WordPress Plugins

We all know how important fast sites are nowadays. Small page sizes are essential to minimize loading times, making sure that both users and search engines like your site. A slow site means that visitors will probably abandon it in favor of a competing one before it even loads, and search engines will lower its rank in order to provide a better experience for their audience. This is especially true for mobile users which are getting more every day. Modern landline connections might be fast and consistent enough to minimize the impact of a slow site, but this is not always true for mobile networks. While modern wireless networks are very fast, low coverage areas with spotty connections will always exist. A fast site even under these conditions might be the key to your success.

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As promised back in March, we’ve been continued improving AudioIgniter, our free audio plugin for WordPress, adding new features and upgrades based on the feedback of its many happy users. Today we’re excited to announce a few minor tweaks for the free version (in anticipation for more free features) and two long-awaited features for the AudioIgniter PRO version, namely: Playback rate control and Track skipping.

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There are many cases in which you might need to create an identical copy of a post, page or custom post type on your WordPress site. You might need to work on the redesign of a page without messing up the original, check out edits on a post that is already being worked on by another editor, allow a client to make their own changes on a post and preview theme without affecting the live version, and so on. For this you need a reliable tool to help you clone any post item quickly and easily. Luckily there is one.

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WordPress allows the users to upload many file formats via its built in media uploader. Among them one can find the most popular image file formats, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif and .ico. As you might have noticed SVG files are not among the ones allowed. In today’s article we’ll learn more about SVG and then we’ll add support for them in WordPress’ media uploader.

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Continuing with our WordPress security theme, in this guide we’ll find out how we can further prevent unauthorized login attempts by hiding the default WordPress login URL. This introduces a big obstacle to attackers who by default target wp-login.php or wp-admin/, you can’t attack what’s not there, right? How are we going to do that? You guessed it, there’s a plugin for it.

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If you have read any WordPress security hardening related article, you know that you need to somehow limit the number of login attempts a certain IP can make before it gets locked out, this is done to prevent malicious actors by gaining access to your site via brute force attacks. Due to WordPress’ popularity as a site building platform, attacks on it are pretty common. Luckily it’s pretty easy to protect your site from them and, of course, there’s a plugin for this!

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In today’s short tutorial we’ll have a look at how to take care and backup our site’s database. This way we can make sure that our site runs optimally and prevent unexpected data loss.

What is the database?

According to Wikipedia a database is an organised collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. This means that the WordPress database is the place where all our site’s generated data lives, posts, pages, users, comments and more, everything is stored in it. For more information about the WordPress database you can have a look at this WPBeginner glossary entry, and for an in depth look at the default tables and their relations you can check out the database description in the codex.

From all the above we can easily figure out that the database is pretty important for the well-being of our site, any corruption can result to irreversible loss of data and accumulation of clutter might make queries, and by extension our site, slower. Below we’ll find out how we can backup, optimize and repair our database, to prevent these issues.

To help us with these tasks we will be using the WP-DBManager plugin which is available for free in the WordPress plugin repository.

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If you are a photographer or any other sort of visual artist you are most likely concerned by the fact that your work can be very easily copied from your site and used elsewhere without your permission. This might cost you both directly  if you sell your work online, and indirectly by losing potential clients by not getting proper credit for your work.

Due to the nature websites work it’s very hard to properly protect your work from being copied without permission. One of the most effective ways of preventing people from taking your images are watermarks, these generally make pictures unsuitable to display, especially in commercial settings, but even if someone ends up taking the image, you’ll get proper credit through the watermark. Today we’ll take a look at a plugin that helps you easily add watermarks to any image you upload on your WordPress site.

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We love Slack. It’s the place where every single discussion takes place around here. New theme/plugin features, bugs, roadmaps, tasks, the works. We also have to keep an eye on 2 WordPress multisites (our demos) for plugin or WordPress core updates and we thought it’d be cool to let WordPress call Slack whenever something important happens in these site. Better Call Slack, a free WordPress plugin was born.

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Facebook is by far the most popular social network on the planet, almost everyone you know is on it. You can capitalize on this by adding Facebook comments to your WordPress site.

Adding Facebook comments to your WordPress site allows everyone with an account to join in the discussion below your posts, or to start one if none is going on. People won’t have to go through the process of creating yet another account on another site just to leave a comment, they’ll be using an account they already have.

It’s not just the ease of your readers though, there are some major benefits for the site owner. First, there’s less spam because anonymity is scarce on Facebook, and second it has  a potential of reaching a great audience because users can choose to post their comment on their Facebook feed just by checking a box, so the comment will be seen by their friends and followers as well, instead of just by your site’s reader, it’s a pretty sweet deal.

Today we’ll take a look at a plugin that replaces WordPress’ default commenting system with Facebook comments, and on top of that it only loads Facebook comments when a user clicks a button so it won’t impact the site’s performance much.

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