₦airaland Forum

Before You Install a WordPress Plugin, Ask These Questions

Using WordPress plugins are great way to add new and very exciting functionalities to your website. Plugins can save you time, speed up your website , improve SEO , and do much more. Plugins give web designers and developers the leverage to build sophisticated websites quicker and even better because of the functionalities they add to the website. With more than 20,000 plugins and over 330,000,000 downloads in the official WordPress plugin directory , there’s no question that plugins are an important component of WordPress and will continue to lay a pivotal role in the relevance and position of WordPress as a leading content management system. Also read: How A Plugin Installation Can Crash Your Wordpress Website Generally speaking, here are some basic reasons

Read full blog post: https://www.todhost.com/blog/before-you-install-a-wordpress-plugin-ask-these-questions.html

Common Mistakes in Search Engine Optimization
https://www.todhost.com/blog/common-mistakes-in-search-engine-optimization.html

We have been around for 9 years. That proves our strength. But more than that, we have been able to win the support of our customers through our 24/7 support.

kingthreat:
I have used 4 Nigerian hosting companies so far.
To choose a good host, below are my prerequisites.
- Your company has a physical address
- Client base of over 500 customers
- Assurance of Good uptime and 2-hour maximum customer support
I hope you fit into these. Many webhosts were being run from a bedroom and couldn't offer the best of support in malware attack and other issues

1. The quality of our support is unmatched. We take support one step further by tailoring our replies to suit your knowledge, expectations and personality.

2. We're passionate about what we do. What sets us apart from the competition is that we're passionate about the products/services we provide and quality of support.

3. We welcome and act on your feedback. We're always looking to improve every aspect of our business. From more features all the way to more frequent tutorials.

4. Proven track record. We've gained a reputation as a reliable and honest company in the last eight years with most of our customers coming from referrals.

See full features at: https://www.todhost.com/web-hosting.php

Reseller Hosting in Nigeria - cPanel & WHM Packages

https://www.todhost.com/reseller-hosting.php

Todhost Reseller Hosting will help you start your own web hosting company in minutes! We give you technical support, provide you with all of the tools and 24/7 support

Shared plans for Web Hosting with Todhost

https://www.todhost.com/web-hosting.php

Web hosting in Nigeria with 99.99% uptime guarantee, unlimited bandwidth, Free script like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Drupal, OpenCart & 24/7 support

Web Hosting in Nigeria - Todhost Web Hosting

https://www.todhost.com/

Todhost is leading provider of top performance web hosting and domains in Nigeria with instant setup 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7 technical support

The dynamism of the internet is taking a new turn. The changes are becoming so significant that they could throw up new challenges and influence behaviors and the way traditional ranking algorithm have functioned. A new referral traffic report from Shareaholic indicates that in 2017, search accounted for a larger share of website traffic than social network visits. This will be upsetting a trend which had been observed and remained consistent since 2014. It will be the first time since 2014 search will be generating a larger share of visits over social. This throws up some food for thought especially for people whose focus and traffic sources had been the social media channels which had dominantly been Facebook and Twitter.

Read more at: https://www.todhost.com/announcements/46/Search-Perform-Better-Than-social-for-referral-traffic-in-2017.html

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-google-assesses-website-quality.html

If you have been following Google's news and reports as well as updates it has made to its search engine algorithm, you will agree that Google is definitely very serious about website Quality. Of course, Google wants its search engine to represent the best source for finding answers to problems and the only it can maintain its lead in the search engine world is to offer the best quality. Google itself has also provided a guide to what it consider as quality signals. Below is an extract from Google and contain the basic expectations for quality;

Basic principles

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
Don’t deceive your users.
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Think about what makes your website unique, valuable or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Specific guidelines

Avoid the following techniques:

Automatically generated content
Participating in link schemes
Creating pages with little or no original content
Cloaking
Sneaky redirects
Hidden text or links
Doorway pages
Scraped content
Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans or other badware
Abusing rich snippets markup
Sending automated queries to Google

Follow good practices like these:

Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears
Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-google-assesses-website-quality.html

folak48:
Please is WordPress the same as WordPress CMS?

