Hold on to your hats, WordPress fans! Hot on the heels of a successful WordPress 6.2 release in March of this year, the development cycle for WordPress 6.3 kicked off on April 25, 2023, with an eye toward a general release date of August 8, 2023.

The original proposal for WordPress 6.3, released on April 14, 2023, outlined several key areas of focus, including further full-site editing (FSE) enhancements, performance improvements, and accessibility upgrades. As always, the WordPress community sought volunteers to contribute their skills to various teams. Developers, designers, testers, and content creators were all encouraged to participate.

New Features in Detail

There are some truly exciting new features lined up, which were announced in the WordPress 6.3 Field Guide on the Make WordPress Core blog on July 18, 2023!

First up, WordPress 6.3 is introducing a Command Palette, a nifty feature akin to Spotlight (macOS) or PowerToys Run (Windows) for WordPress. It’s a big step towards getting you where you need to go in your dashboard with nothing more than a few keystrokes.

This feature will provide users with a quick and efficient way to access various WordPress functions and perform tasks without having to dig through menu after menu. By utilizing keyboard shortcuts and a search-style interface, users can find and execute commands, helping make their WordPress workflow more streamlined and productive than ever before.

Next, there are significant caching improvements across various components, targeted at enhancing the overall performance and speed of your websites. This means quicker loading times and a smoother user experience for both you and your visitors. Caching plays a crucial role in enhancing website performance by storing frequently accessed data temporarily, reducing the need to fetch the same information repeatedly from the database. These improvements should lead to faster page load times, reduced server load, and happier visitors.

In terms of media, WordPress 6.3 also promises to boost your media performance. This means quicker-loading images and other media for site visitors — keeping your audience engaged and reducing bounce rates.

By optimizing image loading and employing efficient compression techniques, site owners can expect quicker loading times for their visitors. This enhancement will not only contribute to better user engagement but also positively impact search engine rankings, as page speed is a crucial factor for SEO.

Another major step forward is the introduction of rollbacks for failed theme and plugin updates. So, a “bad” update of a plugin or theme — due to things like library incompatibilities or unknown bugs in new code — should no longer brick your site and send you scrambling to get it back up and running.

WordPress 6.3 will introduce a safeguard mechanism that prevents issues arising from most failed manual theme and plugin updates. In earlier versions of WordPress, a problematic update to a theme or plugin could potentially render a site nonfunctional.

The new rollback feature will automatically revert to the previously installed version of a theme or plugin should an update fail. This mitigates the risk of a “bad” update breaking the site. This enhancement hopes to provide peace of mind to website administrators, as they’ll now be able to confidently update themes and plugins without fearing catastrophic consequences.

The introduction of style revisions is another feature to look forward to. This allows you to roll your theme back to old site styles in just a click, providing you with the flexibility to experiment and change your site’s look without worry. This feature will be especially beneficial for users who frequently modify their website’s appearance and layout.

In case a user wants to revert to a previous design configuration, they can easily do so by selecting their revision from an easy-to-use timeline, avoiding the need to manually revert each change. The style revision history enhances the user experience and provides greater flexibility in managing the visual aspects of your WordPress site.

Last but not least, WordPress 6.3 includes significant accessibility updates. These enhancements aim to make WordPress more inclusive and easier to use for everyone.

Accessibility is a critical aspect of website development, ensuring that all users, regardless of their abilities, can access and navigate a site effectively. WordPress 6.3 will implement its accessibility updates to improve the platform’s compliance with accessibility standards. These updates include enhancements to ensure compatibility with assistive technologies, keyboard navigation improvements, and other features that enhance the overall accessibility of WordPress websites. By prioritizing accessibility, WordPress aims to create a more inclusive online environment for all users.

Overall, WordPress 6.3 promises to deliver significant usability and performance improvements, as well as enhance site security and accessibility, making it a highly anticipated release for the WordPress community.

A Busy Year

With WordPress 6.2 having been released on March 28, 2023, and WordPress 6.3 set for August 8, 2023, it’s safe to say that this year has already been a busy one for WordPress volunteer developers!

As reported in Make WordPress Core on April 14, 2023, the timeline for WordPress 6.3’s release has taken into account two major flagship WordPress events scheduled to take place this year: WordCamp Europe, which occurred in early June, and WordCamp US and the Community Summit in late August.

The developer teams hope to avoid having any major milestones like Beta 1 and RC1 conflict with the WordCamp gatherings, so they’ve proposed fitting the release process, from Beta 1 to the final WordPress 6.3 release, in a 10-week window between both WordCamps.

What’s more, regarding the Gutenberg release cadence, WordPress 6.3 is expected to bring over changes in the block editor from the Gutenberg plugin up to version 16.1, for a total of 10 Gutenberg releases since the release of WordPress 6.2.

Teamwork

In the April 14 proposal announcement on the Make WordPress Core blog, openings were announced for volunteers to lead a number of development teams: Release Coordinator, Core Tech Lead, Editor Tech Lead, Core Triage Lead, Editor Triage Lead, Documentation Lead, Marketing & Communications Lead, Test Lead, Design Lead, and Performance Lead.

Proposed Schedule

Looking Even Farther Out

Even though WordPress 6.3 is nearing completion but is yet to have its general release, the WordPress community is already thinking ahead to the release of WordPress 6.4 and a return to a historic point in the history of WordPress.

Version 6.4’s development will be led entirely by a team of women and nonbinary creators, which harkens back to the WordPress 5.6 release, “Simone.” The release squad will be open to anyone who identifies as a woman, nonbinary, or gender-expansive, but, of course, in keeping with the WordPress collaborative spirit, all contributions from anyone, regardless of how they identify themselves, will be welcomed.

The post WordPress 6.3 Nears August 8 General Release Date; New Features Detailed appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

Fortunately, building your restaurant website using WordPress is pretty easy. This content management system allows you to design an online space that perfectly matches your brand, complete with menus and a booking form.

To make the process simple, we recommend choosing a pre-built theme. Not sure what you’re looking for? Here’s a generous serving of WordPress themes for your restaurant business and some tips on how to use them.

The Best WordPress Themes For Restaurant Websites

Whether you’re starting from scratch or aiming to refresh your current website, the following themes should help you promote your restaurant online in style:

1) Astra: Most Customizable Theme For Restaurant Websites

Although Astra wasn’t made specifically for restaurant websites, it comes with several starter templates that were designed with food establishments in mind.

These templates allow you to showcase your food via slick image lightboxes and carousels. They also cater to booking systems, so your diners can reserve a table with ease.

The underlying theme is fast to load and easy to customize without code. It works nicely with most page builders, and you have plenty of theme options to play with.

Key Features:

• Multiple restaurant starter templates with customization options
• Support for most reservation plugins
• Fast to load and SEO-friendly

Pricing: Basic version is free; Extended pro version starts at $59/yr. Also available on a lifetime basis for $299.

2) Jevelin: Best Multipurpose Theme For Restaurant Websites

With over 40 pre-made starter templates and 50 styled elements, Jevelin is a premium theme that gives you plenty of creative control. Just as importantly, it has built-in features that will appeal to restaurant owners.

Slider Revolution is part of the package, meaning you can design beautiful slideshows for your homepage. Native support for Contact Form 7 gives you the option to build a DIY reservation system, and support for WooCommerce allows you to process orders online.

Although Jevelin is not specifically aimed at restaurant owners, the crisp and modern design will work well for all eateries.

Key Features:

• Wide selection of starter sites and pre-styled elements
• Drag-and-drop editing
• Crisp design, with plenty of customization options

Pricing: One-time purchase of $59, including 6 months of support.

3) Rosa 2: Most Stylish WordPress Restaurant Theme

Designed specifically for restaurants, Rosa 2 is a mighty stylish theme. Parallax scrolling effects provide a healthy dose of visual polish, and you can choose from a range of eye-catching fonts.

In fact, you can customize almost everything about this theme. That’s because the design is made up of individual blocks, each of which can be adapted to your preferences.

For instance, Rosa 2 has a ready-made menu block that you can drop in anywhere. It also provides deep support for online ordering systems via WooCommerce.

Key Features:

• Parallax scrolling effects and branding options
• Block-based editor with restaurant-specific elements
• Support for e-commerce via WooCommerce add-on

Pricing: Free Lite version; Main theme is priced at €75/yr (~$82). WooCommerce add-on is priced at €15 (~$16).

4) Osteria: Best Café And Bistro WordPress Theme

If your business offers a more casual dining experience, Osteria might be a better fit. As with Rosa, this theme provides eye-catching scrolling effects, a choice of over 600 fonts, and support for WooCommerce.

Another key feature here is the built-in reservation system. This allows diners to book a table on any device. In fact, the whole design is responsive, so it works nicely on phones, tablets, and computers.

Strong SEO and good loading speeds complete the package.

Key Features:

• Scrolling effects, plus color and font customization
• Reservation system and support for online orders
• Responsive, SEO-friendly, and fast to load

Pricing: Starts at €115/yr (~$125); WooCommerce add-on is €15 (~$16).

5) Restaurant Food Delivery: Best Theme For Takeout Restaurants

Not all restaurants fit in the fine-dining niche. If your business is more like a casual outfit rather than a tuxedo, the Restaurant Food Delivery theme could serve you well.

It’s not as fancy as some other themes on this list, but your food takes the limelight. Using the default layout, any visitor can start browsing your menu right on the homepage.

In addition, you can set up an ordering system with this theme because it provides full support for WooCommerce and Contact Form 7.

Key Features:

• Homepage menu with category tabs
• Built-in sliders and over 100 fonts to choose from
• Works with WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, and Elementor

Pricing: Free basic version; Main theme starts at $49.

6) Foodica: Best Restaurant Theme For Food Blogging

Writing about food, produce, and your process can be an effective way to promote your restaurant online. If you decide to go down this route, consider using Foodica.

Aimed primarily at food bloggers, this theme delivers your content with stylish fonts and plenty of white space. The minimalist, magazine-like design includes a homepage carousel, 10 preset color palettes, social media options, and full e-commerce support.

This is not a theme for the hard sell, but it does provide all the ingredients for a successful restaurant website.

Key Features:

• Clean, magazine-type design with color and font options
• Social media and e-commerce integrations
• Built-in recipe display feature

Pricing: Free limited version; main theme from €69/yr (~$75).

7) Auberge: Best WordPress Theme For Restaurant Menus

With Auberge, your menu takes center stage. This theme works in harmony with the Jetpack menu builder, allowing you to showcase all your dishes in neat sections.

We like the default homepage design, too. Along with a nice big cover image, you can add a brief description of your establishment, your opening hours, and your phone number.

Auberge also combines with the Restaurant Reservations plugin to provide a slick table booking system. In addition, with the paid version of this theme, you can build the perfect layout via Beaver Builder.

Key Features:

• Full support for Jetpack menus and the Restaurant Reservations plugin
• Smart frontpage design that includes opening hours and contact details
• Works with Beaver Builder

Pricing: Free basic version; Main theme is $44 as a one-time purchase.

8) FoodHunt: Best Page Builder Theme For Restaurant Websites

The default layout of FoodHunt is easy on the eye. There’s nothing too fancy here, but the design is clean and modern. This theme stands out in the many ways it can be customized.

For a start, FoodHunt works with every major page builder you can think of. That means you can craft your own layouts from scratch. The theme also offers a whole heap of built-in customization options for colors, fonts, and widgets.

Key Features:

• Works with Gutenberg, Beaver Builder, Brizy, Elementor, and SiteOrigin
• Two starter templates and loads of customization options
• Excellent performance and SEO-friendly

Pricing: Free basic version; Pro version with full feature list starts at $69 with a year of support.

9) Tamarind Restaurant: Best Theme For Fine Dining Restaurants

When you offer a fine dining experience, it’s important to show the quality of your menu. Tamarind Restaurant is a theme well-suited to this task.

The design of this theme is classy and fresh, with multiple menu styles to choose from and plenty of places for imagery. Revolution Slider is included, and you can choose from several homepage templates.

Tamarind Restaurant is based on a page builder, so you can create your layouts as you please. In addition, support for OpenTable and Contact Forms 7 makes it easy to take reservations.

Key Features:

• Classy, fresh design with multiple menu styles
• Page builder and slider features included
• Take bookings via OpenTable and Contact Forms 7

Pricing: One-time purchase of $59, including 6 months of support.

10) Appetizer: Best Theme For Attracting Reservations

With a punchy default color scheme and fun animations, Appetizer is a theme that will work best for restaurants with a distinctive character. It’s the online equivalent of an upmarket burger joint.

What we particularly like about this theme is that it encourages visitors to reserve a table. It has a CTA built into the front page slider, and this button links to a booking form page.

Of course, this is just the default template. The pro version of Appetizer provides plenty of latitude for changing things up.

Key Features:

• Bold, punchy design featuring animated elements
• Front page slider featuring booking CTA
• Pre-styled menu and online store sections

Pricing: Free basic theme; Pro license is priced at $59.

11) Ristorante: Most Creative WordPress Theme For Restaurants

Want to stand out from the crowd? Ristorante is an elegant, shape-shifting theme that allows you to build a truly unique online brand.

The theme is built in sections, which you can rearrange using the supplied page builder. There are six different layouts for food menus, and you can split dishes into visual categories.

WooCommerce support allows you to take orders online and sell gift cards, and Ristorante even offers event management tools so you can host special dine-in evenings.

Key Features:

• Elegant design with page builder customization
• 6 menu layouts and templates for individual dishes
• Event management and e-commerce support

Pricing: One-time purchase of $39, including 6 months of support.

12) Resca: Best WordPress Theme For Table Booking 

A great restaurant website should put your food on display and encourage visitors to make a table booking. Resca covers both angles but particularly excels when it comes to reservations.

You have two options here: take bookings via OpenTable, or through the built-in reservation form. The former even allows people to book on behalf of others and earn points in the OpenTable loyalty program.

On other fronts, Resca provides a stylish parallax effect and extensive WooCommerce support.

Key Features:

• Two table booking options, menu display plugin
• Three layouts with parallax scrolling
• Support for OpenTable and WooCommerce

Pricing: One-time purchase of $44, including 6 months of support.

13) Eatery: Best Responsive Theme For Restaurant Websites

Most of the themes on this list follow the principles of responsive design — that is, they can adapt to various display sizes. Eatery is a theme that implements this idea spectacularly well.

On desktop, the theme has a side-mounted menu and a full-size image background. On mobile devices, the layout condenses into a neat single column.

All the other key features you would expect are present and accounted for. Visitors can view menus, make reservations, and sign up for your events.

Key Features:

• Responsive design with 5 preset styles
• Customizable menu templates
• Event management and reservation systems

Pricing: One-time purchase of $59, including 6 months of support.

14) Foxeresto: Best One-Page WordPress Restaurant Theme

In many cases, a good one-page website will perform better than a cluttered design with many individual pages, and the Foxeresto theme was designed for this purpose.

The default design is made up of multiple sections, including areas that highlight your specials, your regular menu items, and customer reviews. A simple booking form allows you to take reservations, and the theme includes a couple of gallery styles for showing off your dishes.

Because Foxeresto is built upon the WPBakery Page Builder, you can rearrange all the sections above to suit your needs.

Key Features:

• One-page design with multiple sections
• Booking form, online menu, and galleries
• Drag-and-drop editing via page builder

Pricing: One-time $69 purchase, including 6 months of support.

15) Ekko: Best One-Click Restaurant Theme

For owners with limited time, Ekko provides a neat shortcut for creating an online presence. This multi-purpose theme has a one-click restaurant website template that matches up against any dedicated theme.

The two demo sites we really enjoy are Pizza and Restaurant. The former is best suited to pizzerias, while the latter delivers the kind of slick presentation that would be a good fit for any dining venue.

There’s plenty of functionality here, too. Ekko helps you show off your menus, customer reviews, and dining events with minimalistic flair.

Key Features:

• Multiple full-site templates
• Highly customizable
• Over 200 pre-styled blocks to play with

Pricing: One-time $59 purchase, including 6 months of support.

16) Cinnamon Restaurant: Restaurant Theme With The Most Stylish Menus

Cinnamon Restaurant is the “sister” theme of Tamarind Restaurant. Both offer a similar range of features in a slightly different package.

What differentiates this theme is the way it handles menus. You’ll have seven different layouts to choose from, including image grids and accordion-style categories.

Away from the food, Cinnamon allows you to accept reservations and online delivery orders and create events. It’s also pretty easy to adapt because it is based on a page builder.

Key Features:

• 7 food menu layouts
• Supports reservations, online orders, and event management
• Page builder with customization options

Pricing: One-time $59 purchase, including 6 months of support.

17) Restaurant And Cafe: Best Free Lightweight Theme

If your budget is tight, Restaurant and Cafe is a theme worth your attention.

The free version of this theme covers all the basics, including a simple menu section and a reservation system. Better still, you can set up your own store via WooCommerce integration. To reiterate, this is all available for free.

Of course, the pro version offers plenty more. With a paid upgrade, you get predefined pages, various header styles, and a choice of 600 fonts.

Key Features:

• Solid free version with menus and reservation form
• Responsive design
• Pro version adds pre-styled pages and customization options

Pricing: Free basic version; Pro version from $59.

18) GloriaFood: Best Free Restaurant Theme

Who would have thought that the best free restaurant theme would come from cloud computing giant, Oracle?

GloriaFood rivals many premium themes in terms of both design and features. The basic layout is clean and uncluttered, with customization options and widget areas to grab visitors’ attention.

Better still, this theme is designed to work with Oracle’s own plug-and-play ordering system. This allows you to take unlimited orders and table reservations with no commission, and you can track your takings via the companion mobile app.

Key Features:

• Free theme with built-in customizer
• Works with plugin for online ordering and reservations
• Syncs with mobile restaurant app

Pricing: Free

19) Cookery: Best Theme For Restaurant Marketing

It’s worth remembering that creating a website is only the first step towards promoting your restaurant. Building a successful food business involves attracting new customers and keeping loyal diners.

Cookery is a theme to help with marketing tasks. It has built-in sections to promote your Instagram and your newsletter, including an email sign-up form.

The pro version comes with some interesting extras, such as pages for promoting your own recipe books and cooking courses.

Key Features:

• Sections for promoting your newsletter and Instagram
• Support for various sliders, landing pages, and sidebars
• Pre-styled pages for courses, recipes, and books.

Pricing: Free basic edition; Full theme starts at $59.

20) Zakra: Best Restaurant Theme For Performance

Zakra is another one of those multi-purpose themes that can be adapted to anyone’s specific needs. The Restaurant starter template is the area to focus on here.

The design is super elegant, with floral flourishes instead of regular separators, and appealing layouts. It has spaces for the menu, testimonials from your customers, and a gallery for foodie photos.

In addition to this visual appeal, Zakra offers exceptional performance. The underlying code is clean and optimized, meaning load times are under one second.

Key Features:

• Elegant, responsive design with customization options
• Sections for menus, testimonials, photos, and newsletter sign-up
• AMP-ready and excellent performance

Pricing: The underlying Zakra theme comes free with extended premium versions. Paid options start at $69/yr. Restaurant starter template is free.

21) Foodoholic: Best Minimalist Restaurant Theme

The best restaurant websites make food the center of attention — and that’s exactly what you get with Foodoholic.

This minimalist theme puts your best dish in the spotlight, along with links to your content and a personal profile. Other sections include a full-width menu and a neat block for showcasing testimonials.

The free version of Foodoholic is stacked with features, but you get more customization options when you upgrade.

Key Features:

• Clean, minimalist design with an eye-catching banner
• Sections for menus, chef profiles, blog posts, and reviews
• Customizable layouts, header, footer, and more

Pricing: Free basic version; Pro version from $59.99/yr.

