Tag: Wordpress

WordPress Optimization: Minify CSS and JavaScript

WordPress site optimization is very important for seo. If you check webmaster tool than you will now importance of minify css and javascript. Here we given some tips and tricks of wordpress optimization. For WordPress SEO get installed Smart wordpress SEO plugin to your wordpress website.

You decided to read this post because you must be interested in making your blog load faster! After all, who loves a blog that loads slow like a snail? No one, I can assure you that. Slow loading blogs have been noticed to have negative traits like- high bounce rate, lack of ‘repeating’ visitors, less user engagement etc. And believe me, page speed also has an impact on SERP (Search Engine Results Page) standings also! Thus, investing some time in minifying CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JS (JavaScript) files to boost page speed is highly recommended! And I’ll teach how to accomplish this task easily!

WordPress Optimization: Minify CSS and JavaScript

First of all, before we jump into the ‘optimization’ aspects, let’s know the baddies- CSS and JS files a bit closer. Err, they aren’t baddies actually. They are pretty crucial components of a blog. CSS lends a big hand in shaping up the ‘appearance’ of your blog. With it, you can turn your blog’s looks from Arun (myself) to Brad Freaking Pitt! I’m not kidding, CSS is that powerful!

Now, let us talk about JavaScript (JS). It is used to add functions to your blog. For example- JS can be used to deal with animations, interactive content (that requires action from user’s end), dynamic actions etc. In short, it is also freaking crucial to a blog’s functionality.

But they turn baddies when they affect page speed negatively. You see, these very useful files are also somewhat ‘bulky’ and ‘lazy’. If you observe the components of your blog, CSS and JS will fall into the category of ‘heavy’ files (well, most of them).

If you analyze your blog’s loading speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you’ll see how render blocking JS and CSS slows your blog down. They are actually CSS and JS files belonging to your blog’s theme and plugins.

Let me explain how they reduce a blog’s loading speed. When a visitor visits your blog, his/her web browser is actually downloading the above mentioned files and HTML files of your blog one by one. Like- it grabs the themes CSS file, then it grabs a plugin’s CSS file, then it grabs another plugin’s JS file etc. This process goes on until all files are loaded up and your blog is rendered ‘completely’.

All this repeated downloading requires much time and resources (of your server). And, to make matters worse, sometimes the blog won’t load up until all the CSS and JS files are loaded (blocking files and scripts)! This is what actually makes a blog load insanely slow!

But, you can’t remove the above mentioned files also. Because, if you do so, your blog’s crucial aspects like its appearance, plugins’ functionality etc will be compromised, leaving your blog useless! So what’s the remedy, you might ask. This is when minifying comes handy!

What is minifying?

I described above about how a browser loads the heavy files one by one to render a blog. If this ‘one by one’ process could be merged to form a single process, it could save truckloads of time! And minifying is one such process!

Minifying is all about gathering these individual ‘calls for downloading files’ and merging them into one single file. Naturally, if we gather so many heavy files and gather them into a single file, it will become ‘super heavy’, won’t it? Actually no, the final stage of minifying process is to compress the hell out of this file and make it as ‘light’ as practically possible! This enables fast loading possible. And this process will also help solve the ‘render blocking JavaScript and CSS’ issue also!

How to minify CSS and JS files of a WordPress blog?

First of all, I’d ask my readers to take a PageSpeed test and take note of the CSS and JS files that are too slow. Then analyze which plugins does those files belongs to. After the analysis, ask yourself if you really need those plugins or not.

If you don’t need them, deactivate them and delete all files associated with them. This will not only get rid of unwanted files, but also free up server resources.

But, under normal circumstances, the above method won’t be of much use. Because we us use only those plugins, which are really useful. Removing them, fearing CSS and JS files is not practical! This is when the following tools and plugins come handy-

#1 Autoptimize

This plugin performs a number of tasks that makes your page literally ‘featherweight’! It gathers all files, compresses it, adds expires headers to it before delivering the final output!