Yes! It's a matter of your preference. WordPress is actually a Content Management System(CMS)

Common Problems with WordPress Websites and How to Fix Them

https://www.todhost.com/blog/common-problems-with-wordpress-websites-and-how-to-fix-them.html

If you have ever heard the saying that "Website Traffic Is Not The Key To Success" then you may not be unfamiliar with some of what we wiill discuss in this post. Yes, we do understand that website traffic is considered the single most important factor when it comes to the success of a website but that statement needs to be further clarified. Most certainly, traffic is the biggest desire of every website. But there are traffic that do not produce the best results - traffic that are not relevant to the industry and traffic coming from the wrong regions are certainly not likely to convert and be of benefit to a website. So, although it's true that a constant stream of traffic is the lifeblood of a website, the quality of the traffic is far more important than the volume of traffic coming to a website.


Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-guide-to-website-traffic-optimization.html

A key feature of our web hosting is the availability of site builder templates..For lots of web users, site builders make it easy to set up a new website by simply swapping content with theirs and a new website is created. We will in this post examine the key features and benefits of using site builder templates and how to optimize them for best performance. What Is Actually a Website Builder All About? When you are new to or learning how to setup your new website, there are lots of terms you will come across One of these is the "Site Builder". Quite ambiguous it is. You could very well know that you need a web hosting service and seeing that it comes with a site builder, you could be confused if it means someone will have to build your website for you or some auto-website builder that comes with your web hosting.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/website-builders-an-easy-way-to-launch-your-website.html

How to Reset WordPress Admin Password

If you forget your WordPress password, you can reset it in one of three ways:

Use the Lost your password link on the login screen
Reset your password through QuickInstall
Manually reset the password through the database with phpMyAdmin

Lost Your Password Link

Go to your login screen at http://example.com/wp-login.php (replace example.com with your actual domain and installation location).
Under the login form, click Lost your password.
Enter the username or email address of the account you're trying to log into.
Click Get New Password to have the password sent to your email address.

QuickInstall Password Reset

Log into cPanel.
Under Software/Services, click on QuickInstall.
At the top of the page, click My Installs.
Locate the installation you wish to modify.
Click Reset Password.
Select the username you wish to change the password for from the drop down box, then enter a new password.

Check out our guide on how to make a strong memorable password:
How Can I Make a Stronger Password?

Click the reset Password button to change the password for the selected user.

Manual Password Reset

Log into cPanel.
Under Databases, click phpMyAdmin.
Click on the WordPress database (if you installed this through QuickInstall, this will be named wrdp#) from the left panel list.
Click wp_users from the left panel list.
Under user_login you will see the list of registered users. Under the user whose password you wish to reset, click edit.
Under the user_pass column, clear the value on the far right and replace with what you would like the password to be.
In the Function drop-down menu, select MD5.
At the bottom of the page, click GO.

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-to-choosing-the-right-web-hosting-plan.html

In today's world, not having a website particularly for your business will be vied as a downside for your business. Although many businesses use a third party for their design and hosting, some companies still maintain an in-house I.T department that take charge of their websites. Whichever is the option you take, you must decide on a web hosting plan or package for your website. Your ultimate decision about the appropriate website hosting plan is affected by a lot of factors which include whether you’re launching a new website or thinking about switching to a new plan for the one you already have. The decision can be a difficult one for starters especially as there are lots of web hosting packages coming with different types features that it’s hard to truly understand and for a starter, can make a decision hard to reach.


Read full blog post at https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-to-choosing-the-right-web-hosting-plan.html

YouTube is the Internet's biggest video sharing channel. It is big business offering lots of opportunities for its users and presenting a good window for business growth for its teeming users.

Current statistics show that over a billion people use YouTube. That puts YouTube as a very valuable channel accounting for about one-third of the world's internet users. This is why YouTube remains and will continue to be a big opportunity for business, not just for Google, the owners of YouTube but for every other user of the website. We also use YouTube and you could also be one of the users of YouTube. Do you remember the adverts you view on YouTube videos. Google places those adverts and so make lots of money from the video ads. YouTube pays out huge amounts yearly to video content creators. Over $2 billion has been paid out by YouTube to content creators and rights holders. You can also join the ranks of those enjoying these benefits offered by YouTube. This article will take you through how you can be part of those making money from YouTube.

Fead full article at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-detailed-guide-on-how-to-monetize-your-youtube-account.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/tips-and-tricks-to-help-you-run-a-professional-joomla-website.html

Joomla offers a number of great functionalities to make easy, your website development process. Given the loads of plugins, modules and components that run on a default Joomla installation, these functionalities can sometimes be overwhelming and cause you to miss out on some of the lovely and very exciting features offered with Joomla which actually makes you a Joomla professional developer.

