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Is A VPN The Safest Way To Browse The Internet?

This Article Is Britten By

Sourav Kumar

Reviewed By Rx Editorial Board

Contact Authors: souravkumarseo1@gmail.com

In an era where cyber security threats are a daily occurrence, it is essential to take all steps necessary to protect data and information while browsing the internet. One of the safest ways to do this is to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPNs are designed to provide an extra layer of security when accessing the internet and can be used on multiple devices including laptops, tablets, and phones.

A VPN creates an encrypted network between your computer and the websites you visit, helping ensure your privacy and security while browsing. In this article, we will explore why using a VPN might be the safest way to browse the internet. But before shifting to a VPN you can use the official company APN setup such as the official Verizon APN, Qlink APN, Straight Talk APN, and many more.

Does A VPN The Safest Way To Browse The Internet?

The internet is an integral part of our daily lives, and we use it for various purposes. From browsing social media to accessing online banking, the internet has become a necessity. However, as much as the internet offers convenience, it also poses several risks to our privacy and security. Therefore, finding a way to browse safely on the internet has become increasingly important.

One solution that has gained traction in recent years is using a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN encrypts your online activities and data by routing them through secure servers located in different parts of the world.

This means that anyone trying to intercept or spy on your online activity would only see encrypted data that cannot be deciphered without authorization. While using a VPN may not be foolproof against all cyber threats, it certainly offers one of the safest ways to browse the internet.

How Does A VPN Protect Your Browsing The Internet?

A VPN, or virtual private network, is the safest way to browse the internet. It protects your online activity by encrypting your data and routing it through a secure server. When you connect to a VPN, all of your internet traffic is funneled through an encrypted tunnel that hides your IP address and prevents third-party tracking. This means that nobody can see what you are doing online, not even your ISP.

The primary benefit of using a VPN is privacy. Your online activities are hidden from prying eyes, keeping you safe from hackers and cybercriminals who want to steal your personal information or use it for malicious purposes. Additionally, many countries have strict censorship laws that limit access to certain websites or services. You can get around these limitations and view stuff that would otherwise be blocked by using a VPN.

Is VPN The Safest Way To Use The Internet?

Using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) is generally considered to be one of the safest ways to use the internet, but it is not necessarily foolproof. A VPN can provide a high level of security and privacy by encrypting your internet traffic and routing it through a secure tunnel to a remote server. This can help protect your online activity from prying eyes, such as hackers, ISPs, and government surveillance.

Some potential drawbacks include:

VPNs can slow down internet speeds: Using a VPN can sometimes result in slower internet speeds due to the encryption process and the distance to the remote server.
VPNs can be blocked or detected: Some websites and services may block access from VPNs or detect when a user is using a VPN, which can limit their functionality.
VPNs can be subject to data retention laws: Depending on the country where the VPN service is located, it may be subject to data retention laws that require them to store user data or provide it to authorities upon request.
VPNs can be vulnerable to security flaws: Like any software or service, VPNs can have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers or other malicious actors.

Does A Vpn Protect Your Browsing?

In today’s interconnected world, browsing the internet comes with inherent risks. Cybercriminals and hackers are always on the lookout to steal sensitive information such as passwords, credit card details, and personal data. This is where Virtual Private Network (VPN) comes in to provide a safer way for users to browse the web.

A VPN provides an encrypted connection between your device and the internet, making it difficult for cybercriminals or prying eyes to intercept your online activities. By routing your traffic through a secure server located elsewhere in the world, a VPN hides your IP address and encrypts all incoming and outgoing data on your device. This makes it more difficult for anyone trying to track or monitor what you’re doing online.

What Will A Vpn Protect You From While Browsing The Internet?

