₦airaland Forum

Welcome, Guest: RegisterLoginWith GoogleTrendingRecentNew

Stats: 3,331,172 members, 8,448,969 topics. Date: Tuesday, 21 July 2026 at 07:35 AM

Toggle theme

Todhost's Posts

Nairaland ForumTodhost's ProfileTodhost's Posts

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 (of 20 pages)

WebmastersA Checklist Of Bad SEO Practices To Avoid by todhost(op): 11:44am On Nov 02, 2017
Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/223-a-checklist-of-bad-seo-practices-to-avoid


For every website owner, discussing SEO is never enough and can never be too much. Search engine optimization, or SEO is something you learn continuously and built on experience. Moreover, the way the search engines behave is constantly changing and so experiments and changes continue on websites and the SEO world.

It is an often-discussed topic among website owners. Most owners engage in positive forms of SEO, such as improving their website's content, making it load quicker, and having quality link back to it. However, there are techniques that are known as negative SEO. These can work against an individual who uses them expecting them to bear fruit or can be used by unscrupulous individuals to tank a rival's search engine rankings.

It's rare that negative SEO attacks will be used against you by malicious actors, but it is important that you refrain from doing anything that will hurt your own rankings. Here are some common techniques that inexperienced website owners may try, only to harm themselves.

Keyword Stuffing

Don't shove keywords into your content just to get search algorithms to pick them up. Doing this usually makes your content difficult to read or appear spammy and unprofessional. Using this article, for instance, constantly repeating 'negative SEO every other paragraph would do more harm than good. Instead, use your keywords primarily in the titles and perhaps an introductory section, then let the content flow naturally.

Above the Fold Ads

If your website relies on advertisements, make sure to place them so they aren't the first thing your visitors see. Google wants visitors to instantly see the content they came for, so most of the screen space visitors view when the page loads should not be dedicated to ads. If they have to scroll to get to content, it's not good.

Spam Links

It may seem like a good idea to include a link to your website in your signature every time you post a comment on a blog, a forum, or other place which is crawled by Google. But while this can get a few people to click through to your site, particularly if your comments are high quality and relevant, posting everywhere may make your site appear to be spamming links.

Too Much Guest Blogging

While writing the occasional content for a well-regarded website and including a link to your site in the article is good, constantly guest blogging just for the links will likely not help. Instead, you'll be churning out content or even reusing content, which is frowned upon by Google.

Buying Links

It may be tempting to pay someone to provide you with numerous links to your site. However, these link farms often use many of these bad tactics listed here to generate a brief boost in your SEO that will quickly cause it to crash once the algorithm catches on to what they're doing. It may provide short term results, but will leave you with long term problems.

Anchor Text

When providing links to your site, don't include the keywords you want to rank for as part of the text (for instance, linking your baseball card blog with the words baseball card blog). Instead, use only the URL, the actual name of your site, or longer phrases.

Outgoing Link Overload

Many people like to provide links to the numerous websites they enjoy, particularly if those sites offer reciprocal links back. However, if you have too many outbound links, it may appear your site is just a link farm for other sites. Plus, link exchanges (where several sites all link to each other) are frowned on by Google. Be reasonable with the numbers you use and you should be fine.

WebmastersSEO Effects Of Changing A Wordpress Theme by todhost(op): 4:22am On Nov 01, 2017
Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/221-seo-effects-of-changing-a-wordpress-theme


Changing a WordPress theme is a common and usual thing. If you use a free WordPress theme, then changing your theme is something you will most likely do quite often.

Website managers are concerned about the effects of changing and will often ask two questions:

Will it affect my site SEO?
Will it affect my site traffic?

The answer will be dependent on the situation. But we will attempt an answer from a more general perspective with regards to WordPress, SEO, and traffic.

Before we proceed, you need to understand some fundamental underpinnings:

Many WordPress themes come with built-in SEO options, and if you are using the theme's SEO feature, chances are high that your blog's SEO will be affected.
If you are using an SEO WordPress plugin to handle your blog's SEO, you are more likely to retain your overall SEO, but only if your new WordPress theme is SEO optimized.

How do You Manage Your SEO - Using The WordPress Theme or SEO Plugin?

Some WordPress themes can effectively handle your search engine optimization requirements.

The benefit of this is that you are not running an additional plugin which reduces your security risks. However, if are in the habit of changing their WordPress themes very often, it will be a good idea to let a WordPress plugin handle your blog’s SEO.

Using the default WordPress SEO functionality is good, however, using a plugin is better. You will better appreciate the power of an SEO plugin only after you use one and experience how it enhances your site's visibility in search engines.

The Free WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin is highly recommended for this purpose. This plugin is one of the best free plugins for WordPress you will find. It will let you handle your complete blog's on-site and on-page SEO. Shifting your SEO settings from your theme to this plugin is not a technically difficult thing to do and requires only to follow the steps and save the new settings.

However, changing a WordPress theme could create some issues and we will have to look at them in some slight detail.

Heading tag changes: This change can affect the header tags such as H2 tags for post titles, or the hyperlinking of page titles.

This will have some effect on your overall search engine ranking. You must have heard that Genesis & Thesis are two of the top SEO optimized WordPress themes. This is because their codes are clean, they use proper heading tags, and they take care of all small requirements for an SEO optimized theme.

When you are making a shift from a good theme to another good theme, you have less to worry about. But, when you make the shift to a brand new WordPress theme, chances are high that they are not as SEO optimized as the previous one. It could affect your rankings.

Changing themes will lead to loss of theme custom settings. When you make a theme change, it certainly affect your old custom settings.

When you change your old WordPress theme for a new one, you might end up losing theme-specific features. Either your new theme should offer such features, or you need to hire a WordPress developer to do the customizations for you. Moreover, all the themes are coded in certain ways and you will loose the theme specifics and customizations of your old theme

More specifically:

Some themes will load the content part first and then the sidebar.
Some themes load everything at once (which increases loading time).

Today, we know that the loading time of you're a website impacts search engine ranking, you can clearly determine if your ranking will be better or worse based on how much faster or slower your blog is loading.

Change WordPress Theme Without Losing Search Engine Ranking

This is achievable when the site SEO is managed with the use of a plugin. Please note that if you are changing your theme framework (Thesis to Genesis or anywhere else), you should first take a complete backup of your blog database and theme.

This is important so that if anything goes wrong, you can roll back to the point when your site worked well without issues.
Remember to migrate all SEO data to a plugin. WordPress SEO by Yoast, offers this feature internally, and you can quickly import all SEO data to the Yoast plugin. After this step, you can change your theme to any other theme without any effect on SEO.

Chosing Your SEO Friendly Theme

There are amazingly beautiful WordPress Premium themes out there. While they may look great and aesthetically pleasant in design, many of them lack basic SEO features. Pick a theme which is SEO friendly and has codes that are bug free.

Once you have shifted your WordPress theme, you can use tools like SEMRUSH or SEO spider to crawl your blog and see if there are any errors these crawlers can detect. If yes, then proceed tp make the necessary changes to your new theme or change your theme again and choose a more SEO friendly theme.

It\s a fact that when you change your theme, the crawling of your site might be affected. So a little change in ranking and traffic is usually obvious in most cases, though you can always fix any SEO issues with a proper site SEO audit. You will notice a slight drop in ranking withing the first three days, that should not make you panic. But after that, you will begin to experience a gain in ranking if you have configured your SEO settings better than the way they were before.

It is better that you to stick to one theme for a long time, as changing your theme regularly will affect the overall branding of your site. Moreover, most of the time you will not be able to immediately spot SEO changes which happened due to the theme change, so it may take some time to see any difference.

Other Considerations

Ensure that your chosen theme is compatible with the most recent version of WordPress.

Check the mobile friendliness to be sure you will not have to adjust the screen of mobile devices to be able to view parts of your website.

Test the CSS to ensure there are no errors that will affect your ranking. This is usually a function of those who coded the theme.

Remember, there lots of plugins that can help the performance of your WordPress website but do not forget to check the plugin reviews before you choose them. It will help protect you from security breaches to check up reviews before you decide on any plugin.

Let us hear from you, other considerations that are good when changing your WordPress theme.

WebmastersA Guide On How To Reduce The Downtime On A Wordpress Website by todhost(op): 3:29am On Oct 31, 2017
Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-tips/219-a-guide-on-how-to-reduce-the-downtime-on-a-wordpress-website

Downtime can hurt a website's performance in several ways. It can affect the reputation of the website and turn visitors away. High downtime for your website has disastrous consequences. When people click through to your site they want to be able to use it, but if it is offline your audience will quickly loose patience. So what can you do to reduce your WordPress website's downtime?

In this article we are going to discuss how downtime can negatively affect your WordPress website and how you can monitor your downtime to see if it's a problem. Critically, we are going to look at how you can improve your uptime to help make your site successful.

Why Downtime is Bad for Your WordPress Website

Common sense puts it that you don't want your site to be offline. Downtime will frustrate, confuse, and upset your visitors. When people try to access your site, they will have a goal in mind, that could be to be entertained, learning something new, or making a purchase.

If your website is offline, it can cost you returning visitors, new leads, potential clients, and sales. Downtime can also mean that your site loses credibility with your audience and within your market or industry. A site that has problems with downtime portrays an image of unprofessionalism and would not be a first choice for paying clients. It definitely wouldn't be considered to be a leader and authority in its field.

The other major reason that you don't want a problem with downtime is that Google, and the other search engines frown at it. Regular downtime will very quickly start to affect your ranking in the search engine results pages, and as we all know, the lower you fall the less traffic you will receive. Therefore, it's vital you do all you can to reduce your WordPress website's downtime.

Monitoring Solutions That Will Track Downtime

The first thing you need to know when considering how to reduce your WordPress website's downtime is just how much your site is affected by this problem. It may well be far more than you think.

