated data in your WordPress. It also optimizes your database tables.
• Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Host your Google Analytics javascript-file (analytics.js) locally and keep it updated using wp cron.
• Plugins Garbage Collector – Plugins Garbage Collector scans your WordPress database and shows the tables beyond of core WordPress installation.
• Delete Expired Transients – Delete old, expired transients from WordPress wp_options table.
• Advanced Database Cleaner – Clean database by deleting unused data such as ‘old revisions’, ‘old drafts’, ‘orphan options’, etc. Optimize database and more.
• Add Index To Autoload – This tool will speed up your database queries by adding an index to the autoload field.
• Clean Up Optimizer – Clean Up Optimizer is a Superlative High Quality WordPress Plugin which not only allows you to clean and optimize the WordPress Database but also performs other vast functions.
• Dedicated Transients – WordPress plugin to re-route transient storage to dedicated tables.
• Transient Cleaner – Housekeep expired transients from your options table.
• PJ Transient Cleaner – Cleans expired transients behind the scenes.
• Servebolt Optimizer – A plugin that checks and implements Servebolt Performance best practises for WordPress.
• Delete Expired Transients – Deletes all expired transients upon activation and on a daily basis thereafter via WP-Cron to maintain a cleaner database and improve performance.
• Yoast SEO Cleaner – Cleans up your WP options table by removing Yoast SEO “_cache_validator” entries.
• Yoast SEO Cleaner – WPS Cleaner cleans the database and WordPress.
• Custom Post Type Cleanup – Detect and delete posts from custom post types that are no longer in use.
• Cleanup Duplicate Meta – Checks for and deletes duplicate Post and/or User Meta entries in the database tables.
• HTML Pages – Create pure HTML pages without any of the WordPress code.

Slow Query and Debugging Plugins

• Query Monitor -Query Monitor is a debugging plugin for anyone developing with WordPress.
• Debug Bar – Adds a debug menu to the admin bar that shows query, cache, and other helpful debugging information.

NGNIX and Varnish Control Plugins

• Ngnix Helper – Add greater control for purging NGNIX cache if using for page caching.
• Varnish HTTP Purge – Varnish HTTP Purge sends a PURGE request to the URL of a page or post every time it it modified.
• WP Super Cache nginx.conf example – Example configuration for Nginx and WordPress with WP Super Cache plugin.
• Rocket-Nginx – Rocket-Nginx is a Nginx configuration for the WordPress cache plugin WP-Rocket.
• WPBase Cache – Plugin is developed to optimize wordpress deployment on varnish + nginx + php-fpm + php-apc server stack using three type of caches full page cache, db cache and opcode cache.
• Nginx Cache – Purge the Nginx cache (FastCGI, Proxy, uWSGI) automatically when content changes or manually within WordPress.