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) can protect you from several potential threats while browsing the internet, including:

Hackers and cybercriminals: A VPN can encrypt your internet traffic, making it much more difficult for hackers and cybercriminals to intercept your data and steal your personal information, such as credit card numbers, passwords, and other private information.
ISP monitoring and tracking: A VPN can prevent your internet service provider (ISP) from monitoring your online activity and collecting data on your browsing history, which can help protect your privacy and prevent targeted advertising.
Government surveillance: A VPN can also protect you from government surveillance and censorship, particularly if you are accessing the internet from a country with strict online censorship laws.
Public Wi-Fi security risks: A VPN can secure your internet connection when using public Wi-Fi networks, which are often unsecured and can be vulnerable to hacking and other security threats.
Geographical restrictions: A VPN can allow you to bypass geographical restrictions and access content that may be blocked in your region, such as streaming services or websites.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a VPN is widely considered the safest way to browse the internet. Encrypting data and masking IP addresses, provides a secure layer of protection from malicious actors. Furthermore, its benefits go beyond security – it also allows users to access geo-restricted content, unblock censored websites, and enhance their online privacy. The fact that VPNs are increasingly affordable and easy to set up makes them even more attractive.

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How to move website’s content to another domain name?

Changing the domain of a website and transferring the content at Hostinger

If you are moving your website’s content to a different hosting account, it can be easily done with the help of backups.

If you simply want to change the domain of your website but leave the content as it is (for example you had domain.tld and want to have newawesomedomain.tld), and both domains are in the same hosting account, you would just need to copy the website files from one domain to another. A step-by-step guide for WordPress can be found here: How to Change WordPress Domain Name: A Step-by-Step Guide.

If you are using any other CMS or have a custom coded website, here are the steps to change your website’s domain:

Step 1 – Preparations

First, you need to define your final goal and check your hosting account, as the process is slightly different for various cases.

If you want to have your website accessible by the new address, but leave the old address working and both domains leading to the same content, the best option for you is to simply park your new domain to the old one.
If you want to completely copy or move the website’s content to a different domain name, make sure that the new domain name is added to your plan. You can check it in the Add Website section in hPanel:

After this, open your File Manager:

And check if you can see both domains in your File Manager:

Based on the reply, choose one of the options below.

Option 1: You see all your domains in File Manager

Open the public_html folder of the domain you wish to copy files from:

Select all the files and click on Copy or Move (based on if you want to leave the copy of the files on the old domain):

Click on Change to choose the destination folder for the files. Path should be: domains/new_domain_name/public_html. Press Copy or Move to finish the process:

If your website has a domain mentioned in any configuration files (like OpenCart, Joomla, and many more), make sure to update the domain name in those files. You might need to contact a developer or a forum specified on your CMS for additional guidance.

If your website uses a database, and you are completely moving the content, you can simply continue using this database. If you want to have a copy of it for the new domain, all you need to do is:

Export your old database.
Create a new database.
Import your old database’s backup to the newly created database.
Correct URL’s in a new database along with configuration file on your website.

That’s it – your content is fully moved or copied to the new domain

Option 2: You see only one domain in the File Manager

If you see only one domain in File Manager, and your domains have different usernames while added to the same hosting plan, the procedure of moving or copying the website content would be the following:

Generate and download backups of your old domain.
Upload the backup to the new domain’s public_html folder.

If you are also using a database proceed with these steps:

Export your old database.
Create a new database for your new domain.
Import your old database’s backup to the newly created database.
Correct URL’s in a new database along with configuration file on your website.

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Why Is WordPress So Hard To Use?

Why Is WordPress So Hard To Use?/WordPress, with the thousands of themes, plugins, and limitless customization options, may seem complicated, but those things are necessary to build a beautiful and functional website.

While website builders like Wix and Squarespace are attracting a good chunk of users to their platform, they usually do not let users own the data, with many design and function limitations.

With WordPress, you can build a truly unique website without limits.

This is what website builders like Wix or Squarespace lack, and this is what makes WordPress so powerful.

Powerful, but sometimes a little complicated.

In this post, we’ll try to answer why WordPress is so hard to use. We will share everything you need to know about WordPress and a few tips on how you can make your WordPress experience less painful.