One way to do this is to use a monitoring solution to see if, and when, your site is going offline. Here are a few options for measuring your WordPress website's downtime.

Jetpack

Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that has multiple uses and is worth installing on your site. One important part of Jetpack is its module Monitor, which can help track downtime for you.

Monitor will check you site every 5 minutes to see that it is online. If something goes wrong Jetpack will email you to let you know your site is down, and then again once it is back up and running. This will give you an accurate picture of when your site is offline and how long for each time.

Pingdom

Pingdom is a popular premium solution for those wanting a little bit more information about their sites performance. Pingdom provides uptime monitoring, using 60+ probe servers from all over the world to test your website up to every minute. If something breaks it immediately alerts you.

However, more impressively, Pingdom offers analytics to help you understand the root cause of each downtime issue. This means you can fix the problem and prevent it reoccurring, resulting in more uptime long term. Plus with the Pingdom Real User Monitoring plugin you can easily integrate Pingdom tools with your WordPress installation.

Choose a Web Host With a Good Reputation

Once you have an idea of how often your site is suffering from downtime then you need to start addressing the causes. Your web hosting could well be one of the problems so it is important that you entrust your site to a professional hosting company like Todhost that won't let you down.

Todhost Web Hosting Provides Reliable Uptime Guarantee

Todhost hosting plans that come with great technical support, powerful servers and an impressive 99.99% uptime guarantee. You might see that uptime and wonder why it's not 100% - that's because Todhost allows for up to 0.01% of your server time each month for maintenance.

Want to learn more about Todhost and all the features they offer with their managed WordPress hosting plans? Checkout our full hosting review.

Tips For Choosing The Right Hosting

When choosing a web hosting provider don't be swayed by the price or size of the outfit. It maybe a cheap deal, but if your web host can't guarantee uptime then your site will quickly be losing the money you saved on hosting.

Equally, just because a hosting solution is well known, it doesn't mean it is reliable. Even well-known hosts can have problems so do your research and check companies hosting reports before signing up.

Therefore, if you want to reduce your WordPress website's downtime investing in quality hosting is a great place to start.

Keep Your Site's Security Up to Date

One of the main ways your uptime can be effected is by security breaches. Issues with security can range from irritating viruses to your whole site being hacked, all which can increase your site's downtime rate dramatically.

There are many ways of improving the security on your WordPress site. At the most basic level, you should regularly change your passwords, update WordPress themes and plugins, and perform daily malware scans. However, investing in a WordPress security plugin is one of the best ways to keep your site safe and your downtime at a minimum.

Wordfence Security

The WordPress Wordfence Security plugin provides free protection for your site against hackers and malware. Its Web Application Firewall prevents problems before they happen and the Wordfence Scan will instantly alert you in the event your site is compromised.

There is also a premium version of this plugin, incorporating a range of extra high tech security technologies, like real-time threat defense. Free or premium, Wordfence Security is a great plugin to install if you want to keep your site safe and online.

VaultPress

VaultPress is a premium security and backup solution for WordPress sites. This powerful feature rich plugin will not only protect your site from all security issues big and small but it also offers protection if the worst was to happen.

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and your whole website had disappeared due to a security breach. Now we are talking about severe downtime, as you have to slowly but surely rebuild your site.

VaultPress enables you to backup your site and lets you restore it quickly and easily. Not only will you always have a workable copy of your site, but your uptime should never be seriously impacted.

he right backup plugin can greatly help reduce your WordPress website's downtime in the unfortunate event of your site being hacked or corrupted in some other way.

Maintenance and Optimization

As well as implementing a robust backup and restore process, it's important to carry out regular optimization and maintenance of your WordPress website, including its database.

You can find out more about how to keep your website running smoothly in our guide to optimizing the WordPress database and our beginner's guide to WordPress website maintenance.

And if this all sounds like too much work then you could always enlist the services of a professional WordPress support service and let them take care of reducing your WordPress website's downtime.

Final Thoughts

The importance of putting in the work to reduce your WordPress website's downtime cannot be underestimated. By choosing a professional web hosting service, monitoring your downtime, and keeping on top of your site's security and maintenance tasks you should be able to maximize your site's uptime.

This should result in better rankings in the search engines, happier visitors, and ultimately a more successful and better-performing website.

Does your website suffer from downtime? What do you think is causing it? Please let us know how you now plan to reduce your WordPress website's downtime in the comments below.

WebmastersRe: 9 Common Problems Of A Wordpress Website by todhost(op): 6:53pm On Oct 30, 2017
Thank you for all your comments. This article was not intended to discourage the use of WordPress or to run down that very powerful CMS. The fact is that each of the points raised here indicate a vulnerability for WordPress. The article is to guide you on what to avoid and what not to take for granted. All CMSs have downsides and you need to take the right steps to secure and keep them safe from attackers.

Hope you can now better appreciate this article.
Webmasters9 Common Problems Of A Wordpress Website by todhost(op): 3:23am On Oct 30, 2017
WordPress is the most popular Content Management System(CMS) used on the web today for creating powerful blogs and websites. It has lots of advantages and also have some disadvantages. The disadvantages often scare some persons who do not know how to cope with them and the run away from using WordPress to create blogs and for website development

Every content management system undergo some updates and upgrades released over time. The updates are usually designed to fix identified bugs and patch security issues. Some other bugs may take a long time to fix.

There are several WordPress bugs and which count as disadvantages which you will need to put into consideration when using WordPress for website development. You will need to understand how to address these bugs as you decide on the use of WordPress for your website development. Some of these issues include: translation, security, bad programming, support, bad default configuration, source code, customization, updates and resources.

Translation

One major problem with WordPress is the problem of translation. Most of the volunteers who are involved in WordPress do not have proper skills and expertise knowledge in the areas of translation. The volunteers involved in WordPress Anyone can be a volunteer, you only need a WordPress account and you can start translating from English into different languages without any restrictions.

Translators can do a very poor quality job and end up with very bad translations from English to foreign languages, turning the easy to use dashboard into non-sense admin area.

In some of the WordPress versions, especially the newest one, translations are incomplete. By updating the system, you might end up having your website in both English and the other languages you used before.

So if you need to build a website for a client who does not understand English, you rather do the translation and help the community out with your work, or you choose another method to build your website.

Security Problems

Security is a major concern in WordPress. One major concern is the brute force attack;. Btute Force Attacks occurs when someone tries to access the dashboard of your WordPress site or your FTP account by trying out different user names with different password combinations. If you choose a strong password and changed the default admin user name, you can reduce the chance of getting hacked, but there is no guarantee that you will always win.

Another big security hole is the quality and source of third-party themes and plugins which are made by both professional development companies and also by the hackers themselves. This underscores the need to carefully review the plugins before use and be sure that you confirm the credibility of the developer before implementing a plugin on your WordPress website.

These files are verified, but sometimes the developers can hide fishy code that will not catch the attention of the verifier. This has become a major security concern for WordPress.

These security problems cannot be resolved just with updates. They need to pay more attention on the themes and plugins that are being updated and verify the users who are doing it. Employing highly skilled programmers and WordPress expert to review the code could be a solution.

Bad Programming

The Core WordPress is developed by Automatic Inc, a professional web development company, who pay really close attention to details, most third-party plugins and themes are created by many other individuals and organizations who are, in some cases, really unskilled.

Not optimized code can not only slow down your site or cause errors, but can also be the back-door for a hacker to break into your site.

Lack of Support

Although there is an active and very large WordPress community providing support to users and developers and answering most of user questions, there are cases when you have to figure out things by yourself. The official WordPress support is represented by volunteer, plugin and theme developers, WP assistants or people from all around the world.

When buying a commercial theme or plugin, you will get a level of support from the company who sold it to you, but you might still have unanswered questions at the end of the day. You can also purchase WordPress support from different companies or buy guides to learn this system.

Default Configuration

To really be safe with WordPress, you need to tweak some default settings and secure your website, speed it up and make it really good for users. Basically when you install WordPress on your site, you will have to make some adjustments. For instance, you will have to activate SEF URLs for better SEO, so search engines such as Google can find your pages and content more easily. The visual editor might also cause problems for newbie users, because by default some important features are hidden, which the user have to figure out.

Source Code

WordPress gets regular updates but despite the frequent updates, there are still parts of the core where old PHP techniques are used for global variables, functions, and classes. WordPress produces bloated code with its WYSIWYG visual editor and you can easily see this when you write an article in the editor and then toggle to HTML editor where you can see the source code.

Some free themes and plugins have been found to have hidden codes and links to suspicious websites. When removing these codes, the theme and the whole website will stop working. In some cases the dashboard can also be affected, disabling the option to change the theme or modify your site as you wish.

Customization

For you to be able to implement some customization in WordPress, there is the need for some good knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You also need to understand the WordPress framework itself to be able to modify the files and functions to archive the results you want. SQL queries are also hard to customize because you need knowledge of MySQL and PHP or you need to hire a web programmer to make your website in WordPress so it is better to make one from scratch without using any CMS.

Updates

WordPress core gets a monthly update. But some plugins can have daily updates. Updating your plugins or theme every day can in such cases be frustrating. You don't have to do it, but it is recommended. However if you have already modified your theme or the plugins you are using, watch out, because the update will overwrite all your modified files. Will not create a backup or a copy of the files you have edited, so you will lose your modifications. In this situation you will need to live with the constant update notification.

Server Resources

WordPress websites use a huge amount of server resources because the core WordPress and third-party extensions includes a high number of PHP functions and SQL queries. There are problems regarding CPU usage and nobody seems to know the solution or even to identify the source of the problem. If you buy managed WordPress hosting some plugins that are heavy resource consumer are banned. So you will not be able to install the necessary plugins to your site, because your hosting provider will not allow that. Caching your website is one way to reduce resource usage by your WordPress website.