To make matter easier, it forwards the style sheets file to the header and the script files to the footer. I’ve tried this plugin on my blogs and got amazing results. It won’t disappoint you at all!

The set-up is pretty easy. You just need to select the files to be optimized- CSS, JS and HTML. The default set-up will work fine for laymen. If you know how to play around with codes, you may give advanced settings a try! You may even exclude certain files from being minified. It works well with other caching plugins and creates no conflict at all. Overall, a great plugin!

#2 Better WordPress Minify

This plugin is pretty stable and ‘conflict free’. Works well with almost all essential plugins. It does tasks like- gathering files, minifying them and compressing them.

The customization options that it offers are impressive. It gives you much better control, you know. You can decide which component gets minified and which component is to be excluded. Plus this plugin relies on the PHP Library minify and uses WordPress’ enqueueing system. This makes the plugin stable, which I mentioned above.

#3 W3 Total Cache

Many rate this as the best ‘Optimization’ plugin out there for WordPress blogs. Basically, it is a plugin meant for Caching purpose. But being the ‘multi-purpose’ plugin that it is, it also deals with the aspect of minifying!

By turning on the ‘minify’ function, you may save bandwidth by minifying JS, CSS and HTML files. By using this plugin, you are getting two things done- caching and minifying. Thus, you can get rid of an extra plugin (for minifying) by using it! The only problem with this plugin is that there have been some recurring reports of conflicts being created.

#4 CloudFlare CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. Basicall, a CDN will host files and components of your blog on their ‘super optimized’ and ‘super fast’ servers. This frees up the resources on your blog’s servers and ensures smooth functioning of it.

That was the description of the ‘classic’ CDN. CloudFlare is a bit different though. It is not exactly the classic CDN. But is it a cool tool!

When a visitor accesses your CloudFlare enabled blog, its servers ping your blog’s server. Then it waits for your server to pass on the files and various components to it. It then optimizes and delivers the content through their servers.

By optimization, I mean minifying CSS, JS and HTML! Yes, CloudFlare has this option of minifying your blog’s components. You may even choose to make those files load asynchronously by using the ‘Rocket Loader’ feature.

Enabling CloudFlare on your blog is ridiculously simple. Register at their site, add your blog, change your domain’s nameservers, add CloudFlare’s plugin on your blog, enter the API key and your e mail address and it is done!

#5 WP Minify

I used to love this plugin. Setting it up was very easy and it worked like a charm. That was until the plugin broke my blog’s CSS! When I checked the WordPress plugin repository while writing this article, I saw a remark that the plugin is ‘broken’.

I asked some of my friends who have been using it. After my little investigation, I found that some folks claimed that the plugin is working perfectly fine. While some folks claimed that it ruined their blog’s CSS. In my case, it affected my blog’s CSS and changed its looks. Also, the plugin hasn’t been updated since 2012!

Still, if you are in a mood to experiment, do try it out. If it messes up the CSS, deactivate it and delete files associated with it. It’ll restore your blog’s CSS. But remember to take backup before experimenting!

I’m eagerly waiting for the authors of this plugin to update it. Because it used to work so well in the past!

I’m about to end this article

I’ve mentioned some plugins that I’ve used/ been using to minify CSS, JS and HTML files of my blog. If you want to mention your own choice of plugin or your own method, feel free to do so in the comment section. And I’ve got an awesome set of social sharing buttons. Make use of them and share this post with your friends!

solved wordpress 3.3 dashboard blank issue

Recently, I came across very weird issue. I found wordpress 3.3 dashboard blank issue on my PC. There are many wordpress admin pages not shown to me. suddenly all admin pages became blank.
Only left side bar was visible to me. I checked my site in firefox, chrome, IE browser but same result. I am not able to see the posts, dashboard. Only left sidebar was visible.
I was using wordpress Version 3.3.2. I was using php 5.5 on my local box.

solved wordpress 3.3 dashboard blank issue

Note: This issue nothing to do with plugins or images. When I realized on production server I was using PHP 5.3 and local box I am using PHP 5.5 version. I quickly solved issue.