Let’s get started…

Quick WordPress Overview

Started in 2003, WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and MySQL database.

Today, WordPress is the most popular way of creating a blog or a website on the Internet.

This is how a standard WordPress dashboard looks:

WordPress is a completely free CMS offered and managed by WordPress.org, now used by over 53% of all the websites on the web.

Theoretically, you can use WordPress to build and manage your website without writing a single line of code. Once a website is set up, publishing in WordPress is as simple as writing in a Microsoft Word document.

However, if you want your website to be something more than just a blog, you’ll need additional customization.

As mentioned above, customization possibilities are close to limitless in WordPress.

This is definitely good news, but again it’s not easy. But we’ll get there in a minute. Read on.

We use WordPress here at Siteefy, and we just love the freedom and flexibility it gives us. Hopefully, soon you’ll be able to enjoy all that WordPress offers with no headache or frustration too.

Note: There’s a difference between the self-hosted version of WordPress (WordPress.org) and the for-profit WordPress version (WordPress.com). While WordPress.com is easy to use, it’s a limited and paid platform (similar to Wix and Squarespace). In this post, we’re going to concentrate on the free WordPress.org CMS only since this is what we all usually refer to when we say WordPress.

Why Is WordPress So Hard To Use?

Let’s first see why is WordPress so hard for beginners?

What exactly makes WordPress hard to use?

WordPress Requires Initial Installation and Setup

WordPress is open-source software, not a service like website builders (Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Blogger, etc.), and it needs to be installed on a server before it can be launched.

While there are many WordPress-focused hostings available now (SiteGround or Kinsta), the hosting setup is still not as easy and straightforward as starting your work with website builders.

Yes, with managed WordPress service, you can install it on your website with one click, but this is not the whole story.

In most cases, you’ll need to continue configuring WordPress further after the installation.

Another thing is selecting reliable, fast, and quality hosting for WordPress, which can become a bottleneck for non-technical users.

Poor WordPress hosting is a pain in the ass. Try to avoid this.

Usually, going with top-rated options like Siteground, Kinsta, or Cloudways is the safe bet here.

The right hosting company will provide you two extremely important things:

Fast, quality WordPress hosting
Easy WordPress installation

Getting these two parts in place would save you tons of time and effort in the long run.

Themes and Plugins can be Complicated

After the setup, the themes and plugins can complicate WordPress as the CMS relies on multiple third-party extensions to function properly.

The two types of extensions used on WordPress are themes and plugins

Themes control all the design elements and general website behavior.
Plugins are add-ons that extend the capabilities of a WordPress website.

Both themes and plugins give unlimited flexibility to WordPress websites, as they allow you to build any type of website you want, without any functional limitation … but multiple plugins and themes can create confusion and complexity.

While WordPress tries to keep all the themes and plugins in its directory compatible with each other, quite often, they conflict, which can cause various issues on a website (which again, you as a site owner, need to fix).

Categories and Tags can be Complicated

WordPress is now used by all sorts of different websites (like business websites, eCommerce stores, etc.), but it was primarily built for blogging purposes only.

And this is why it still uses the categories and tags structure that was initially designed for blogs to manage their blog posts.

So if you’re going to use WordPress only for your blog, you’ll be fine. But for other types of websites, you might have to noindex categories to preserve the overall SEO of the website.

Many users make a mistake with the WordPress structure and use multiple categories with no tags and vice-versa, which results in difficult navigation.

WordPress.org has specifically mentioned this on the top of their documentation:

Note: Categories allow you to group blog posts based on the topics, while you can use tags to describe posts in detail. Both categories and tags are a part of default taxonomies, which is a way to organize content on WordPress.

WordPress has lots of Settings to Configure

While WordPress is highly customizable, the multitude of different settings available makes it hard to use for beginners.

For example, the sidebar in the blog posts is controlled via Widgets in the dashboard, and a custom page should be set as the homepage in reading settings before a website can be launched.