22) Lzrestaurant: Best Theme For Casual Dining Restaurants

The big and bold design of the Lzrestaurant theme lends itself to casual dining brands. It’s not down-market, but the vibe here is definitely sneakers and hoodies rather than dress shoes and a jacket.

Lzrestaurant allows you to put a reservation form right on your home page. You can also display your menu categories with photos and show your venue in a video.

The newsletter sign-up section is another area of strength. Here, you can offer a discount to people who subscribe, and there’s a field for accepting coupon codes.

Key Features:

• Vibrant, eye-catching style with theme options
• Sections for menus, testimonials, videos, and subscription
• Works with WooCommerce

Pricing: Free basic version; Full theme is priced at $59.

23) Yummy: Best Photo Theme For Restaurants

It’s often said that diners eat with their eyes as much as their taste buds. Yummy is a theme that takes this idea to heart.

This theme hits you with loads of photos, from the full-screen header slideshow to the beautiful parallax backgrounds. It even has space for a couple of decorative images in the characterful menu section.

The free version of this theme covers the essentials. Meanwhile, the pro version introduces multiple-page templates and extensive customization options.

Key Features:

• Image-rich design with parallax scrolling
• Advanced customization
• Support for WooCommerce

Pricing:  Free basic version; Full theme is priced at $59.

24) Giardino: Best WordPress Theme For Italian Restaurants

Own an Italian restaurant? Whether you’re in downtown New York or the backstreets of Bologna, the Giardino theme should fit perfectly.

With a muted green color scheme and plenty of white space, this theme looks best when you load the front page with pizza and pasta. The default fonts add a sense of rustic authenticity, and you even have space to add profiles of your staff.

Under the hood, this theme is designed with a page builder plugin, so you can rearrange the elements as you see fit.

Key Features:

• Specifically made for Italian restaurants
• Page builder design
• High-end, clean design

Pricing: One-time $69 purchase, including 6 months of support.

25) Delicio: Best WooCommerce Restaurant Theme

Our final recommended theme is Delicio, which is an excellent choice if you’re planning to set up online ordering with WooCommerce.

You have two options: use the basic plugin or create an advanced ordering system using a premium WooCommerce add-on. Either way, your diners get a very stylish user experience.

Delicio can also handle OpenTable bookings, and it has a slick front page with multiple pre-made sections to choose from.

Key Features:

• Deep WooCommerce support for online ordering
• Reservation forms that sync with OpenTable
• Customizable, responsive design

Pricing: From €69/yr (~$75).

How To Create Your Restaurant Website With WordPress

The list above should hopefully provide plenty of inspiration about the design of your restaurant website, but how exactly do you set it all up? If you’re still a bit shaky on the answer, here’s a quick five-step process to follow:

1) Choose Your Domain Name And Web Host

Choosing a web host is the first crucial step in getting your restaurant website up and running. Your host is where all your data, files, and media will be stored and maintained.

There are a few things to consider when choosing your host. Consider what you are likely to need in the first year of running your site, and look at what each provider has to offer.

Some key areas to focus on include:

• Security: A website crash on a Friday night can mean losing business if your customers want to book a weekend lunch. Make sure to review the security features of potential web hosts to see what protection they offer. Backup and restoration options are a good place to start.
• Software: If you need to get your restaurant site online fast, partnering with a host that offers easy software options can be a big help. Find out whether your host offers one-click installation and optimization features.
• Support: Web hosts typically offer increasing levels of support as you upgrade to higher-tier plans. You’ll want to decide whether you need 24/7 expert support or if you can wait a little while for a ticket to be answered.
• Extras: You might find that choosing between several high-quality web hosts is hard. If that’s the case, you can closely examine what extras each host offers. If you know you could benefit from premium themes, pre-installed e-commerce options, or site builders, reviewing these options might be a good way to break a tie.

While deciding what type of hosting you need, keep in mind that here at DreamHost, we offer a wide range of WordPress plans to choose from.

Once you have a host picked out, you get to decide on a name for your new website.

Some best practices might be helpful in this process. While .com is still the most recognized and respected top-level domain, there are many other options. The most important thing is to make sure your domain is short and memorable.

Remember, your hosting plan might come with extra goodies. For example, some hosts offer free add-ons. Here at DreamHost, we’re excited to be able to provide access to a handy site builder tool.

To get started, you’ll need to select WP Website Builder as an option during checkout of your DreamHost plan purchase. Then, we’ll automatically install WordPress and premium website builder plugins for WordPress (Inspirations and Page & Post Builder), built by our friends at BoldGrid.

2) Install a Dedicated Restaurant Theme

Once you choose a host and set up your site with its domain name, you can start thinking about website design.

If you want to get up and running quickly, the list above should provide plenty of inspiration. All you need to do is download your chosen theme and upload it to your site under Appearance > Themes > Add New.

Another option is using WP Website Builder, our built-in site designer. This tool lets you create the perfect website via drag-and-drop controls. Alternatively, you can import a ready-made template with a couple of clicks. Check out the Restaurant category for a selection of suitable designs.

3) Select Plugins To Expand Your Site’s Feature Set

While WP Website Builder includes several plugins to help create and improve your restaurant site, you might want to explore a few other tools, as well. Plugins, true to their name, plug right in to your WordPress site and theme to extend their existing options.

Whether you plan on offering new menu items every week, only on holidays, or whenever you feel like it, plugins can help you manage those changes. Additionally, other plugins can help you develop an online reservation system or organize in-house events.

One plugin to check out is Five Star Restaurant Reservations.

This solution is packed with features to help you manage all aspects of taking online reservations and table bookings. You can accept, reject, or block reservations as needed. Additionally, you can set up specific user roles for your staff and send notifications to customers.

4) Create Engaging Content

Once you have your design in place, you’ll want to solidify the content strategy for your restaurant.

Whether you choose to feature blog content, exciting menus, or just pictures of your tasty-looking food, WordPress has you covered. Even the rotisserie giant Boston Market uses WordPress for its restaurant website.

There are several ways to publish content with WordPress, including various options within the WordPress Edit Post area. Additionally, you can check out a plugin like WP Scheduled Posts.

This tool can help you create an editorial calendar to keep your blog fresh and up to date. That way, you won’t have to worry about forgetting to post a timely article or showcasing outdated content.

Once you establish your approach to content, you might want to turn to social media channels to spread the news about your new website.

5) Build An Email List

Building up a loyal clientele can take some time. Creating the opportunity for potential customers to sign up for an email list can be a smart strategy.

Creating an email list for your restaurant gives you a direct link to your customers. You can send menu announcements, hours-of-operation updates, and discount offers.

There are a lot of great marketing tools. Mailchimp is a popular email newsletter and list management service. You’ll need to create a free account, and then a plugin that can connect your site to this service instantly.

With Mailchimp, you can fully integrate your WordPress site with your email marketing campaigns. That way, you can bring in as many new patrons as possible.

How To Set Up Curbside Pickup And Delivery

For many restaurants, curbside pickup and delivery are good ways to make some extra money on a busy weekend.

While you can use third-party platforms to handle online orders, setting up a system on your own website is much more cost-efficient in the long run.

The easiest way to achieve this is by adding WooCommerce to your WordPress site. This plugin is free and very powerful. Here’s how to set it up for online food orders:

1) Configure A Local Shipping Zone

• In your WordPress dashboard, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Shipping
• Click on Add Shipping Zone
• Name the shipping zone descriptively and select your region
• Opt to limit to specific ZIP/postcodes for accurate service area mapping
• Remember to save your changes

2) Enable Local Pickup As A Shipping Option

• Still on your local shipping zone page, click Add shipping method
• Select Local Pickup from the dropdown and click Add shipping method

Note: For a more customized pickup setup, consider the Local Pickup Plus WooCommerce extension.

3) Add A Flat Rate Shipping Option For Local Delivery

• Next, add a second shipping option: Flat Rate.
• Click Edit and change the method title to Local Delivery, optionally adding a delivery fee.
• Click on Save changes

Note: Both ‘Local Pickup’ and ‘Local Delivery’ will now appear at checkout.

4) Install ‘Order Delivery Date For WooCommerce’ Plugin To Manage Requests

• Install and activate the Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce plugin
• In your WordPress dashboard, go to Order Delivery Date
• Select the checkbox next to Enable Delivery Date capture on the checkout page
• Choose which days you’re available for delivery
• Set the minimum number of hours you need to prepare an order for delivery
• Specify how many days in advance customers can schedule an order
• Select the checkbox next to Selection of the delivery date on the checkout page will become mandatory
• Set the maximum number of deliveries you can handle per day
• Enable default sorting of orders by delivery date for the WooCommerce Orders page
• Remember to save your changes

And that’s it! You’re ready to become the local takeout place that everyone talks about.

Launch Your Restaurant Website Today With DreamHost

The restaurant business can be competitive. Along with tasty food and creative dishes, customers are looking for an experience that often goes beyond the time they spend in your physical establishment. Creating a standout restaurant website design can help them feel more connected to your business and keep them coming back for more.

Here at DreamHost, we want you to be able to put your energy into making delicious meals and not worry about whether your website maintenance and support is taken care of.

That’s why we offer complete WordPress hosting solutions, now served with a side of our premium website builder tools, so you can focus on making Instagram-worthy food!

WordPress + DreamHost

Our automatic updates and strong security defenses take server management off your hands so you can focus on creating a great website.

Check Out Plans

The post Order Up! Here Are 25 WordPress Themes Perfect For Your Restaurant Website appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

WordPress is an excellent, secure platform out of the box, but there’s certainly more you can (and should!) do to keep your site safe from malicious intent. Many of these security enhancements are easy to implement and can be performed manually in mere minutes. Others simply require installing a particular plugin.

In this article, I’ll guide you through 20 different strategies for upping the defenses on your WordPress fortress. But first, let’s go a little further into why website security should matter to you.

Why WordPress Security Is So Important

Choosing WordPress as your platform is an excellent way to start when you’re trying to create a site. It’s not only a flexible, powerful platform for building websites — it’s also remarkably secure as is.

But of course, no platform can be 100% secure, and there are many reasons to be concerned about the security of your WordPress site:

• Popularity – WordPress powers a huge portion of all the websites on the internet, making it a prime target for cybercriminals. Its widespread usage makes it an attractive platform to exploit vulnerabilities and gain unauthorized access to websites.
• Vulnerabilities – As with any software, WordPress is not immune to vulnerabilities. Hackers constantly search for vulnerabilities in WordPress themes, plugins, and core software. Exploiting them can lead to unauthorized access, data breaches, defacement, or even complete control of a website.
• Data breaches – WordPress websites often store sensitive user information, like email addresses, passwords, and personal data. A security breach can expose this confidential data, leading to identity theft, financial loss, or even legal consequences (yikes!).
• SEO impact – A compromised WordPress site can be used for malicious activities, like hosting malware, redirecting visitors to harmful websites, or sending spam emails. Search engines may flag and penalize such websites, leading to a significant drop in rankings and organic traffic once you regain control of your site.
• Reputation and trust – If a WordPress website is compromised and used for malicious purposes, it can severely damage the site owner’s reputation and erode user trust. Think of an e-commerce store, for example. If the store can’t commit to keeping shoppers’ personal data safe, people just won’t shop there (and who can blame them?).
• Downtime and financial loss – A hacked site can experience extended downtime while the website owner works to resolve the security breach. In turn, downtime can result in lost business, decreased revenue, and additional expenses for recovery and restoration.

Given these risks, investing in WordPress security measures is essential to protect your website and its users’ data. Ideally, you should put just as much time and effort into security as you spent designing your site in the first place (if not more). Fortunately for you, dear reader, there are lots of simple, quick ways to improve your site’s security, as well as some more complex techniques you may want to employ — and below, we’re covering them all.

Top WordPress Security Vulnerabilities

As the saying goes, know thy enemy. Before we dive into our security tips, let’s learn more about the security vulnerabilities you need to protect your WordPress site from.

• Outdated software, themes, and plugins – Using outdated versions of WordPress, themes, or plugins can leave your site vulnerable to known security flaws.
• Weak usernames and passwords – Weak login credentials make it easier for hackers to access your site. Avoid using common usernames like “admin” and choose strong, unique passwords that include a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols.
• Brute force attacks – Brute force attacks involve repeated attempts to guess your login credentials. You can prevent them by limiting login attempts and using two-factor authorization (more on that later in this article).
• Cross-site scripting (XSS) – XSS vulnerabilities happen when malicious scripts are injected into web pages, potentially compromising users’ browsers or session data. Many security plugins have features to prevent XSS.
• Malware infections – Malware can be injected into your site through vulnerabilities, infected themes or plugins, or compromised files. To avoid malware, don’t install plugins without checking into their reputation first. And regular malware scanning can catch infections before they have the chance to wreak havoc on your site.
• Backdoors – A backdoor is a hidden entry point in a website that allows unauthorized access even after security measures are in place. Backdoors can be created by malicious actors or accidentally introduced through compromised themes, plugins, or weak security practices. Once a backdoor is established, it can grant unauthorized access to an attacker, who can then manipulate the site, steal data, or perform other malicious activities without the website owner’s knowledge.

Implementing security plugins and other best practices can protect your site from these vulnerabilities. So without further ado, let’s get to what you’re here for: actionable WordPress security tips and how to put them into practice.

20 WordPress Security Tips

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you about the importance of maintaining a secure WordPress website. If not, I’m going to have to re-enroll in Persuasive Writing 101. Please don’t make me do that.

Throughout the rest of this article, I’ll introduce 20 strategies (along with some of the best WordPress security plugins) for making your site safer from some of the most common and dangerous security vulnerabilities. You don’t have to implement every suggestion on this list (although you certainly can!), but the more steps you take to secure your site, the lower your chances of encountering a disaster down the road.

1. Use A Quality Host

You can think of your web host as your website’s street on the Internet — it’s the place where your site “lives.” And like a good school district matters to your kid’s future (so they say; I turned out fine), the quality of your website’s home base counts in a lot of big ways.

A solid hosting provider can impact how well your site performs, how reliable it is, how large it can grow, and even how it ranks in search engines. The best hosts offer a variety of useful features, excellent support, and a service tailored to your chosen platform.

As you’ve probably already guessed, your web host can also have a significant impact on your site’s security. There are several security benefits to choosing from the best hosting companies.

How Web Hosting Can Improve WordPress Security:

• A quality host will constantly update its service, software, and tools to respond to the latest threats and eliminate potential security breaches.
• Web hosts often offer various targeted security features, such as SSL/TLS certificates and DDoS protection. You should also get access to a Web Application Firewall (WAF), which will help monitor and block serious threats to your site.
• Your web host will most likely provide a way to back up your site (in some cases, even carrying out real-time backups for you), so if you’re hacked, you can easily revert to a stable, previous version.
• If your host offers reliable, 24/7 support, you’ll always have someone to help you out if you do run into a security-related issue.

This list should give you a good starting point to work from when looking for a host for your new site. You’ll want to find one that offers all of the features and functionality you’ll need, plus has a reputation for reliability and excellent performance.

DreamPress is a managed WordPress hosting service that’s fast, reliable, scalable, and, of course, secure. DreamPress includes a pre-installed SSL/TLS certificate and provides a dedicated WAF designed with rules built to protect WordPress sites and block hacking attempts. With your hosting plan, you’ll also get automated backups, 24/7 support from WordPress experts, and Jetpack Premium — a plugin that can add many additional security features to your site — at no additional cost.

With DreamPress, you’ll be able to rest easy knowing that your site is protected. Our hosting service even takes care of many of the other security-enhancing steps on this list — although we still encourage you to read on to learn what extra measures you can take to protect your site.

2. Register Your Domain Privately

To register a domain, you’re asked to provide your name, address, and phone number. This information is used to track ownership of domain names and can be found online with a quick search on the WHOIS directory.

While keeping track of this information is vital to the health of the internet, it’s reasonable not to want your personal information online. This is where Private Registration enters the story. When you register a domain with DreamHost (or another secure hosting platform, I guess), you have the option to substitute your personal information with the relevant data from the hosting platform — so looking up your domain on WHOIS shows DreamHost’s address and contact information instead of yours. You can even enable this security feature after your domain has already been registered!

3. Change Your Admin Username

When you first create your website, all shiny and new, you’re given a User Profile. At any time, you can go back and change your Nickname or fill in your Full Name, but to change your username is a different story — you will need to create a whole new user and grant that account the administrator role. The drawback? You need to use a different email address than the one used by your current account.

You can then alter your username by creating a new user, giving it the administrator role, attributing all your content to it, and deleting your original account. When your previous username has been deleted, you can change the email address of your new account if you desire.

4. Enable A Web Application Firewall

You’re probably familiar with the concept of a firewall — a program that helps to block all sorts of unwanted attacks on your site. Most likely, you have some kind of firewall on your computer. A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is simply a firewall designed specifically for websites. It can protect servers, specific websites, or entire groups of sites.

A WAF on your WordPress site will function as a barrier between your website and the rest of the web. A firewall monitors incoming activity, detects attacks, malware, and other unwanted events, and blocks anything it considers a risk from accessing your web server. #winning

You have many options for adding a WAF to your site (WordFence is a popular choice). But if you’ve opted for our DreamPress package, you can relax; you won’t need an additional firewall. DreamPress includes a built-in WAF that will monitor your site for threats and block malicious users and programs from gaining access. No action required on your part.

DreamHost also offers DreamShield, our in-house malware scanning service. When you enable DreamShield on your hosting account, we’ll scan your site weekly for malicious code. If we find anything suspicious, you’ll be notified immediately via email.

5. Implement Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication (which also goes by two-step authentication and a variety of other, similar names) refers to a two-step process you’ll need to follow when logging into your site. This takes a little more time and effort but goes a long way toward keeping hackers out.

Two-factor authentication involves using a smartphone or other device to verify your login. First, you’ll visit your WordPress site and enter your username and password as usual. A unique code will then be sent to your mobile device, which you must provide to finish logging in. This enables you to prove your identity by showing you have access to something solely yours — such as a particular phone or tablet.

As with many WordPress features, two-factor authentication is easy to add with a dedicated plugin. The Two Factor Authentication plugin is a solid choice — it’s created by reliable developers, compatible with Google Authenticator, and will enable you to add two-factor functionality to your site with no fuss.

Another choice is the Two-Factor plugin, which was built mainly by core WordPress developers and is well known for its reliability. As with any plugin in this category, it comes with a bit of a learning curve, but it will get the job done and is incredibly secure. If you’re willing to spend a little money, you can also check out Jetpack’s Clef-like premium solution.

Whatever route you choose, make sure to plan ahead with your team, since you’ll need to gather phone numbers and other information for all user accounts. With that, your login page is now secured and ready to go.

6. Be Mindful When Adding New Plugins And Themes

One of the best things about WordPress is the ready availability of plugins and themes for just about any need. With these handy tools, you can make your site look just right and add nearly any feature or functionality you can think of.

Not all plugins and themes are created equally, though.

Developers who aren’t careful or don’t have the right level of experience can create plugins that are unreliable or insecure — or just downright sucky. They might use poor coding practices that leave holes hackers can easily exploit or unknowingly interfere with crucial functionality.

This means you must be very careful about the themes and plugins you add to your site. Each one should be vetted to ensure it’s a solid option that won’t hurt your site or cause problems. Here’s how to select quality tools:

• Read reviews – Check user ratings and reviews to learn whether others have had a good experience with the plugin or theme.
• Developer support – Look at how recently the plugin or theme has been updated. If it’s been longer than six months, chances are it isn’t as secure as it could be.
• Easy does it – Install new plugins and themes one at a time, so if anything goes wrong, you’ll know what the cause was. Also, remember to back up your site before adding anything to it.
• Vetted sources – Get your plugins and themes from trustworthy sources, such as the WordPress.org Theme and Plugin Directories, ThemeForest and CodeCanyon, and reliable developer websites.