Caching Helping Plugins

• WP Rocket Helpers – This repository hosts a number of helper plugins that target some specific use cases for WP Rocket.
• WP Rocket Static Resources List – List the CSS and JS files loaded on a WordPress page.
• WP-Rocket Background Cache – This plugin will defer all cache pre-loading to wp-cron. If a page request comes and a page is not cached yet, wp-rocket will be disabled.
• WP Rocket Footer JS – Unofficial WP-Rocket addon to force all JS both external and inline to the footer
• WP Rocket ASYNC CSS – This plugin will combine all inline and external CSS in the order found on the page and save it to WP-Rocket’s cache folder as a new file.
• WP Rocket Disable Cache for Members – Unofficial WP-Rocket addon to disable cache from being saved for members, but still be enabled.
• VIP Performance Plugin – A plugin that helps every site benefit from the performance features built into WordPress.com VIP.
• Inside Menu Cache – Easily cache rendered menus using the Transients API.
• WP Static HTML Output – This plugin produces a static HTML version of your wordpress install, incredibly useful for anyone who would like the publishing power of wordpress but whose webhost doesn’t allow dynamic PHP driven sites.
• DB Cache Reloaded Fix – The fastest cache engine for WordPress, that produces cache of database queries with easy configuration.
• OPcache Dashboard – As you know, OPcache has no management page. This plugin offers you the OPcache dashboard designed for WordPress.
• WP REST API Cache – Enable caching for WordPress REST API and increase the speed of your application.
• Warm Cache – Crawls your website-pages based on any XML sitemap. If you have a caching plugin this will keep your cache warm.
• Cache Buddy – Minimizes the situations in which logged-in users appear logged-in to WordPress, which increases the cacheability of your site.
• Inside Translation Cache – Improves site performance by caching translation files using the WordPress object cache.
• Batcache Manager – Batcache manager is a drop-in solution, that adds cache clearing the popular caching Batcache plugin by Automattic. This plugin is based on the work by Andy Skelton and expands upon it, clearing archive pages, author pages and feeds.
• Advanced Nav Cache – Cache wp_nav_menu output in object cache.
• Advanced Comment Cache – A plugin to force caching of comments in wp_comment_query.
• Clear cache for Timber – Clear cache for Timber and Twig caching.
• Cache Enabler rebuild cache Based on sitemap.xml – According to sitemap.xml rebuild cache in Cache Enabler.
• Object Cache Flusher Button – This plugin adds a button to the adminbar that simply flushes the object cache.
• Analytics For Cloudflare – This is a WordPress plugin to connect your WordPress dashboard to your CloudFlare account to display some key analytics data.
• Hyperdrive – The fastest way to load pages in WordPress.
• oEmbed Cache Clear – With this plugin you can clear the cached oEmbed responses that WordPress saves for outgoing (oEmbed-Provider) links in posts and pages.
• Cache Blocks – Cache blocks.
• WP Engine Advanced Cache – This plugin works to increase cache time across the board, and gives a smarter way to purge the cache.
• Shin’s Pageload Magic – A lightweight WordPress plugin that dramatically boosts your page’s render speed.
• LH HTTP/2 Server Push – HTTP/2 Server Push Optimization for JavaScript and CSS resources enqueued in the page.
• Async JavaScript – Async JavaScript adds a ‘async’ or ‘defer’ attribute to scripts loaded via wp_enqueue_script.
• PageSpeed Purge Button – One-click PageSpeed cache purging using an admin bar button.
• Cache Version – Adds a version number (a timestamp) of all content that can be used in cache keys.
• FacetWP Cache – Caching support for FacetWP.
• Far Future Expiry Header – This plugin will add a “far future expiration” date for various file types to improve site performance.
• Clear Sucuri Cache – Simply clears whole Sucuri cache. Clear is done from the wp-admin panel or plugin’s page.
• WP Rocket User Role – Restrict WP Rocket settings access to super admins.
• Hummingbird – Hummingbird zips through your site finding new ways to make it load faster, from file compression and minification to browser caching because when it comes to page speed, every millisecond counts.
• Cache Sniper for Nginx – Purge the Nginx FastCGI Cache within WordPress on a global or per-page basis.
• Purge Varnish Cache – This plugin provides integration between your WordPress site and Varnish Cache to purge cache objects automate/manually.
• WP Rocket Disable Cache for Members – Unofficial WP-Rocket addon to disable cache from being saved for members, but still be enabled.
• WP Critical CSS – Use the CriticalCSS.com web service to automatically create the required CSS for above the fold.
• Multisite Support for WP Rocket – Plugin to enable WP-Rocket to be managed in multisite.
• FV Gravatar Cache – Speeds up your website by making sure the Gravatars are stored on your website and not loading from the gravatar server.
• ACF Simple Cache – Boost ACF speed by enabling JSON caching.
• Widget Output Cache – Caches widget output in the WordPress object cache.
• Beaver Builder Cache Helper – This plugin will clear various caches when layouts and templates are saved. It also clears the cache when WordPress finishes updating plugins and themes. The plugin also defines the DONOTCACHEPAGE constant when the builder is active, this is respected by most cache plugins.
• Flush Opcache with Varnish – Automatically flush the PHP opcache when you click the “Purge Cache” button created by Varnish HTTP Purge.
• Rest API Cache – Boost your application speed by caching the WordPress REST API.
• WP Super Cache Cleaner – Ajax-based Clear cache for WP super cache, with this you can clear WP super cache from any place in WordPress dashboard without leaving the present page.
• Requested! – Force browsers to load the most recent file if modified.
• WP-Cache Remember – Helper for the WordPress object cache and transients.
• Cache-control by Cacholong – Automates purging of Nginx Pagespeed cache and Nginx FastCGI cache on your Nginx server(s).
• HTTP/2 Optimization – Advanced HTTP/2 optimization toolkit. HTTP/2 Server Push, Service Worker based Cache-Digest and more.
• Cache-Control – Configurable HTTP Cache-Control headers for webpages generated by WordPress.
• Next Page Caching – Speed up the loading of the NEXT page your visitors will go to.
• Merge + Minify + Refresh Clear Caches – Clears popular caching plugins when the Merge + Minify + Refresh cache is updated.
• Better Resource Hints – Easy preloading, prefetching, and HTTP/2 server pushing for your CSS and JavaScript.
• Real IP and Geo for Cloudflare – Saves and displays visitors’ real IP and location, instead of Cloudflare’s.
• Autoclear Autoptimize Cache – A companion plugin for Autoptimize that automatically clears cache if it grows larger then selected size.
• WP Rocket LoadCSS – WordPress plugin to quickly modify php output with appropriate loadCSS syntax.
• Static Menus – Save WordPress menus as static files for faster page loading times.
• Quicklink for WordPress – Faster subsequent page-loads by prefetching in-viewport links during idle time.
• WP Admin Cache – The first cache plugin for WordPress admin area.
• Admin UI Cleaner – Cleanup WordPress admin area.
• Flying Pages – Load inner pages instantly, intelligently.
• WP FOFT Loader – Implements and automates Zach Leatherman’sCritical FOFT with Data URI.
• API Cache Pro – A simple plugin to cache WP Rest API Requests.
• OPcache Manager – OPcache statistics and management right in the WordPress admin dashboard.