All of this is relatively easy to do and takes only a few minutes to set up, but there’s no universal default step-by-step structure in WordPress that new users can follow.

There is also no setup wizard or anything like that website builders usually have.

Plus, all the settings from third-party plugins can quickly add up — resulting in further confusion.

Tip: We have written extensively on WordPress here at Siteefy. Check our blog to find lots of useful WordPress tips and advice.

There’s no in-built WordPress SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

With WordPress, you get a strong website foundation, but it’s just not enough to rank in Google.

Tip: SEO is the process of optimizing a website to get targeted organic traffic from search engines (like Google and Bing).

So once you’re done with the website setup and design, you will have to install an SEO plugin to make your WordPress website SEO optimized. Without proper SEO, the website will be almost invisible to search engine crawlers, and you will receive no organic visitors.

This is, of course, not the hardest part of using WordPress but still requires some learning for beginners.

Note: Basic SEO might be easy to set up with the help of WordPress plugins (like Yoast), but advanced SEO, which is exactly what brings you organic search traffic, is a whole different story.

There’s no in-built Analytics

Analytics is the name of the system that is used to gather and analyze information about a certain website.

This information includes but is not limited to

users visiting your website;
their behavior;
and overall website performance.

Analytics is something every website must-have.

But WordPress has no in-built analytics.

Many third-party (free and paid) Analytics plugins are available, but all of them require initial setup (which adds one more step for beginners).

What may complicate the matter further is that there’s no single third-party Analytics solution, and users have to choose from a variety of options like Google Analytics, Clicky, Jetpack by Automattic, etc.

3 Ways To Make WordPress Easy to Use

Now that we’ve seen why WordPress can be hard to use, the question is, should you go for it or not?

Well, the answer is surprisingly straightforward.

WordPress can be hard, but it’s worth it.

Yes, WordPress may require some learning curve and be not very easy to use sometimes, but it is the perfect CMS for users looking for a way to build amazing and functional websites without massive investments and with literally no limits. It’s a capable CMS that can handle every type of website, starting from simple blogs and ending with full-fledged eCommerce stores.

That is why WordPress has a CMS market share of over 60% and powers 53% of all the websites on the web.

Here are 3 tips you can follow to make your life easy with WordPress:

1. Select Managed WordPress Hosting

To avoid all the initial installation work, go with a top-rated dedicated WordPress managed hosting.

Managed WordPress hostings are specifically optimized for WordPress, and they take care of everything in the backend, like codebase management, performance, security, backups, and the server stack.

If you are starting a website you will need to host it somewhere. If your CMS choice is WordPress then going for quality managed WordPress hosting is a no-brainer. It’ll cost the same, but make your life so much easier.

So, all you have to do is sign up for managed hosting, set up your server, start the installation process, and you will get a working WordPress website instantly.

2. Use a Lightweight Theme

To keep everything simple from the start, it’s a good idea to use a lightweight theme and then build the design on it. Themes are an essential part of WordPress as they control the core functions of a website, and you can only activate one theme at a time.

A few good lightweight themes are Generatepress, Astra, and OceanWP. All three themes are available for free in the WordPress directory, with a paid version if you need any premium features (for most blogs, free themes are enough).

Once you have selected the theme, you can use a page builder to build your website.

3. Use WYSIWYG Page Builders for Design

Complete front-end WYSIWYG is another important thing that WordPress does not have by default.

WYSIWYG is the functionality that makes website builders (like Wix) so easy to use.

But here is the kicker:

You can have WYSIWYG on WordPress too!

How?

With WordPress WYSIWYG builders.

WordPress WYSIWYG page builders are powerful tools (some are even complete toolkits) that you can use to design and run your WordPress website in a code-free manner.

Most page builders are available with a drag and drop WYSIWYG interface that you can use to create responsive pages visually.

Check our page on WordPress WYSIWYG for more information on this.

Currently, the two most popular WordPress page builders are Elementor and Divi Builder. Both page builders are true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, and both work seamlessly with almost every WordPress theme and plugin, so you can build a site you want with pixel-perfect design.