7. Regularly Update WordPress

Keeping WordPress up to date is one of the most important things you can do to secure your site. Smaller patches and security updates will be implemented automatically, but you may need to approve major updates independently (don’t worry, this is very simple to do). This probably goes without saying, but DreamHost handles these updates for you, so you don’t have to worry.

But your work isn’t done just because WordPress is up to date.

You’ll also need to regularly update your plugins, themes, and other WordPress installations to ensure they work well together and are secured against the latest threats. Fortunately, this is also pretty easy — simply go to your WordPress dashboard, look for the red notifications telling you there are themes or plugins with available updates, and click “Update Now” next to each one.

You can also update your plugins in a batch by selecting all of them and then hitting the update button, either here or in the WordPress panel.

8. Configure File Permissions

Let’s talk technical for a minute.

A lot of the information, data, and content on your WordPress site is stored in a series of folders and files on its back end. These are organized into a hierarchical structure, and each one is given a permissions level. The permissions on a WordPress file or folder determine who can view and edit it. They can be set to allow access to anyone, only you, or almost anything in between.

File permissions are represented by a three-digit number in WordPress, and each digit has a meaning. The first digit stands for an individual user (the site’s owner), the second digit for the group (for example, members of your site), and the third for everyone in the world. The number itself means that the user, group, or world:

• 0: Has no access to the file.
• 1: Can only execute the file.
• 2: Can edit the file.
• 3: Can edit and execute the file.
• 4: Can read the file.
• 5: Can read and execute the file.
• 6: Can read and edit the file.
• 7: Can read, edit, and execute the file.

So, for example, if a file is given a permissions level of 640 it means the primary user can read and edit the file, the group can read the file but not edit it, and the rest of the world cannot access it at all. It’s important to ensure that each person only has the level of access to your site’s files and folders you want them to have.

WordPress recommends setting folders to a permissions level of 755 and files to 644. You’re pretty safe sticking to these guidelines, although you can set up any combination you’d like. Just remember that it’s best not to give anyone more access than they absolutely need, especially to core files.

You should also keep in mind that your ideal permissions settings will depend somewhat on your hosting service, so you may want to find out what your host recommends.

Note: Be very careful when making changes to your permissions levels — choosing the wrong values (like the dreaded 777) can make your site inaccessible.

And while we’re on this subject, it’s important to note that WordPress comes with a built-in code editor that allows users to edit theme and plugin files right from the Admin Area. This is handy when you need it, but a big security risk if your site falls into the wrong hands. That’s why you should disable file editing with a plugin like Sucuri.

9. Keep WordPress Users To A Minimum

If you’re running your WordPress site solo, you don’t need to worry about this step. Just don’t give anyone else an account on your site, and you’ll be the only person who can make changes.

However, there are many reasons to add another user account to your site: You may want to let other authors contribute content, or you might need people to help edit content and manage your site. You may even have an entire team of users who regularly access your WordPress site and make their own changes.

This can be beneficial (or even necessary). However, it’s also a potential security risk.

The more people you let into your site, the higher the chance that someone will make a mistake, cause problems, or just be a putz. That’s why you should keep your site’s user count as low as possible without hampering its ability to grow. In particular, try to limit the number of administrators and other user roles with high privileges.

Here are a few other best practices:

• Limit each user to only what permissions are necessary for them to do their job.
• Encourage users to use strong passwords.
• Try to stick with one administrator and a small group of editors.
• Remove users who have left the site or no longer need access.
• Regularly log out idle users (the Inactive Logout plugin is great for this!).
• Consider downloading a plugin like Members, which provides a user interface for WordPress’ role and capabilities system.

10. Limit Login Attempts

Everyone forgets their password sometimes. But good news! By default, WordPress allows an unlimited number of guesses.

But is that really good news? Brute force attacks, or attacks where a hacker tries any number of passwords, are one of the most common ways hackers gain access to private accounts. With no limit on login attempts, a hacker or bot could try every password in the book with no consequences.

First, check your Web Access Firewall (WAF) to limit the number of login attempts a user can make. If your firewall is already set up, a limit will already be in place, but you can also use a separate plugin for that! Both Login Lockdown and Cerber Limit Login Attempts record the IP address and time stamp for each failed login attempt, let you limit the number of failed attempts allowed in a certain span of time, and lock out IP addresses that exceed the limit. Both plugins are free, but Login Lockdown is simpler and more beginner-friendly. If you require a more robust system, Cerber Limit Login Attempts is the way to go, allowing not only IP white/blacklisting, but also notifying admins if a certain number of lockouts is reached.

11. Track Your Admin Area Activity

If you have multiple users, keeping tabs on what they’re all doing on the site is a good idea. Tracking activity in your WordPress admin area will help you spot when other users are doing things they shouldn’t — and can help you spot when unauthorized users have gained access.

But you also need a tool to help you see who is behind different site activities — like when someone makes an unauthorized change or a suspicious new install. For that, you need another plugin. Simple History lives up to its name by creating a streamlined, easy-to-understand log of changes and events on your site.

For more comprehensive tracking features, check out WP Security Audit Log, which tracks just about everything that happens on your site and offers premium add-ons.

12. Password Protect Your Login Page

The login page is the most likely way for hackers to access your website, so protecting it is a great way to protect the rest of your site. This can be a bit technical, but it’s still worth learning. Use this tutorial to learn how to create an htaccess file and add a password prompt to your login page. A login for your login — what will they think of next?

And if you’re hosting content that not everyone needs to see, you can password protect other parts of your site. For blog posts and other pages, you can add password protection by going into pages >> all posts option. Click “edit,” and you’ll see the option to change the visibility to “Password Protected”. Just publish, and badabing-badaboom, that page is locked up tight!

13. Hide Your Login Page

Adding password protection to your login page is great, but even better is if hackers can’t even find it. Changing your wp-admin and wp-login pages is easy and helps deter hackers who can easily find your login page if you leave default settings in place.

There are several plugins that can redirect the default login page to another page of your choosing. Many plugins offer this as part of a larger package (for example, Defender also includes a malware scanner and firewall). But if you’re looking for something simple, try WPS Hide Login, which just hides your login. Just don’t forget to bookmark your new login page so you can find it.

14. Update PHP

Just like America runs on Dunkin’ (don’t quote us there), WordPress runs on PHP. Updating WordPress isn’t enough to keep your site safe and secure — you need to make sure you’re using the latest version of PHP, too.

Normally, each PHP version is supported for at least two years after its release date, meaning vulnerabilities are addressed by the engineers who designed the code. When the code goes out of date (or reaches its EOL or “end of life”), it’s time to upgrade, or you risk being exposed to security concerns, performance slowdowns, and bugs galore.

To see which version of PHP you’re currently running, log in to your WordPress site, and select Tools >> Site Health. Navigate to Info and then Server, and view your current PHP version.

15. Secure Your WordPress Database

Leaving anything at the default settings is a boon for hackers, and by default, WordPress uses wp_ as the prefix for all of your related tables. Good news! If you’re using the One-Click Installer, you already have a prefix of random letters and numbers. As long as it ends with an underscore, the system is happy. Better News! Even if your WordPress is already installed, it may be eligible for the One-Click Installer as long as the site is fully hosted and meets a few other guidelines.

Just note that breaking something can be as easy as a missing underscore. Luckily, there is a default version of the wp-config.php file available at WordPress Core, so you can quickly and easily rebuild — whether you tried to change the database prefix manually, or with a service like phpMyAdmin.

16. Add Security Questions

Security questions are often overlooked, but they give extra oomph to your security. Depending on the plugin you choose, you’ll either choose from existing security questions or create your own.

17. Hide Your WordPress Version

Security through Obscurity — if they can’t find it, they can’t hack it!

Hide which version of WordPress you’re using (or hide that you’re using WordPress altogether) by altering the header code. If that sounds too technical, use a plugin like WPCode. Just make sure to alter the code and not just edit the display information in your theme settings — those snippets of code will only return during the next theme update.

18. Prevent Hotlinking

Hotlinking is the act of stealing bandwidth by using files hosted on one site and linking them to another. For example, let’s say someone draws a pretty clever comic, and some other website wants to feature it without permission. They could hotlink the comic instead of hosting it on their own servers, costing the original website more bandwidth, and therefore more money.

To prevent hotlinking, you can choose to reject certain domains, allow only certain domains, or remove the ability to hotlink altogether, all by making a few changes to your htaccess file. You can even include a snippet in your .htaccess file that routes all hotlinking attempts to a page or image of your choice — perhaps one that says, “Stop hotlinking, freeloader!”

19. DDoS Protection (Disable XML RPC)

A Distributed Denial of Service attack (or DDoS) is when a hacker uses multiple systems to send a huge volume of data and overwhelm their target. This can slow down and crash their target — imagine a huge traffic jam for your website where no legitimate traffic can get in.

We know that patience is hard to come by online, with the average user waiting only 3 seconds for a page to load before clicking away, so the sooner you can identify and resolve an attack on your website, the better.

While preventing a DDoS attack may seem daunting, one of the first steps you can take is to remove or disable any old or unutilized plugins. Plugins are incredibly handy, but by increasing functionality, they also have access to your website that can be exploited. For once, downloading more plugins is not the answer!

XML-RPC allows WordPress access through the app on your mobile device. If you don’t use your smartphone to make changes to your WordPress website, you likely don’t need this feature enabled. Turning it off involves adding a quick snippet of code to your htaccess file, and you’ll be all the safer for it.

20. Malware Scanning

Malware (short for malicious software) hides in what appears to be safe applications so that the user doesn’t know their computer or website has been infected.

Malware scanning is an important defense that works by using anti-malware software to identify and isolate suspicious files until you decide if they need to be removed. If a threat is detected, a good malware scanner will delete any trace of it from your computer ASAP. Luckily, several firewall plugins come with malware scanning built in, so make sure to check your security plugins to see what they offer.

If you have DreamHost as your hosting platform, you can activate DreamShield to handle weekly malware scanning for you.

WordPress Security: Locking It Up

If your website is hacked, you’ll spend hours (perhaps even days) trying to repair the damage. You may permanently lose data or see your personal information compromised — or worse: your clients’ data.

That’s why you have to put enough time and energy into making sure your site is secure. Otherwise, you just risk losing valuable business and precious time.

These WordPress security tips should help. Some are simple tweaks, while others affect your entire site. But if you’re looking for one impactful change you can make today to keep your site secure, make sure it runs on a secured WordPress host.

DreamPress hosting (with free WordPress migration) is specifically designed for the WordPress environment. Plus, if you ever do encounter a security issue, we’ve got you covered with automatic daily backups, a weekly malware scan, and our support team of WordPress experts! Ready to protect your site from threats and vulnerabilities? Learn more about DreamPress hosting today.

Launch Your Website with DreamPress

Our automatic updates and strong security defenses take server management off your hands so you can focus on creating a great website.

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The post Everything You Need To Know About WordPress Security (+20 Hardening Tips) appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

The only question is, which ones should you install?

We created this epic guide to provide the answer. In the list below, we’re going to introduce the hundred best WordPress plugins known to humankind — including some exciting new entrants in the AI space.

The Best Website and Page Builder Plugins

There are thousands of great ready-made themes for WordPress, but if you want to make something truly unique, try working with these page builder plugins:

1) Essential Blocks

If you’re new to using page builders, Essential Blocks is a great starting point.

Designed to extend WordPress’ Gutenberg editor, this plugin gives you more than 40 pre-styled blocks to work with. Each block is customizable, and you can use them in both pages and posts. If that sounds like too much hard work, you can access 1,000 full-page templates through an add-on subscription.

Key Features:

• Extends Gutenberg editor
• Over 40 element blocks
• Responsive designs and fast to load

Pricing: Free; Pro license with extra blocks is $49 per site

2) Elementor

If you’re just starting your website, you can benefit from using a page builder plugin such as Elementor. This tool has a drag-and-drop editor to design your website’s appearance on the front end. You can also import pre-designed pages, blocks, and templates to speed up the creation process, and get creative with animations and motion effects.

Key Features:

• Over 40 free widgets
• Performance improvements with reduced CSS and JavaScript files
• Ready-to-go website kits and templates

Pricing: Free version with limited features; Elementor Pro starts at $59 per year

3) Beaver Builder

In comparison with many drag-and-drop page builders, Beaver Builder uses “clean” code that conforms to WordPress standards. This means your work will remain intact, even if you choose to remove the plugin later. You also get a good range of design elements to choose from, and a choice between visual and in-line editing.

Key Features: 

• Drag-and-drop editor that leaves behind “clean” code
• Responsive designs featuring over 30 elements
• Excellent loading speeds for a page builder

Pricing: Free Lite version with limited features; Premium plans start at $99 per year.

4) Spectra

Designed to work in tandem with the Gutenberg editor, Spectra serves up over 20 full website templates that work with the free Astra WordPress theme. If you prefer to take control yourself, you have a generous supply of stylish blocks to play with. What’s more, this free tool works nicely with various other plugins, including WooCommerce.

Key Features:

• Page builder plugin designed to extend Gutenberg
• Over 20 pre-made site designs that can be installed with a click
• Works with other plugins, including WooCommerce, LifterLMS, and more

Pricing: Free

5) Cornerstone

A relative newcomer, Cornerstone is a powerful theme builder that combines pre-styled elements with extensive options for design customization. Aimed at professionals and advanced WordPress users, this plugin offers an impressive array of tools, and it delivers excellent performance thanks to a lightweight codebase. Plus, it has great SEO features built in.

Key Features:

• Theme builder with element library and conditional logic
• Extensive design customization options
• Lightweight plugin that delivers “clean” semantic code

Pricing: $69 one-time fee, or available in a yearly subscription

6) Themify Builder

With 60 pre-made layouts and the same number of animation effects, Themify Builder is a page builder with plenty to offer. This plugin delivers the usual drag-and-drop editing experience, with plenty of modules and custom styling options. It hasn’t quite received the same level of admiration as other builders in this roundup, but it’s still a solid, free option.

Key Features:

• Drag-and-drop page builder with over 60 predesigned layouts
• Customizable responsive styling and adjustable columns
• Full revisions history

Pricing: Free

7) Otter Gutenberg Page Builder

Gutenberg is WordPress’ built-in editor for designing posts and pages. While it does have some pre-designed block patterns, it might have more limited functionality than you expect. Fortunately, the Otter Gutenberg Page Builder plugin extends the features of the Block Editor — without drastically slowing your load speeds.

Key Features:

• Many block types, including the Maps Block, Product Review Block, About Author Block, and more
• Over 50 different block templates
• Built-in responsive settings to control color, animation, and typography

Pricing: Free, with the Premium version providing extra features from ~$52 per year.

8) Getwid by MotoPress

When it comes to keeping your site up to date and adding new content, Getwid by Motopress can give your workflow a needed boost. This drag-and-drop builder system extends WordPress’ native block editor, allowing you to create content using predefined elements. This can be a huge timesaver, especially if you frequently add and customize blog posts, pages, or other content types.

Key Features:

• 40+ Gutenberg blocks to extend WordPress’ default library
• 35+ pre-built block templates you can use to create pages quickly
• Built-in toolset allows for quick editing of posts and pages

Pricing: Free basic version, which can be extended with premium add-ons. Get access to the full library of Motopress plugins with an annual membership, starting at $299 per year.

9) Responsive Menu

WordPress provides a flexible menu system out of the box. But if you’re looking for even more control, Responsive Menu lets you customize menus to your heart’s content. It serves up more than 150 options, covering text, fonts, colors, buttons, animations, background images, and custom logos.

Key Features:

• Provides more than 150 menu options that can be customized to your liking
• Lets you alter key elements of your menus, such as fonts, colors, sizes, and animations
• Offers various menu placements

Pricing: Free basic version; Advanced features start at $49 per year.

10) Slider Revolution

Slider Revolution is another popular plugin included in many premium WordPress themes. It helps you spruce up the design of your site with sliders and carousels that contain images, posts, videos, and other content. It’s particularly good for creating an eye-catching front page, and the plugin offers a dedicated editing tool for this task.

Key Features:

• Includes a visual, drag-and-drop page editor to simplify the design process
• Lets you add sliders, carousels, and hero scenes to your site
• Offers a front-page designer so that you can customize your home page

Pricing: Plans start at $35 per year.

Bonus: WP Website Builder by DreamHost

When you host your website with DreamHost, you get access to our powerful WordPress site builder.

This easy-to-use tool allows you to create the perfect layout for your site using drag-and-drop controls. Need some inspiration? Our library of over 200 full-site templates should help you get started. The WP Website Builder also offers valuable SEO recommendations, great content editing tools, and a handy quickstart wizard.

Key Features:

• Easy drag-and-drop editing of pages and posts, with loads of stylish elements to choose
• SEO recommendations to ensure your content ranks highly on search engines
• Over 200 full site templates, which you can install with a couple of clicks

Pricing: The website builder is included free with all our hosting plans, starting from just $2.59 per month.

The Best WordPress SEO Plugins

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a proven strategy to help your site rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. However, it can be challenging to remember its complicated rules and guidelines. These plugins can help make the process a whole lot easier:

11) Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO provides an easy way to hone in on keywords and customize how your posts appear on search engine results pages. To help optimize content, this plugin uses a simple traffic light system – A green light indicates that a post or page is good to go, while a yellow or red light means improvement is needed.

Key Features:

• Optimize your search engine results with titles, URLs, and meta descriptions
• Analyze your pages and posts and find areas for improvement
• Control which of your site pages are displayed in Google search results

Pricing: Core plugin is free; Premium costs $99 per year.

12) All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

With more than 3 million installs to date, AIOSEO is an incredibly popular SEO plugin. It provides a complete set of tools for optimizing your site, packaged in a clean interface. E-commerce and local SEO are strong points for this plugin, along with the beginner-friendly auditing features.

Key Features:

• Easy editing for meta titles, meta descriptions, and SEO keywords
• Schema markup, XML sitemaps, and Google Search Console tools
• Social media integrations

Pricing:  Lite version is free; Pro version with extended features starts at $124 per year.

13) SEO Plugin by Squirrly SEO

Boasting over 650 individual features, Squirrly SEO’s plugin is clearly very capable. However, there is one particular tool that gets us excited: the A.I. SEO consultant. This tool analyzes your site and provides step-by-step instructions on how to optimize it for search. It’s a great idea that can really help those of us with limited SEO knowledge.

Key Features: 

• Over 650 individual features for SEO
• AI-powered assistant provides task list for better optimization
• Keyword research tool that uses fresh data and unique algorithms

Pricing: All features are free with limited usage; Premium plans start at $29.99 per month.

14) SEOPress

Also joining the AI bandwagon is SEOPress. This on-site SEO plugin can create a good meta title and description for any page automatically, and it provides plenty of guidance for content creation. Tight integration with Google and Microsoft analytics allows you to gain key search insights, and SEOPress can even set alt text for images on your website.

Key Features:

• Content analysis covering unlimited keywords
• Automatically fills metadata and alt titles using AI
• Integrates with Google, Microsoft, IndexNow, and OpenGraph

Pricing: Free with core features; Pro version starts at $49 per year.

15) WPSSO

Providing structured data is essential for SEO because it helps search engines and other platforms index the content on your website. WPSSO is a plugin that makes it easy to create and format structured data for every major search engine and plenty of social media sites. It can optimize your images for various platforms, too.