Conclusion

You now know some of the major problems associated with the use of a WordPress website. What is important here is that you should be able to have solutions to address these problems. These problems do not suggest that the WordPress CMS is bad. No, it is not bad. The fact is, that it is the best CMS around, and it is powering over 75 million websites world-wide. Its key plus is that it is very simple to use and is free.

However there are still some cases when you should not use WordPress for your project: if you want to create a simple website, which does not need to be updated. In this case you can create the site in plain HTML and CSS. You should not use WordPress for sensitive projects that need high security. You should also avoid using WordPress if you can't afford a reliable web host that supports WordPress Hosting.

WebmastersHow To Backup Your Wordpress Website Automaticaly Using Backup Plugins by todhost(op): 5:42am On Oct 29, 2017
Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/website-security/216-how-to-backup-your-wordpress-website-automaticaly-using-backup-plugins

Keeping a healthy backup for your website is a golden rule. You cannot run a website, especially a content management system, CMS. without maintaining a healthy backup. The emphasis on backup is not necessarily because something bad is sure to happen. It is a safeguard, a preventive measure to ensure that if something happens and you are unable to get an effective repair, there should be a backup to fall back on. Even though it is a week old, at least, you are not made to start all over.

You will find a lot of WordPress plugins in the WordPress plugin directory but not all of them are so effective to do a complete backup for your website. If fact, you will discover that only very few can effectively deliver a complete backup for a website. A complete backup will involve taking backup of plugin, themes, backup wp-content folder. Moreover, it's always recommended to automatically backup WordPress to make sure; you have most recent version of backup available for your website or blog.

Why backing up your WordPress blog is important

If you rely on your web hosting company and fail to maintain a backup, then you will be making a mistake. We recommend that you always maintain a healthy backup and here are the reasons why:

Hackers can bring down your website

Hacking is not a new word for anyone who is knowledgeable about the internet. It is common to hear of hackers. Most hackers will target sensitive information like credit cards while most hackers simply want to prove their skill and ability to hack. The majority of hacker attacks on small, simple and small business websites are just to cause trouble. The only guarantee to be sure you can recover or fix your hacked WordPress website and to protect your website from further security hacks is if you have a healthy backup available. For as long as your website on online, there are chances that it can be attacked and compromised. The safe way to go is to maintain a backup.

Computer Related Problems

Having a copy of your website stored on your local machine is a good idea. But computers can crash and the data may not be recoverable. In that case and to be double sure of having a secured backup, backing up remotely is a safer option.

Issues with your updates

WordPress websites undergo regular updates. It has become a source of worry for most WordPress users to have issues with their websites after an update. This is why WordPress always tells you to perform a backup before updating. WordPress websites have multiple components, including plugins, themes, software, and back-end programming. An error during updating can take off the entire website from the internet, Only a backup can serve as an easy recovery measure for website owners who are not so good at understanding WordPress recovery techniques.

Malware and Viruses

Malware and viruses are a major concern and can lead to a serious penalty from your hosting company. They can find their way into your website even through third parties. You can download them unknowingly with a theme or plugin, Having backup files means that you'll be prepared just in case your site starts acting weird.

Employee Errors

This is commonplace and happen even with the most skillful website managers. A slight distraction can cause a code error and you may never be able to detect where the mistake was made. We all make mistakes. You can even erroneously click a button that deletes a file and cause a major damage. You can even empty a content into the wrong folder and cause a serious conflict. All these could just happen by accident and one way to recover fast is to have a healthy backup in place.

Important Files to backup in WordPress:

Though you can configure a full website back for your WordPress website. Technically, you require to backup just two elements of your WordPress website - the Database and the Files.

Database: This contains all your posts/pages, comments, categories, tags, theme settings, plugin settings, WordPress settings, user accounts and every URLs/links you have on your site.

Files: The WordPress files will need to be in the root of your domain, typically the public_html folder. It consist of three folders called wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes plus a few other configuration files and a .htaccess file. The wp-content is a very important folder for your site which contains all your images/uploads, plugin files, theme files, and additional files created by plugins.

Generally speaking, the Database and the wp-content folder are the two most important part to be backed up on a regular basis. With your wp-content and database file, you can restore or migrate your site.

Trusted WordPress Backup Plugins

1) VaultPress

VaultPress is the backup solution by Automattic (theParent company behind WordPress). This solution is perfect to take backup of 1-2 blog, and will not be very good for a website with multiple blogs because of the cost of running it for multiple blogs.

2) UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration

This backup solution works for multiple WordPress backup and is a very popular WordPress backup solution. This comes in two version: Lite (Free in WordPress plugin repo) and the Premium Version

Updraftplus is the most popular backup solution for WordPress. It offers all the features which you would need to backup your WordPress blog. It offers more than just backup, as using the cloning migration feature, you can easily migrate one WordPress site from one host to another.

What make this plugin stand out is the variety of options for backup. With UPdraftPremium, you will also be getting free 1GB of space for UPdraftPlus Vault, which is their cloud storage.

3) ManageWP Backup

Good for multiple WordPress site, ManageWP is also popular and it is easy to optimize, update & track all your blog from one dashboard.

ManageWP offers real-time protection as it offers incremental backup. That means, instead of taking complete backup every time which slows down our server, it takes backup of only those files which are changed & is uploaded to their cloud storage infrastructure.

One key and very exiting about ManageWP is that it can be used by even the least knowledgeable user as does not require any skill to configure configuration. You only need to enable or disable it. You have the option to take a backup using Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, One drive or ManageWP cloud infrastructure.

There are other free and premium WordPress backup solutions including:

1. BackUP WordPress (Free)

2. Dropbox backup & restore (Supports only Dropbox is free)

3. BackupBuddy (Pro)

However, the three(3) we have examined above are the best solutions for WordPress backup and will server every need.

WebmastersHow To Revert Back To A Previous Version Of Joomla by todhost(op): 2:10am On Oct 28, 2017
Credit: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/812/How-to-Revert-Back-to-a-Previous-Version-of-Joomla.html


Website upgrade is a common practice. Keeping up with the latest version of your content management system or website software is a good security measure as it ensures you are dealing with latest security bugs and keeping up with the latest features. But sometimes you decide to upgrade your version of Joomla, and then after the upgrade is done, your website becomes completely unusable or some of its features become broken.

Why does that happen, and how to revert back to a previous version of Joomla to undo the upgrade. That will be the focus of this post which essentially will take us the process of reverting back to a previous version of Joomla after you have had some issues with functionality following an upgrade

Why a Joomla upgrade might break your website

There are several reasons that are behind this, and they mainly are:

1.You have modified the core of your Joomla website: Many website owners modify the core of their Joomla website (or have it modified) in order to add some custom functionality. While this can be necessary, it should be avoided when possible. Only modify the core of your Joomla website when there is no other alternative. Note that in most cases there is an alternative! 99% of the very complicated work on a Joomla website can be done using extensions. You will rarely find any need to modify the core. And, in the very rare cases whereyou have to, it will be good to make changes compatible with future upgrades.

2. You have installed an extension that is not compatible with your current version of Joomla: When you do an upgrade, sometimes a 3rd party extensions can be incompatible with your current version of Joomla, and if this extension is a System plugin that runs on every page, then most likely your page will either show a blank page or will display a fatal error (at best your page will display a warning). There are also cases where an existing extension is not compatible with an upgraded version and it creates problems. So before an upgrade, it is a good idea to check the versions to be sure they are compatible with the version you are planning to upgrade to.

3. You have uploaded the files to the wrong place: A Joomla upgrade usually consists of uploading specific files to specific directories. Sometimes the upgrade can consist of just uploading a couple of files to a couple of directories. What if, for example, you need (as part of the upgrade) to upload index.php to the administrator directory, and instead of uploading that file to the administrator directory, you uploaded it to the root directory of your website. Not a single page on your website will work (the index.php file that is located directly in the root directory of your website is used on every page on the frontend of your Joomla website). You will, in such cases, simply locate the newly uploaded file and delete it or simply move it to the proper directory using your file manager.

4. You haven't finished uploading the files, but you thought you did: As stated above, a Joomla upgrade consists of uploading several files. What if the upgrade consisted of uploading 5 files and you uploaded only 4, and what if the file that you missed is used by those other files? At worst, all of your website will stop working and at best, some of your functionality on your website will be broken. This creates corrupt files on your server and will need a complete re-upload or you find a way to resume upload and complete it.

How do you revert back to a previous version of Joomla

Once you notice that the upgrade has broken your website, you realize it is big trouble and have to think of a way out. Chances are that you could think there is no way out and so your next step could be to delete the entire files and re-upload Joomla afresh.

No! You will have to try out some of our suggestions and see how you could fi things up. If every other efforts fail, then you can consider a new upload.

It is important that when this kind of error occurs, you don't panic. Please stay calm and carefully look at the options to fix the problem by reverting back to a functional state.

Well, the easiest way to revert back to a previous version of Joomla is to just go back to a previous filesystem backup. But even that can be tricky, especially if the upgrade has modified both your file system and your database. So, if you do have backups, then it's always better, when reverting to a previous filesystem backup, to revert back to a database backup that was generated the same day the filesystem backup (that you're using) was generated. It is for this reason that we emphasize the need for regular back. In fact, we will advice that you need not embark on any upgrade without having a safe backup. Having a backup is just in case something goes wrong.

Now, what if you don't have any backups?

This is when this can quickly become very challenging. When you uploaded the files, you have erased the previous versions of the files. So, the first thing that you should do is the download the previous Joomla version (the one that you had before the upgrade), and then replace the files that you have already uploaded with the files from this (previous) Joomla version. Once you do that, two things might happen:

Your website will return to its previous working state. If that happens, then you need to congratulate yourself. You have done things right and deserve some commendation.