Another thing that can make your life easier dealing with WordPress is the fact that these page builders come with hundreds of pre-built ready-made layouts (templates) for different niches, like a blog, hotel, restaurant, travel, and so on.

You can import any template with a single click and then customize the content accordingly. This allows you to set up a WordPress website with a consistent and professional-looking website design super quickly – literally in minutes.

Here is an example:

Watch this video to learn how you can build a website with Elementor + Astra theme:

Conclusion

One of the best things about WordPress is that it is a robust content management platform. With the right tools and approach no coding or technical knowledge is required for a WordPress website — which is why now, almost 53% of the web uses this platform.

There’s a learning curve with WordPress, but you don’t have to learn everything overnight … you can start small and then expand as your website grows.

With the help of managed hosting and page builders, you can set up a complete website with all the functions within minutes. You can also hire a WordPress freelancer from platforms like Codeable or Toptal in case you need any technical help.

Still, if you’re looking for WordPress alternatives, check our post on how you can build a website from scratch with page builders like Wix and Squarespace.

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WordPress – What About You Need To Knows

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

But is it right for you?

Look:

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

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

Yes, it does.

But, let’s begin with Pros

WordPress Pros

1. User Friendliness

Get this:

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

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

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

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

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

2. Plugins and feature extendibility

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

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

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

Wordpress pro - Plugin supported to enhance features

Things are quite easy if you use WordPress plugins:

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

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

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

3. Responsiveness

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

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

Well, the worry is over.

Pro - Responsive themes for mobile friendly sites

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

Here is the interesting thing…

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

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

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

4. SEO Ready

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

You got it, it’s SEO.

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

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

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

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

5. Open source

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

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

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

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

6. Inexpensive and reliable

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cons of WordPress

1. Vulnerability

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

Our aim is not to frighten you, but…

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

Nevertheless, you can take the following precautions:

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

2. Expensive as you move forward

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

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

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

3. Developers needed

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

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

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

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

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

WordPress Pros and Cons: Wrapping things up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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WordPress Page Builder/WordPress WYSIWYG Editors

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

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

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

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

Best WordPress WYSIWYG Editors Table

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

1. Divi Builder (Best WordPress Page Builder Overall)

Pros

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

Cons

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

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

Divi Builder is

super easy to use
beautifully designed
extremely powerful

Here is how Divi Page Builder looks in action:

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

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

Divi WordPress Page Builder Plugin Layouts Library-min

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a quick video that explains Divi in detail:

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

There are two ways of building websites with Divi Builder:

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

Divi Visual Editor Screenshot — Divi Visual Editor

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

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

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

Both Divi page building modes are actually great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Divi Test Drive

Explore the surprising power of Divi Visual Builder

Try Now

Divi Builder Main Features:

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

Additional Features

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

Divi is compatible with Gutenberg.

How Much Does Divi Cost?

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

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

Here is the current pricing information for both options

Yearly access is $89
Lifetime access is $249

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

What is included

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

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

2. Elementor (Best WordPress Editor for Custom Design)

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

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

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

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

Elementor Showcase

See the real websites built with Elementor

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

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

Here is how building with Elementor looks like:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elementor Form Widget:

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

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

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

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

Amazing, isn’t it?

Elementor Main Features

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

Additional Features

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

Elementor Pricing

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

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

Elementor Pro costs as below:

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

All plans include 1-year support and updates.

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a quick introduction video to Beaver Builder:

Beaver Builder Main Features:

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

Beaver Builder Additional Features:

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

Beaver Builder Pricing

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

Standard Package – $99

Beaver Page Builder is included
Beaver Builder Theme is not included

Pro Package – $199

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

Agency Package – $399

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

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

4. Thrive, Architect,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check this quick Thrive Architect walkthrough video:

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

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

Thrive Architect Main Features:

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

Thrive Architect Additional Features

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

Thrive Architect WP Drag and Drop Plugin Pricing

Thrive Architect comes at two different pricing options:

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

5. Themify

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

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

Here is how Themify works:

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

Backend editing
Frontend editing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Themify Builder Main Features:

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

Themify Builder Additional Features:

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

Themify WordPress Page Editor Pricing:

The basic version of Themify Builder is free.