Read full blog post here: : https://www.todhost.com/blog/tips-and-tricks-to-help-you-run-a-professional-joomla-website.html

Best Comment Plugin for WordPress Websites

If you run an interactive website or blog like WordPress, then allowing visitors to leave comments on our posts is something you will conside to do especially if your blog traffic is growing. There are several reasons for this and we will consider those in greater detail later. Blog comments do have advantages just as they also have disadvantages and can actally hurt your website SEO efforts. Blog comments not only help you engage with your readers, they can be quite helpful for your site rank too just as when abused can also hurt your site ranking on Google too.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/best-comment-plugin-for-wordpress-websites.html

Analytic tools help you understand your website, how well it is performing on the key metrics and gives you a good guide on how your visitors are relating with your website. Audience understanding is imperative to make the best of your website. If you want to make your blog better, learning more about your audience is imperative. You can figure out what content they like the most, where your traffic is coming from, and whether your blog is growing in the right direction..With Google analytic, you can determine the amount of traffic you have received in a particular week compared to the previous week and compare your website bounce rates relative to a previous period. All of these give your a good idea of how visitors are relating with your website and how certain posts are performing.

For instance, the bonce rate statistics can help you determine posts that your users love just as the page views also give you an idea of post they read more.. Analytics help you improve user friendliness and thereby enhance your website performance and ranking with Google.

Read full article at; https://www.todhost.com/blog/best-google-analytic-plugin-for-wordpress.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/the-most-common-reasons-why-your-website-can-be-penalyzed-by-google.html

If you take your website seriously, then you are likely to be concerned about its ranking in the Google search engine. Statistics have shown that the search engine result pages build more traffic than that gotten from advertisement.

But search engines themselves have become very sensitive and complex with increasing focus on quality and user experience. These had been achieved through various changes to the search engine algorithm. To be loved by search engines, you need to keep up not only with what the search engines love but also be aware and avoid what they do not love. Getting good traffic flow to your website boosts your Internet marketing campaigns just as location is to real estate. It's the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales and your being on the internet will definitely not be worth it.

Read fukk article at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/the-most-common-reasons-why-your-website-can-be-penalyzed-by-google.html

ICredit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-get-your-content-on-google's-featured-snippets.html

If you have been using Google search for a while, you would have noticed the shift from just being able to target the top spot to being in the Google featured snippet. Now getting the top position and the desired traffic is not just about the ranking in the top position in Search Engine Result Pages. It is also about being able to get featured by Google.

What Exactly Are Featured Snippet?

It will sometimes show up below ads, but most of the time it’s the very first thing on the page, drawing your attention away from the list of links that shows up below. That is why some SEO have referred to it as position zero(0). This position go by a number of names.. Like we mentioned just earlier, some SEO professionals call this “rank 0” since it goes above the #1 ranking spot in the Google search engine result pages.. Others call them answer boxes or instant answers or, featured snippets. Whatever you call it, being featured is the best position to attain. The featured snippet has in great way disrupted the traditional SEO and even though your website may not rank so well in the Google SERPs, being featured guarantee a steady and great inflow of traffic to your website.

Being presented as a Google featured snippet is extremely valuable for driving organic search traffic. According to Moz, studies show that click-through rates (CTR) increased by 6 percent, and others saw a 20 to 30 percent increase in traffic after their websites were featured as Google Snippets. So doing the best article that attracts Google to feature your post is the most rewarding outcome of your posts. The good thing is that any article can be picked by Google to be featured. You can’t pick and choose when your website will be featured.

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/how-to-get-your-content-on-google's-featured-snippets.html

Joomla 4 is expected in the middle of 2018. The Joomla 4 alpha 2 has already arrived. Users are peeking at the amazing core functionalities and features introduced with Joomla 4. Joomla is gradually evolving from version 2, and now Joomla 4 is on its way with improved quality and features. So, let’s have a close loo at what to expect in Joomla 4 and how they compare with previous releases.

Read more at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/major-features-and-improvements-in-joomla-4.html

Full blog post available at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/5-easy-on-page-seo-tips-that-yield-big-results.html

How a website ranks on Google will to a large extent determine the success of your website on the internet. Ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) generally is determined by the success of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To achieve good ranking, therefore, there are two critical areas of your SEO that significantly affect your suscess. One is on-page SEO and the other is off-page SEO. This post focuses on on-page SEO which itself involves a lot of things you can do on your website to improve ranking. Some of these things you can do are more difficult to do than others. In this post, we take a look at 5 easy-to-implement on-page optimization tips that can be beneficial and boost the ranking of your website. But before we move on to discuss these important factors, let us give a brief background of search engine optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as "natural", "organic", or "earned" results. This is a very broad definition and do precisely explain the meaning of search engine optimization(SEO).