Key Features:

• Creates structured data, optimized for a range of search engines and social media platforms
• Optimizes image sizing for various platforms
• Supports over 500 different schema types

Pricing: Core version is free; Premium features require a $59 one-time purchase. Free add-ons are also available.

16) Rank Math SEO

Billed as the “Swiss Army knife of WordPress SEO,” Rank Math is definitely versatile. One of the first SEO plugins to introduce AI features, this tool provides an intelligent writing assistant. As you compose posts and website copy, the plugin provides dynamic suggestions that should guide you toward the front page of Google.

Key Features:

• AI writing assistant that provides dynamic suggestions
• Smart link recommendations
• Support for 16 types of schema markups

Pricing: Free with basic features; Pro plans with extended features start at $59 per year.

17) The SEO Framework

If optimizing every pixel of your website sounds like hard work, The SEO Framework is worth your attention. This plugin comes preconfigured, and it can intelligently create important SEO meta tags for all of your content. If you’re willing to put in some effort, the plugin provides plenty of good advice. In fact, it follows Google’s best practices exactly.

Key Features:

• Intelligently creates meta tags in any language
• Color-coded overview helps you see which pages need improvement
• Notifies Google and Bing about site changes

Pricing: Free, with premium extensions available.

18) Redirection

When making changes to your website, you may accidentally create broken links. With Redirection, you can fix this issue by redirecting old content to a new URL. This plugin makes it easy to manage all your redirects in one place, even if you’re not familiar with the inner workings of Apache or Nginx.

Key Features:

• Track 404 errors and implement many redirect types
• Migrate old permalinks to a new structure
• Add HTTP headers to your website

Pricing: Free

19) WP 301 Redirects

A slightly more advanced tool, WP 301 Redirects helps you fix three common website errors: redirections, 404 errors, and bad outbound links. It’s really easy to use, and you get full control over redirects and error messages. You can even use it with localization plugins; keep scrolling to see our top picks.

Key Features:

• Create redirects for pages, posts, custom post types, and archives
• Works with translation plugins
• Bulk redirect management

Pricing: Core features are free; Pro license with extended features available on a one-time purchase, starting at $79.

20) Internal Link Juicer

Adding internal links within your content is vital if you want your content to turn up in search results. Inserting links manually can be a chore, but you can automate most of the process with Internal Link Juicer. This highly rated plugin finds suitable posts and pages that already exist on your site, and suggests adding a link when appropriate.

Key Features:

• Automatic link building based on your chosen keywords
• Customizable link output, including tags
• Appears on the post editor screen

Pricing: Free with all core features; Premium version with extended linking options is $69.99 per site.

The Best Security Plugins

Losing full control of your website is a nightmare scenario for any WordPress user. Thankfully, there are loads of great security plugins that can stop threats and reduce spam comments:

21) Akismet

Eradicating spam is crucial for securing your website, so it’s important to find tools that monitor comments and emails. Akismet is a plugin from Automattic (makers of WordPress) that filters malicious links and irrelevant content from your site by checking against a global, constantly maintained database. As a result, visitors to your site can enjoy your content without having to wade through the trolls and avoid virus-ridden links.

Key Features:

• Checks all comments on your site automatically and filters out potential spam
• Lets you review what’s been marked as spam so that you can correct the plugin if necessary
• Evaluates contact form submissions to ensure you receive legitimate responses

Pricing: Pay what you want for personal websites; Commercial licenses start at $9.95 per month.

22) Sucuri Security

Sucuri is a popular full-featured security plugin for WordPress. It offers a lot of great features, such as a comprehensive scanning module and easy-to-use monitoring tools. The plugin can even walk you through the recovery steps after an attack. The only key component missing here is a firewall, but we have no complaints, given that Sucuri is completely free.

Key Features:

• Offers continuous malware scanning
• Stops hacks and DDoS attacks immediately
• Provides help for accessing hacked websites

Pricing: Free

23) Jetpack

Jetpack was created by the WordPress developers at Automattic. Although it isn’t a dedicated security plugin, a number of its features can help to protect your site — such as the simple set-and-forget brute-force prevention module. On premium plans, you can also take advantage of malware scanning and automatic site backups to help protect you further.

Key Features:

• Prevents brute-force attacks from botnets and hackers
• Monitors your site for downtime and keeps you updated with notifications
• Provides automatic backups on higher-tiered plans

Pricing: Core features are free; Paid plans start at $5.95 per month, bundled with Akismet credits.

Related: Using Jetpack with DreamPress

24) IThemes Security

Yet another full-featured and popular plugin, iThemes Security is arguably the most comprehensive option on this list. The plugin is packed with features such as login URL obfuscation, a way to change your admin username, and a global dashboard restriction mode based on the time and date. In addition, the premium version includes advanced features such as malware scanning and a Google reCAPTCHA box.

Key Features:

• Ban the IP addresses of known attackers from your site
• Monitors your files to check for any unauthorized changes
• Limits the number of login attempts allowed to prevent brute force attacks

Pricing: Free, with Pro upgrade available for $99 per year.

25) WPS Hide Login 

Hackers using bots will often seek out sites using the default URLs, attacking those they find. To prevent this, WPS Hide Login allows you to change the standard WordPress login URL to a custom one. It’s a pretty simple tool, but it provides a valuable service.

Key Features:

• Provides an easy-to-use, simple interface
• Prevents brute force attacks by letting you change the default login URL
• Doesn’t add rewrite rules

Pricing: Free

26) BulletProof Security

BulletProof Security provides strong protection against SQL injections and other WordPress exploits. In addition, this plugin features a firewall that prevents malicious scripts from executing before they reach your WordPress core files. The premium version adds further features, such as suspicious activity alerts and greater protection against a wider range of threats.

Key Features:

• Enables you to perform full or partial database backups
• Prevents the occurrence of brute-force attacks
• Alerts you when suspected malicious activity affects your site

Pricing: Free, with extended features under a Pro license priced at $69.95.

27) All-In-One Security (AIOS)

Ideal for those who are less familiar with security settings, All-In-One Security (AIOS) makes it easy to defend your content. A simple meter on your dashboard scores the current security of your site. You can then use the wealth of features to shore up any holes in the armor. It has some excellent features around login security, as well.

Key Features:

• Password strength tool ensures you and your visitors are creating secure passwords
• Protects against brute force attacks with the Login Lockdown feature
• Offers one-click database backups, and firewall protection against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

Pricing: Core features are free; Premium plan (including malware scanning) starts at $70 per year.

28) Security Ninja

While some security tools bombard you with features, Security Ninja is a lean security plugin that gives you full control over what features you want to implement. The plugin’s main selling feature is the number of tests you can conduct — more than 50 with a single click. You also get a WordPress core file scanner and an event logger, plus you can schedule your scans.

Key Features:

• More than 50 security tests, including brute-force attacks and password strength tests
• Checks for vulnerabilities such as zero-day attacks
• Hides your WordPress version number to prevent hackers from exploiting vulnerabilities in older versions

Pricing: Free with core features; Pro plan with extended features is $39.99 per year, per site.

29) WP Hide & Security Enhancer

Some hackers search for old, vulnerable versions of WordPress, so it’s vital to keep yours up to date. With WP Hide & Security Enhancer, no one will even know you run a WordPress website! With this plugin activated, any WordPress-related identification within your HTML files will be removed or obfuscated without affecting your site’s functionality.

Key Features:

• Removes the WordPress version number.
• Blocks access to WordPress’ default core files.
• Doesn’t change your directory

Pricing: Free core version; Single-site license with full features is priced at $39.

30) Shield Security

Like many other plugins in this section, Shield Security acts as your website’s first line of defense. It only lets trusted, non-harmful traffic through while blocking other malicious traffic. To ensure its protection can’t be removed, the plugin requires an access key before any changes are made — a neat failsafe.

Key Features:

• Blocks malicious URLs and their requests, along with automated spambot comments
• Provides security against brute-force attacks via 2FA
• Instant bot blocking

Pricing: Free; Extra features available via premium upgrade, starting at $79 per year.

31) WordPress Security by CleanTalk

WordPress Security by CleanTalk is a simple plugin that mainly prevents brute-force attacks. If a user fails to log into WordPress, the Security Brute Force Firewall adds a short delay before you can try again. This stops constant attacks on the login screen. It’s a simple and effective way to keep many hackers at bay.

Key Features:

• Security firewall to filter access to your site by IP, networks, or countries
• Provides a daily security report sent to your email
• Sets a delay between login attempts to prevent brute-force attacks

Pricing: Free

32) miniOrange’s Google Authenticator

Our final plugin in this section handles a vital security feature: Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). This offers an additional layer of login protection by requiring login attempts to be verified via a trusted device. Google Authenticator is one of the best available 2FA solutions. The plugin is simple to use and is enabled via scanning a QR code using a mobile device.

Key Features:

• Log in to your site if you aren’t able to utilize 2FA
• Customize your own set of security questions
• Provides multiple login options

Pricing: Free; Enterprise upgrade available (user-based pricing)

33) WP Force SSL

If you haven’t yet heard about HTTPS and SSL, this is an important topic to read up on. In short, HTTPS is a way to encrypt your site’s data more securely, and SSL is a type of certificate that enables this technology to work properly. WP Force SSL is a plugin that redirects traffic toward the secure version of your site, utilizing both of these standards.

Key Features:

• Redirects traffic from the HTTP to the HTTPS version of your site
• Handles the redirection automatically after minimal setup
• Offers loads of security tests

Pricing: Free

The Best WordPress Lead Generation Plugins

Many people use WordPress to build business websites. If your aim is to generate interest in your product or services, these lead generation plugins should help you to engage with potential customers:

34) Contact Form by WPForms

Including a contact form directly on your site allows visitors to share their thoughts on your content or to sign up for your services. Contact Form by WPForms makes it really easy to create custom forms for such purposes. This plugin features a drag-and-drop interface, and several pre-built templates to speed up the process.

Key Features:

• Create and customize contact forms, and insert them into your WordPress pages and posts
• Makes it easy to add unique fields to your forms
• reCAPTCHA solution to combat form spam

Pricing: Free; Pro from $99 per year .

35) Popup Builder by OptinMonster

Want to build an email list? Popups by OptinMonster can help. This plugin lets you create custom opt-in forms and pop-ups that will attract the attention of visitors and encourage them to sign up. Every interaction with a pop-up form is tracked, and you can even set up A/B testing to find the most effective designs.

Key Features:

• Create and customize opt-in forms, with mobile-friendly templates to help get you started
• Build a variety of pop-up types, such as timed, scroll-triggered, and mobile-specific
• Provides testing tools to help you get the most out of your lead generation efforts

Pricing: Free to download, but most features require a premium subscription; Plans start at $16 per month.

36) Icegram Engage

Another plugin that can help you build great sign-up forms is Icegram Engage. The pop-ups and CTAs from this tool are a little more basic on the design side, but you still have a ton of customization options and loads of great templates to choose from. Just as importantly, Icegram Enage is secure and compliant with GDPR.

Key Features:

• Engage visitors with pop-ups, action bars, countdown timers, and more
• User behavior and exit intent targeting
• Over 100 base designs to choose from

Pricing: Free with basic features; Premium plans from $129 per year.

37) Icegram Express

Once you have built a subscriber list, you will need to create some content to send out to your audience. Part of the same suite of tools, Icegram Express allows you to send email newsletters and set up automated email updates from your WordPress Admin area. It also provides features for collecting, verifying, and analyzing new subscribers.

Key Features:

• Create and send custom newsletters from inside WordPress
• Automated updates when new WordPress blog posts are published
• Verify new signups and measure the performance of each email campaign

Pricing: Free with basic features; Premium plans from $129 per year.

38) Responsive Contact Form Builder & Lead Generation

It might not have the catchiest name, but Responsive Contact Form Builder & Lead Generation is a well-made plugin for creating custom forms. You get nine different field types to work with, various sizing and styling options, and plenty of premade designs. It works with page builders like Elementor and Gutenberg, and you can even set up autoresponders via the plugin.

Key Features:

• Create and customize forms, starting from scratch or from pre-built templates
• Lets you add custom fields and reorder them using a drag-and-drop system
• Offers multiple ways to receive and store lead information (such as through email and in a database)

Pricing: Free to use with core features; Pro version with extended options is priced at $49 per year.

39) Lead Call Buttons

While email and social media are great for lead generation, the Lead Call Buttons plugin adds special CTA buttons to the mobile version of your site, making it easy for people to call you with a single click. Alternatively, you can add a link to your address or allow people to schedule an appointment with a tap.

Key Features:

• Add Call Now, Map, and Schedule buttons to the mobile view of your website
• Provides options for customizing the look and functionality of your CTA buttons
• Includes the ability to track links

Pricing: Free

40) Easy Forms for MailChimp

MailChimp is a big name in email marketing — so it’s no surprise that the platform has a dedicated plugin. Easy Forms for MailChimp makes it easy to add MailChimp sign-up forms to your posts, pages, and sidebars, and it automatically pulls in your subscription list information from your MailChimp account.

Key Features:

• Build MailChimp subscription forms and add them to your pages and posts
• Multiple options for placing your forms, and custom CSS classes for additional styling
• Integrates with and pulls in the information from your MailChimp subscriber list

Pricing: Free

41) Sumo

Sumo is a highly popular lead generation toolkit that includes an eclectic range of useful features. You can use this plugin to create pop-ups and floating bars to grab potential customers’ attention and add share buttons across your site. Sumo can also handle email marketing, focusing on drip campaigns for e-commerce stores. It even provides analytics to help you figure out what’s working.

Key Features:

• List Builder that helps create stylish pop-ups, full-screen CTAs and targeted pop-ups, scroll boxes, and more
• Social sharing features to encourage site visitors to engage with your content
• Heat maps for fine-tuning your lead generation efforts

Pricing: Free base version; Pro plan with full features priced at $39 per month.

42) HubSpot 

Some WordPress plugins provide specific, targeted features, while others offer comprehensive packages of functionality. HubSpot definitely falls into the second category. This plugin handles classic lead generation tasks such as email list building, newsletter creation, and attracting leads through on-site CTAs. But it also lets you track leads and user behavior on your site, and it works with the Hubspot CRM.

Key Features:

• Create user-friendly pop-up forms for collecting contact information
• Loads of analytics tools to track traffic, leads, conversions, and more
• Integrates with over 1,000 other platforms, including MailChimp, Shopify, and Magento

Pricing: All core features are free; Premium plans start at $50 per month.

43) Optin Forms

While there are a lot of plugins that offer lead capture features, Optin Forms stands out for two main reasons: ease of use, and integrations. This targeted plugin helps you build compelling forms that look great without writing a line of HTML or CSS. Just as importantly, you can use Optin Forms alongside AWeber, MailChimp, GetResponse, iContact, and many other email marketing solutions.

Key Features:

• Build custom opt-in forms and add them to your site with a click or using a shortcode
• Offers initial designs you can personalize to suit your needs and tastes.
• Integrates with a range of popular email marketing services

Pricing: Free

44) LiveChat

Live chat can help you make an immediate connection with visitors to your site. There are many live chat plugins for WordPress, but we’d recommend starting with LiveChat. It’s not the cheapest, but the quality of this add-on cannot be ignored. It works seamlessly with most major page builders, all themes, and every major e-commerce plugin.

Key Features:

• Adds live chat to your website so you can communicate directly with visitors
• Syncs with your social, messaging, and email channels
• Offers customization and chat history features

Pricing: Free; Pro version with additional features, starting at $20 per month.

45) Ninja Forms

There are dozens of contact form plugins we could have included in this list, but Ninja Forms is undoubtedly the most user-friendly. This neat little plugin lets you get creative, customizing forms to your exact needs using simple controls. It’s a solid choice for beginners and developers alike.

Key Features:

• Drag-and-drop form builder with unique fields, actions, and more
• Enables you to create success messages for users, or direct them to a particular page after completing a form
• Provides advanced options for developers, such as built-in hooks and filters

Pricing: All core features are free; Can be extended with a monthly membership or individual add-ons.

The Best WordPress Performance Plugins

WordPress does a decent job of serving up content in a timely fashion, but if you want to provide the best possible user experience, these performance plugins should cut your load times down to size:

46) WP Super Cache

As you may have noticed, the folks at Automattic develop many functional yet crucial plugins for WordPress. WP Super Cache is no exception. This plugin caches your pages as static HTML files, with minimal setup required. Actually, it offers three different caching modes, each with increasing customization options.

Key Features:

• Three different ways of caching files: Simple, Expert, and WP-Cache caching
• Basic CDN support with an integrated OSSDL CDN off-linker
• Customizable garbage collection settings

Pricing: Free

47) W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is a pretty comprehensive performance plugin, designed to improve both the speed and user experience of your website. The main attraction here is caching: page, object, database, and browser. However, the plugin also offers minification and HTTP compression of the code underlying your site. It all adds up to greatly reduced loading times.

Key Features:

• Page, database, object, and browser caching
• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript minification to reduce file sizes
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) integration

Pricing: Free

48) EWWW Image Optimizer

Using large or poorly optimized images can slow down your site, hurting your overall user experience. EWWW Image Optimizer is a tool that converts, resizes, and compresses images on your site for speed. It’s straightforward to set up, and the plugin adapts to different devices to ensure that you won’t see any significant drop-off in image quality.

Key Features:

• Automatically optimizes images and converts them into the best file format for performance
• Provides various compression options, such as pixel-perfect and high compression
• Includes security features like SSL encryption and free 30-day image backups

Pricing: Free; Premium plans with extra features start at $7 per month.

49) Smush

You could describe Smush as an image optimizer, but that is a bit of an understatement. This impressive plugin offers 2x compression, smart resizing for all standard image formats, and lazy loading. It’s fast, flexible, and easy to use. What’s more, Smush has its own servers — so all the work is handled remotely.

• Lossless compression to optimize images without a noticeable drop in quality
• Lazy loading for faster load times
• Bulk “Smush” for optimizing multiple images at once

Pricing: Core features are free; Pro plan offers background optimization, starting at $7.50 per month.

50) WP Rocket

As a premium caching plugin, you would probably expect WP Rocket to offer more than free alternatives, and to be honest, it delivers in style. This tool provides powerful page caching, GZIP compression, and e-commerce optimization. It can also handle the minification of CSS and JS files, and works with most popular themes and plugins. As an added bonus, you get the extra performance boost of lazy loading on images and iframes.

Key Features:

• Wide-ranging caching features, including page caching, cache preloading, and browser caching
• Works with most popular themes and plugins
• Lazing loading for images and iframes, database optimization, and CDN support

Pricing: Starting at $59 per year.

51) Proxy Cache Purge

After you update your content, Proxy Cache Purge requests your proxy service to delete its cache. This ensures that visitors always get the latest version of your site while still enjoying the performance benefits of caching. You can use this plugin to purge your entire cache or set up automatic purging on specific post and page types.

Key Features:

• Requests purges for entire cache or specific pages
• Temporarily disable the cache during development
• Enables plugins to hook into the purge actions

Pricing: Free

52) WP Fastest Cache

Another caching plugin option, WP Fastest Cache focuses on simplicity. It’s designed to “get out of the way” and let you focus on speeding up your website, not managing plugin settings. Loyal users rave about its simple configuration and excellent support.

Key Features:

• CDN Support
• WP-CLI cache clearing
• Premium plan offers greatly expanded functionality

Pricing: Free

53) Perfmatters

Developed by two brothers with substantial experience in tech, Perfmatters provides a wide array of performance-enhancing features. This premium plugin offers database optimization, lazy loading for videos and iFrames, and a unique script manager that allows you to control which plugins are loaded on each page of your site.

Key Features:

• Script Manager that allows selective enabling/disabling of plugins and scripts
• Lazy loading for images, videos, and iframes
• Database optimization and quick toggle options for reducing load times

Pricing: Starts at $24.95 per year.