I enabled debug mode of wordpress using wp-config.php file. You can open wp-config.php file put following code in that.

/**
* For developers: WordPress debugging mode.
*
* Change this to true to enable the display of notices during development.
* It is strongly recommended that plugin and theme developers use WP_DEBUG
* in their development environments.
*/
define('WP_DEBUG', true);

When I checked apache error logs I found following error:

Fatal error: Access to undeclared static property: WP_Screen::$this in blog/wp-admin/includes/screen.php on line 706

Solution:

This is old bug in WordPress 3.3 versions which causing issue.

To solve the issue you can update WordPress to the current stable release and do integration testing afterwards. Or you can do a quick bug fix.

Open file in your wordpress, wp-admin/includes/screen.php in any text editor.
On line no 706 find following PHP statement: <?php echo self::$this->_help_sidebar; ?>
Replace with above: <?php echo $this->_help_sidebar; ?>
Save changes and that will solve your issue.

<?php echo $this->_help_sidebar; ?>

Above code is working with PHP 5.3 version but with newer PHP 5.5 version. We are facing issues.

update wordpress user password through phpmyadmin

Many PHP new developer asked my how to update wordpress user password through phpmyadmin. It is very easy trick. Many PHP sites are using Md5 encryption logic for saving the password in database.

Similarly wordpress is using MD5 encryption for saving the password in database. We can easily keep any password and change through phpmyadmin for wordpress users very easily.

First we need to open phpmyadmin in your web-browser. open wp_users tables. You are able to see following screenshot when choose user for edit.

wordpress-user-pass-phpmyadmin

First select user for which you want to edit the password and click on change button. you will be able to see above image.

Important thing is, you need to select MD5 in function column for user_pass field. Than choose your password and click on go button.

It is very simple to change password using phpmyadmin for any php application if that application is using MD5 encryption logic for saving the password.

boost your business Conversion With Top Sales Ready WordPress Themes

WordPress has a grown out quite luxuriantly and has gained a strong foothold in the industry. You can boost your business Conversion with Sales ready wordpress themes. WordPress has obviously become the right choice for the developers as the platform has expedited the process of development.

Goal Target Success Aspiration Aim Inspiration Concept, boost your business
Goal Target Success Aspiration Aim Inspiration Concept, boost your business

Moreover, there is no point doing the same thing again and again when you know that you are not going to attain different results. Business owners who think that their goal is to get immediate conversions must need a WordPress theme that is designed appropriately and have an incredible landing pages. This is one of the prime requisites that helps you to begin your buying and selling process straying away from entering your website into the tech world and for this, you do not need to design as well as go deep into the complete setup to get a custom landing pages that have sales attached to it.

boost your business

There are people who think that instead of choosing paid themes they should go DIY route. Wherein, they must remember the fact that they need to spend a lot of time and money in developing a custom theme as compared to paying for a particular theme.

In this blog, we have discussed WordPress themes that help you to get a kick start in your business and everything which is needed to start the monetization process of your money. All these themes comprise of the customizable homepage which is designed so as to build highly converting landing pages. I think that these themes are quite incredible for developing your site.

Genesis Altitude Pro Theme – Developed by StudioPress

altitude wordpress-theme

Those who are looking for simple themes can opt for Genesis Framework developed by StudioPress, which is a great way to perform. They offer some of the extremely best themes, that have helped them to move awesome conversion-that are tailor made for homepages so as to make a complete theme for increasing conversion.

Altitude Pro is an incredible theme that allows you to create hero shot as you can see in the example. This theme is great for selling courses online and offers quite deeper and earthy color schemes.

Enfold Multipurpose (Startup) Theme – Developed by Kriesi

enfold-banner

The Enfold Multipurpose theme offers a configuration of numerous layouts as well as looks. It comes with one of the most advanced builders present in the theme, and setting this up is quite easy as doing so is just a click away.