To achieve the desired outcome to positively improve the ranking of a website on search rngines, you can understand that there are two major tweaks to a website that will help. One will be what you do on the website to boost its quality and enhance its ranking. The other are the things you do on the internet, not on the website you intend to rank, which also boost the ranking of the website. The former is refered to as on-site or on-page SEO while the later is referred to as off-site or off-page SEO. Now let us look at the on-page techniques you can easily implement to gain rankings on Google and other search engines.

Also read: OnPage SEO Guide for Top Search Engine Ranking

1. Improve your website speed

Google love fast loading websites. Fast web pages are also good for your website visitors. If you want to get good raning in search engines, you need to work on your website load time. The speed of your website however does not only depend on your optimiation efforts, your server performance also play a role. If your server is overloaded, then there is little you can do to get the best performance. If your server loads fast however, then it will be possible to achieve faster loading web pages with some tweaks.

To impprove the speed of your website, the first thing to do is to check the speed of your website. Here are some tested tools good for checking your website speed

Google PageSpeed Insights

GTMetrix

Google Mobile Speed Test

Pingdom

There are other tools which can be used to test the speed of your website but these ones are sufficient. Once you are able to determine the speed of your website, you can then measure the performance of your optimization efforts. Let's look at how to improve the speed of some popular tools used to build websites.

Full blog post available at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/5-easy-on-page-seo-tips-that-yield-big-results.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/announcements/45/Google-going-to-mark-all-HTTP-sites-as-not-secure.html

According to a blog post by Chrome security product manager Emily Schechter, Google will soon begin to mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”in Google Chrome.

Read full blog post: https://www.todhost.com/announcements/45/Google-going-to-mark-all-HTTP-sites-as-not-secure.html

If you are new to web hosting, considering to get a web hosting account or thinking of changing your current web host, then there are some important and critical factors to consider in the process of taking a decision. This are not easy decisions to take because most web hosting services are similar in many ways - they offer a price that are truly very competitive and closely within the same range, most of them run on cPanel, they run similar applications and so on. However, there are several other factors that make web hosting services different. So, before you decide on the choice of web hosting, there are some core features that distinguishes a good web host and will help you make a choice you can't regret. Let's take a look at these critical factors:

Read full blog post: https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-features-every-businesses-should-take-seriously.html

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-guide-on-how-to-design-your-website-by-yourself.html

Let us assume that you have gotten a web hosting package that suits your need. The next thing will be to design your website and launch your dream on the internet then begin to take steps to drive traffic to the site. Getting a web hosting package that will support your site involves deciding on the domain name also. Many will think that the choice of domain name do not matter. It actually does to a large extent.. So the first thing to do is to register a search engine friendly domain name and then proceed to design your site to be hosted on your hosting plan.

Much of your success will again depend on the power of your website. In this post we will give you some suggestions on how you can put up a powerful and rewarding website for yourself. Let's look into the quick and easy ways you can create your own website.

1. Building your Website from Scratch

When you choose to build your website from scratch, you choose your own domain name based on your ideas or your business name. You plan the layout of your website, decide on the site navigation and the main menu layout. After that, you start doing the technical aspect, which is coding. If you are not good at coding, you can rely on one of the popular template-based designs or use our QuickInstall software or Softaculous software to quickly install your website.

The beauty of the 1-click installs is that it sets up a complete website for you without your writing a single code.. But you will still need to fully customize your installation add your content to it and you may also want to change your template to add beauty to your website.

It’s like hiring an interior designer to help you design your available space and then employing some contractors, who will work to bring those ideas to life.

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/a-guide-on-how-to-design-your-website-by-yourself.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/seo-lessons-from-google%E2%80%99s-john-mueller.html


Learning from Google is definitely learning from the masters. Google dictates the tune as far as Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is concerned and so when Google speaks in favour of anything all SEO efforts favour that thing. In a thread in an online forum, a user complained about being listed last for keywords she once listed highly for. Google’s John Mueller answered her and here is what Mueller had to say:

1. Website migration takes time

The webmaster made a lot of changes on the website. John Mueller said that a clean website migration takes time, and that you should aim for the final result. All changes should be consistent.

“You’ve made considerable changes with the collection of sites, some of the domains redirect, not all of them do though. This kind of site-merging will always take time, but you make it significantly harder by not doing the merge consistently or cleanly. Redirect them all, set canonicals, crawl all of your old domain URLs to check, etc. A clean migration takes time, a hacky migration with an attempt to get short-term advantages will just take much longer. Aim for the final result.