54) Autoptimize

One of the most well-known plugins for performance, Autoptimize minifies and caches scripts and styles to improve loading times. It can also inject CSS into the page head and defer scripts to the footer, all in the name of faster browsing. This plugin can even optimize Google Fonts and remove the unnecessary code that comes with WordPress emojis.

Key Features:

• Minifies and caches scripts, styles, and HTML
• Moves and defers scripts to the footer, injects CSS into page headers
• Optimizes images and Google Fonts

Pricing: Free, with enhanced features starting at $5 per month.

55) NitroPack

According to the makers of this performance plugin, installing NitroPack can drastically speed up your site in just five minutes. In fact, they claim that the average site should see a 69% PageSpeed score boost from using this tool. Whether or not you believe these numbers, there’s no doubt that NitroPack is a worthy addition to this list.

Key Features: 

• Can be installed and configured with zero technical knowledge
• Advanced caching, minification, compression, and image optimization
• Built-in global CDN

Pricing: Free with limited features; Premium plans start at $17.50 per month.

The Best WordPress E-Commerce Plugins

Did you know that you can build a great online store with WordPress? Whether you’re selling T-shirts or digital downloads, these plugins can help you create your e-commerce empire:

56) WooCommerce

If we’re going to talk about selling products via WordPress, the conversation has to start with WooCommerce. By far the most popular e-commerce plugin, this platform provides a remarkable list of features completely free — from inventory tracking to shipping label printing. It might take a while to get your head around all of the options here, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

Key Features:

• Create a storefront in minutes, with loads of ready-made themes and customization options
• Custom product pages with drag-and-drop editor
• Sell products, downloads, subscriptions, bookings, memberships, and more

Pricing: Free, with premium upgrades available.

Want to get set up with WooCommerce faster? Try our dedicated e-commerce hosting!

57) Easy Digital Downloads

If your online store specializes in digital products, you might want to try Easy Digital Downloads. Optimized for products like themes, courses, and ebooks, this free plugin offers strong file protection and loads of payment processing options, including PayPal and Stripe. It works with pretty much any theme, and we especially like the clean and customizable checkout.

Key Features:

• Optimized for selling digital products, with file protection
• Works with any theme
• Strong customer management and promotion features

Pricing: Free for core features; Advanced features available through “Passes” starting at $199 per year.

58) Ecwid Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Originally promoted as a social media e-commerce platform, Ecwid now plays nicely with WordPress. This means you can set up a store on your website, and it will sync with your Facebook and Instagram profiles. You will need an Ecwid account to unlock this compelling package, but this will also give you access to a dedicated mobile app. Pretty useful, we think.

Key Features:

• Shopping cart with multiple payment options, automatic taxes, and shipping
• Products sync between your website and social media profiles
• Dedicated mobile apps for managing your store

Pricing: Free with limited features; Paid plans start at $19 per month.

59) SellKit

WooCommerce is pretty powerful straight out of the box, but with SellKit, you can optimize the checkout area to drive more sales. For instance, this plugin lets you add one-click upsells and autocomplete on forms. You can even offer custom discounts based on user behavior. Of course, you can also measure the effectiveness of every change using the built-in analytics tools.

Key Features:

• Vast range of tools for optimizing the checkout experience in WooCommerce
• Rule-based triggers for “bump” offers and one-click upsells
• Custom sales funnel builder with loads of ready-made templates

Pricing:  Free with limited features; Premium plans start from $59 per year.

60) ShopWP

If you’re really into e-commerce, there is a fair chance you already have a store hosted with Shopify. ShopWP allows you to bring all your products across to your WordPress website and present them perfectly. This plugin uses no iFrames — it’s all native and optimized for search. You can even drop in products using a shortcode.

• Syncs Shopify data to ensure your product listings on WordPress are always up-to-date
• Seamless shopping cart experience powered by JavaScript
• Provides 10+ shortcodes and works with top page builders

Pricing: Free with core features; Premium plan with advanced display options starts at $199 per year.

61) WP EasyCart

WooCommerce not floating your boat? WP EasyCart is a worthy alternative. Ten years in the making, this shopping cart plugin serves up a variety of useful e-commerce features — from live shipping estimates to cart abandonment emails. You also get to choose from loads of great payment options, including Amazon Pay and Square.

Key Features:

• Multiple product types and product page customization
• Allows you to sell subscriptions and memberships
• Inventory management and order fulfillment tools

Pricing:  Free version with core features; Premium plan with extended features starts at $69 per year.

62) Wish List for WooCommerce

There are many add-ons made for WooCommerce that expand the base features of the plugin. These include official extensions, along with unofficial plugins and themes developed by the community — Wish List for WooCommerce is one such add-on. Quite simply, it adds a wish-list feature to your online store so customers can save their favorite products.

Key Features:

• Adds a customizable wish-list feature to your site
• Offers a dedicated widget that points to your wish-list page
• Lets users share their lists on email and social media

Pricing: Free

63) FunnelKit 

For anyone who is serious about building a successful store, FunnelKit could be really useful. This highly-rated WordPress funnel builder is one of the best plugins for enhancing WooCommerce. Using simple controls, you can streamline your checkout, add relevant upsells, and create opt-in forms. Plus, it comes with over 20 great e-commerce templates.

Key Features:

• Streamlined checkouts, with express pay options and address autocomplete
• A/B testing and traffic routing to the better-performing page
• In-depth insights and analytics, including open rate, clickthrough rate, revenue made, orders placed, and more

Pricing: Free version with basic features; Full feature list on premium plans, starting at $129 per year.

64) AffiliateWP

One good way to drive potential customers to your site is through affiliate marketing. AffiliateWP helps you take advantage of this approach. The plugin makes creating and managing your affiliate program for your WooCommerce store incredibly simple. Fraud protection ensures that affiliates can’t make money from endlessly clicking on their own links, and you can see your revenue stacking up via the built-in analytics.

Key Features:

• Reliable tracking with fraud protection and smart commission rules
• One-click payouts for affiliates
• No extra fees

Pricing: Starts at $299 per year.

65) FOMO & Social Proof Notifications by TrustPulse

Social proof, such as customer reviews and testimonials, can be a powerful tool in e-commerce. TrustPulse’s plugin helps you leverage the activity of your customers to make new sales, with pop-ups that deliver timely messages. More specifically, this FOMO-generating tool shows activity from other visitors on your site — like when someone makes a purchase.

Key Features:

• Instant pop-ups show when someone takes action on your site, creating a sense of real-time activity
• Customizable notifications that can be adapted to your brand
• Designed to work with WooCommerce

Pricing: Basic plugin is free with limitations; Premium plans start at $9 per month.

The Best Website Admin WordPress Plugins

WordPress makes it relatively easy to keep your website running smoothly. However, you can enhance the core functionality by installing the right plugins. Here are some website admin tools to consider:

66) Easy Updates Manager

To keep any WordPress site running efficiently, you must ensure the system, your themes, and your plugins are updated regularly. Easy Updates Manager helps take care of this process automatically. This lightweight plugin is simple to use, and you can customize the settings so that only the updates you want are installed.

Key Features:

• Lets you enable or disable updates for plugins, themes, WordPress, and more
• Automate updates for all software of a particular type, or only for specific plugins and themes
• Provides user customization options, such as the ability to block certain users from performing updates

Pricing: Core features are free; Premium upgrade with extended features from $29 per year.

Want to make updates even easier? When you host your site with DreamPress, we keep your WordPress updated automatically.

67) UpdraftPlus 

Backing up your site is really important if you want to avoid downtime. UpdraftPlus makes it really easy. This plugin lets you upload a copy to the most popular cloud storage platforms, such as Dropbox and Google Drive. You can even set an automatic backup schedule. Once you have a backup, the plugin allows you to restore your site with a few clicks.

Key Features:

• Supports both manual and automatic scheduled backups
• Provides encryption to your backups
• Enables you to upload your backups to any number of cloud storage providers

Pricing: Free with basic features; Premium upgrade starts at $70.

68) Duplicator

A good WordPress backup plugin is Duplicator. Downloaded over 30 million times, this plugin lets you save a complete clone of your site. This can work for ad hoc backups, but it’s perhaps more useful for migrating your site or creating a locally hosted version. With the premium version of this plugin, you can also schedule automatic backups.

Key Features:

• Create backups of your WordPress website automatically and save them to the cloud
• Clone, copy, or migrate your site to another server
• Makes it easy to create a staging site for testing purposes.

Pricing: Free version allows manual cloning; Premium version with scheduled backups and cloud storage integrations, starts at $99 per year.

69) WPFront User Role Editor

By default, WordPress lets you assign varying roles to individual users. These user roles have different permissions levels —for example, an Administrator can edit or change just about anything on the site. If you find yourself wanting to adjust the default settings, try WPFront User Role Editor. This plugin lets you create new roles, edit and rename the default roles, and more.

Key Features:

• Lets you create, rename, edit, and manage user roles on your site
• Adds or removes capabilities from specific roles
• Enables you to assign multiple roles to each user

Pricing: Free with very limited features; Pro license is priced at $89 per site.

70) User Role Editor

User Role Editor is another plugin that enables you to customize the default WordPress user roles, and determine exactly what each type of user should be able to do. The free version of this tool is pretty generous, giving you granular control over user permissions. Upgrade to the premium version, and you gain the ability to hide specific menu items from various user types.

Key Features:

• Edit the capabilities of the default WordPress user roles.
• Add and customize new user roles
• Assign more than one role to a single user.

Pricing: Free version with core features; Extended premium version starts at $29 per month, or $89 for a lifetime license.

71) Oasis Workflow

The goal of Oasis Workflow is to help you manage your site more efficiently, particularly when it comes to creating and publishing content. The plugin provides a drag-and-drop interface that enables you to create a custom workflow for you and your team. You can assign tasks, give them custom statuses, and move them around or reassign them as necessary.

Key Features:

• Drag-and-drop workflow designer with an easy-to-use interface
• Create, assign, and reassign tasks as needed.
• User-based rules to automatically route tasks to the correct team members

Pricing: Free version covers most core features; Premium version adds automations, starting at $119.

72) Enhanced Media Library

The WordPress Media Library lets you upload images, videos, and other media files to add to your site. Enhanced Media Library makes it more powerful. For example, this plugin allows you to categorize and tag media items so they’re easier to organize and find. Plus, you’ll get access to a variety of useful shortcodes and a more flexible way to control media file types.

Key Features:

• Lets you add categories and tags to files in your Media Library
• Provides filters to help you search through and sort your media files
• Adds shortcodes that enable you to categorize media items on the front end

Pricing: Free, with extra features/the pro license priced at $25.

73) ACOS – Custom Admin Color Scheme

While you can’t customize the back end of WordPress as much as the front end, you can make a few tweaks. With ACOS, you can liven things up with a splash of color. WordPress already comes with eight color schemes for your admin area, but this plugin adds eight more– You’ll have double the options!

Key Features:

• Adds eight new color schemes for your WordPress admin area
• Lets you quickly switch between schemes
• Reverts to default color schemes with a click

Pricing: Free

74) Admin Menu Editor

Even though WordPress is pretty intuitive, all the different options can feel overwhelming for new site owners. Admin Menu Editor helps you reduce the visual clutter by enabling and disabling specific menu items in the admin area. You can even add your own custom links to the menu.

Key Features:  

• Rename, rearrange, and add menu items
• Drag-and-drop controls
• Custom branding for your login screen

Pricing: Free basic plugin; Premium version available with per-user control, starting at $39.

75) Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)

Out of the box, WordPress can handle a lot of different data types. But if you want to add something extra to your posts and pages, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) can help. This very intuitive plugin allows you to add and display custom fields almost anywhere, with 30 different field types to choose from.

Key Features: 

• Add fields to posts, users, taxonomy terms, media, comments, and more
• Intuitive field creation process
• Over 30 field types, and supports custom post types

Pricing: Free; Separate pro version available for $49 per year.

77) MainWP

Running more than one WordPress site? MainWP lets you manage them all from a single dashboard. This free, open-source plugin is great for handling updates, installing themes, and even managing users across your sites. You can also review comments in bulk, and monitor uptime across your online empire.

• Manage all your WordPress sites from one central dashboard
• Handle updates for themes, plugins, and core WordPress files
• Post and edit content across all your sites from the dashboard.

Pricing: The main plugin is free; Pro plans with extensions included start at $29 per month.

The Best WordPress Analytics and Reporting Plugins

Whether you want to reach more readers or attract new customers, understanding how people are interacting with your site is really important. These analytics plugins can reveal all:

78) MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It provides a Google-specific dashboard right in your WordPress admin panel, and you can track your customers across multiple platforms and devices. Unlike other link-tracking plugins, MonsterInsights won’t slow down your website.

Key Features:

• Provides custom reports for data regarding Audience, Behavior, Content, E-commerce, Forms, Search Console, and Custom Dimensions
• Offers easy integration with WooCommerce for product and sales tracking
• Enables use of tracking for Google Adsense and affiliate links

Pricing: The core plugin is free; Premium versions start at $99.50 per year.

79) Site Kit by Google

Google offers many free tools to analyze your website’s success. With Google Site Kit, all of these products are combined in your WordPress dashboard. This means you can explore page speed, SEO, and audience analytics, and set up various Google products without code.

Key Features:

• Implements site analytics on your WordPress dashboard
• Provides metrics from Search Console, AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, and more
• Integrates Google tools without editing your website’s source code

Pricing: Free

80) StatCounter

Most WordPress analytics plugins allow you to analyze your audience over a period of time. But with StatCounter, you can see this data in real-time. This tool can track almost anything you can dream of, from keyword activity to the presence of cookie blocking. You can view the data inside your WordPress admin area, or get StatCounter to send you email reports.

Key Features:

• Granular visitor analytics covering visitor paths, duration of visit, exit pages, and more
• Real-time statistics
• Visitor alerts when certain users return to your site

Pricing: Free with basic StatCounter account; Paid plans start at $9 per month.

81) WP Statistics

If you don’t want to rely solely on Google products, you can take control of your analytics with WP Statistics. This powerful plugin captures a wide range of data about your audience, which you can view in your admin area or export to popular file types. We like the colorful design, too.

Key Features:

• Captures visitor data including IP, browser, search engine, OS, and location
• View stats in WordPress or export your data
• GDPR compliant

Pricing: Free; Premium extensions available from $39 per year.

82) Matomo Analytics

Honed for business, Matomo Analytics is a plugin that provides valuable insights, without sacrificing privacy. In fact, you own 100% of the data that this plugin collects, and the plugin comes with an opt-out widget for your users. The whole package is completely free to use, and easy enough for even a WordPress beginner to install.

Key Features:

• Powerful visitor analytics tools and visualizations
• Strong privacy protection
• Supports data import from Google Analytics or WP Statistics

Pricing: Free, with premium upgrades starting at $39 per year.

83) Conversios

Aimed at e-commerce websites, Conversios is an analytics plugin that helps you track customers from the moment they click on your ad to the instant they make a purchase. To make this work, the plugin combines Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and the tracking systems for most social media platforms.

Key Features:

• Pixel manager to track events across all popular social channels
• Remarketing features to engage potential customers
• Works with Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager

Pricing: Free; Premium features start at $99 per year.

84) Independent Analytics

Independent Analytics strikes a nice balance between features and usability. Yet another alternative to Google Analytics, this free plugin lets you track views, visitors, and referrers. It’s completely compliant with GDPR, and has almost no impact on the performance of your site.

Key Features:

• Comprehensive analytics dashboard within WordPress
• Full GDPR compliance with additional configuration
• Deep WordPress integration for valuable traffic source insights​

Pricing: Free; Pro version adds real-time data for $99 per year.

85) ExactMetrics

Our favorite thing about ExactMetrics is that this plugin allows you to check your Google Analytics data via your WordPress Dashboard. But this isn’t the only worthwhile feature; for instance, it can handle Meta Pixel and Bing Ads tracking. ExactMetrics can even send you a weekly update about your traffic.

Key Features:

• Displays Google Analytics data in your WordPress Dashboard
• Supports dual-tracking with Google Analytics 3 and GA4
• Weekly email updates with your traffic numbers

Pricing: Lite version is free with limited features; ExactMetrics Pro offers the full feature list, starting at $99.50 per year.

86) 10WebAnalytics

Part of a larger suite of marketing tools, 10WebAnalytics is another plugin that brings Google Analytics to your WordPress admin. While not as polished as some of the other plugins in this section, it works well and delivers an impressive amount of data.

Key Features:

• Displays all of your Google Analytics reports
• Supports custom notifications and alerts
• Lets you create and manage goals

Pricing: Free with limited features; Premium packs start at $85.

87) WP Google Analytics Events

It’s time to get a little bit nerdy. Google Analytics 4 allows you to create custom events — user actions on your site that you want to track. WP Google Analytics Events allows you to set up these events without messing around with code.

Key Features:

• Code-free interface for creating custom events
• Track in-page navigation and contact form submissions
• Integrates with Google Tag Manager

Pricing: Free; Premium upgrades start at $79 per year.

The Best WordPress Localization Plugins

If you want to reach a global audience with your WordPress site, it’s a good idea to translate your content. These localization plugins can help you adapt your website for different markets:

88) ConveyThis

Offering fast and accurate automatic machine translation for 120 languages, ConveyThis is a great tool for localizing any WordPress website. It can also translate attributes, alt text, meta-text, and page URLs. Plus, it works with pretty much any theme or other plugin, including WooCommerce​.

Key Features:

• Fast, accurate machine translation in 120 languages
• SEO-friendly output
• Works with 100% of themes and plugins

Pricing: Free for up to 2,500 words in one language; Upgrades start at $7.99 per month.

89) Loco Translate

For website owners who are happy to get more hands-on, Loco Translate provides an in-browser editing tool for WordPress translation files. The interface is pretty easy to navigate, and the plugin offers keyboard shortcuts for faster translating. You don’t necessarily need to translate content manually; this plugin integrates with translation APIs, including DeepL, Google, Microsoft, and Yandex.

Key Features:

• Translation management inside WordPress Admin
• Integrates with top automated translation tools
• Built-in locale codes for every region of the world

Pricing:  Free up to 2,000 translations, and then $5.95 per month.

90) Polylang

Polylang allows you to create a bilingual or multilingual WordPress site with a translation tool covering custom post types, custom taxonomies, widgets, and menus. It provides full support for right-to-left (RTL) language scripts, and can automatically download and update WordPress language packs​.

Key Features:

• Translation management that covers custom post types, custom taxonomies, widgets, and navigation
• Support for RTL scripts
• Based on core WordPress technology for better performance

Pricing: Base plugin is free to use; Pro version starts at €99 (~$105).

91) GTranslate

When you need a quick translation for something you see online, which app do you use? Probably Google Translate. The GTranslate plugin drops that same functionality into your WordPress site. It can translate over 100 languages on the fly, with full support for all right-to-left (RTL) languages​.​ Upgrade to the premium version, and you get the benefits of neural machine translation.

Key Features:

• Adds real-time Google Translation to your website, without the Google branding
• Works on posts, pages, widgets, menus, and more
• Premium version offers multilingual SEO and neural machine translations

Pricing: All core features are free; Premium plans start at $9.99 per month.

92) TranslatePress

Most localization plugins have the usability of 90s database software. TranslatePress stands out thanks to its user-friendly interface that allows you to easily translate the entire page at once. The plugin even covers the content from your shortcodes, forms, and page builders. If you don’t want to handle localization yourself, you can do automatic translations with Google Translate.