Enfold holds a record of over 83,000 downloads from the well-known repository ThemeForest.net and is perfect for the newbie WordPress developer who is looking forward to delivering a professional look to their website.

Genesis Digital Pro Theme – Developed by StudioPress

Genesis Digital Pro Theme

Digital Pro is quite an incredible theme Genesis theme that offers amazing features. This contrast with the Altitude Pro, Digital Pro is quite a sleek and updated template which is best for businesses which are quite efficient in the tech space.

This theme requires you to go through the documentation process from the StudioPress if you need to set it up correctly, however if you can read the documentations properly, then you can set it up correctly.

Stamp (Corporate) Theme – Developed by Pirenko

Stamp Corporate theme

The stamp is a special theme which helps the brand carve a niche for their brands. Along with this, it offers numerous amazing homepage layouts, for instance, “Corporate” which is used by several of users.

No matter whether you are into eCommerce or offers number of several landing pages for services, Stamp is no doubt no doubt theme which is ready for conversion in the market.

JustLanded Theme – Developed by ShapingRain

Just landed Theme

As nowadays brands are looking forward to having a modern look, sleek, designs for their business websites we can see that this design style tends to render quite a positive vibe to the users.

JustLanded is an incredible theme for business owners who want to render quite a professional looking website to their potential visitors. It offers “professional services” styling but updates it as per the latest tech advancement which is perfect for business that has old themes.

Berg Multipurpose (Creative) Theme – Developed by Maskan

berg multipurpose theme

For those who are looking for another quite modern, clean, as well as multipurpose theme, then you can go to Berg that makes it easy for even the novice WordPress users to develop an incredible website. Berg’s offers several themes as well as layout options that make it a perfect shop for giving different looks to the website.

Genesis Parallax Pro Theme – Developed by Genesis

genesis parallax pro theme

The Parallax Pro theme is another quite an incredible theme for development. It offers incredible stock typography which is the main attraction of the theme, and the best part about the theme is quite authoritative.

There are people that are looking for simple, and seamless design that makes your copywriting style different and helps you to create a smooth impact on people to go, and this theme is quite better than Parallax Pro. Certainly not to forget this theme offers all the benefits of being a StudioPress theme based on the Genesis framework.

Increat Theme – Developed by Progression Studios

increat theme

We are well aware of the fact that most of the WordPress themes are quite similar to each other. This simmers us down to the fact that there is only the landing page that’s left to do all the customizations.

Increat is one such theme that has moved this conception rule by offering unique looks that are available for download. This theme offers quite colorful as well as bold architecture which is developed so as to create highly converting web pages. This theme is quite suitable for brands who are seeking to display fashion; this is quite a versatile theme which any developer can tailor so as to get a perfect website for its genre.

9 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

We will give you 9 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your WordPress Site If you have been part of virtual world for some time, it’s least likely that you haven’t heard about WordPress, but did you know?

Speed Up Your WordPress
Speed Up Your WordPress

I think this might give you a hint of how popular WordPress is right now (and its popularity doesn’t seem to halt anytime soon!).

And oh, my bad, I forgot to mention these few bits:

speed-up-wordpress-site-2

Fact of the matter is that WordPress serves amazingly well as an efficient CMS platform, but it can slow down as well if it’s not optimized rightly. And trust me, you don’t want this. Why? Because a study by akamai.com shows that:

  • 47% people showing up on a website expect the page to load in less than two seconds.
  • 40% are likely to move elsewhere from a web page that takes over three seconds to load.
  • 52% of online shoppers confessed to show loyalty to a site whose web pages load quickly.

Speed Up Your WordPress

So, here I am with these 9 tips to help you get the best of WordPress in speed.

1. Start with a fast and reliable web hosting company

One of the simplest (and yet overlooked!) ways to improve your WordPress site is to resort to a fast as well as reliable web host. I recommend not going for cheap shared hosting solutions, as those are really overcrowded and you might end up sharing your hosting resources with hundreds of other users.