WP-CLI Commands and Packages

• WP Orphans – Locate and remove orphaned media from the WordPress media library.
• wp transient – Adds, gets, and deletes entries in the WordPress Transient Cache.
• wp db optimize – Optimizes the database.
• wp-cache flush – Flushes the object cache.
• wp media – Imports files as attachments, regenerates thumbnails, or lists registered image sizes.
• wp media regenerate – Regenerates thumbnails for one or more attachments.
• EWWW IO via WP-CLI – EWWW Image Optimizer features a WP-CLI extension that allows you to optimize your images “en masse”.

Performance Benchmarking Sites

• WebPageTest – Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more.
• KeyCDN Site Speed Test – A page speed test that includes a waterfall breakdown and the website preview. Select any of the 14 test locations.
• KeyCDN Performance Test – A free online web performance test. Query a single asset from 14 test locations.
• Sucuri Load Time Tester – How fast is your site? You can test here the performance of any of your sites from across the globe.
• GTmetrix – Start optimizing your site! GTmetrix provides explanations for each recommendation, and gives you actionable advice.
• Pingdom – Enter a URL to test the load time of that page, analyze it and find bottlenecks.

Load Impact Tools

• Locust – Scalable user load testing tool written in Python.
• Bees with Machine Guns! – A utility for arming (creating) many bees (micro EC2 instances) to attack (load test) targets (web applications).
• Iago – A load generator, built for engineers.
• k6 – A modern load testing tool, using Go and JavaScript.
• Apache JMeter – Apache JMeter is a 100% pure Java application designed to test and measure performance. It may be used as a highly portable server benchmark as well as a multi-client load generator.
• Artillery – Artillery is a modern, powerful, easy-to-use load-testing toolkit. Artillery has a strong focus on developer happiness & ease of use, and a batteries-included philosophy.
• Serverless Artillery – Combine serverless with artillery and you get serverless-artillery (a.k.a. serverless-artillery) for an instant, cheap, and easy performance testing at scale.
• Gatling – Gatling is a stress tool. Development is currently focusing on HTTP support.
• Siege – Siege is an open-source regression test and benchmark utility. It can stress test a single URL with a user-defined number of simulated users, or it can read many URLs into memory and stress them simultaneously.
• Tsung – Tsung is a multi-protocol distributed load testing tool.
• Work – Work is a modern HTTP benchmarking tool capable of generating significant load when run on a single multi-core CPU. It combines a multithreaded design with scalable event notification systems such as epoll and kqueue.
• Boom2 – Like Boom, but based on Molotov.
• Vegeta – Vegeta is a versatile HTTP load testing tool built out of a need to drill HTTP services with a constant request rate. It can be used both as a command line utility and a library.

New Relic Plugins

• Midsize NewRelic – Better WordPress data for New Relic, with WooCommerce support.
• New Relic Reporting for WordPress – New Relic APM reports for WordPress
• New Relic Browser by rtCamp – New Relic Browser Monitoring plugin.

NGNIX Configs

• Browser caching rules for NGNIX and expire headers – Browser caching rules for NGNIX and expire headers being set.
• Enabling Gzip compression in NGNIX – Enabling Gzip compression in NGNIX.
• NGNIX Modules – Forked community NGNIX modules.
• NGINX Amplify Agent – The NGINX Amplify Agent is a Python application that provides system and NGINX metric collection.
• Nginx WordPress Configurations – TNginx-only, Apache-free configurations for WordPress with PHP-FPM, FastCGI cache, SSL, security settings, .webp support, and phpMyAdmin (just in case!). Mix and match the .conf files for your preferred configuration and traffic needs.

Apache Configs

• Browser caching rules, mod_deflate and expires – Browser caching rules for Apache, mod_deflate and expire headers being set.
• mod_expires example – mod_expires examples for most common file types.

Varnish Configs

• Varnish 4 VCL for WordPress – Varnish 4 VCL configuration for WordPress. Also allows purging.
• Example VCL file for Varnish – Update to work with Varnish 4.
• Install + Configure Varnish 3 Cache with NGNIX for WooCommerce Speed – Varnish is one of the best WooCommerce caching solutions I have tried. I’ve managed to get WooCommerce shop load times under 1 second.
• Cache AJAX GET Requests in Varnish – Possibility to cache admin-ajax GET requests.
• Gzip in Varnish – Set to Gzip, deflate or remove entirely in Varnish.
• How to check if chosen Varnish cache size is ideal – You can monitor how much of the maximum cache size (512 MB in this case) that Varnish has allocated by running varnishstat. Then look for the output lines “bytes allocated” and “bytes free”.