Key Features:

• Live on-page editor allows you to translate content with context
• Works on content from shortcodes, forms, and page builders
• Provides Google Translate integration and support for WooCommerce

Pricing: Free; Premium add-ons start at €7.99 (~$8.53) per month.

93) Google Language Translator

Now part of the GTranslate family, Google Language Translator is a plugin that offers similar features in a slightly different package. This tool automatically hooks up to the Google Translate API automatically and can fetch translations for any supported language. It works on posts, pages, categories, tags, menus, and widgets, along with content from other plugins​​.

Key Features:

• Automatic translation with Google Translate API
• Translates content from themes and other plugins
• Premium version offers multilingual SEO and neural machine translations

Pricing: All core features are free; Premium plans start at $9.99 per month.

94) Weglot Translate

It would probably be fair to say that Weglot Translate is one of the easiest translation plugins to configure. There’s even a multilingual user guide if you need it. The plugin works with all themes and other plugins, and it follows Google’s best practices for good SEO. In terms of machine translation, you have a choice of DeepL, Google, Microsoft, and Yandex.

Key Features:

• Easy to install and detects new content for translation
• Follows SEO best practices
• Provides high-quality machine translation and access to professional human translation

Pricing: Free for the first 2,000 words; Paid plans start from $17 per month.

95) Bogo

If you’re just looking for a way to manage translations of your content, Bogo should do just fine. This free plugin lets you set up a multilingual site, with a language switcher widget to help visitors find the right version for them. It’s simple, but very efficient.

Key Features:

• Adds localization options to your WordPress admin
• Includes language switcher widget
• Based on WordPress core features

Pricing: Free

Bonus: AI Plugins for WordPress

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we interact with the web. It is also providing website owners with new tools, like these AI plugins for WordPress:

96) AI Engine

AI Engine lets you play with ChatGPT and other GPT models. You can use it to generate content and images, suggest titles, and create excerpts. It also tracks your OpenAI usage stats.

Pricing: Free, but requires OpenAI subscription.

97) WordLift

By leveraging AI, WordLift allows you to compose SEO content faster than you can type. It delivers engaging, accurate writing, and the plugin handles all the chores related to optimizing your posts for search.

Pricing: From €49 (~$52) per month.

98) AI ChatBot

When you’re not around to engage with visitors to your website, AI ChatBot can strike up a conversation. Powered by natural language processing, this impressive plugin is great for providing interactive customer support.

Pricing: Free with limited features; Full version starts at $49 per year.

99) ImageSEO

Alt texts are pretty important for SEO, but filling them out takes time. ImageSEO provides a neat shortcut by using AI technology to automate the whole process.

Pricing: Free for 10 images per month; Paid plans from ​​€4.99 (~$5.30) per month.

100) AI Content Writing Assistant

With 20 different writing styles and over 40 tones to choose from, AI Content Writing Assistant is undoubtedly a versatile plugin. This content generation tool supports multiple languages, and it even works on locally hosted websites.

Pricing: Free

…And That’s Not All

Whew. We’ve made it to the end of our list. But we’ve only scratched the surface of all the amazing extensions, power-ups, and plugins available for your WordPress site. You can find many of these tools and thousands more for free in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Of course, the world’s top WordPress plugins won’t make much difference to your website if your host isn’t up to the challenge. Here at DreamHost, our hosting plans are optimized specifically for the WordPress platform.

Our managed WordPress hosting makes it really easy to maintain your website and keep it running smoothly — even when you install loads of plugins. And with plans starting at just $16.95 per month, it’s open to anyone.

Don’t need a managed site? Our shared hosting offers the same guaranteed uptime and strong performance, with plans starting at only $2.59 per month.

The post The 100 Best WordPress Plugins (Including New AI Tools) appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

Plugins are extensions that can broaden the functionality of your WordPress website in almost any area. Many are free, and they are incredibly easy to install.

If you’re hearing about plugins for the first time or you’re unsure how to use them, we’ve got you covered. In this guide, we’re going to take a closer look at what WordPress plugins can offer and how to use them.

What are WordPress Plugins?

In short, a plugin is an add-on for your WordPress site — a small piece of third-party software you can install to add new features and functionality.

No matter which aspect of your site you would like to upgrade, there’s probably a plugin out there that can help. You can find plugins to speed up your site, optimize security, and help your site rank higher in search engines. Page builder plugins allow you to create custom layouts without code, and form plugins make it easier for visitors to make contact.

Other options enable you to add specific features to your site, such as custom post types, an ecommerce storefront, or a user forum. Some even help with basic maintenance tasks, like cleaning up broken links.

Why You Should be Using Plugins

To understand why plugins are so vital, let’s imagine a scenario.

Say you just bought a new iPhone. Thanks to iOS, you can make calls, send messages, check your emails, listen to podcasts, and even track your health without installing any new apps!

However, chances are that the built-in features of iOS won’t cover everything you want to achieve. At some point, you’re likely to install some third-party apps, like Instagram or Google Maps.

If WordPress is the operating system of your website, plugins are the apps. While the underlying platform handles all the basic functionality, these add-ons provide the features you need for handling specific tasks or managing parts of your site.

Since thousands of plugins are available and most are free to install, adding some to your WordPress site is a no-brainer.

How to Pick the Right Plugins for Your WordPress Website

So, where should you start? Well, a few plugins come highly recommended as a starter kit for any new WordPress site.

Beyond these, you need to pinpoint what you want to achieve with your site and find the right plugins to fulfill those needs. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

1) Identify Your Needs

As a first step, consider what is missing from your website.

If you want to sell products online, you might need an ecommerce plugin. If you want to build your email marketing list, consider adding a newsletter sign-up form. Perhaps the back end of your website is missing something, like a sitemap directing search engines toward your content.

Not sure what you need? Check out our beginner’s guide to building your own WordPress site for some inspiration.

As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that a quality hosting plan eliminates the need for certain plugins. For example, DreamHost’s managed WordPress hosting service takes care of optimizing your site’s speed and performance without the need to install add-ons.

2) Search for a Solution

Once you have a shopping list of needs, the next step is to hunt down the right plugins to fill those gaps.

The best place to start is by searching the WordPress Plugin Directory. This is essentially a huge online warehouse stacked high with plugins. In fact, it’s where the vast majority of plugins are hosted.

You can access the Plugin Directory via wordpress.org and download plugins onto your device, which can then be uploaded to your site.

However, we recommend logging in to your WordPress Dashboard and navigating to Plugins > Add New. Here, you can install new plugins straight from the Directory. We’ll talk more about this later.

There are a few WordPress plugins that do not appear in the Directory. These are almost all premium plugins, where you will need to pay either a one-time price or a subscription fee for access. These are generally hosted on the site of the plugin provider, and some offer valuable advanced features.

A note of caution: you might come across a free or heavily discounted version of premium plugins through unofficial channels. While these may seem appealing, we recommend avoiding them at all costs. They have often been heavily modified and can put your site at risk of being infected with malware and spam.

If you don’t have the budget for the official premium versions, it’s totally okay if you stick with the regular free WordPress plugins. With over 60,000 of them, there’s sure to be one that does what you need.

3) Check the Details

While all plugins in the official Plugin Directory are free to install and compatible with some version of WordPress, it’s still worth checking the details.

For a start, you should figure out whether a plugin actually covers everything you need. You can do this by clicking on the name of any plugin in the Directory search results.

Here, you will find a complete description of the plugin, including a full list of features. Study this carefully to decide whether the plugin does everything you need, and look out for any mention of “pro” or “premium” features — you will have to pay to unlock these.

On the right, there is a small table that displays some key information about the plugin. The most important areas to look for here are WordPress version and PHP version. Both need to be aligned with your WordPress website; otherwise, some features might break.

Last updated displays when the most recent version was released. This is a crucial part of site security, as plugins that are not actively maintained can leave your site open to attacks. Meanwhile, a large number of Active installations can be evidence of a higher-quality plugin.

Below this data, you can check out user ratings and reviews. WordPress ratings work on a star system, with one being the lowest and five being the highest. You can also access reviews by clicking on See all. It’s a good idea to check what other users think since not all plugins work as perfectly as they claim.

Below the reviews, you will find the Support section. A high number of resolved issues is a positive sign, as it indicates that the developers are responsive. Reading through some support questions can also give you an idea of potential challenges you may face when using the software.

Right at the bottom of the page, the Screenshots section gives you a preview of the plugin’s user interface (UI), and the FAQ section can reveal common issues.

4) Download and Test 

If everything looks good, you can download and test the plugin on your site. There is a complete tutorial on how to install plugins later in this guide.

Even if you’re comfortable with the process, we encourage you to consult each plugin’s installation instructions before downloading, because it may contain important information to help you avoid software-specific issues.

After you’ve set up the plugin, you can start testing its performance. An important issue is how it impacts your site’s speed. To test this, we recommend using a tool such as GTmetrix.

Alternatively, you might use a staging site to determine the usability and front-end functionality of your chosen plugin.

Testing is vital because it only takes one poorly coded plugin to take down your entire website.

How to Install WordPress Plugins

Not sure how to install WordPress plugins? There are essentially three different approaches. Let’s take a look at them now:

1) Install a Plugin From the Official Directory

If you have decided on a plugin from the official WordPress Plugin Directory, you’re in luck. Installing free plugins from this source couldn’t be easier — and you can do so without leaving your dashboard.

To get started, log in to your website and navigate to the Plugins tab:

Here, you can see all the plugins you have currently installed (if any). Click on Add New, and you’ll be taken to a searchable version of the Directory. Simply type in the name of the plugin you want. If you haven’t chosen one yet, you can use the various search options to explore everything that’s available.

When you find the right plugin, hit the Install Now button:

WordPress will spend a few moments performing the installation, and then you’ll see a blue Activate button appear. Click on that, and the plugin will be ready to use!

Depending on the plugin you’ve chosen, you may be prompted to configure a few settings or run through a setup wizard.

2) Upload a Plugin Through the Dashboard

If you’ve purchased a premium plugin or downloaded one from an offsite location, you’ll need to use a slightly different method than the above.

All you’ll need is the .zip archive containing the plugin’s files saved to your computer. This should have been provided to you when you bought the plugin. If you aren’t sure where to find it, you should contact the plugin’s developer for help.

Once you have access to the plugin, log in to your site and head to the Plugins tab. As before, click on Add New. This time, however, you’ll want to select Upload Plugin on the next page:

Click on the Choose File button, find the zipped plugin folder on your computer and select it (you don’t need to extract the files), then click on Install Now. Give WordPress a few moments to work its magic, and you should see a success message.

Hit the Activate Plugin button, and you’re all set! The plugin should now appear on your list in the Plugins tab.

3) Use FTP to Install the Plugin Directly

If you have a plugin’s .zip file saved on your computer, you can also install it using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). FTP enables you to access your site’s files and databases directly so that you can make changes to them by hand.

For those who are comfortable working with FTP, this can be a quicker way to install multiple plugins. However, even if you’ve never used FTP before, you might want to consider this method. It’s a perfect way to start learning how to work with your website’s files. It’s also a useful alternative if you run into any errors when installing a plugin through the dashboard.

The first thing you’ll want to do is download an FTP tool. We recommend FileZilla, which is free and easy to use. Then you’ll set it up and connect to your web host. This is a good time to make a backup of your site if you haven’t already. FTP enables you to make permanent changes to your website, so it’s important to be careful and have a readily available way to reverse any mistakes.

Once you have FileZilla open and connected, it should look something like this:

In the top right quadrant, you’ll see your website’s home directory (it will typically be named after the site’s domain). Within this folder, navigate to wp-content > plugins:

This is where you’ll need to place the files for your new plugin. Unzip them first, then copy and paste them into the plugins folder. Alternatively, you can find the files on your computer using the two left-hand quadrants of FileZilla, and drag them over (again– after they’ve been unzipped).

That’s all you need to do to install your new plugin. However, you will still need to visit your site to activate it. Navigate to the Plugins tab from your dashboard, and find the plugin you just installed in the list. Once you click on Activate, you’re all done!

What are the Best WordPress Plugins?

If you’re ready to start exploring the world of WordPress plugins, you might be wondering whether there are some must-have options.

The truth is that there are way too many great plugins to fit in this post. You could try these articles for inspiration:

• 20 Incredibly Popular WordPress Plugins You Need to Know About
• 10 WordPress Plugins to Maximize Your Lead Generation
• 13 of the Best Security Plugins to Keep Your WordPress Site Safe
• WooCommerce Guide: How to Start an Online Store in 1 Hour

But if you want some idea of where to begin your search, let’s take a look at the standout plugins in each category.

Key Types of WordPress Plugins

While there are thousands of niche options, the majority of popular plugins fit into one of the following groups:

WordPress SEO Plugins

These plugins help you to optimize your website for search engines like Google. The category includes tools for improving your content and plugins that build XML sitemaps and schema files.

Examples include Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, WP Meta SEO, and Schema.

Prefer us to handle SEO for you? Check out our SEO Toolkit.

Ecommerce Plugins

If you want to set up an ecommerce store or take payments for a service, you’re going to need an online store plugin. Some of these plugins are designed specifically for digital products, such as online courses.

Examples include WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Payment Button for PayPal, and Easy Digital Downloads.

Our specialized WooCommerce hosting makes it super easy to set up shop online.

Promotional Plugins

From pop-up forms and interactive quizzes to social media share buttons, this category of plugins helps you with lead generation and audience building. Certain marketing plugins can even hook into your CRM.

Examples include Sumo, OptinMonster, Gravitec (Web Push Notification), MC4W (MailChimp for WordPress).

Contact Form Builder Plugins

Want to help your visitors get in touch or encourage submissions? These plugins allow you to create a user-friendly form with total customizability when it comes to looks and layout.

Examples include Contact Form 7, WPForms, and Ninja Forms.

Slider Plugins

These plugins allow you to add an eye-catching slider or carousel anywhere on your site. Responsive design is a really important feature here, because it means your slider will look good on all devices.

Examples include RoyalSlider, and Soliloquy.

Widget and Shortcode Plugins

Widget plugins allow you to add something extra to the sidebar, header, or footer of your WordPress site. Shortcode plugins open up similar options elsewhere.

Examples include Social Icons Widget & Block by WPZOOM, and the SiteOrigin Widget Bundle.

Page Builder Plugins

If you want to go beyond the basic template of your WordPress theme, website builder plugins can help. It’s possible to transform the user experience of your website using these tools, and some allow you to create custom landing pages.

Examples include Elementor, and Beaver Builder.

When you host your WordPress site with DreamHost, you can also use our powerful website builder.

Custom Code Plugins

While drag-and-drop tools are great, custom code plugins allow you to make your own changes using a little CSS or JavaScript. These tools should be used with caution, but they can be very useful in the right hands.

Examples include CodeKit and WP Custom Code.

Analytics Plugins

Want to track who is visiting your site and see how many conversions you’re making in real-time? Analytics plugins can help. Some can also track social sharing.

Examples include GA Google Analytics and MonsterInsights.

Security Plugins

Keeping your WordPress site secure is incredibly important. Some plugins can reduce the chance of becoming a website security horror story, and cut down on spam as well. It’s a good idea to protect your site with a firewall, too.

Examples of security plugins include Cloudflare, All-In-One Security (AIOS), and Wordfence.

Optimization and Admin Plugins

This catch-all category covers a huge range of tools, including some real gems. Lazy loading and caching plugins can reduce load times, and backup plugins help you create a copy of your entire site. Image optimization tools are essential for bloggers, and automation tools can keep your database tidy.

Examples include Jetpack, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, and UpdraftPlus.

Remember to visit our comprehensive list of top WordPress plugins to dive deeper into all of the categories mentioned above and more.

The WordPress Plugin Directory Awaits

Plugins are fantastic resources that enable you to build your site into anything you want it to be. No matter what feature or functionality you’re looking for, chances are there’s a plugin that can make it happen.

Even better, installing plugins on your WordPress site couldn’t be easier. A quick reminder:

1. Identify and prioritize what you need from a plugin.
2. Search for your options in legitimate, quality marketplaces.
3. Review the available information on each plugin’s page.
4. Download and test the plugin.

Even with the perfect plugins, putting together a website can be challenging. Let us do the heavy lifting with our DreamPress managed WordPress hosting!

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The post Your Complete Introduction to WordPress Plugins appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

Well, actually, almost no-one makes calls nowadays. If the plaster cracks or there’s some decorating to do, most people simply search online for a handyman or tradesperson.

In other words, maintaining a great website is incredibly important if you offer home improvement and repair services. In fact, the design of your homepage can be the difference between being booked out, and struggling to find work.

To help you build a compelling online presence, here’s a roundup of the best WordPress themes for your handyman website.

Best WordPress Themes for Handyman Services

One key benefit of powering your business website with WordPress is that you have thousands of great themes to choose from. The tricky part is finding the right design for your brand.

This handpicked list contains various themes, from highly specialized designs to multi-purpose options. But every single entry offers the kind of functionality you need for promoting a trade business, with a head-turning design to match!

1) Terri: Best Theme Designed for Tradespeople

Designed explicitly for handymen, decorators, plumbers, and other tradespeople, Terri provides a solid start to our roundup.

This responsive and Retina-ready theme includes a slick homepage slider, containing a form for inquiries from potential customers. The one-click demo helps you get set up in minutes, and you can customize the color and fonts of the design.

We also like that this theme works with Yoast SEO, meaning you can easily optimize your content for search engines.

Key Features:

• Frontpage slider with built-in inquiry form
• Works with Google Fonts, Contact Form 7, and Yoast SEO
• Responsive design and one-click demo template

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

2) RenoWise: Best Theme for Multiple Trades 

With nine different pre-built templates for different trades, RenoWise is a versatile theme that can work for various service websites.

The collection of templates covers painting, flooring, renovation, carpentry, and more. Each version comes with relevant imagery, and the layout of each template is honed for that particular trade.

The other great thing about this theme is the built-in features, like a cost calculator for estimates, and an element that shows homes before and after you have completed your work.

Key Features:

• Fast to load and SEO-friendly
• Nine templates for different trades
• Unique features incl. cost calculator and before/after image slider

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

3) Constructor: Best Drag-and-Drop Theme for Handyman Websites

Although Constructor comes with pre-made designs for tradespeople, this theme stands out because you can create something unique.

The content builder feature allows you to design individual pages using drag-and-drop controls. You have a variety of modules to choose from, including client testimonials and example projects. On top of this, Constructor lets you select your own color scheme and typography via the WordPress Customizer.

This theme also offers up loads of layouts, shortcodes, social media integrations, and scrolling effects. Unsurprisingly, it’s not the fastest theme here, but it’s definitely one of the most powerful.

Key Features:

• Drag-and-drop content builder with customer review modules
• Color and font options via WordPress Customizer
• Pre-built templates for trade businesses

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

4) ProRange: Best Theme for Home Decorators

With attractive colors and a clean layout, ProRange should appeal to homeowners looking for a handyman with some finesse. This theme is aimed at home decorators, and it actually feels a bit like a paint catalog.

Of course, this is only the default setup. ProRange provides over 750 customization options, so you can make it your own. You can move things around using the WPBakery Page Builder, as well.

Other integrations include Contact Form 7, MailChimp, and WooCommerce — basically everything you need for promoting your company.

Key Features:

• Modern take on web design
• Over 750 customization options
• Works with WPBakery Page Builder, Contact Form 7, MailChimp, WooCommerce, and more

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

5) BlueCollar: Best Theme for Multiple Home Services

Highly rated by Envato customers, BlueCollar is a no-nonsense theme that is well suited to small businesses.

The overall design is clean and professional, with clickable sections for your various services. Using the WPBakery Page Builder, you can also add sections for testimonials, your team, FAQs, your previous work, and your blog. You have the option to choose your color scheme, too.