So many hosting companies impose various limitations to their shared hosting plans, hosting (read hording!) hundreds of sites on just one server to slash hosting fees, which chokes the resources. The better alternative is to go for a VPS or managed WordPress hosting depending upon your site visitors, business niche and financial viability.

2. Choose an efficient framework/theme

This is where sometimes even people having years of experience can make a mistake, i.e. choosing an inefficient and heavy framework/theme. Many people trade speed and efficiency of a WordPress framework/theme with unnecessary features, which can affect them seriously.

It’s better to keep away from bloated frameworks loaded with fancy features (which a serious web contender seldom needs) that can delay the process of crawling your site. Similarly, too much plugins also take a toll on your site speed. So, make sure you equip your website with only what it needs to keep up with its functionality seamlessly.

3. Resort to helpful caching plugins

Talking of plugins; instead of falling for some fancy plugins that might choke the speed of your site; go for caching plugins, which are designed to help improve page loading time significantly. The best thing is that you can get all of them on WP.org free of cost and they are not complicated to use at all.

Based on my personal experiences, I would recommend W3 Total Cache rather than trying anything else. It is loaded with all features that can help you better your site speed. It doesn’t take either much of time or effort in downloading, installing and using it.

4. Make use of a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

You might have never heard of this, but all those big blogs out there that you like so much, are making use of CDN, also known as Content Delivery Network. It is one great way of reducing loading time of a webpage.

What it does is collects all the static files present on your website (images, CSS, javascript, etc), places them strategically on a collection of serves across the globe. Now whenever a visitor wants to download them, he is routed to the server located closest to him geographically, saving much of his time doing so.

There is also another aspect to this. Since the content of your site is being loaded from multiple servers in different locations, any traffic spike is least likely to bother visitors.

5. Leverage image optimization

Many of you must have used or at least heard of Smush.it, a wonderful image optimizer used by Yahoo. It helps you reduce image file size drastically, more importantly, without affecting quality of the image.

The good news is that you can do the same on WordPress with a plugin called WP-SmushIt for free. In fact, if you have it installed, it will optimize all images that you choose to add to your site by itself, automatically, leaving not much on you to worry about.

6. Don’t forget about WordPress database optimization

Fact of the matter is that you cannot expect a database-driven website (all CMS-based sites including WordPress) to work well without optimizing your database.

There are a few things you have to consider in this regard, starting from monitoring code for slow queries. For sites on VPS or dedicated server, enabling query caching and optimizing database server configuration does the trick.

Or, you can resort to a wondrous tool like WP-Optimize plugin, which will take care of all such concerns without even letting you know when and how it’s done.

7. Homepage needs optimization too

Call it tweaking if too much of ‘optimization’ is driving you crazy, but you can’t overlook it if you want your WordPress site speed up. Though whole of your site should be fast enough, but homepage remains the most important part of your site, as majority of people will land there more than anywhere else on a website. Some of the things you can do to optimize homepage of your website include:

  • Limit the number of posts to be seen on a page.
  • Display a brief excerpt as an intro with your posts rather than showing full post.
  • Cut down the number of social sharing widgets on homepage

In short, these are just a few things to help you make your homepage load quick; ultimately do everything possible to keep it this way.

8. Introduce LazyLoad

Well, this is another great way of serving your visitors with a quickly loading webpage. It involves loading only those images on a webpage that are above the fold (the images which visitors can see in their browser windows). The next set of images is loaded as soon as a visitor scrolls down, minimizing loading time ingeniously.

This not only results in your page loading quickly, but it also helps in saving your bandwidth, as less data is loaded for users who don’t scroll down through the end.\

9. Avoid Pingbacks and Tracbaks

WordPress is designed to respond to the requests from other blogs featuring pingbacks and trackbacks by default, which ends up harming more than charming when it comes to site speed. Turning this intrinsic feature off in your WordPress settings will not affect the backlinks strengthening the position of your website; it will just reduce extra labor.