Further Reading

• WordPress Performance – Breaking It Down by HTTP Requests – WordPress can be a tricky beast as they say when it comes to web performance. Especially if you are comparing it against others running static sites.
• Cloudflare Cache WordPress Posts and Pages Guide – Cloudflare helps speed up WordPress and WooCommerce sites all around the world. Powered by more than 100 datacenters globally, Cloudflare’s CDN and security is a great addition to any web site.
• 18 Tips on How to Speed Up WordPress – WordPress is an amazing CMS platform, but it can also be quite slow if not optimized correctly. In this guide, we will show you how to speed up WordPress by sharing our web performance strategies and recommendations.
• 15 Website Speed Test Tools for Analyzing Web Performance – That is why it is important to take advantage of the many free website speed test tools available out there so you can achieve optimal performance.
• Batch Optimize JPG Lossy Linux Command Line with jpeg-recompress – Optimizing your images can feel like black magic sometimes. The safest JPG compression is lossless meaning no quality loss (guide), lossy compression has far superior space savings.
• Cache AJAX GET Requests with Cloudflare and Varnish – AJAX requests are typically used to provide dynamic content on WordPress sites and bypass cache. I have already shown how to Cache AJAX requests with Varnish to bypass PHP and MySQL for AJAX processing by storing the cache in Varnish.
• How to Diagnose High Admin-Ajax Usage on Your WordPress Site – A very common scenario when dealing with WordPress is diagnosing high admin-ajax.php usage. If you have been working with WordPress for a while, you have most likely encountered this when running speed tests or checking your server access logs.
• How to Enable GZIP Compression in WordPress – To achieve fast load times on your WordPress site, decreasing the size of your pages is crucial. This can mean the difference between a site that loads in under 1 second and one that feels like its crawling.
• How to Fix “Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding Header” Warning – Are you seeing the “Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding Header” warning in Pingdom, GTmetrix, or Google PageSpeed Insights on your WordPress site? This is an HTTP header and should be included on every origin server response, as it tells the browser whether or not the client can handle compressed versions of the content.
• WordPress Cache Enabler Plugin – The WordPress Cache Enabler plugin is a lightweight caching plugin that creates static HTML files and stores them on your web server. This means that a static HTML file will be delivered whenever possible to provide users with the response data that would otherwise involve the resource-intensive process of using the WP core, plugins, and database.
• Setting Up WooCommerce Cache – WordPress caching plugins are a popular choice when looking for ways to improve page load times.
• Configuring caching plugins Excluding pages from the cache for WC – If using caching plugins (such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache), make sure you exclude the following pages from the cache through their respective settings panels.
• [A Guide on Web Font Optimization in WordPress] – Web fonts are a staple of modern web design and used by the overwhelming majority of WordPress websites. Optimizing the use and delivery of web fonts is critical because poorly optimized web fonts can bog down the performance of your website.
• Troubleshooting slow page speed on your WordPress site – If you think that your WordPress pages are loading slowly, it is time to do some troubleshooting to improve the page speed. Do not wait in doing the troubleshooting and let your site’s success be its downfall.
• What is hit-for-pass in Varnish – There is a term in Varnish Cache that every Varnish Cache user should know: “Hit for pass”. Like other Varnish Cache terms, it is not self-explanatory and in order to understand what it is you’ll need to understand some of the mechanics of the caching.
• 10 Varnish Cache mistakes and how to avoid them – Caching an object with a Set-Cookie header can have devastating effects, as any client requesting the object will get that same cookie set.
• How do I enable HTTP/2 Server Push in WordPress – HTTP/2 Server Push allows a website to push content to a browser, without having to wait for the HTML of one page to render first.
• Get to know New Relic Reporting for WordPress – New Relic is a SaaS product that offers application performance monitoring (APM), which provides developers with real-time data for use in proactive diagnostics as well as debugging. This data—including basic information about WordPress hooks, plugins, and themes—can be queried and visualized using the New Relic Insights dashboard.

Initial Analysis

Since starting TSI’s organic seo services, I’ve realized that working with my own sites is hugely different from working with clients; especially if the website has weak foundations.

I know how I want my money sites to look, so I build them using rigorous attention to detail. But if you take a website that’s developed by somebody else without a certain level of SEO knowledge – there’s normally quite a lot of on-site and off-site to fix.

Here’s how my team broke down the initial analysis:

• Keyword Research
• On-Site Audit
• Backlink Audit
• Competitor Analysis

Keyword Research

My team broke down keyword research into two main workflows: one is used to monitor the health of a website, and the other is for content gap analysis.

When we’re looking to track keywords for a website, we want to track some of the core terms, but also terms that are having problems. If a term is suffering from keyword cannibalization that we’re trying to fix – it’s worth tracking this daily until it’s resolved.

Since this client needed a huge content strategy, we did both a health check and initial content gap analysis. This approach included breaking down all keywords for that industry into topics of relevant terms.

In total, this process took over 20 hours and included thousands of keywords chunked into neat topics. This work later helped with choosing page titles, headings and content.