But other than that, BlueCollar keeps things simple and user friendly. The underlying code is pretty clean, and you can disable any post types you don’t need.

Key Features:

• Clean, professional design
• Multiple post types incl. people, FAQs, galleries, and services
• Drag-and-drop editing via WPBakery Page Builder

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

6) Renovate: Most Powerful Theme for Home Repair Websites

It would be fair to say that Renovate is a theme that is packed with functionality. It comes with a variety of great page builder templates, several premium plugins, and a design that is optimized for sales.

This theme is pleasing on an aesthetic level, as well. All of the default modules are clean and uncluttered, with roomy tables for pricing estimates and colorful tabs that store longer descriptions.

Plus, you can set up your own online store for accessories and service packages.

Key Features:

• Page builder, slider, and cost calculator plugins included
• 20+ page builder templates
• Unlimited custom menus and sidebars

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

7) ProHauz: Best Theme for Home Improvement Services

With six full-site templates for home improvement and maintenance services, ProHauz is a theme that you can use straight out of the box.

The pre-made designs are packed with visual interest, and you have plenty of space to insert your own images and promote your own products. In fact, you can make a pretty compelling one-page website with this theme.

If you want to create something with more depth, you have multiple headers and layouts to play with, and more than 20 elements.

Key Features:

• 6 full-site templates for home improvement services
• Highly visual design with images, icons, and parallax scrolling
• Over 20 individual elements available

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

8) Constructo: Best Theme for Building Service Websites

Even though Constucto is more aimed at construction firms, this theme can definitely work for other services and trades.

It comes with 11 pre-made demos, each with a large hero image or slider to catch the attention of potential clients. In the admin area, you will find a rich selection of customization options, and you can transform any page using Visual Composer plugin.

We particularly like the fact that this theme is 100% responsive. If someone stumbles upon your professional website on their phone, they should be able to navigate easily.

Key Features:

• 11 pre-made demos for different services
• Works with Visual Composer plugin and WooCommerce
• Design is 100% responsive and easy to customize

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

9) Plumbing: Best Theme for Handyman Plumbers

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Plumbing is one of the cleanest themes on this list. It practically sparkles like white bathroom tiles.

Just as importantly, this dazzling theme comes with three pristine site templates, an assortment of page designs, and some really useful lead generation features.

For example, this theme allows you to set up online bookings, build your own pricing tables, and fill out ready-made testimonial blocks. It works with Elementor and WooCommerce, as well.

Key Features:

• Clean, white design with three demo templates
• Online booking system, ecommerce options, testimonials
• Works with Elementor, MailChimp, and WooCommerce

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

10) MrFix: Most Versatile Theme for Home Repair Services

With 60 pre-built elements and a striking default color scheme, MrFix delivers a generous helping of professional polish.

This particular theme is designed for appliance repair businesses, but it can work for a variety of services. The package includes three homepage designs, each with a strong call-to-action. You can drag and drop modules into any order, and change the colors as you see fit.

In the admin area, MrFix helps you with SEO. The theme has been optimized for search, and it has built-in fields for your meta description, site title, and more.

Key Features:

• 3 homepage layouts and 60 pre-built elements
• Strong call to action in default designs
• Good SEO features

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

11) Boldman: Best Theme Builder Template for Tradespeople

Want to try your hand at website design? Boldman is a theme for tradespeople that works with both Elementor and WPBakery — two popular drag-and-drop page builders.

In fact, this highly rated theme enhances these plugins with over 70 custom elements, and builders for both headers and footers. You also have plenty of layouts to choose from.

If all that customization sounds like hard work, Boldman provides an easier option. With over 100 full-site templates and 25 page demos, it’s easy to see why this theme is popular with business owners.

Key Features:

• Extended support for Elementor and WPBakery page builders
• Over 70 custom elements and 100 full-site templates
• Support for WooCommerce online stores

Pricing: $66 one-time purchase

12) Renovation: Best Page Builder Theme for Construction

If you’re definitely going to use a page builder, you might want to consider using the Renovation theme. It was designed specifically for use with Elementor and WPBakery.

This theme gives you seven different homepage layouts to work with, along with three different blog layouts and 14 page templates. Each design can be rearranged using your chosen page builder, and you can build your own headers and footers.

The default look here is slick, if a little uninspiring. But it’s easy enough to change things up using the various theme options.

Key Features:

• Designed for Elementor and WPBakery page builders
• 7 homepage designs and 3 blog layouts
• Support for WooCommerce, Google Fonts, and Contact Form 7

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

13) Construction: Best Full-Screen Theme for Trade Websites

While the Construction theme offers a variety of more standard layouts, the main attraction here is the full-screen homepage.

This design allows you to display a large image related to your work, supplemented with blocks that contain key links. It’s a super-engaging template that should deliver plenty of leads.

Aside from this particular layout, you have multiple homepage designs, page templates, headers, and footers to experiment with. And as a bonus, this theme even comes with a couple of useful SEO plugins.

Key Features:

• Full screen homepage layout and other options
• Works with Elementor and WPBakery
• Fast to load, and SEO plugins included

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

14) ElectroServ: Best Theme for Electrical Services

If your trade is electrical services, ElectroServ would make a good choice for your professional website. It would actually work well for almost any trade.

As with many other themes on this list, you get page builder features, loads of pre-made templates, and plenty of customization options. The design is simple but effective, and ElectroServ works with third-party plugins like MailChimp and Visual Composer.

We also like how easily you can set up online bookings with this theme, and create good-looking forms.

Key Features:

• Page builder features and pre-made templates
• Works with MailChimp, Visual Composer, and Contact Form 7
• Easily set up online booking and contact forms

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

15) SturdyFix: Best Ready-Made Theme for Handyman Websites

While SturdyFix does work with the Elementor page builder, the real advantage of this theme comes from the ready-made templates.

All of the designs are modern and clean, with premium stock images included. This means you can publish your new site with minimal editing.

Of course, you can still adjust the colors and fonts if you want. SturdyFix also provides an extensive menu of widgets and shortcodes, including a testimonials list and a box for listing your service areas.

Key Features:

• Full-site templates with images included
• Extensive shortcodes and widgets
• Compatible with Elementor

Pricing: $79 one-time purchase

16) Yellow Hats: Best Theme for Construction Business Websites

Yellow Hats is primarily aimed at the construction industry. It comes with 35 full-site demos, each with an appealing full-width slider and prominent CTAs.

These layouts are designed using a huge array of reusable UI elements, which you can place anywhere using the Visual Composer page builder. More than 350 of these modules are available, each with its own settings.

Yellow Hats also offers loads of different menu options, several blog layouts, 15 slider presets, and plenty of theme options.

Key Features:

• 35 full-site demos and 350 UI elements
• Works with Visual Composer and WooCommerce
• Multiple homepage, menu, and blog layouts

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

17) Fixtor: Best Modern Theme for Handyman Services

There is nothing particularly flashy about Fixtor — and that’s precisely why we like it.

This theme applies the principles of modern web design in a package that is perfect for sole traders and small home maintenance firms. The five different homepage templates are clean and efficient, with your business phone number displayed prominently or a link to your contact page.

Another nice feature is the visual layout on the services page. Using small squares in a grid, you can easily show off your talents and add some details.

Key Features:

• Clean, modern design with compelling layouts and white space
• Works with Elementor, MailChimp, and WooCommerce
• Search optimization and social media integrations

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

18) Sway: Best Multipurpose Theme for Tradespeople 

You don’t necessarily need a specialized template to make a great website. Sway is a general small business theme that you can adapt to your trade, and it will look fantastic.

This theme comes with over 300 template blocks and 50 content elements, which you can piece together using the WPBakery page builder. The default styling is impeccable, and extensive theme options allow you to make any number of changes.

With 18 portfolio layouts and four project templates, Sway also helps you to showcase your previous work.

Key Features:

• Page builder with 300 elements and 50 content blocks
• Numerous blog, portfolio, and online store templates
• 45 full-site designs

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

19) Handyman: Best Responsive Theme for Repair Service Websites

Pretty desktop themes are great, but more than half of people now search on mobile devices. The Handyman theme will put you in prime position to catch those potential clients.

Based on Visual Composer code, the layout of this theme adapts beautifully to smaller screens, with swipe controls and mobile-friendly sliders.

The search optimization of this theme is another strength, and you get a nice selection of custom widgets to spice up footers and sidebars.

Key Features:

• Responsive design with strong mobile optimization
• SEO and ecommerce features
• Various homepage layouts, built with Visual Composer

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

20) HomeCare: Best One-Click Handyman Website Theme

If you want to create a site without putting in hours of effort, HomeCare is worth your attention.

Based on Elementor and a collection of other plugins, this theme allows you to install a clean, responsive template with a couple of clicks. You get multiple ready-made pages to choose from, and you can even use the stock images from the default design.

In terms of functionality, you can build your email list with MailChimp and set up shop with Ecwid.

Key Features:

• Ready to publish in a couple of clicks
• Easy to adapt using Elementor
• SEO friendly and responsive

Pricing: $67 one-time purchase

Best Free Themes for Handyman Service Websites

Don’t fancy paying for a premium theme? You’re in luck. The following five themes are all completely free, and they offer many of the same features as the premium themes above.

21) Chique Construction: Best Free Handyman Theme with Slider

If you compare Chique Construction with many premium themes on this list, you probably won’t notice much difference.

A child theme of the Chique theme, this freebie has a stylish image slider at the top of the homepage, and sections for testimonials and portfolio projects. It’s also responsive, and you get a decent selection of theme options.

Key Features:

• Great homepage slider
• Testimonial and portfolio content types
• Responsive design with theme options

22) Building Construction Architecture: Free Bootstrap Theme for Handyman Websites

It might not have the catchiest name, but Building Construction Architecture is a solid free choice for any trade business.

Based on Bizberg, this child theme uses the Bootstrap framework to adapt to different devices and browsers. The base design is pretty straightforward and modern, and support for Elementor means you can make it your own.

Key Features:

• Responsive design based on the Bootstrap framework
• SEO friendly
• Works with Elementor

23) Construction Kit: Best Free Page Builder Theme for Tradespeople

At first glance, Construction Kit seems like a very simple theme. But because it works with a long list of page builders, anyone can turn it into something special.

You can use this theme with Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy, KingComposer, and other similar apps. The responsive design works well on mobile devices, and WooCommerce support means you can set up your own online store.

Key Features:

• Works with most page builder plugins
• SEO friendly and responsive
• Supports WooCommerce

24) Blocksy: Best Free Lightweight Theme for Handyman Websites

This all-purpose theme is free, incredibly fast, and optimized for page builders.

You don’t necessarily need to use a drag-and-drop editor to get the most out of Blocksy. The basic design is super clean, and you can import various starter sites with the one-click installation.

If you’re happy to be more involved with the design process, you can work with Gutenberg, Brizy, Elementor, or Beaver Builder.

Key Features:

• Very impressive speed
• One-click starter sites available
• Works with Brizy, Elementor, and Beaver Builder

25) Construction Landing Page: Free Handyman Theme for Inquiries

Many free themes skip the features that make WordPress useful for business. Not so with Construction Landing Page.

This speedy, responsive theme slaps an inquiry form at the top of your homepage, meaning potential clients don’t have to navigate to make contact.

Visitors who want more information can visit your services and client sections, and you can build a stylish little portfolio with this theme. It has great user reviews, too.

Key Features:

• Fast and responsive design
• Call-to-action on default homepage
• Portfolio, services, and client sections

How to Build a Great Handyman Website

Of course, choosing a theme is only part of the process of setting up your site. Here’s a quick guide to building the best handyman website the world has ever seen:

• Grab a memorable domain — Register a domain that matches the name of your business. Alternatively, choose something short, snappy, and memorable.
• Find a reliable hosting provider — Dreamhost offers hosting with a 100% uptime guarantee, and some of our packages come with WordPress pre-installed.
• Optimize your site — From theme options to the site title, it’s worth taking some time to get your new WordPress website set up correctly.
• Choose your pages — You don’t need a million pages to have a great website. But for a handyman or trade business, we would recommend having services and contact pages, as a minimum.
• Decorate your site with high-quality images — It’s easy to ruin a beautiful theme with bad photos. On the flip side, adding high-quality images to your website can really grab the attention of visitors.
• Take advantage of plugins — Check out the WordPress plugin directory for instant upgrades to security, performance, SEO, and much more.
• Highlight your results — In writing and pictures, make sure to talk about what you have achieved for previous customers. You can mention years of experience, but people mainly want to know about results.

Complete each of the steps mentioned above, and you should be near to publishing your handyman or trade website. The whole process shouldn’t take you longer than a few hours; our guide to WordPress will help you with the details.

If you get stuck, remember that DreamHost is here to simplify this process for you. From WordPress hosting and custom web design to SEO and website management, our team of in-house experts can help you build the ultimate online brand.

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The post 25 WordPress Themes Perfect for Your Handyman Website appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

For any writer trying to build an audience or attract professional clients, a good author website is essential.

Many writers choose to create their digital presence with WordPress. It’s easy to use and optimized for publishing, after all.

If you decide to follow this path, you will need to select a design. But with thousands of WordPress themes aimed at authors and journalists, the options can feel overwhelming.

To help you narrow down the options, we have searched high and low for the best themes for writers. Here are our top picks!

Best Themes for Authors and Novelists

To start our roundup, let’s keep it literary. The following themes are all good choices if you want to promote your author brand and sell your latest books in style.

1) Astra: Best Author Theme for Customization

Optimized for the WordPress Site Editor and third-party page builders, Astra provides a complete no-code design package.

The base theme is very clean and readable, and Pro users can choose their own fonts and colors. If you’re looking to save time, Astra Pro includes a library of 180 full-site templates.

Another key feature of Astra is performance. With a load time of half a second, you won’t keep your readers waiting.

Key Features:

• Lots of customization options
• Works with most popular site builders
• Lightweight theme with strong performance

Price: Free, Astra Pro from $47/year or $227 lifetime license

2) BookWise: Best Theme Template for Selling Books

BookWise isn’t strictly a standalone theme — it’s actually one of the default setups for the Thrive Theme builder. Much like Astra, this gives you the option to build out your own design or choose something from a vast template library.

The difference here is that the blocks and templates are aimed at authors, so you can create sections for reviews, characters, purchase links, and more.

This template’s focus is mainly on selling books. It lets you easily promote author events, and set up your own online store.

Key features:

• Drag-and-drop customization
• Template library with designs aimed at authors
• Events and e-commerce features baked in

Pricing: $99 as part of the Thrive Theme Builder

3) MyBook: Best Theme for Promoting Your Latest Release

This theme has a homepage design that really helps show off your latest title. It also includes an author bio section, and an area for placing your affiliate ecommerce links (e.g. Amazon, Bookshop).

If you prefer to sell your book via your own site, MyBook is compatible with WooCommerce. In addition, a built-in email newsletter feature makes it easy to keep in touch with your audience, and reusable content blocks allow you to build custom portfolio pages.

Key Features:

• Front page design that displays a book cover
• WooCommerce support for selling direct
• Newsletter integrations for building your email list

Price: $49 one-time purchase

4) Book: Best Author Theme for Promoting eBooks

Made for selling digital titles, Book is a premium theme that provides a visually appealing landing page design.

The default layout is made for promoting ebook titles, but you can use the built-in theme builder to create your design. This theme comes with FontAwesome and Google Fonts ready to use, as well.

You can find many more customization options behind the scenes. Given all these options, we appreciate the incredibly thorough documentation that comes with this theme.

Key features:

• Theme builder and customization options
• Strong landing page design with call-to-action
• Native support for Google Fonts, FontAwesome, MailChimp, and Twitter

Pricing:  $59 one-time purchase

5) Read WP: Best Author Theme for Readability

With an excellent choice of fonts and plenty of negative space, this premium theme is perfect for any of the minimalists among us.

If you find yourself wanting to change things up though, Read WP provides access to 600 Google Fonts and three different layouts. Professional writers will appreciate the portfolio feature, and the design is fully responsive — so it looks the part on all devices.

Key Features:

• Elegant typography that highlights your writing
• Three different blog layouts
• Dedicated portfolio section

Price: $49 one-time purchase

6) Book Author: Best Theme for Self Publishers

There’s something about the Book Author theme that feels very Penguin Classics. Perhaps it’s the bold scheme, or the particular way in which at which the books are displayed.

Nevertheless, this theme is certainly aimed at self-publishing authors — particularly folks with multiple titles or a book series. The design is crisp, with six possible layouts, an advanced homepage slider, and the ability to create an online catalog. Plus, you can sell digital downloads of your various works.

Key features:

• Multiple layouts
• Huge array of cataloging and ecommerce options
• Easy to customize with colors and fonts

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

7) Gindur: Best Theme for Online Novels

And now, for something a little different.

Gindur features medieval inspired typography, but the design is cutting-edge — Built for publishing stories, this theme is both responsive and Retina-ready. It’s snappy as all get out, too.

Most aspects of Gindur are customizable, so you can easily swap out that ornate blackletter font if you’d like. Meanwhile, built-in SEO optimization could help give you a head start on other writers in your genre.

Key features:

• Set up for online publishing
• Responsive, Retina-ready, and fast to load
• SEO optimization

Pricing: $39 one-time purchase

8) Book Landing Page: Best Free Theme for Authors

If you only want a simple one-page website to promote your writing, the free version of Book Landing Page might cover your needs.

The design of this theme lets you show off a single title alongside a big old buy button. Further down the page, you have seven sections to play with, including a tabbed box for preview snippets. It feels best suited to non-fiction titles, but you could use it for any type of book.

While it’s not the most visually distinctive template on this list, you really can’t complain for the low low price of $0.

Key features:

• Seven home page sections
• Social media integration and search optimization
• Ready for translation

Pricing: Free, with Premium upgrade available for $59

9) Novela: Best Author Theme for Readers

This innovative theme allows you to create immersive previews of your ebooks, complete with page-turning animations.

The default landing page is pretty striking, too, with a big background image and parallax scrolling effects. Just as importantly, you have sections for your author bio, and for introducing your characters.

On the business side, Novela allows you to set up and sell digital downloads. In fact, the whole theme is really optimized for ebook sales.

Key Features:

• Unique book-like preview mode
• Optimized for digital downloads
• Visually striking design with loads of customization options

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

10) Leona: The Most Powerful Theme for Authors

Featuring a dazzling assortment of shortcodes and widgets, Leona is perhaps the most powerful author focused theme in this list.

That’s not the only thing we like — this theme offers WooCommerce and MailChimp integrations, social media widgets, Google Fonts support, and a preview mode similar to the one in Novela.

Just as importantly, the design of Leona is crisp, contemporary, and completely responsive.

Key features:

• Loads of shortcodes and widgets built in
• Integrates with MailChimp, WooCommerce, and Twitter
• Modern design and excellent documentation

Pricing: $64 one-time purchase

11) Bookory: Best Online Book Store Theme

If you’re trying to create more of an online store than just another author site, consider using Bookory.

This theme allows you to choose from five handsome front page designs, each carefully honed for ecommerce. You also get five product page layouts to choose from, and dedicated templates for your author page.

Bookory lets you get even more creative via the Elementor theme builder. That said, you might want to stick with the default options, as this theme has a good PageSpeed score out of the box.

Key Features:

• Slick, responsive ecommerce store design
• Multiple front page and product page templates
• Works with WooCommerce and Elementor

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

12) Auteur: Best Blogging Theme for Authors

Blogging can be a good way to promote your next book and encourage interactions with readers. But not all blogging themes are suited to selling books.

Auteur bridges this gap with 10 stylish blogging layouts and three commerce designs. It also has everything you would expect from a dedicated author theme, such as email signup forms, individual book pages, and author bio sections.