Over to you now

This is where my list to improve WordPress site speed ends for now, but this can’t be all about it, surely. That’s why I am handing it over to you now; feel free to share your experiences and opinions with us on this in the comment section below.

10 Best WordPress websites of the world

WordPress websites are in popular demand since their emergence. Easy accessibility, uncomplicated management, compatibility with Search engines, 100 % customization, built in blogs and ready to grow business assists multiple users to grow their business.

Since 2003, many word press websites have come into picture but the top 10 that have gathered maximum attention worldwide due to magnanimous inbuilt features are-

10 Best WordPress websites of the world

  1. This is Your Kingdom:

This is Your Kingdom

This wordpress website is a perfect blend of style and substance. Visitors can easily have an idea of all the activities going in any local area. Its concept is pretty simple and incorporates enormous content. The website keeps getting updated on regular basis consecrating its visitors with loads of information making them return to the website. Its charismatic looks and playful designs provoke the visitors to stick to the website for pretty longer period of time. It’s a perfect blend of wide range of illustrations leading to imaginations and explorations.

  1. TravelPortland:

TravelPortland

This is a highly commendable website that highlights enticing opportunities to the visitors of Portland in Oregon, US. The websites reveals immaculate designs citing great stories of waterfalls and food trucks. It employs customised responsive themes adding magnetism. Zurb’s Foundation framework is its platform that utilizes the third party APIs at all places. Storify, ChooseCulture, Weather Underground are some of its special attractions. Based on the location of the visitor, MaxMind’s Geolocation customises the content present on the homepage. The website is good for visitors in planning phase or for in- town visitors.

  1. WorryFreeLabs:

WorryFreeLabs

Based in New York, it caters rich mobile experiences. This tantalising facet has increased the web traffic on mobile and tablets to remarkable extent. It’s highly responsive website that employs HTML5 offering mind arresting touches, browsing thereby becomes highly fascinating. Some of the features include smooth sliding to animation, automated scroll slides or swipe button on the contact form.

  1. Great Lengths Hair:

Great Lengths Hair

This is a highly powerful and responsive WordPress website popularly known for hair extensions fashion brands located in Leeds. Various Java Scripts and frameworks have offered it excellence above par. The website is enormously heavy as images of various dimensions have been loaded on it, however the super clean navigation and quick touch enhances its accessibility. New HTML5 and W3C Geolocation API elements are its other attractive facets.

  1. Toronto Standard:

Toronto Standard

This is a purely digital creative agency that uses CSS3 and HTML5 on its websites. These tools assist in reorganising the dynamic grid elevating the rich experience of the users while browsing. The intricate proprietary system has lot to offer to its contributors in terms of learning.

  1. Harvey Nichols:

Harvey Nichols

The site is dedicated to international scale luxury fashion destination. It supports an exhilarating ecommerce proposal while delivering the best shopping proposals. Retailers can make their presence widespread while upgrading the website via Magento Enterprise. It is an open source platform that has made it a great success.

  1. Captain Creative:

Captain Creative

It is an enriching wordpress website that offers a common platform for portfolio and blog management.

  1. Little:

Little

The WordPress website has been designed to meet the challenges faced by the businesses internally as well as externally. Little wordpress website has been surviving in the industry since 30 year diverting the website traffic on tablets and mobiles. It is easy to use and uses responsive framework via Bootstrap and CMS. The homepage offers succinct portfolio of eminent clients adding weight to the page. The website has hit the mark highlighting its beauty.

  1. Poster Roast:

Poster Roast

It is a distinguished website that promotes screen printed gig and exhibition posters for UK artists. The website uses exceptional WPE- Commerce and the golden cart plug-ins. The plug-in can be used flexibly and facilitates the integration of any theme structure easily. You can drive traffic at any place via widgets and short codes while adding categories and products.