The second thing that could happen is that your website will show different errors. In this case, it's because the database was updated using that upgrade. You will need to contact Joomla experts at this point because it'll be really hard to fix these errors without a backup (and you will need programming and MySQL skills to fix them).

What if it is a migration?

So far, we have been talking about reverting back to a previous version of Joomla if it's an upgrade. But if the error had occurred in the course of doing a migration, then it is a real big problem and in that case, there is no other way but to revert to a previous backup (a migration is a destructive process as it consists of recreating the site from scratch), and if you don’t have any previous backup, you will need to contact a Joomla expert or developer to help revert your Joomla website back to an earlier date. Handling migration issues requires a lot of experience and professional expertise to work on the databases and fi things up.

Best practices when upgrading your Joomla website or migrating your Joomla website to another version.

Here are some best practices when upgrading or migrating to another Joomla version:

Backup your database and your filesystem just before doing the upgrade or the migration.

Create a copy of your database (using phpMyAdmin) and create a copy of your actual website under an previous directory (so, in other words, you should upload all the files for your website to that previous directory, which should be located directly under the root directory). Change the configuration.php file in your directory to point to the copy of the database (not the original database).

Avoid using Akeeba backup. Akeeba backup is one extension that you will only know it's useless when it's too late. This is because in order for Akeeba Backup to work, your website must be functional (which defies the whole point). In many cases, people revert back to previous versions of their websites when their websites no longer work.

If you have problems with your upgrade/migration, then reverting back simply consists of doing a simple redirect in your .htaccess file to yourjoomlawebsite.com/previous, and that's it! So, in case you have problems, you need to add the following lines to your .htaccess file:

rewritecond %{http_host} ^yourjoomlawebsite.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourjoomlawebsite.com/previous/$1 [r=307,nc]

Once you add the above lines to your .htaccess file, upload it to your website, and your website will now work!

Although the website is working, it's working out of the previous directory. We want to make it work out of the root directory, so here's why you need to do:

Delete the original database, and then re-create the original database from the backup.

Delete all the directories in your website's filesystem (with the exception of the previous directory, of course), and then re-upload them from the backup.

Roll back the changes you did on the .htaccess file and then upload it back.

Your website should now work well without issues.

You now have to delete the previous directory, you don't need it anymore.
WebmastersRe: $1 Unlimited Hosting - One Dollar Hosting – Visualwebtechnologies.com! by todhost(m): 8:29am On Oct 27, 2017
WebmastersDominant Search Engine Optimiation Practices For 2018 by todhost(op): 5:02am On Oct 27, 2017
Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/211-dominant-search-engine-optimiation-practices-for-2018

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is ever changing and have proved to be far more beneficial than advertising and other online marketing methods. With Google rolling out more frequent and complex updates, SEO will significantly shape the future of many companies. Google is constantly pursuing a better search experience. Focusing more on user experiences. The result had been the changes to how they index and rank pages, resulting in changes to SEO.

It is likely that in 2018 and beyond, new tips and SEO practices will start emerging. In this post, we shall look at some of the emerging SEO Trends expected 2018 and beyond.

Before we proceed to examine the upcoming SEO trends for 2018 and beyond, let us delve briefly into some background understanding of SEO.
WebmastersAutomatic Update In Wordpress by todhost(op): 11:42am On Oct 25, 2017
Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/810/Automatic-Update-in-WordPress.html



WordPress will by default update itself when a security or minor release is available. For major releases, you have to run the update yourself. Plugins and themes also require manual updates. It is important especially for security reasons to keep your WordPress site updated. So also it is necessary to keep up with the latest version of plugins and themes installed on your website. You need to install updates for themes and plugins to get new features and bug fixes.

However, you may have noticed that some of them are updated more frequently than others. A lot of popular plugins are updated almost weekly

Two Different Update Types

Functional Updates

This type of update adds features and options to the WordPress core. It involves the major core updates. Functional updates are first offered as a beta and then the release version is made available.

Security Updates

This update type contains security or minor fixes that are set out to repair a vulnerability or bug in the WordPress core.

WordPress Automatic Updates

For some WordPress users, it is a bit disturbing, annoying and time consuming to always check up available updates regularly to be in tune with latest and up-to-date releases. They wish updates could be automated. But applying automatic updates to all plugins, themes and WordPress core may not always be a wise decision. Let's look at the pros and cons.

The benefits of automatic updates are glaring from the foregoing. Besides keeping you secure with the latest version of software, it save you times especially when you have to manage multiple websites.

Automatic updates also have its downside. Basically, if you fall into one of the following groups, you may not want to allow automatic updates:

1. You have made customizations to the core of WordPress website. Any automatic updates to those core files will override and erase those customizations.

2. If you run third party (non-official WordPress.or) themes/plugins on your website. You wouldn't want to run the risk of your site updating beyond the compatibility of your theme and plugins. That will break up your site and can lead to serious security breach. It can even bring down your entire website.

It will be a better option to setup WordPress to automatically install updates for WordPress core, trusted plugins, and themes.

Let's see how you can take total control of WordPress and minimize the time spent on installing updates.

Setting up Easy Updates Manager

First thing you need to do is to install and activate the Easy Updates Manager plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Dashboard; Updates Options page to set up the plugin.

Manage WordPress updates page

The plugin's settings page is divided into different tabs. You will land on the Dashboard tab which has three columns and two rows.

This page provides you quick access to turn off updates for WordPress core, plugins, themes, translations, etc. The default settings here are recommended for all WordPress site owners.

We strongly recommend not to turn off updates for WordPress core, plugins, or themes. It will seriously compromise your site's security and health.

Next, click on the General tab in plugin settings. This page provides you access to Enable or Disable WordPress updates globally on your site.

Global update settings

Setting Up Automatic Updates for WordPress, Plugins, and Themes. Easy Updates Manager allow you to quickly enable automatic updates for WordPress core, plugins, and themes.

Go to the plugin's settings page and click on General tab. After that scroll down to the automatic updates section.

Managing auto updates

Here you can quickly turn on automatic updates for Core, plugins, or themes. Simply click on enable and then click on save changes button to store your settings.

This plugin also allows you to selectively turn on automatic updates for some plugins or themes. If you would like to selectively turn on automatic updates, then click on Select Individually next to the Automatic Plugin Updates option.

Set Automatic Updates for Select Plugins and Themes

If you selected to individually enable automatic updates for few plugins, then you need to switch to the plugins tab under plugin settings.

Enable automatic updates for individual plugins

Here you will see a list of all plugins installed on your WordPress website. Below each plugin, you will find a link to enable automatic updates for that plugin.

Switch to the Themes tab, and you will see a list of themes installed on your site.

Select which themes to automatically update

Simply click on enable automatic updates for themes that you want to be automatically updated.

How to Rollback to a Previous Version of Plugin or Theme After Update

Plugin or theme incompatibilities is the major reason why some users are not willing to run automatic updates. Even though most good developers thoroughly test their plugins, there can still be bugs that can cause your site to break. It is suggested that you look up plugin reviews before you make a choice.

The first step you should take to protect your website is to install a WordPress backup solution.

However, restoring your WordPress site from a backup can be a lot of work. If you know what plugin or theme update caused the problem, then it would be easier to just rollback the update.

Here is how you can easily rollback plugin or theme updates.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Rollback plugin.

Upon activation, go back to the plugins page on your WordPress site. You will notice a new Rollback option below each plugin installed on your site.

Rollback plugin updates

Clicking on Rollback will allow you to rollback your plugin to any previous version you want. It can also rollback theme updates

Hope this was helpful. Please let us have your comments.
WebmastersA Review Of 4 Popular Joomla SEO Extensions by todhost(op): 3:20am On Oct 25, 2017
Read fug ppost at https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-tips/210-a-review-of-4-popular-joomla-seo-extensions

Joomla is the second most popular content management system (CMS) after WordPress, used for website development. It is robust, very flexible, secured and can be used to build websites ranging from the simplest to very complex websites. Joomla also has a large community of developers who support its users with components, plugins and modules. These three are simply called extensions and actually define the look and feel, the usability and functionality of a Joomla website.

Like other web-building software, Joomla is designed to be search engine friendly. It has its in-built Search Engine Friendly (SEF) capability, you have the option to turn on Search Engine Friendly URLs and can choose to add website branding or not. But beyond the in-built Joomla SEO capability, there are plugins which can boost Joomla's capacity to feature a website prominently on search engines. This post will look at five of those plugins, there pros and cons. They are actually applications that you cannot do without if you are to do well with Joomla in the highly competitive world of the internet.

Also read: Tested Tips To Increase Joomla Website Loading Speed

What is SEO

We will adopt the definition of Rand Fishkin which serves our purpose quite aptly. He defined Search engine optimization (SEO) as "the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of the traffic that you earn through the organic results in search engines".

This definition underscores three components: Quality of traffic, quantity of traffic and organic results. Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming to your site because Google search engine results presents you as a resource for web hosting when you are actually only involved on website hosting and not providing any learning resources, you will find that you get the traffic but they won’t be quality traffic. It is better to attract traffic who are interested in products that you offer.

Quantity of traffic. Having the right interests click your link from the search engine results pages (SERPs). Organic results. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for. These come from several sources including links and referrals.

Also read: How to Set Up Your Personal Blog With Joomla

Now that you know what SEO means, you probably have an idea on why websites should be properly optimized. Let's look at some of the gains of SEO and why it should be taken seriously.