6. Visual Composer

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

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

WordPress Visual Editors - Visual Composer

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

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

Main Features:

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

7. WP Page Builder

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

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

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

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

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

Main Features

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

Pricing

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

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

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

8. Oxygen

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

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

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

Check this video to see Oxygen in action:

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

Oxygen Builder Main Features:

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

Oxygen WordPress Visual Editor Plugin Pricing:

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

The three pricing plans Oxygen offers are:

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

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

9. Brizy

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

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

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

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

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

Main Features

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

Pricing

Brizy offers three different pricing plans:

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

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

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

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

Additional resources on Gutenberg

10. Live Composer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live Composer Main Features:

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

Live Composer Pricing:

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

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

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

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

11. MotoPress WordPress Page Builder

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

MotoPress Page Builder and Frontend Editor

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

Main Features

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

MotoPress Page Builder Pricing

You will get three pricing options with MotoPress builder:

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

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

12. WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress

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

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

Main Features

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

WPBakery Page Builder Pricing

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

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

13. Colibri WordPress Page Builder

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

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

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

Main Features

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

Pricing

Colibri offers both yearly and lifetime plans:

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

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

14. Page Builder by SiteOrigin

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

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

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

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

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

Main Features:

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

15. Gutenberg WordPress Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gutenberg Editor Main Features:

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

Gutenberg Pricing:

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

16. Microthemer — Live CSS editor for WordPress Site Builders

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

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

Main Features

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

Microthemer Pricing

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

The plans are as follows:

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

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

17. Advanced Editor Tools (TinyMCE Editor)

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

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

Main Features

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

TinyMCE Pricing

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

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

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

18. Blog Designer and Blog Designer PRO for WordPress

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

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

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

Main Features of Blog Designer

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

Main Features of Blog Designer Pro

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

Pricing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main Features

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

Atomic Blocks Pricing

The basic version of Atomic Blocks is free, which includes 14 blocks, 4 pre-built page layouts and 8 pre-built sections.

20. Ultimate Blocks – Gutenberg Blocks Plugin

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

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

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

Main Features

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

Ultimate Blocks Pricing

Ultimate Blocks is free.

Best WordPress Page Builder: Who is the Winner?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

FAQs

What is WYSIWYG mode?

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

What is WordPress Page Builder?

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

Do I need a Page Builder for WordPress?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which free page builder is best for WordPress?

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

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

How to use WP page builder?

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

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

Are drag and drop WP themes the same as builders?

In most cases, yes.

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

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

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

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

Reasons Behind the WordPress Visual Editor Not Working

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

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

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

Faulty plugins
Outdated themes
Corrupted WordPress core files
User settings misconfiguration

✓ Quick Solution:

Switch to Gutenberg or Get a Front End Editor

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

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

Fixing the WordPress Visual Editor

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

Let’s start!

1. Clear Your Browser Cache

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

Here’s how to do it on Google Chrome:

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

To do it on Mozilla, you need to:

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

2. Edit User Settings Through the WordPress Dashboard

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

log in to the WordPress dashboard and head to Users > Your Profile.
Make sure the Disable the visual editor when the writing option is not checked and update the profile.

Refresh your website and that’s it! If it still doesn’t work, try checking and unchecking the option.

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

3. Use WordPress Default Theme

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

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

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

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

4. Disable Plugins

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

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

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

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

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

5. Re-install the Latest Version of WordPress

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

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

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

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

Fix WordPress Visual Editor By Reinstalling WordPress

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

Download the latest WordPress version.
Extract the zipped files on your computer, then delete the wp-content folder.
Connect to FileZilla and head to your site’s root directory (/) under Remote site and press on it.
Now, head to the Local site, select the extracted WordPress files and right-click to upload them to the directory.