  1. Customizr:

Customizr

This is one of the best free WordPress themes available on web. You can customize your website in the way you want. Whether you want to add layouts, sliders, or featured blocks to make the homepage more enticing or want to do anything else, you have complete leverage to customize anytime. This wordpress website is linked with Twitter Bootstrap framework to open new doors of creativity for the users.

So, go and choose the best one based on your preferences to build an eye-catching blog enjoying hundreds of benefits.

Is WordPress A Good Foundation For Mobile Apps

Business site owners and bloggers can’t afford to ignore mobile. As PC sales stall and tablets and smartphones become ubiquitous, the revenue being generated from mobile interactions is skyrocketing. WordPress theme developers have been on the case for quite a while, with many responsive and mobile-first themes available that look good on devices of any size. But, even with responsive design, sites are missing out on many of the features that make mobile so powerful.

Is WordPress A Good For Mobile Apps

Without the ability to tie into a phone’s hardware, place icons or widgets on the device’s home screen, and access notification mechanisms, there are limits to what a site can do. To properly leverage the advantages of mobile, site owners should be thinking about mobile apps. But, mobile app development is expensive. Many businesses can’t afford to invest in the creation of a high-quality mobile application built from scratch by an experienced developer.

Is WordPress A Good For Mobile Apps
Is WordPress A Good For Mobile Apps

There have been plugins that can create an app “wrapper” for WordPress sites for some time. They solve half the problem: a web view of the site allows site owners to launch an app without having to invest in development, but this approach is seriously limited and usually doesn’t offer an experience for users that improves significantly on a visit to the site in a web browser.

AppPresser is a new breed of premium plugin that seeks to ease the process of making a WordPress site truly mobile without having to start from scratch. AppPresser is capable of taking a WordPress site and wrapping it in a native app, just like many previous plugins, but where it differs is that it makes available — for a price – extensions that allow the site to communicate with the phone’s hardware. For example, with the AppGeo extension, site owners can use a phone’s native geolocation tools, or with AppCamera, users can take and upload images to the site using a device’s camera.

Once the plugin has been properly integrated with the site, the app can be packaged ready for submission to the iOS app store or the Android Play Store. It’s a nifty plugin and out of the box it offers a range of useful features, but to get the maximum benefit it’s helpful to have at least some development experience. To make the most of AppPresser, you’ll need knowledge of JavaScript, which will allow you to use the Phonegap API that comes along with the plugin, writing your own custom integrations with the device hardware.

AppPresser is a clever solution for businesses and site owners who want to go mobile but don’t want to implement an expensive parallel development effort for a mobile application.

Converting WordPress Site to a Mobile App: Plugins Worth Considering

According to an online survey, Smartphone users around the world spend 85 percent of their mobile time in using apps. And so, no matter how great your WordPress website may function or look, you might not be able to drive good traffic to your site if you don’t have a mobile app. But, developing a mobile app can turn out to be challenging task even when you need to develop a small app (especially for the first time developers or technophobes). Fortunately, there are many great plugins out there that makes the task of turning your site to a mobile app a hassle-free process.

 convert wordpress site to mobile app

Mobiloud

Mobiloud
Mobiloud

If you’re searching for a plugin that help convert your site into a complete native app for iOS and Android devices, then Mobiloud plugin is worth a try. The plugin can be installed for free and allows you to design native applications for WordPress with ease, without the need of writing any code. In addition, you can even preview the app and test it on your device. But, you’ll have to invest a little to publish your mobile app on Google play Store or Apple app store.

Key features:

  • Help in updating your mobile app content automatically.
  • Allows customizing the app using your own custom styling options (like colors, icon, logo, etc.)
  • Allows automatic as well as manual push notifications and much more.

Worona

 

Worona
Worona

Want to turn your WordPress powered blog to a native app without spending a dime? Then, Worona will prove a suitable option. Worona is available in two different parts: the first one is the WordPress plugin (that sends your site content to the app), and the second one is the popular Corona SDK that helps code your native application.