Here’s an example of how we did it:

Step 1. Search Broad Keywords

Step 2. Review Parent Topics

Step 3. Find Competitors for Parent Topics

Step 4. Reverse Engineer Competitor’s Keywords

Step 5. Exclude Outdated Keywords

There is the option to also export all of these keywords into excel documents and then filter them that way. But most of the time, a lot of the top keywords are fairly similar.

Here’s an example for the best dog food term:

• best dog food
• best dog foods
• healthiest dog food
• what is the best dog food
• top rated dog food
• best food for dogs

While each keyword is unique, they all follow a singular intent. The users are interested in finding out what are the best dog foods in the market.If you can include 1 – 2 exact match for each of these terms in the text – you’re going to have a solid foundation.

On-Site Audit

Finding all the technical and content issues with the website requires a full on-site audit. However, while big reports are easy on the eyes, it’s small changes that make the difference.

We audited the website and found a whole bunch of technical issues, from lack of breadcrumbs, poor internal link structures, bad quality anchor text and unoptimized titles.

A full on-site audit tutorial is too big for this post (perhaps coming soon), but here are some quick tips:

• Screaming Frog – A cheap way to regularly crawl your website. There are lots of ways to find errors, redirects, and missing metadata. You can also use a custom search to find all references of your keywords.
• Sitebulb – This tool is more expensive and is a monthly recurring fee. However, it gives you lots of extra data that would be impossible to spot manually and hard with Screaming Frog. An example would be empty hyperlink references.
• Site Search – By using Google’s site search (site:domain.com) and operators, you can find hundreds of issues with index management, outdated page titles, and multiple pages targeting the same keyword. There are a lot of quick wins here.
• Page Titles – If you wrote your page titles 1 – 2 years ago, you may find that they’re outdated now. A quick site search with “intitle:2018” will find all your content that is either not updated or not yet crawled by Google.
• Internal Links – A major way to pass relevance signals and authority to your core pages is through internal links. Make sure that your pages are well interlinked and you’re not using low-quality anchors from your power pages, such as “click here” or “more information”.

We focused on fixing around 5 issues at a time varying from small changes like improving accessibility, to bigger changes like introducing breadcrumbs for a custom build website.

Backlink Audit

The website had a relatively small backlink profile, which meant it lacked authority, relevance signals and entry points for crawling. It also meant that a full in-depth link analysis was unnecessary for this campaign.When a website has an algorithmic penalty, manual penalty or came in unfavorable after an update, it’s a great decision to audit your link profile page-by-page.

In this instance, the initial check revealed there was nothing to be concerned about, so we moved on to technical implementation as soon as possible.

Had the website experienced problems with the link profile, we would have done a full backlink audit to try and recover this. Here’s what to look out for:

• Link Distribution – Pointing too many links toward internal pages instead of your homepage can cause lots of issues. So make sure that you’re not overdoing it.
• Anchor Text Analysis – Using exact match, partial match and topical anchors are a great way to pass third-party relevance signals. Too many and you’ll be caught out over-optimizing, but too few and you won’t be competitive. Read more about anchor optimization.
• Referring IP Analysis – There are a finite number of IPv4 Addresses, so this isn’t often a big cause for concern. However, it’s worth making sure that you’ve not got too many links from the same IP address.
• Autonomous System Numbers – Since a server can be assigned any number of IP addresses, these systems often include an ASN. This is another way that Google could flag large numbers of websites from the same origin.

My team did a case study on how to remove an algorithmic penalty, a lot of these audits come included in any penalty removal campaign.

Competitor Analysis

The difference between a search analyst and data scientist is how you approach the search engines. An analyst is focused on reviewing the SERPs and finding what is working best today, while a data scientist wants to understand how things work.

We built our team to include both since competitor analysis requires a keen eye for reviewing the SERPs and algorithm analysis requires solid data scientists.

If you want to do SEO at a high level, you’ve got to constantly be reviewing competitors. You will notice that tons of best practices get ignored in the top positions and the devil is in the details.

In this instance, we found that both more content and more links would be required for long-term success.

Content Strategy

Building any long-term authority website in competitive industries will include both an authoritative link profile and content plan.

My team reviewed their existing content, looked at how other websites in their industry wanted to help users and then addressed these four cornerstones:

• User Intent – before we did anything, we wanted to nail the user intent on every page. This research meant that we identified three pillars of content for their site. We’ll get into this in further detail below.
• Service Pages – these pages were dedicated to explaining what service was offered, how to contact and what was included with that offering.
• Blog Content – these posts were dedicated to providing non-commercial, informative content that was interesting to the reader.
• Resource Center – this section was dedicated to giving basic information about topics in their industry. Instead of using Wikipedia for all our links to authority content, we wanted to use internal links instead.

Here’s a little bit about each section and our strategy for them:

User Intent

The biggest mistake I see all the time is the simplest thing to check:

What types of content is Google ranking in the top 10 positions?