Once a prompt message pops up telling you the Target file already exists, select Overwrite and tick the Always use this action and Apply to current queue only options.
That’s it! Once the upload finishes, you have reinstalled the WordPress core files.

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

6. Edit the wp-config.php File

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

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

log in to your hosting provider’s control panel and head to the File Manager.
Once you’re in the public_html directory, locate your wp-config.php file. Right-click to edit the file.

WordPress Visual Editor Not Working - Edit the wp-config

Add the following line right under the <?PHP opening tag: define(‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false);
Save changes and refresh your site to check if the visual editor is back to normal.

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

Advanced options to fix the WordPress Visual Editor Not Working

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

Replace your TinyMCE folder

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

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

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

Wrapping Up

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

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

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

References

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Top 50 Reasons Your Website Deserves to Be Penalized By Google

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

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

What Is a Google Penalty?

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

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

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

Recognizing a Penalty

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

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

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

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

Why Has Google Penalized My Site?

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

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

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

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

How to Deal With a Penalty

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

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

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

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

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Best Website Monitoring Tools and Services

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Website Monitoring Tools And Services

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

#1) SolarWinds Web Performance Software

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

Key Features

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

=> Download SolarWinds Web Performance Software For Free

#2) eG Innovations

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

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

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

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

Key Features

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

=> Visit eG Innovations Website

#3) Site24x7

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

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

Key Features

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

Official Website: Site24x7

#4) Pingdom

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

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

Key Features

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

Official Website: Pingdom

#5) SiteUptime

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

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

Key Features:

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

Official Website: SiteUPtime

#6) Monitis

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

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

Key Features:

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

Official Website: Monitis

#7) Montastic

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

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

Key Features:

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

Official Website: Montastic

#8) UptimeRobot

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

Key Features:

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

Official Website: UptimeRobot

#9) HostTracker

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

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

Key Features:

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

Official Website: HostTracker

#10) Are My Sites Up?

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

Key Features:

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

Official Website: Are My Sites Up?

#11) FreeSiteStatus

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

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

Key Features:

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

Official Website: FreeSiteStatus

#12) Uptrends

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

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

Key Features:

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

Official Website: Uptrends

#13) Uptime Doctor

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

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

Official Website: Uptime Doctor

#14) AppBeat

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

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

Official Website: AppBeat

#15) InternetSeer

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

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

Official Website: InternetSeer

#16) Status Cake

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

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

Official Website: Status Cake

#17) Observu

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

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

Official Website: Observu

#18) Livewatch

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

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

Official Website: Livewatch

#19) UPTIMIA

The UPTIMIA uptime testing tool also provides a free account.

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

Official Website: UPTIMIA

#20) Insping

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

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

Official Website: Insping

#21) Binary Canary

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

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

Official Website: Binary Canary

#22) idera.com

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

Official Website: ideara.com

#23) Happy Apps

Happy Apps is a good performance and uptime testing tool.

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

Official Website: Happy Apps

Conclusion

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

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

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Top Website Application Performance Monitoring Tools

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

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

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

Top Website Application Performance Monitoring Tools

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

#1) Traceview

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

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

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

Key Features

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

=> Download Free

#2) eG Innovations

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

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

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

Key Features of eG Enterprise

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

=> Visit eG Innovations Website

#3) Datadog

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

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

Features

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

=> Visit Datadog Website

#4) Sematext APM

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

Key Features

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

=> Visit Sematext Website

#5) ManageEngine Applications Manager

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

Key Features

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

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

=> Visit ManageEngine Applications Manager Website

#6) New Relic

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

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

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

It provides performance-related metrics as given below

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

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

=> Visit New Relic Website

#7) AppDynamics

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

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

It has the following key features

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

Visit the official site: AppDynamics

#8) Opsview

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

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

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

Key Features

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

Visit the official site: Opsview

#9) Dynatrace

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

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

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

Key Features

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

#10) Zenoss

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

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

Key Features

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

Visit the official site: Zenoss

#11) Dell Foglight

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

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

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

Key Features

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

Visit the official site: Dell Foglight

#12) Stackify Retrace

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

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

Key Features

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

Visit the official site: Stackify Retrace

#13) Application Insights

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

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

Key Features

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

Visit the official site: Application Insights

#14) CA Technologies

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

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

Key Features

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

Visit the official site: CA Technologies

#15) IT-Conductor

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

Minimize Noise > Maximize Performance.