Why is SEO important

In January 2016, I held a discussion with a the CEO and developer who manages a large company website. Neither he nor his employer believed in the power of SERPs and how it can turn round the business fortunes. Their focus was on developing modules and functionalities and leaving out a key aspect as SEO. SEO is important and will remain so. According to Google, 94% of all clicks accounts for organic search results and 90% of users never look beyond first page of Google.

Also read: How to Prevent Spam on Your Joomla Website

There are several reasons why you should continue to invest in SEO. We will take a look at some of them in this post.

1. It still works - Recent updates to the search engine algorithms have reduced the impact of old fashioned search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, like using keywords and link exchanges, notwithstanding, SEO still works and makes a huge difference. Meta data, including the title and headings affect rankings. Although Google claims that descriptions do not affect rankings, the fact that they still appear in search results is an indication that they still matter.

These statistics will tell you how much search engine results page (SERP) do matter today.

93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
90+% of searches are done on Google, Yahoo, or Bing, with Google getting 65-70% of all searches.
The first 5 listings on page 1 of search engine results is the hot zone - about 95% of searchers click in this area ONLY as it's considered the most relevant and trusted of all results. If you're not in the top 5, your listing is unlikely to get clicked.
75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results - if they don't find what they want there, they refine their search and try again.

Also read: Recommended Security Checks For Your Joomla Website

SEO techniques will continue to work, at least, it is not expected to stop working soon. Based on the way search engines appear to be evolving, it is not likely that SEO will cease to be effective any time in the foreseeable future.

2. It is cost-effective - When compared to the costs of other forms of online marketing such as PPC advertising, social media marketing, or purchasing leads for an email marketing program, SEO provides fairly good ROI.

3. Search engines generates greater market share - More customers now check online reviews prior to making a purchase, and this number is only expected to increase. It is estimated that between 70-80% of customers check online reviews before a purchase. It may not take so long before virtually everyone will be searching for products and services online.

3. Your competitors are doing it - Given that search engines generate more traffic than advertising, companies are competing for search engine positions and make continuous efforts to gain ranking positions. If your SEO efforts do not make you gain an improved position, then you are losing ground to a competitor. You can't let your competitors outsmart you and so you've got to make efforts to gain ranking positions.

4. SEO brings credibility to your business - When people make searches and find your business withing the top 10, first page, it is definitely a sign that Google is telling the customer to check out your page. That gives some credibility to your business. You may not know that ranking high is like getting an endorsement from Google but that is what you actually get with doing your SEO rightly and gaining ranks.

5. SEO brings business visibility and branding - People conduct searches not just once, find what they need and that is it. No! You will rather find that they refine their search terms, search over and over. Each of the results places the websites on their mind and if your website features prominently in the search outcomes, you will find that you will be gaining a higher level of mindshare. The implication of this is that if you can continually show in all these search results, you will continue to gain more and more mindshare with each potential customer. Chances are that they will eventually click through to your website, and since you are continually displayed in all their search results, they will trust you to some extent. That registers your brand as trusted and gives you good business through good visibility in the search engine result pages.

Also read: Web Hosting Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Indispensable Joomla SEO Plugins

Extension Overrides Joomla! core files which can break functionality Basic URL rewriting, no plugin obligation Generating URLs from backend automatically Static XML sitemap file Dynamic XML sitemap link Configurable internal links Social Bookmarks Unicode (UTF-cool URLs website
AceSEF No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Joomace
ArtioSEF No Yes No No No Yes - Yes Artio
SEFAdvance Yes No No No No No - Yes Sakic
sh404SEF Yes No No No No - - No SH04SEF


Overall, all five plugin do have great features and will serve the basic purpose of improving your site SEO. For any Joomla website that is serious about SEO, it has to use any one. They are great and I have seen them used on numerous websites particularly sh404SEF and AceSEF. I have used AceSEF quite often and on nearly all the Joomla websites I have developed.
WebmastersEnhance Your Search Engine Performance In Simple Steps by todhost(op): 6:33am On Oct 24, 2017
WebmastersRe: A Step-by-step Guide On How To Create A Wordpress Blog by todhost(op): 6:32am On Oct 24, 2017
Thanks for the lead. We will put that tutorial together.
cowleg:
Please teach how to install premium theme and the customization
WebmastersA Step-by-step Guide On How To Create A Wordpress Blog by todhost(op): 12:29pm On Oct 23, 2017
Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/205-a-step-by-step-guide-on-how-to-create-a-wordpress-blog

WordPress is a great and free publishing platform that can be used to create blog and its use had been extended to corporate websites and applications like social networking, real estate management and a lot of other uses.

WordPress is easy to use, and a fast and flexible script. It comes with some good features which makes user experience pleasant. With WordPress you can easily:

Publish and edit posts
Sort articles in categories
Search within your content
Manage users access
Change your website themes
and more .......

For you to automatically create your WordPress blog using the 1-click install tool in cPanel, this tutorial will guide you effectively on what you need to do to get your blog running. Let us get started with the required steps:

Domain name
Web hosting account
Blogging software

Step 1: Choose a right domain name for your Blog&

A domain name is essentially your web address that people will use to find your blog on the internet. With recent development on the internet, your domain name should reflect the niche you intend to blog for or the particular area you want to focus on in your blog posts. For example, ogoninews.com - one will expect that such blog will dwell mainly on Ogoni events and news stories.

There are few things to keep in mind before you rush out and purchase a domain name.

1. Make sure that there will be no legal problems with the domain name you choose. Ensure you do not choose a domain name that will later be placed under restrictions.

2: Register a Domain Name: Once you have chosen the domain name you want, it's time to get it registered with a reliable domain name registrar. Some web hosting companies offer free domain registration for every web hosting order. You will need to check if your hosting company can also provide the domain registration service.

To order web hosting and domain registration service with Todhost follow these steps:

1. Go to todhost

2. From the homepage, choose your preferred web hosting plan. You can click on the web hosting menu to view the detailed features of all web hosting plans to be able to know which plan will best suit your need.
3. Enter your domain name in the box after you click "get started and you will be able to know if it is available for registration. You will not be able to proceed with the new domain registration option except the domain is available.
4. Choose the duration for which you want the hosting. It could be for 1 year, 2 years or more.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions and complete your web hosting order.
6. Complete the form required for your billing information.
7. Proceed to complete your order and may applicable payments. Once you pay for your web hosting order, your account will be created for you almost immediately. Once your account is created, you will receive an email titled: new account information; which will contain details of your account including username and password for your cPanel account. With those details, you will be able to login to control panel and install WordPress.

Now that you have your domain name and hosting account, the next step is to install WordPress. You will find the 1-click install under the software section of your website. On Todhost, it is listed under QuickInstall. Remember, this will be under the software section in cPanel. You can also find this tool under Softaculous.

WordPress is a software that helps you create and manage your own blog or website.

To install WordPress with QuickInstall, follow the steps below.

1. In your cPanel, click on the QuickInstall or Softaculous under the software section of your website.

2. Click the Install button to begin the installation process.

3. Choose the domain you want to install WordPress on (you can leave the directory field blank if you want to install in the root folder or enter the directory name to install in a sub-directory or folder). I always prefer to use the www version of domain.

4. Continue with the install and follow the on-screen instructions. Watch your WordPress install successfully and the admin details sent to the email address you entered as you performed the installation.

These login information will be used to login to the backend of your WordPress blog. So it's a good idea to save these details somewhere safe. You will also receive an email with your login information as soon as the installation is complete.

Congrats, you can now access your WordPress dashboard by going to yourdomain.com/wp-admin in your browser.

What's next?

Wait, you're not yet ready to start working on content. There are still some checklist of things you need to do after installing WordPress to improve the user experience and the SEO of your website or blog.

If you have any questions with this process, feel free to leave a comment below and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
WebmastersA Guide To Manage Google Algorithm Changes by todhost(op): 9:11am On Oct 22, 2017
Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/204-a-guide-to-manage-google-algorithm-changes

The internet has changed significantly and so have the signals that determine search engine ranks. We recently made changes to our website title. Some two years ago, such change would have affected our search engine ranks but today, it does not really cause any ranking gain. The fact is that titles are now expected to be more related to page content and not just built around keywords.

We've got to change our strategy and do so very fast following emerging guidelines and indicators that the recent changes to Google's algorithm are pointing us to. So be careful with tweaking critical content like page title, description, main menu titles, other menu titles and description. They add up to how Google accesses your website friendliness and usability.

An algorithm change can create a major upset and force a radical change to how pages and content are constructed. That's the dynamism of the internet and sets us on the path to thread cautiously. We must keep in mind that changes to the search engine algorithm is continuous. One thing that seems constant is the focus to improve user experience. If you keep your content development efforts on improving user benefits, you are not likely to get a penalty even with future update to the search engine algorithm.

You may be struggling to recover from a past penalty and drop in ranking. We have once suffered a heavy rank loss in Google search engine. Dropping from top 5 position and going down to 32 for a very relevant keyword.. That was because we frequently fiddled with metatags at a time it played very important roles and hoped that those changes will force Google to re-access our page and push it up. It worked but when the penalty came, it was also huge. That was the lesson that got us to know that there can be penalties for some things. We began to learn about the best and acceptable practices and have since moved up steadily. Slow and steady is the way to go. Never be in a hurry, stick to the rules and work with the advice of reputable SEOs, that will bring you eventually to a winning position.

In this article, you'll find very useful guidelines that will help you avoid a penalty and also help your recovery if you are suffering a Google penalty. The focus of this writing is on Google from 2015. We shall be looking at the last four big algorithm updates from Google and lay out a strategy for dealing with the damage.

Let's look at them one after the other.

1. RankBrain, 2015
RankBrain signaled the introduction of advanced machine learning into the search algorithm. This algorithm uses advanced features of artificial intelligence, working with data from users, trends, queries, and other input sources to understand websites.