If you’re serving 10,000 words of content in a huge blog post, but Google is only interested in serving service pages with 50 words of content – you’ve missed the point.

Another commonly found problem is including too much content in a single post, when your competitors have several shorter posts.

One of the main attractions for Thailand are the yoga retreats. If you’re searching for this in America, you’re expecting to find destinations. Let’s take a look:

The first position is called Yoga Journal and includes almost no content aside from images and headings. That’s exactly what the users were looking for.

There are other websites doing a similar service and can help you make bookings. While others have written a blog and clearly labelled what they believe are the best retreats.

Notice that none of these pages include information such as “what is yoga?”. It’s because that’s not the user intent.

But these websites didn’t exclude the term because nobody is searching for it:

Instead, they created content specifically designed to rank for that keyword:

Service Pages

The first piece of content that we wanted to create was the service pages. These are often short in content and outline your basic service.

You want to include your contact details, list of services, unique selling points and any niche-relevant interactive content.

The other key point on service pages is that they don’t require lots of content. Often 3 – 4 bullet points with some fancy icons can go a long way.

This is something that even Google has documented.

Blog Content

The second piece of content that we needed to create were informational blog posts. There were a lot of opportunities for interesting pieces of content in this niche.

While the service pages were designed to answer a purchase-based user intent, this was informational. It can help boost the rankings of your service page through topical clusters, internal linking and as a buffer for tiered links.

We wanted these pieces of content to focus on ‘Top 10 Tips to deal with X’ type queries.

Our target audience for bloggers are people that would be considered middle-of-the-funnel. So instead of providing explanations, we wanted to focus on creative solutions.

Resource Center

Lastly, we wanted to create a resource center for all things to do with this niche. If your niche is technical, it’s a great idea to have one of these.

Let me explain…

One of the most abused SEO strategies is to link to irrelevant Wikipedia articles. This tactic is used because people heard that external links are good for ranking. Which is true.

But we’re talking long-term success for a real business, not flipping an affiliate site. So, we wanted to become that external link for others; the person you would link toward when you needed to add some context.

It also helped because we could answer a different set of questions. Where the blog would answer stuff like ‘Top 10 Tips to deal with X’, this section would focus on ‘what is X’.

It’s a very different user-intent and can sometimes be separated into a completely different parent topic. Rather than cram one page full of thousands of words in content, why not create two pages and utilize the benefits of internal linking?

Link Strategy

The bread and butter for any campaign is a solid link strategy. This campaign is no different in that regards, but we identified a few really important link categories for the website.

To get the most out of our links my team decided to take advantage of the PageRank algorithm. We identified Tier 1 links that had high levels of trust and then sent juice to them.

I’m going to cover why we chose to take advantage of PageRank algorithm in the following section, but here’s what we found would work for the website:

• Internal Link Building – Some of the cheapest ways to improve rankings is by building links internally. This fact is why a solid content strategy is so important.
• Diversity Links – Any audiophiles know there’s a constant battle between signal-to-noise. The same is true for search engine optimization.
• Outreach Links – We wanted to reach out to big names in the industry to acquire link placements. We use a white-hat link strategy and managed to get some incredible links.
• Tier 2 Link Building – links pass more authority the higher their URL Rating. To boost the authority passed from outreach links we did some tier 2 links too.

Internal Link Building

One of the initiatives that we’ve started at TSI is to refer to internal linking as ‘internal link building.’

This is how seriously we take it.

Every great link building strategy includes internal links built in the supplementary content.

Google knows that links play a major part in their algorithm, so they monitor it closely. To bypass some of these filters you can just add supplementary content and power up those articles too.

This is great for your user-intent analysis that we’ve already done above. Now, instead of one article, you can have links pointed toward 10 different articles all clustered.

With this campaign, a simple test was to review the competitors and find common trends in the top 10 positions. One easy to spot trend was that we needed to add Breadcrumbs.However, a less obvious find is when you have multiple pages targeted with the same internal anchor text.

This creates keyword cannibalization, which remains one of the Top 10 Most Common Issues for new clients.

Finding this is really simple:

Step 1. Crawl your website with Screaming Frog

Step 2. Bulk Export all Anchor Text

Step 3. Filter By Anchor Text Containing Keyword

Step 4. Reduce Anchor Text Cannibalization

BONUS: You can use the Configuration > Custom > Search feature in Screaming Frog to parse specific keywords across your entire website.

It’s super simple, here’s a quick video by my Head of Strategies talking through the process:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PmDXznbXn2E

Directory Links

My team and I noticed that directory links were something that the competition had that we didn’t. This is an easy win and helped us to accelerate the link profile rapidly.

Not only did we get to create tons of new entry points to the website, improve anchor text ratios and link distribution; we also gained link velocity.

This helped to quickly excel the website’s rankings and was all built within the first month.

Tier 1 – Outreach Links

After a lot of research, my team decided that very small numbers of high-quality links were going to be better for trust in this niche.