Key Features:

  • It works in an easier and faster manner.
  • Help build native apps for iOS 7 and Android versions 4.1, 4.2 and 4.4.
  • The app built using Worona supports many different extensions including Push Notification, Rate my app, and Enhanced List. This help in enhancing the app functionality.

 

AppPressor

AppPressor
AppPressor

AppPressor is one of the leading app building tools that converts any WordPress site (like news site, e-commerce site, etc.) into a mobile application having native device features. It even allows compiling your app using the popular PhoneGap app development framework. Once your app is compiled with PhoneGap Build, it is being submitted to the iOS and Android app stores.

Key Features

  • Offer tools to customize your app.
  • Allow to update your app in real time.
  • Provides integration with WordPress features like content, plugins, etc.
  • Gives control on hosting the app just like any WordPress site.

Mobile App Convertor

Mobile App Convertor
Mobile App Convertor

This is another free plugin, which helps in converting a WordPress site to a fully-functional mobile app in just a matter of few seconds. Plus it doesn’t require you to have any coding skills. You just need to follow a few simple steps, for converting your site to a mobile application extremely using the plugin intuitive interface.

Key Features:

  • Help in publishing your app on app markets such as Windows Phone Market, App-store and Google Play.
  • Provide the ability to preview your site as a mobile app on your own device.
  • Offer the capability to hide elements of your app from visitors.
  • Provide complete professional technical support.

WiziApp

WiziApp
WiziApp

In case you want to mobilize your WordPress site, by creating a HTML5 mobile application for platforms such as Windows Phone, iPhone and Android, then WiziApp is the right choice for you. The best part of this WordPress plugin is that it is free to download.

Key Features:

  • It helps in building your own custom app with the help of a user-friendly wizard.
  • Allows previewing how your customized app looks in real-time.
  • Allows publishing the app on two most important app store, such as: Google Play Store and Apple app store.

WP App Maker

WP App Maker
WP App Maker

This is another great option for transforming your WordPress blog into a mobile application in just 5 minutes.

Key Features:

  • Enables you to monitor your app usage using Google Analytics tool for Mobile.
  • Let you publish your apps once you’ve created your account on AdWhirl.
  • Offers lot of customization options like customizing text color, background and more.

Conclusion

The need for mobile apps is only going to increase in the coming years, and thus it makes sense to prepare your WordPress sites for the mobilegeddon. And the best way to do so requires converting your site into a mobile application. Doing so, will also help you expand your reach to a large number of potential users. If you lack programming skills, but want to transform your WordPress site/blog to a mobile app, then the aforementioned list of plugins can prove useful assets for you.

How to customize Comment Count Text in wordpress

Some people asked me about changing the default wordpress comment template and comment count text. If you are wordpress developer than it is easy.

customize Comment Count Text in wordpress

You can customize the text for displaying comments number or count inside loop. This is just a simple template edit however it is extremely useful if you are creating a theme that is not a traditional theme or you wanted to inject a little bit of personality into the site.

You just need to copy and paste following code into comments.php file.

Using  following code you can change:

<?php
    echo get_comments_number_text( "No thoughts, yet", "One Thought only", "% thoughts");
?>

wordpress-comment-count

There are some useful articles about wordpress comments customization:

how to remove unwanted image sizes from wordpress theme

Many times you do not need the many image sizes for wordpress. You need the original image only for your wordpress sites. Sometime you need the original and thumbanil image only. But many wordpress themes creates the multiple image version in your site which is not useful. Using following code you can remove the unwanted images while uploading the images.

Here in this article I going to show you, how we can remove unwanted image sizes from wordpress theme. Using code snippet, you can easily remove unwanted image sizes.

remove unwanted image sizes

You just need to add following code into functions.php file.

function wpapi_remove_image_size($sizes) {
                unset( $sizes['small'] );
                unset( $sizes['medium'] );
                unset( $sizes['large'] );
                return $sizes;
        }
add_filter('image_size_names_choose', 'wpapi_remove_image_size');
remove unwanted image sizes
remove unwanted image sizes