Google have clearly made known, the impact of this change and how it is used to process a very large portion of the search volume it receives.

RankBrain had been around for a while and now dictates the results of the search algorithm. The impact of RankBrain is very significant and is reported to be impacting about 15% of all queries. This is a huge figure. Keep in mind that a previous change (Panda 4.0, May 2014) affected only 7.5% of English-language queries.

What Impact Did RankBrain Have

Though very massive, RankBrain's SEO collateral damage has been pretty low. The algorithm isn't trying to regulate the ranking of existing websites, rather, it is focused on interpreting user queries. The biggest impact of the algorithm change is an upside for users. Users who input ambiguous or more natural human language queries can expect to get more relevant results.

How to Repair a Damage from the Algorithm Change
You may or may not have had any damage from RankBrain. Whichever may be the case, these suggestions are good to keep you on the advantageous position and to help a speedy recovery from a hit if there be any. You accomplish this by:

Creating the best user experience possible. Make your website easy for user navigation and for them to find answers to their querries.
Post content that provides answers to the questions your users ask.
Deemphasize the stress over keywords. Not bothering to channel your content to focus on target keywords but rather write for user benefits is a better practice. Just be natural and try to solve problems.

2. Panda 4.2, July 17, 2015
This was another major algorithymic change. Relatively an old news, it is still worthy to lay some emphasis and talk about how to recover from any penalties that may have arisen from its updates. According to MOZ, Panda 4.1 is the 28th of the Panda updates. Some of the negative effects Panda 4.1 (which Search Engine Land calls Panda 4.2) were still being felt as recently as October 2015, two months after it was implemented.

To be technically accurate, Panda updates are actually a refresh. The algorithm doesn't change as much as it processes new information, learns from it, and makes adjustments. Essentially, the Panda algorithm is a quality factor. It is basically designed to lower the rank of sites with low quality or thin content, and upgrade the ranking of sites that have strong, authoritative, longer form content.

What Effects Did It Have?
Panda 4.1 affected around 3% of queries. Sites that escaped previous Panda updates were most likely hit by this update. But there was a good side of it. If you have been hit by a previous Panda update and you made improvements, you most likely got an upgrade.

How to Repair a Panda Damage
If you still suffer from a Panda penalty, then here's how to make improvements:

Make your content longer. Short-form content doesn't rank well.
Create a strong page title that matches the content on the page.
Solve a real problem with your content. Do not just write and fill up pages with words.
Improve on your spelling and grammar.
Remove or reduce the number of adverts on the page.
Check to make sure your links are working properly.
Create a strong meta-description to encourage click-through.

3. The Quality Update, May 2015

Google's Quality Update was unexpected as Google actually modified their core algorithm to adjust how it processes quality signals. In other words, Google was probably shifting some of the 200-or-so ranking factors that they use to rank websites.

This update had some significant impact on content-heavy sites. The How to articles were the worst victims like those found on Answers.com, Hubpages, and WikiHow. Each of those sites was affected by the algorithmic update. This update was similar to Panda because it focused on content. However, there were noticeable performance differences. There seemed to be a high degree of intuitiveness in the way that Google assessed the quality of the sites and pages that were affected.

How to Recover from a damage induced by the Google Quality Update

Google appear to be more interested in improving user quality rather than reducing spammy content. The Quality Update is meant to increase the quality of searches by bringing long-form content to the forefront. If an article title suggests that it will explain how to do something, then Google wants to make sure that the article has authority, validity, and a thorough explanation; it wants to ensure that the article provides what it claims.

The recommendation here is that you ensure that your content is authoritative, comprehensive, and detailed.

4. Mobilegeddon, April 21, 2015

Google's comment on this update which was simply a mobile-friendly update puts it like this:
"As we noted earlier this year, today's the day we begin globally rolling out our mobile-friendly update. Were boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Now searchers can more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling".

To check if your website is mobile friendly, use the Google Mobile Friendly Test Tool

The mobile-friendly update made the biggest headlines but did not turn out to be so destructive. It however gave a strong signal and had some impact for mobile users which has increasingly become a huge community.

It had some limitations also:

1. It only affects search on mobile devices.

2 It applies to individual pages, not to entire sites.

How to Repair a Damage from this Update

If you don&' yet have a responsive or mobile-friendly site, it's time to change. You can test the mobile performance of individual pages by using Google's mobile-friendly test.

Conclusion

Google's algorithm updates are basically driven by the need to improve user experience on the web. Working to ensure that your visitors are happy when they visit your site through the quality of content they read is a sure way to get the thumbs-up in the eyes of Google.

Do you have something to contribute or share on this issue? Let's know.

WebmastersWebsite Cloaking: What The Search Engines Allow And Disallow by todhost(op): 12:47am On Oct 21, 2017
Credit: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/203-website-cloaking-what-the-search-engines-allow-and-disallow

According to Google cloaking is when "a website returns altered web pages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, a human reading the site would see some different content or information than the Googlebot or other search engine robot reading the site.

The reason people implement cloaking is to improve their search engine ranking by misleading the search engine robot into thinking the content on the page is different than what it really is. While cloaking does not necessarily turn people away from your website, it can be more damaging as search engines frown seriously at it. Some kind of lying to the search engines and given them a misleading representation.

How Search Engines Respond to Cloaking

Most search engines will wield a very heavy penalty on any website found to be engaged in cloaking. Most search engines will immediately delete and sometimes blacklist a site that is discovered to be cloaking. They do this because cloaking is usually intended to completely fool or manipulate; the search engine's algorithms and programming that determine what makes a site rank high or low in that engine.

If the page that the customer sees is different from the page that the search engine bot sees, then the search engine cannot do its job. So they ban sites that use cloaking strategies in an attempt to gain ranking.

Personalization and Cloaking

The key question here is to determine if website personalization amounts to Cloaking.

New and advanced websites display specialized content which depends on various factors and determined by the customers themselves. For example, on About, if you haven't visited the site in several months, you might get different content displayed in the navigation menus than you would if you regularly visited the site. Other sites use a technique called "Geo-IP which determines your location based on the IP address with which you are accessing the site or with which you have logged in and displays ads or weather information relevant to your part of the world or country.

Some argue in favour of this practice as cloaking positing that this kind of personalization displays and delivers different to a customer than what is delivered to the search engine robot. But the robot receives the same type of content as the customer, just personalized (if you will) to that robot's locale or profile on the system.

Common Forms of Cloaking?

What are some common Cloaking Practices?

Webmasters use a combination of techniques to present different information to users and search engine crawlers. We will look at these practices.

1. Invisible or Hidden text

Using this approach, webmasters can stuff keywords, overwriting content in a way that is invisible or hidden to the users. In most cases, webmasters use text color to keep content away from users but search engines crawl and detect the content. For example, if a text is written in white color and displayed on a white background, the human eyes cannot see it but search engines do. Such texts can be used to stuff keywords into web page content without the knowledge of human users.

2. Flash Based Websites

The use of flash, as you may know, is today not a recommended technique to display content as far as SEO is concerned. Notwithstanding, lots of websites are still built on flash. Some of the websites cannot be converted into something better and what the owners do is that in order to feed search engines with content from the websites, they write content rich web pages and provide them to search engine crawlers  and flash pages to visitors.

3. E-mail Cloaking

In e-mail distribution, cloaking is the act of masking the name and address of the sender so that the recipient does not know who sent the e-mail.

4. HTML Rich Websites

Good SEO practice recommends having TEXT to HTML ratio as high as possible. In other words, your web page should have more text (content) as compared to your HTML tags. But if anyone is writing short articles or posts, your text to HTML ratio will be very low. To avoid redesigning a website, some webmasters choose cloaking to meet SEO guidelines

5. Image Gallery Websites

Because web crawlers do not scan images, websites with Image gallery websites with more images than the actual content on their pages try to use cloaking to get top placement for relevant keywords.

Can There be Acceptable Cloaking Practices

Some practices are allowed despite presenting different content to search engines and users. Some content delivery methods now acceptable to Google that might have once been considered cloaking include:

Geo-IP Location
In Geo-IP location cloaking, content is presented to different users based on their location. If you take the case of Google itself, you will find that if you do a search for SEO from your location (country), it will present a different result from when you do the same search from another country. This is not considered as bad cloaking. It is done to provide a better experience to users so perfectly fine for any webmaster to do on their website.
First Click free, Users clicking from Google to a listed page can read the page without having to pay or register with the hosting site. You let Googlebot through as if it were a registered member and also allow anyone coming from Google's search listings through.
URL Rewriting. This practice includes the removal of unnecessary parameters and other URL (URL cloaking). It is a perfectly acceptable practice to present a different URL for a particular content to make more search engine friendly.
Replacement of Java Scripts. Using JavaScript to show content to non-JavaScript capable visitors that matches the textual information within a Flash or other multimedia element.
WebmastersA Simple Guide To Website Performance Evaluation by todhost(op): 4:26am On Oct 20, 2017
Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/201-a-simple-guide-to-website-performance-evaluation

The task of building a well performing website is not an easy and straight-forward task. It is the work of a combination of skill, experience and patience. In this post, we shall provide a checklist of website performance evaluation criteria that are useful to maintain good health for a website.

The performance of a website is usually done regarding user experience and website security. These are very fundamental to success.

The First Steps

URL (Intuitive) - The URL needs to be short and simple. The best URLs are intuitive. From the URL, you need to be able to understand what the website will be all about before you read the content of the website. An example is todhost.com It tells you that it is about a web hosting service.

Download time - Size of home page. The is very important for users. Most users are not willing to spend so much time waiting for a slow website. This factor has also become a search engine ranking factor and so should be taken seriously. It is recommended that all pages should be kept under 50k in size. The homepage should be especially small and quick to load.