We targeted extremely specific websites that built their entire domain around each keyword we targeted on the service pages.

For example, if your website is in the fitness niche, there are going to be websites focused on weightlifting, others on running, and others on diet or wellbeing. Rather than matching up the running domains with a weightlifting page, try to keep them on topic.

This looks the most natural, so it’s the least likely to be picked up by Google.

The trick was to write the content ourselves and focus on providing external links that made sense to the piece of content. It’s a form of guest posting, but because these sites have lots of traffic – content quality needs to be better than algorithmically friendly.

You can read these guest posting tips to get ahead of the game.

It also provided us the opportunity to tailor our content relevance as much as possible – but the real magic comes in the next step.

We recently published how we converted to a scalable white hat link building scheme, this shows you exactly how my team does outreach campaigns.

Tier 2 – Guest Posting

Once you’ve built super relevant content on high-authority websites, you need to power it up.

A big misconception in the industry is that people think Google works at the domain level. In reality, they’re working at a page-by-page level.

This is called Google’s PageRank algorithm and is actually the crux of this entire strategy.

So what does that mean for you?

Google takes the links pointed toward each page and gives that page a value. Then the number of links coming out of that page will be a fraction of the power of that page.

This means that even if a page has a high domain authority, it’s not necessarily passing a lot of authority to your website.

But you can change that with this approach:

With the previous step, we had already acquired a DR70+ link, but we need to give it some juice to power up our rankings.

Since we wrote the first tier link content ourselves, we built it to rank for specific keywords that discussed the need for our client’s services. This way we could build guest posts that would not only help to pass authority, but also build up organic traffic.

Then we could benefit from both an improvement in organic traffic but also referral traffic. Truthfully, this is a bit overkill, but we wanted to see how much we could squeeze it.

What did Google’s PageRank do?

As mentioned before, the element that brought the biggest bang for the buck in this campaign was the use of second-tier link building.

It helped us to take a relatively small number of links (4 – 5 every two months) and then power them up the following month.

So, here’s everything you need to know about Google’s PageRank.

What is Google PageRank?

Google uses a citation-based algorithm that looks at the relationship between individual pages. While referring domains are important, it’s the referring pages that are important.

This diagram in Google’s patent helps us to see that PageRank is calculated by the number of links pointed towards a page, as well as the number of external links from that page.

It’s clear to see why this strategy works, but what’s the math behind it?

How does Google PageRank work?

Earlier this year Majestic put out this amazing video that goes through the exact science of how PageRank actually works. This video is extremely detailed.

They break down how Domain Ratings provide radically different results from URL Ratings. It’s seriously worth a watch.

Why we chose it for this client?

My team tailors the strategy for each campaign based on the initial analysis. So, what made us decide that PageRank sculpting was the best strategy for this site?

The nature of the client’s website meant that bloggers aren’t really the industry experts that we needed, but we know it’s a strategy that works well.

So we decided to alternate between first tier links one month, followed by second tier guest posting the following month.

Truthfully, the blogger approach probably could still have worked in this industry too.

We figured that such a trust dominated industry might be worth focusing on high-quality websites rather than high-quantity websites.

The problem with always getting high-quality links is that often you’re getting fresh articles without much PageRank (i.e. link juice) in very small quantities.

They’re good – but they don’t always outweigh cost-to-result ratio of blogger links.

We chose to use guest posting en masse to improve crawl rates, anchor text and authority toward these pages.

I advise that you avoid using auto-generated link services as your second tier links. While they will definitely improve crawl rates of your page – they’re not going to help with authority.

You also run the risk of having your first tier links de-indexed – which is not what you want… and definitely not what your referring domains want.

Instead, focus on good quality blogs that would be safe if they pointed toward your own page and then just direct them toward these trustworthy sources.

In this case, we had the time and resources to give this a shot at the start of the campaign instead of later down the line – which garnered some excellent results.

Results

Organic Traffic

The campaign has been a steady increase after the first month, reaching a peak through October and November.

Keyword Increases

There was an exponential increase in keywords toward the start of the campaign, with stability through the year of updates.

Referring Domains

There is a direct correlation between the number of links we built followed by increases in the number of keywords they began to rank highly for:

Traffic Breakdown

While their social media campaigns and paid search have seen some modest increases in traffic, it’s their organic traffic that has seen a 432.69% increase when comparing the end of year performance against the month they joined.

Conclusion

As you’ve likely experienced in your own SEO career, the paradigm of “one size fits all” really has no place in our industry.

Every niche is different and every site has its own particular needs.

In this particular case, you’ve seen how to apply extensive keyword research to develop a content strategy.

ALLPlayer Latest Version 8.8.1 For Window/ALLPlayer is a multimedia player with subtitles downloader. ALLPlayer is probably the most popular program for watching movies and listening to music, with a modern, intuitive interface known more from smartphones and tablets than Windows. All functions are readily available, the precise moment they are needed, and thanks to codecs built-in, ALLPlayer can play virtually any media file format. The latest engine supports the latest video and audio standards, such as support for 4K Ultra HD or WebM, and also improves the quality of subtitles. By connecting to leading subtitles database such as OpenSubtitles.org ALLPlayer automatically downloads the perfectly matching subtitles in the selected language.