It has the following key features:

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

Conclusion

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

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

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Top Penetration Testing/ Vulnerability Scanning Software

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

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

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

Top Penetration Testing/ Vulnerability Scanning Software

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

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

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

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

Penetration Testing Intro

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

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

Black Box Penetration Testing

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

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

White Box Penetration Testing:

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

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

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

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

Vulnerability Scan Intro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penetration Testing Vs Vulnerability Scanning

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

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

Example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Vulnerability Scan & Penetration Testing Related to each other?

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

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

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

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

Which one to Choose – Pen Test or Vulnerability Scan?

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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Best Android Application Developing Tools

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

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

What is System Testing

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

In Order to Make Automated Tests Effective and Profitable One Should

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

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

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

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

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

Top 11 Android Testing Tools

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

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

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

Best Android Application Developing Tools

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

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

21 Offers

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

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

=> Visit 21 Website

#2) Appium Android Automation Framework

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

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

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

Website: Appium

#3) Selendroid

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

Features

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

Website: Selendroid

#4) Calabash

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

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

Features

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

Website: Calabash

#5) Robotium Android Testing Tool

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

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

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

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

#6) MonkeyRunner Android App Testing

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

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

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

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

Website: MonkeyRunner

#7) Ranorex Android Application Testing Tool

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

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

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

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

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

Website: Ranorex

#8) UI Automator For Android Test Automation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Website: UI Automator

#9) Kobiton

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

Features

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

Website: Kobiton

#10) Testdroid

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

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

Features

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

Website: Testdroid

#11) TestComplete

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

Features

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

Website: TestComplete

#12) Experitest

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

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

Conclusion

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

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Best Cybersecurity Software to Protect Your Business

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

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

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

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

Types Of Cyber Security Tools

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

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

How Important Is Cybersecurity?

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

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

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

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

List Of The Best Cyber Security Tools

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

[stextbox id=’custom’]

Comparison of the Top CyberSecurity Software

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

Let’s Explore!!

[/stextbox]

Best Cybersecurity Software to Protect Your Business

#1) SolarWinds Security Event Manager

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

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

Features

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

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

=> Download Free

#2) Intruder

Best for small to large businesses.

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

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

Features

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

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

=> Visit Intruder Website

#3) Bitdefender Total Security

=> Avail 50% OFF From Bitdefender Total Security Here

Best for small to large businesses.

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

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

Features

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

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

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

#4) Malwarebytes

Best for small to large businesses and personal use.

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

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

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

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

Features

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

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

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

=> Visit Malwarebytes Website

#5) Mimecast

Best for small to large businesses.

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

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

Features

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

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

Website: Mimecast

#6) CIS

Best for small to large businesses.

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

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

Features

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

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

Website: CIS

#7) Snort

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

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

Features

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

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

Website: Snort

#8) Wireshark

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

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

Features

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

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

Website: Wireshark

#9) Webroot

Best for small to large businesses as well as individuals.

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

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

Features

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

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

Website: Webroot

#10) GnuPG

Best for small to large businesses.
Price: Free

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

Features

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

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

Website: GnuPG

#11) Norton Security

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

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

Features

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

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

Website: Norton Security

#12) BluVector

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

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

Features

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

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

Website: BluVector

#13) Nmap

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

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

Features

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

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

Website: NMap

Conclusion

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

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

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Category Archive iT World (Software & Android Apps)

This Article Is Britten By

Sourav Kumar

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