Look and feel - Readability. Make your website easily readable, clear and easy to understand. It is important not to clutter a site with text and images. The font size needs to be large enough to be readable and rioting colors need to be avoided.

Conditions to enter the site - Avoid asking users to download an application or a plug-in before entering a site. This can cause upsets and send your visitors away. Pay importance to the home page (above the fold) It is a good practice to have the major services offered and everything the site is to appear on the homepage without having to scroll down.

Unique Selling Point (USP) or Value Proposition - Try to create a key selling factor that gives your website a major advantage. It is extremely important for users to quickly find the site to be potential benefit to them. The unique selling point should be on the homepage.

Ability to take action (Key action point) - The site should be interactive and encourage user participation from the outset. There should be direct links to key action points immediately visible on the homepage. Links like order now, get started, begin a search etc will need to be strategic and easily visible.

Feeling of wanting more -; Depth of site - The site should strive to create a feeling of wanting more in the user. The goal should be to get the user to stay as long as possible and to come back to the site again.

Contact details - Providing immediate contact details such as e-mail addresses and telephone numbers build confidence and trust in using the site.

Credential validation - certifications, associations etc. - Providing credential information is a useful way to build trust in the user.

Statement from management - This provides an opportunity for the surfer to see the business vision and values of the company.

Website Security - It can be very upsetting to visit a website only to find that it has been hacked, defaced, or put offline due to a security issue. This can put off customers significantly. When you want to perform some maintenance, you need to choose a low traffic time, say 1.00am at night when you will expect users to very minimal on site. If you have registered users, you need to send an advance notice ahead of your scheduled maintenance.


Pay attention to brand consistency: Endeavor to ensure consistency in the pages. The colors, layout, image format etc need to consistent throughout your entire website. If you have a separate blog, ensure that the logos are the same and the colors and not in sharp contrast. Build consistency throughout the site.

Tools for Testing Website Performance

Let's now look at some 5 Tools for Testing Your Site[s Performance and Speed. But before then, you need some insights into why websites load slowly.
Keep in mind that fast-loading sites have better user engagement, conversion rates, and search engine rankings.

Why Does Your Site Load Slowly?

There are multiple reasons your site could be performing less than acceptable or usual. Loading speeds are going to vary site by site, but there are a few factors that trip up most sites.

For most websites, especially content management systems like WordPress, the most common causes of page loading are bloated plugins, having a poorly coded theme, big image files, and/or having poor hosting not suited to your website. Below we'll show you how to fix these common issues. However, before you jump into optimizing your website, you need to see how fast it's running in the first place.

Tools For Testing Your Site

The following tools will give you a complete picture of your website's performance. You can use a single tool, or use them all.

Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a brainchild of Google. This app measures your site's performance across multiple devices, including desktop and mobile browsers. This is useful if your visitors are accessing your site from a variety of screen sizes and devices.

Pingdom
This is a free tool that gives you full-site performance information including load time, page size and an analysis of each page on your website.

GTmetrix
GTmetrix gives you a complete history of the website's loading speeds and a report that suggests ways to improve the performance of your website.

WebPagetest
WebPagetest gives insights into the load speed of your website and a breakdown of your site's performance. It’s unique in that it allows you to select a country to view your report from, so you can see how your site performs across different countries.

YSlow
YSlow is a browser plugin that lets you track the performance of any site you're currently visiting. It doesn't give you the actual load time, but it does break down over 20 different performance criteria.

Webmasters16 Mistakes That Turn People Away From Your Website by todhost(op): 12:11am On Oct 18, 2017
Websites are impersonal ways of communication and so they require strong confidence building measures to keep visitors and get them to return to the site. In this post, we have compiled 16 things that could turn people away from a website. Web builders/designers do forget to note and implement some of these recommendations even when they have themselves been irked by some of these things on other people's website. That happens to most of us but working with a simple guide like this one can help overcome some of these problems. This guide could therefore be simply referred to as a guide to what not to do when designing your website.

16 Reasons Visitors Hate Your Website

1) Slow Website Speed.

People have real trouble waiting for websites when the load time is very high. According to a KISSmetrics report 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and 40% abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Even a one-second delay decreases customer satisfaction by about 16%. This can have very strong and negative impact on website bounce rate. Faster loading website can help reduce bounce rate more than most other factors.

Slow loading time frustrates your site visitors and affects conversion rate and brand perception -- especially for mobile users, who are sometimes relying on slower cellular internet connections when browsing the web. How does slow load time impact brand perception, you might be wondering? According to an Ericsson study the longer it takes a website to load, the more website visitors blame the content provider instead of their mobile internet service providers.

So, optimizing your website load performance should be a priority and you need to spend time and research into getting it right below 2 seconds. If you are running a content management system, you need to pay attention to caching. Page load time can also be impacted by poorly optimized images, code, videos, and other factors This can be addressed by plugins if you built your website with content management systems like WordPress

2. Website is Not Mobile Friendly

If you are a mobile phone user and browse with your mobile phone, you should have come across some websites that you will have to scroll from side-to-side to read copy on a website or zoom to view the text content of the website. These are the painful UX people can have on websites that aren't optimized for mobile.

Google announced a major mobile algorithm update n summer 2015 that penalizes websites that aren't mobile-friendly, and announced it would strengthen the ranking signal from mobile-friendly websites starting on May 1, 2016. That simply means you have to take mobile friendliness very seriously.

The major reason why Google continues to make these changes is to improve the web browsing experience for mobile users. So if your site isn't optimized for mobile devices, you'll likely lose out significantly in the organic search rankings.

3) Poor navigation

When someone visits your site, do they get confused about what to do, Where to go, What their next steps should be. You have to make navigation easy and clear to things easy for your website users.

A research by Small Business Trends suggests that 80% of small B2B business websites lacked a call-to-action -- as recently as 2013. They were missing out because they simply didn't provide any direction on their website or ask people to click around.

To address this problem, you will have to include clear headline copy, jargonless page copy that explains the value of what you do, and a clear primary call-to-action that shows visitors how to take the next steps -- whether that's subscribing to your blog, getting a free trial, watching a video, or any other action you hope visitors will perform on the site.

4) Excessive pop-ups.

Pop-ups can sometimes be very annoying. It disrupts users flow while browsing.

If you're going to use pop-ups there is a right way:


Use them in moderation. That way, you aren't constantly bombarding your visitors with content they may not be interested in.
Make them smart. Making them smart means displaying a different pop-up (or no pop-up at all) to different types of visitors based on whether they've visited your site before, or whether they're at a certain stage in the buying cycle.
Track them for effectiveness. Assess the number of views and clicks on each pop-up along with how many submissions the pop-up actually leads to. If you find it isn't performing very well, consider editing or removing it to create a better user experience for your visitors.
Use delightful copy. Far too many sites use language meant to force visitors into taking the desired action. Use a polite language and give them the option to say no.
Use small banners that slide in from the side or bottom of the page with a call-to-action. They tend to be less obtrusive, providing users with more information while still allowing them to continue reading the piece of content.
5) Multimedia content that auto-plays.

People are mindful about how their internet resources are used and do not just want to be taken by surprise. If someone's enjoying what should have been a silent browsing session and suddenly gets bombarded with your theme song or a talking head on a video for which they didn't press play -- especially if they can't find the button for stop - this can be very annoying for people who are very mindful about noise and the use of their internet resources.

6) It boasts disorienting animations.

Animations, autoplay videos, blinking and flashing paid advertisements, and other interactive entertainment may seem a good way to sell an idea or product very quickly but if they're too obtrusive or disorienting, they can detract visitors' focus during those critical three seconds. Interestingly, visitors dislike this. Keep any animations on your website as simple as you can.

7) Too Much Generic Photography.

Working with images is great as they can represent a thousand words and ease understanding. But sometimes, we use generic images to create a wonderful impression about our company and people working there. We want to show images of happy people and we end up taking internet photos and use generic images showing the impressions. It ends up placing some questions in users mind about the reality about your company or business. You've got to be real and believable with your presentation.

cool A Contact form With no Additional Contact Information.

Users want to be sure that they are dealing with a real company. On the contact us form, you should have more information about a physical address and telephone number. A Contact Us form should not be used just to generate a mailing list.

We have seen users using a contact us form to generate a mailing list and end up with lots of spam mails. The reason being that some persons just contact you with fake email entries just to test your contact us form and when you take such entries, you end up with lots of spam mails. You also need to realize that using the contact us form for opt-in email list is really the least valuable form of lead generation for you and your site visitors. Not only is it terribly generic, but it also doesn't indicate whether or not the contact actually wants to receive ongoing communications from you. It's more likely that they have a one-time problem or request that needs to be addressed and may not want further communication on other issues.

9) Poorly Crafted About Us page.

Does your About Us page truly explain what you do? Your about us page should be truly professional in the use of language and should tell the reader that you know your business, know what you do and understand the terrain.

10) Website Fails to Clearly Explain What Company Does.

Similar to a bad About Us page, it's will be a huge mistake and frustrating for users to find that your website does not clearly explain what company actually offers. You should be able to clearly present who you are, what you do, how you do it, the advantages you offer and why you are better than competition and so on. Your work and the products and services you provide along with the benefits should be clearly understood on your website.

11) Too Much Focus on Keywords - Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing had been an old practice way back around the year 2000. Website owners will over use a keyword in order to gain search engine advantages. Those copy were written for crawlers not humans. Today, it is recommended that you write for humans and not the crawlers. Avoid overuse of keywords because you want to force a high search engine rank. That's no longer beneficial and can really frustrate your efforts at a good presentation. Write for your target visitors and human users and not for bots.

12) Missing social sharing buttons on content.