Most popular formats such as DivX, XviD, MP3, and AVI, FLV, MP4, 3GP, MKV, M2TS, MPG, MPEG, RMVB, WMV, QuickTime, MOV, FLAC, APE, and many less known formats can be played thanks to LiveUpdate codecs downloader. Other features: DVD support, CD support. Other features available with ALLPlayer are automatic downloading of matching subtitles, playing Internet radio stations, and playing movies and TV series from torrents with subtitles by just dragging and dropping the torrent file.

ALLPlayer can open a wide range of multimedia formats, including AVI, MKV, FLV, 3G2, MOV, DAT, M2TS, 3GP, MP4, VOB, APE, MPG, MP3, MKA, AC3, and WAV. Furthermore, the app is also able to play CDs, DVDs, GIFs, and links taken from the Internet.The option to preview movies from webcams, DV or any other video source such as TV tuner. Two monitors or monitor and TV support. Support for Dolby Surround, SPDIF, and 3D audio. Ability to choose any audio output, including SPDIF, allowing lossless digital transmission of sound to an amplifier. Subtitles support in all known formats.

Features and Highlights

• Free easy-to-use multimedia player
• Free simple video editor
• Matching subtitles downloader built–in
• Free video menu creator
• Free converter built-in
• Subtitles audio reader
• automatic playback for next parts of movies or series
• support for Dolby Surround, DTS, 3D audio, SPDIF and other
• playlist
• EQ
• support for audio and video streams, including video from YouTube
• image rotation, color correction, improving the quality
• turning off computer or monitor after the movie
• autoresume
• intelligent subtitles
• dubbing
• parental control – password on a file
• Plays any video and audio format
• Supports Dolby Surround, 3D Audio, and SPDIF
• Video covers and movie information download
• Best MKV and Divx Plus encoder
• Displays video on two monitors
• Playlist and equalizer
• Free DivX subtitles muxer
• RAR Player

PROS

Play it all: True to its name, AllPlayer plays just about any kind of media file, including uncommon and obscure formats. When a page or frame won’t open, it automatically searches for the right codec.

Smart subtitles: AllPlayer’s built-in subtitle engine learns and adjusts itself to your viewing habits. You can customize subtitle appearance and behavior, choose languages, send subtitles to the server, and more. Subtitles can be spoken aloud by speech synthesis, too.

Codec choices: In Custom setup, you can tell AllPlayer to use your own codecs for movies.

Remote control app: The AllPlayer Remote app controls AllPlayer from your Android device.

CONS

Setup extras: Standard setup bundles an app named Catzilla. Custom setup lets you deselect it, but a click-through notification would make you feel less used.

Translations: Some menus didn’t translate fully, such as the Filtry (Filter) menu

WordPress Parse error leading to a blank page – How to fix?

First of all, don’t freak out! 🙂

In most cases, simply deleting the code you’ve added and re-uploading the file manually will fix this problem.

If you’ve been adding some code to your functions.php, you’ll have to remove that piece of code from your php file through an FTP  ( how do I do that ?) or your site’s host page. Once you remove it your page will work like normal.

Still no working? In some rare cases, you’ll need to re-upload a completely new version of your theme by FTP.

Follow those simple steps and you’ll be fine :

1. Connect to your website server by FTP (how do I do that ?)
2. Delete the customizer folder from wp-content/themes.
3. After doing that the admin panel and the site will be up again but with a default theme.
4. Downloaded a new copy of the theme from the Customizr WordPress page.
5. Then go in the admin panel to Themes and upload manually the Customizr theme zip file.

After activating the theme all works fine.  Please note that :

1. You won’t loose your previous settings, or your posts, pages, widgets, etc, by doing this.
2. If you use a Customizr child’s theme, it won’t be impacted by this process either.

For further help, please open a new thread in the Customizr forum:  https://wordpress.org/support/theme/customizr

How to fix “An error occurred, please try again.” when trying to activate your product key?

When trying to activate your product key for a theme or a plugin, you might get the following error message: “An error occurred, please try again.”.

In most of the cases, it’s due to the wrong key. Like for example a missing character.

Here are the steps to fix the problem :

1. Make sure you copy the correct activation key ( Where can you find your activation key ? ) Sometimes there can be a missing character at the beginning or at the end for example.
2. Paste the correct key in the activation key field
3. Click on the Save Changes button
4. Click on Activate Key

If this still doesn’t work, you can try again later. It might be a temporary connection issue with our server. Or a temporary issue with your server, blocking remote requests.

Note that the activation of the key allows you to be notified in your WordPress admin for a new version of your product. If you don’t activate, it won’t prevent the theme or the plugin to work fine.