In effect John Mueller is saying that you must be patient to see the effect of the changes you make to your website. He is also saying that frequent changes to certain portion of your website including title and description changes, redesign and redirects can have profound effect of website performance on search engines. We have experienced this on Todhost website with frequent changes to metatags and redesigning which eventually turned counter productive. John Mueller is recommending that you give time for SEO changes to impact on site performance. A few notes are worth our emphasis here:

Read more: https://www.todhost.com/blog/seo-lessons-from-google%E2%80%99s-john-mueller.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/the-keys-to-high-rankings-in-google's-local-results.html

Google is encouraging being listed in local searches. So depending on what you do, being listed in Google local results can be profitable and less stressful in getting higher ranking in Google. Google's local results use a different ranking algorithm than Google's organic results. So how can you make sure that Google will list your website? What are the things you need to do to improve your rankings in the local results?

What is Local Search

There are three ways to understand local search. These definitions will guide our discussions and the context in which we will use the word "Local Search" in this post

Local search is any search aimed at finding something within a specific geographic area. Example: “hosting in Port Harcourt.”
Local search is seeking information online with the intention of making a transaction offline. Example: “MTN sim replacement center in Lagos.”
Anything that you would traditionally look for in the printed yellow pages becomes a local search when it is conducted online. Example: “Business Center on Kaduna street Abuja.”

Why Is Local SEO Important?

According to a study released by Chitika, more than 60 percent of traffic share (clicks on a search page) are attributed to the first three search results in Google. Take a look at a full breakdown of the top 10 Google organic listings and their average traffic share:

#1 – 32.5%
#2 – 17.6%
#3 – 11.4%
#4 – 8.1%
#5 – 6.1%

#6 – 4.4%
#7 – 3.5%
#8 – 3.1%
#9 – 2.6%
#10 – 2.4%

The implication is that a top three ranking on Google could mean much even if it is for a local search. Therefore, investing in local SEO increases your business’s chances of ranking within the top three results for the search.

How Does an Optimized Local SEO Appear on Google?

Read more: https://www.todhost.com/blog/the-keys-to-high-rankings-in-google's-local-results.html

Read more: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/831/Magento-Website-Security-Tutorial.html

Website security is crucial not just for Magento but also for every other website and every platform. Getting to see one's website being used for phishing, spamming or some other unwholesome activity is one thing so unpleasant a website owner wouldn't want to see. Website security must be taken very seriously.

This post puts you through the details of how you need to secure your Magento website and this involves taking some simple steps.

Change the default username and simple password
Customize the path to your admin panel
Use two-factor authentication
Make a use of secure FTP
Use Trusted Magento Extensions Only
Backup Your Magento Store Regularly
Update your web store on a regular basis
Use Encrypted Connection (SSL/HTTPS)
Create a whitelist of selected IP addresses
Prevent MySQL injection

Read more: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/831/Magento-Website-Security-Tutorial.html

The beauty of content management systems (CMS) is the limitless power to extend its power and functionality. In WordPress, this is achieved through the use of plugins. Without plugins Wordress would not be such a favourite application. Today WordPress is the world's most popular web development tool. The reasons why WordPress is preferred by many abound and the limitless application to which this software can be put is made possible through plugins developed by an active support community.

Notwithstanding the enormous power of WordPress, using it comes with some risks especially when care is not taken with plugins usage. In this post we cover the most important things to keep in mind when using WordPress plugins. The advice provided here will be useful to keep your website secured from external exploitation

Read more: https://www.todhost.com/blog/recommended-tips-to-keep-in-mind-when-using-wordpress-plugins.html

Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/best-slider-plugins-for-wordpress-websites.html

Using sliders are a great way to build an appealing website. We have seen tons of sliders some have very appealing look and when we come across some great sliders, we are persuaded to go for them and purchase for our projects. WordPress as we know depends on plugins for its aesthetics and sliders are just one of those applications that add value to a WordPress website.

To begin with, what are the features that make a great slider? The answer will vary with respondents and may be countless. A good slider should however have these features:

Smooth animated effects
Parallax layers
Quick image uploading
Stylish fonts and buttons

Not all of these features will appeal to you but they will one way or the other influence the decision of a purchaser or user. In this post we have put together a list of the best slider plugins we think you should consider for your WordPress website. Here we go.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/best-slider-plugins-for-wordpress-websites.html