Having the social sharing button on your site makes it easy for people to share your content on the social networks. Rather than copy and paste, it is good to have the social share button allowing your users to simply click and share.

13) Not Having a Blog

Some website owners think they do not need a blog simply because they may be a small company and not interested in regular posts or publications. Many think that blogs are for publications and news alone.

The fact is that although not having a log may not necessarily turn visitors away, it actually will have some effect on your capacity to attract new visits and even to get repeat visits. Blogs are an attraction for people who want to learn new things, get the latest advice, get product updates. Some companies feel too small to run a blog because their activity level does not support a weekly of bi-weekly update. No matter how small your size and activity could be, you have some events and news to report and so you need to have a blog.

A blog will help you provide fresh content to your website and attract web crawlers to revisit and index your content. Search engines like fresh content and so having a blog is a good way to gain their interest.

14) Titles and Headlines Not in Congruence with your Content.

Build content along the titles you have created. When titles and content are not in congruence, in increases bounce rate as users get irritated with content. Remember that visitors are attracted by titles, when the content does not meet their expectation based on the title you have provided, then there is a problem, a gap that creates user dissatisfaction.

15) Call-to-action Not in Alignment with the offer.

Ensure that your call-to-action delivers what visitors were offered. If you offer a free one-month website hosting plan, do not hide it under a conditional clause for them to subscribe to a 3 year plan before they can enjoy the one month free. Out rightly, offer them a one month free hosting for a 3 year subscription.

When you mislead your visitors by offering them a kind of bait-offer that is hidden in conditions, you are not only insulting to your visitors, but it will also hurt your reputation and conversion rates.

16) It contains internal linking that isn't user-friendly.

Internal links are useful both for visitors and search engines. It actually help search engines link your internal pages very fast. When done correctly, internal links are helpful for readers and website alike. They point readers to other relevant information, and help you improve the organic ranking for important pages on your own website. But some websites seem to have trouble executing internal linking correctly pointing users to irrelevant pages, linking strange phrases within the copy, and overdoing it to the point of making content unreadable.

Let's know what other website mistakes drives you crazy and could get you to abandon a page. Lets have your comments

Read full blog post at:: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/199-16-mistakes-that-turn-people-away-from-your-website

Webmasters7 Steps To Reduce The Disc Space Used By Your Wordpress Website by todhost(op): 11:05am On Oct 17, 2017
Have you received a warning from your web hosting notifying you of an unusually resource use from your account and asking you to upgrade from your shared hosting to a more expensive plan like a VPS or a dedicated server where your resource use will have less impact on other clients. That is probably because you are overusing the allocated space way beyond their expectation or going outside the prescribed usage in the web hosting company's fair usage policy. You'll need to manage the process by taking a look at your files and entire data on your WordPress website.

In this post, we look at this issue as it affects a WordPress website. No doubt, WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) and website building tool today. That accounts for our dedication of much resources on WordPress management.

Managing your website size is crucial to running a stable website. Infact, you will find that one major cause of failed backups associated with WordPress is the lack of disk space. Once you are able to address this issue and prune down the size of your website, running a backup for your site will no longer be an issue.

Now, let us look at some steps that will help reduce the size of your WordPress website

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/web-hosting-tips/198-7-steps-to-reduce-the-disc-space-used-by-your-wordpress-website

WebmastersHow To Manually Update A Joomla Website by todhost(op): 3:10am On Oct 17, 2017
Traditionally, Joomla website update had involved three methods: writing files directly, updating with a url for the file source and updating by uploading an update file. All of them are good and I cannot speak of any major advantage of one over the other except speed. Writing files directly can be faster than most other update methods.

There are cases when you are unable to use any of the methods, a manual update method will work in such cases and I will show you how to get this done in this post.

Why Update a Joomla Website?

Regular update for your Joomla website will help you keep your website operational in terms of security, usability and performance. This is a very important process that every business has to take into account to ensure that their website is still at its best.
The world of Content Management Systems (CMS) is constantly evolving, and users are very often not fully aware of the changes that apply to their own websites.

Credit: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/806/How-to-manually-update-a-Joomla-website.html
WebmastersHow To Submit Your Website To Top Search Engines For Free by todhost(op): 6:10pm On Oct 16, 2017

WebmastersBoost Your Website SEO With Google Analytics by todhost(op): 2:49am On Oct 10, 2017

WebmastersA Guide To Website Optimization For Mobile Devices by todhost(op): 1:12am On Oct 09, 2017
WebmastersBest Plugins For Faster Loading Wordpress Websites In 2016 by todhost(op): 12:39am On Oct 08, 2017

WebmastersHow To Safely Disable The Wordpress Automatic Update Feature by todhost(op): 10:02am On Oct 07, 2017
Source: https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/804/How-to-safely-disable-the-WordPress-automatic-update-feature.html

Beginning from WordPress version 3.7, there were some very exciting features and security patches. This WordPress update became significant as it added the automatic update feature. WordPress now updates itself without asking the user for any conformation or notifications to update.(Note the automatic updates are allowed to update to only minor changes which include security issues i.e. from 3.7 to 3.7.1 and 3.7.1 to 3.7.2 by default, It asks you only conformation when there is a major update i.e. 3.7 to 3.cool WordPress team had introduced this feature to improve the stability and security of your WordPress installation.

Before you proceed further, you need to check to see if your WordPress installation can run the automatic update. To do this, you will have to install the Background update tester [official link] plugin on your WordPress installation and confirm if your installation meets the requirements for WordPress automatic updates. This will also help you to find out, if your hosting is compatible with WordPress auto-update feature or not.

Automatic Updates

This feature may sound great for normal WordPress users who don't worry about updating their WordPress sites/installation and also it means you can save money that would have been spent on developers you would hire to handle updates for you. (some managed hosting providers update their client's WordPress sites automatically once the updates are available). But when coming to the issues of Developers they are worried as they don't know which update may screw-up the things on the site!. And some developers need some time before getting their plugins ready for the updates.

There are also some professional bloggers and users who would like to update their WordPress site themselves, to know what changes are made in each update to their blogs. So here this post is for the advanced users who really want to stop WordPress automatic updates, And want to have control over the updates on their sites.

There are two methods which can be used to control the automatic updates on a WordPress installation

Method 1:-The Plugin Method

This is simplest and best method to gain some extra control over the updates on your installation. You can get the Updates Option plugin which is developed by George Stephanis and Chip Bennett from WordPress plugin repository[official link] . You can access the settings of updates from Settings-General. This plugin is best for those who don't want to touch the code and need to be done quick.

Update Plugin gives all the options of the Automatic Updates in simple drop box menu. If you don't want to mess with option and just want to disable the automatic updates then you can simply opt for NO option at Automatic Updates Enabled?. This plugin not only offers automatic WordPress core files updates control, it also supports the update control over the plugin and themes updates

Method 2:- Configuring wp-config file

This second option is a little advanced when compared to the above method. If you want to disable all the WordPress updates including the minor and major core updates then add this code as it is in the wp-config.php

define( "WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE" false );

If you want to enable the minor and major both the automatic updates then add the below code.

define( WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE, true );

If you want to restore to default value i.e to enable the WordPress installation only for the minor updates then use the below code line.

define( WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE);

The preference is for the user to choose which option best suits his need. Most newbie will prefer the plugin method as it is safer and does all the job neatly. Most developers will editing the WP-config method, as it takes off the burden of adding another WordPress plugin to the blog.

Remember to maintain a functional and complete backup of your WordPress blog every day, to avoid any future issues with WP auto update.

WebmastersWhat Is An SEO Audit, And How Can It Help Your Business? by todhost(op): 7:00am On Oct 07, 2017
What is an SEO Audit, and How Can It Help Your Business?

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/186-what-is-an-seo-audit-and-how-can-it-help-your-business

WebmastersRe: In Need Of Reliable And Trustworthy Webhost That Is Affordable by todhost(m): 6:58am On Oct 07, 2017
https://www.todhost.com/
Unmatched quality web hosting

WebmastersHow To Create An Animated GIF Image by todhost(op): 12:31am On Oct 06, 2017

WebmastersRe: Todhost Web Hosting Thread by todhost(op): 2:45am On Oct 04, 2017
WebmastersOnpage SEO Guide For Top Search Engine Ranking by todhost(op): 6:39am On Oct 02, 2017
Two factors play key role in website optimization. These two factors are Onpage optimization and Offpage optimization. This post will dwell on on-page optimization and we will be examining some good on page SEO techniques that should be implemented to achieve high ranks on search engines. The target is for top 10 ranks.

Onpage SEO optimization focuses on optimizing content for our target keywords. This includes use of proper heading, keyword placement, content quality and many other factors. We will look into them one by one in this post.

Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/183-onpage-seo-guide-for-top-search-engine-ranking

WebmastersRe: Todhost Web Hosting Thread by todhost(op): 11:03am On Oct 01, 2017
WebmastersCpanel Branding And Customization by todhost(op): 10:05am On Oct 01, 2017
WHM are tools that has become synonymous with web hosting. Once you wish to an account to start a web hosting business, even as a reseller, you will want to check if cPanel and WHM will be available. But in most cases, branding is an issue with this tools. While we hosting providers will easily use this software to manage their customers and provide easy-to-use web hosting platform for clients to manage their websites, email accounts, databases, and many more, they have little options to customize, personalize and do branding of the services they offer their clients.

cPanel and WHM recent built has changed all these. Now, with additions like Paper Lantern to our software suite, web hosts can alter the color, feel, and overall experience of the cPanel dashboard to provide their customers with a personally branded and truly unique cPanel experience. Now you can customize the cPanel dashboard as if it was your own product.

Read full tutorial at https://www.todhost.com/knowledgebase/802/cPanel-Branding-and-Customization.html

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 (of 20 pages)