If you want to go off-piste, Auteur lets you build layouts via the WPBakery Plugin. This makes it a little more complex to use than some other themes — and somewhat less performant if you go too wild with the page builder — but it is still very flexible.

Key Features:

• Layouts for books, blogging, and ecommerce
• Block-based theme building options
• Integrations with WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, and MailChimp

Pricing: $60 one-time purchase

13) ChapterOne: Best Page Builder Theme for Authors

For authors who want to build a website that stands out from the crowd, ChapterOne could be a good purchase.

Although this theme is really aimed at publishers, there is plenty to interest individual writers. The front page gives you ample opportunities to show off your new book and older titles. You can also set up shop with support for digital editions and even audiobooks.

Flexibility is another strength of ChapterOne, with over 800 Google Fonts, multiple blog layouts and header types, and plenty of useful shortcodes.

Key Features:

• Several homepage designs, each optimized for promoting books
• Contemporary design that can be customized
• Powerful ecommerce templates including various media types

Pricing: $79 one-time purchase

14) Brooklyn: Best One-Click Theme for Authors

Although Brooklyn offers a bewildering array of customization options, this theme makes it easy to set up an author site.

This is due to the 52 ready-made site templates that come free with the theme. In the library, you will find some great options for building your site, and you can install each design with just a click.

If you want to make adjustments, Brooklyn gives you 60 blocks to play with and over 100 customization panels to explore. It even has an advanced slider maker.

It all might be a bit overwhelming for first-time WordPress users, but power users will love it.

Key Features:

• 52 ready-made site templates
• Block-based page builder with 60 elements
• Over 2,500 individual customization options

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

15) Bridge: Author Theme With the Most Features

Designed for creatives, Bridge is another theme that packs in a phenomenal number of features. And as with Brooklyn, you have plenty of ready-made demo sites to choose from.

If you prefer to build something yourself, this theme works with two page builders. With over 200 individual elements at your disposal, you should be able to cook up something special.

This all comes in addition to e-commerce features, full integration with your social media profiles, interactive tours, powerful search, and much more.

Key Features:

• Works with two page builders, includes 200 elements
• 610 one-click demo sites
• Ecommerce, social media, and search features

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

Best Themes for Bloggers and Journalists

Of course, not every writer wants to be a New York Times bestselling author.

If you’re more interested in blogging, journaling, or journalism, the following themes should be a good fit for your online presence.

16) Typology: Best Minimalist Theme for Writers

If you really want your words to shine, Typology could be the theme for you.

The design is much more stripped back in comparison to some other themes on this list, but there is still plenty of visual impact, thanks to bold color choices.

You can change those colors if you want, and the theme provides plenty of control over ​​typography. Plus, you can’t forget the impressive performance.

Key features:

• Minimalist yet bold design with focus on written content
• Well suited to blogs, with ad units included
• Strong performance and SEO optimization

Pricing: $59 one-time purchase

17) Maktub: Best Magazine-Style Theme

At the other end of the web design spectrum, you will find Maktub. This colorful theme delivers content with some visual punch, although the focus is still on typography.

This is also a theme built for speed. It has a perfect PageSpeed score of 100, and MakTub is optimized for AMP. This functionality could be very valuable if you’re trying to attract new readers.

On top of this lightweight frame, you can add 11 custom widgets and customize various parts of the theme — with only one plugin required.

Key Features:

• Bold color scheme and strong typography
• Good performance
• AMP optimization

Pricing: $35 one-time purchase

18) Gutentype: Most Versatile Theme for Bloggers

Designed to work with the native WordPress site editor and Elementor website builder, this shapeshifting theme lets you choose from 18 different premade page layouts.

While not explicitly designed for writers, Gutentype still delivers your written content in style. The design is clean, with plenty of white space and excellent optimization for mobile devices.

Aside from the layouts, this theme allows you to get creative with custom post types, social media integrations, dozens of shortcodes, and seven widget areas.

Key Features:

• 18 different page layouts
• Clean, modern website design
• Works with WooCommerce, Elementor, and WordPress’ site editor

Pricing: $69 one-time purchase

19) Starter: Best Minimal Theme for Bloggers

One of the key selling points of the Starter theme is that it contains only 55 files.

Unsurprisingly, this means you have fewer preset layouts to choose from, but both of the available options are very easy on the eyes, and the theme delivers good performance thanks to clean code.

Even with the small size of this theme, you still get five post types, customizable colors and fonts, and a blog template that is highly readable.

Key Features:

• Lightweight theme with clean code
• Very modern, minimal design with focus on readability
• Three post layouts (left, right, without sidebar)

Pricing: $49 one-time purchase

20) Gema: Best Minimalist Theme for Personal Blogs

Opening a site made with Gema is like flicking through the pages of a glossy magazine. It’s a style of elegant fonts, white space, and large images.

We particularly like the header area of this theme. The name of your site is writ large, and the vertical menu is inset so that it blends in nicely with your latest posts.

In addition, Gema has features that will impress website visitors in other ways. Along with the usual color and font options, you can create drop caps and introduce a light hover effect wherever it feels right.

Key Features:

• Distinctive, minimalist front page design
• Interesting effects and typography
• Responsive, search optimized, good performance

Pricing: €115 (~$128) one-time purchase or €75/year (~$83)

21) Jason: Best Theme for Independent Journalists

A different theme from the same stable, Jason would work well for anyone who is trying to build a personal brand in journalism.

The design here is halfway between a simple blog and a digital magazine, with space devoted to images and nice touches of color throughout.

We particularly like the built-in logo generator, which lets you experiment with different typography to create something unique. Jason also has a good archive section, which means readers can find posts on any topic without the help of a search engine.

Key Features:

• Lively design with large images and a sidebar
• Customizable colors and fonts, and built-in logo builder
• Works nicely with WordPress’ site editor

Pricing: €115 (~$128) one-time purchase or €75/year (~$83)

22) Tove: Best Free Theme for Bloggers

This pretty little theme from Swedish designer, Anders Noren, is completely free and packed with personality.

Although originally designed for café and restaurant websites, you can easily adapt Tove for blogging. The default design is playful yet clean, with easy-to-read fonts and over 40 preset block patterns.

Because many of these elements include buttons, you could link to an external purchase page or another author platform.

Key Features:

• Playful, colorful design
• Over 40 block patterns
• Lightweight at under 200 kilobytes

Pricing: Free

Best Themes for Professional Writers

If you’re the type of author who prefers to work for other people, you might need a slightly different type of website.

In this final section, we’re going to focus on themes that should work for professional copywriters, ghostwriters, and content marketers.

23) Corner: Best Portfolio Theme for Writers

A key part of securing work as a writer is impressing potential clients with your body of work. Corner has a dedicated portfolio section for this purpose, with various layout options to choose from.

There is nothing very flashy about this theme. The look is clean, refined, and polished. But with Elementor integration and plenty of customization options, you can easily make it your own.

Key Features:

• Clean, professional design
• Portfolio feature with several layouts
• Block editor support plus Elementor and Google Fonts

Pricing: $49/year

24) Sydney Pro: Best Professional Theme for Writers

Everything about Sydney Pro has been finely tuned with creative professionals in mind. This freemium theme lets you choose from a variety of layouts, headers, and footers, each promoting your brand in a different way.

The design here is razor sharp and stripped back, although there are splashes of color for key elements. Sydney Pro also lets you create a compelling blog, utilize pre-made sections, and build multiple sidebars.

Plus, it works with tools like HubSpot, Tutor LMS, WooCommerce, and Toolset.

Key Features:

• Refined, professional design with pre-built sections
• Multiple homepage, blog, and sidebar layouts
• Works with a range of third-party platforms

Pricing: Free version available, Pro from $69/year

25) Neve: Most Flexible Theme for Professional Writers

Used by a wide range of business owners, Neve is fast and flexible.

You can choose from over 100 default layouts, all of which deliver good performance. Alternatively, you can use a theme builder of your choice. Neve works with Beaver Builder, Elementor, Visual Composer, and many more.

What’s more, Neve adds features to these third-party plugins — so you get an extended version of Elementor and WooCommerce with this theme. It’s pretty nifty if you want to make something unique.

Key Features:

• Fast, lightweight theme with 100 preset designs
• Works with Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, and more
• Extends popular plugins like WooCommerce

Pricing: Free version with limited features; Pro version is €69/year (~$77)

How to Build a Great Author Website

Each of the themes mentioned above can provide a great starting point for building your author website.

But if you want to maximize the impact of your new site, there are a few tasks you should complete before you launch. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

1. Register a unique domain name — Use your name, your brand, or even your tagline; just make sure it’s something memorable.
2. Choose a reliable host — At DreamHost, we offer 100% Uptime Guarantee to ensure that your readers can always access your author site.
3. Optimize the design for readability — Don’t worry about dazzling design; make sure readers can enjoy your work.
4. Include a call to action on your homepage — Don’t be shy about selling your book; make sure to put at least one buy button on your homepage.
5. Add social proof — Sharing testimonials is a proven way to persuade potential customers.
6. Create a blog — Most of the best author websites include a blog, and publishing regular posts can be an effective book marketing strategy.
7. Ask people to opt-in — Start building your email list so you can share news with readers, like a new book release or guest podcast appearance.
8. Let your readers get in touch — Fans of your work might want to send their appreciation or ask questions, so make sure to include appropriate contact information or even a standalone contact page.

We hope this guide has given you some ideas for your website and the confidence to start building your brand. Just remember: if you get stuck, we have a team of expert web designers ready to help!

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There’s a simple reason for this: Community.

WordPress has managed to tap into the international web design and development community at a scale that no other platform comes close to.

Over the last two decades, this community has contributed tens of thousands of themes, plugins, and other assets to the platform, giving it new ways to customize the look, feel, and functionality of your website or blog.

Customization is an essential part of the WordPress experience, with themes playing a huge role. So let’s take a look at some top tips and tricks to help you choose the perfect theme for WordPress.

How to Install a WordPress Theme

Once you have your website up and running on WordPress — complete with its own domain and hosting — installing a theme is actually very simple.

Just access your WordPress dashboard and navigate to the Theme > Appearance tab. Once there, select the Add New button at the top of the page.

WordPress will then allow you to upload the .zip file that you received after purchasing your theme or download whichever WP theme from the that you chose. When the theme is in place, all you have to do is go to the Themes tab and hit the Activate button, and your new theme is ready to go.

#1 What Is Your Website’s Purpose?

“Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.”

Tyrion Lannister was clearly on to something here. While he wasn’t talking about WordPress websites specifically, it’s clear that aligning yourself on the purpose and reason behind your website can be just as important.

Just ask yourself these two very important questions before you do anything else:

• What’s the point of my website? (Example: Personal blog, ecommerce store, bragging rights, small business, or educational nonprofit.)
• Who is my intended audience? (Example: Accounting professionals, vintage toy collectors, or kombucha enthusiasts.)

#2 Prioritize Performance and Speed

If there’s one thing people hate, it’s a slow website. There are a lot of factors that can affect your site’s speed, but the theme you pick will play a significant role. Some themes are better optimized than others, so they tend to be faster across the board.

It can be hard to gauge a theme’s level of optimization without taking it for a test drive, but you can look at existing reviews and run a speed test (via WebPageTest or GTmetrix) on the theme’s demo website to get a quick idea.

#3 Look through Competitor Websites

In many industries, you’ll find that websites tend to share very similar styles. If your audience expects a specific aesthetic, you’ll need to consider whether you want to provide what they’re looking for or try to give them something unexpected.

If you’re all out of inspiration, check out Awwwards and Lapa.Ninja for some award-winning websites specific to your industry and space.

But it’s not enough just to look at these websites. Examine their design aesthetic and look for patterns in their visual style. For example, here are some things to be on the lookout for:

• Color schemes
• Typography choice
• Graphic design
• Visual hierarchy
• Important functionality

#4 Check for SEO Friendliness

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to your website performing well in search results. The quality and consistency of your content and the optimization of your metadata affect your page ranking.

Why does rank matter? Well, the higher your website falls on the search engine results page, the more people will visit your website.

And you guessed it: your theme matters when it comes to SEO. WordPress sites that perform quickly, are responsive (see above), and are built with clean code are great for SEO.

#5 Ascertain Ease of Use

A user-friendly backend allows you to manage and update your website content more efficiently. This saves time and lets you focus on other aspects of your business or project.

While you may want to buy that fancy-looking multipurpose WordPress theme with a live customizer built in, it’s much better to look for something simple and functional if you are new to WordPress. Keep it simple, smarty! Make sure that your theme is complimentary to your level of expertise and comfort with WordPress.

#6 Confirm Relevant Plugin Support

Plugin compatibility issues can manifest in many ways. If you are picky about the theme and plugins you use, these problems should be few and far between. That being said, if you have specific plugins in mind for powering key functionality on your website, it’s worth checking to ensure your top theme options are compatible.

For example, WooCommerce is the number one plugin for implementing ecommerce functionality. As such, WooCommerce theme integration is a key consideration if you want to start an online store.

A few other popular WordPress plugins and features that you might want to consider include:

• Elementor
• MemberPress
• BuddyPress
• LifterLMS

#7 Look for Customization Options

Usually, the first thing you’ll notice about a theme is what it looks like — if it fits your idea of what you want for your website. In most cases, you’ll need to make some changes to any theme you choose in order to get it looking just right.

Let’s say you’ve done your research and found a theme that’s 90 percent perfect. For instance, you like the layout of the pages, how the menus function, and the overall theme design, but the fonts aren’t quite what you had in mind.

Fear not, it still might be a good choice for your website. One of the great things about WordPress sites is that they are incredibly customizable, especially when you use plugins. Check out our guide to customizing a WordPress theme to get started!

#8 Analyze Reviews and Ratings

A theme’s reviews and ratings are a valuable indicator of what to expect. When it comes to popular themes, you’d be surprised at how many user ratings you can find.

All themes in WordPress.org’s Theme Directory are ranked from one to five stars and feature customer reviews. Look for themes that speak to your site’s purpose and aesthetic ideal, then read the reviews to see what people are saying.

#9 Confirm Regular Developer Support

If you run into any issues with your theme, it’s always nice to know that you can turn to its developers for advice on how to solve it. Ideally, your theme’s developers should provide you with multiple support channels, actively trying to help their user base.

But support isn’t limited to customer service. WordPress is a platform that undergoes regular updates, some of which massively change the functionality of the core platform. Themes need to be updated on a regular basis to keep up with these changes (things like the new page builder and block editor!)

#10 Check for Multilingual Functionality

There are a lot of tools you can use to translate your WordPress pages and create a multilingual website. However, for this to work, you’ll want to use a theme that’s translation ready. Try and look for compatibility with the following plugins to get started:

• TranslatePress
• Polylang
• WPML
• Weglot
• MultilingualPress

Given that English is used by only 26% of global internet users, multilingual support is a feature that’s worth investing in.

#11 Prioritize Accessible Design Practices

WordPress websites that prioritize accessibility are a win-win for everyone involved. Look for themes built to create a user-friendly experience for people with disabilities, keeping in mind things like color contrast, typography choice, and visual hierarchy.

A lot of these things can be adjusted when customizing your theme, but it still helps to have a good starting point. Also remember to test your chosen theme for compatibility with screen readers and keyboard navigation, since integrating these features into a theme that doesn’t already support it can require a lot of effort.

#12 Search for Ecommerce Support

WooCommerce is the most feature-complete WP plugin for ecommerce websites. Looking for themes that specifically support WooCommerce is a good way to ensure ecommerce compatibility for your website.

You should be looking for dedicated inner pages and templates to seamlessly showcase your products. Even if your theme doesn’t mention WooCommerce specifically, check to ensure that the theme’s demo website contains ample examples of ecommerce content like a shopping cart and checkout page.

#13 Check Pre-Built Template Variety

Pre-built templates and block patterns provide ready-to-use designs for various page layouts, such as the home page, landing pages, blog pages, or contact pages. This can save you significant time and effort when setting up your website, as you won’t need to create these layout options from scratch.

When evaluating a new theme for your website, look for the number of pre-built templates and block patterns available within the demo content. Then, prioritize themes with a good collection of templates that match both the layout and the aesthetic you’re looking for.

#14 Stick to Reputable Sources

Themes from reputable sources are less likely to contain malicious code, security vulnerabilities, or hidden backdoors that could compromise your website’s safety. Reputable theme developers also invest more time and effort into creating high-quality themes that adhere to design and coding best practices.

Here are a few examples of reputed websites for purchasing and downloading themes for your WordPress:

• WordPress Theme Directory: The WordPress.org repository offers a wide selection of free WordPress themes that adhere to strict quality and security guidelines.
• StudioPress: Known for their drag-and-drop Genesis Framework, StudioPress offers a range of SEO-friendly themes with professional designs and great customizability.
• Elegant Themes: The creators of the popular Divi theme, Elegant Themes provides a collection of well-designed and feature-rich themes backed by excellent customer support professionals and a solid refund policy.

#15 Evaluate Affordability and Pricing

When it comes to WordPress themes, one of the most critical decisions you need to make is whether to go with a free or a premium option.

Premium themes tend to pack in a lot more functionality to justify their price tags. But, WordPress.org really does offer a plethora of great themes in its directory. WordPress volunteers do an excellent job of vetting these themes, which are submitted by third-party developers, to make sure that the code is up to, well, code.

To get started, do a search to find free themes that match your site’s criteria and then check out their demos to get a sense of how the theme would look with your content.

But if you are going to invest in a paid theme, marketplaces like StudioPress and Elegant Themes offer excellent options. Just be sure to read through the developer’s refund policy and know what level of support you can expect before you go and make your purchase decision. On that note…

#16 Double-Check the Refund Policy

If you’re going to invest in a premium theme, it’s important to check the refund policy of purchase to ensure that you have sufficient time to decide on its quality. Lots of themes offer a 30-day no questions asked refund policy — so that you have plenty of time to test things and contact support should you encounter issues.

The same goes for theme builders, too. Many of them offer a free trial or have a return policy in place for handling dissatisfied customers. Just be on the lookout for this when reading through their features and terms.

#17 Take a Mobile-First Approach

Responsive design is a must-have feature for most bloggers and website owners, but the mobile-first approach takes it one step further. By designing your WordPress theme for mobile devices first, you can ensure that the devices with the trickiest design requirements, with a huge variety of screen choices and hardware options, get the most attention from your design team.

While not all industries necessitate a mobile-first approach, it’s still a great feature to be on the lookout for to ensure that mobile users have the best user experience possible when accessing your site.

#18 Ensure Modern Browser Compatibility

Although most people use the same popular browsers — such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari — they’re far from the only options. There are dozens of browsers you can choose from, and not all of them render content and images in the same way.

Good developers know this, and ensure that their themes play nicely with most browsers by following established best practices for coding and design.

Why Is it So Important to Choose the Best WordPress Theme?

If you have any friends who use WordPress (the numbers say you probably do), ask them how long they’ve been using their current theme. In most cases, the answer will number in years.

Changing your WordPress theme can be tricky, as it will radically alter the appearance and even the functionality of your site. That’s why it’s better to make a great choice the first time around and stick with it as long as possible.

Themes are one of the key features that make WordPress an amazing platform. You have literally thousands of themes that you can choose from. Neve, OceanWP, and Astra are some great examples to look into, if you don’t know where to start.

This is not a decision to be taken lightly. Your choice of WordPress theme will impact your website’s SEO, visitor experience, conversion rates, and much more.

Are you ready to start using your new theme? You’ll first need to pick a WordPress hosting service that plays well with the platform’s unique requirements. Fortunately, we have plenty of plans for WordPress users to choose from!

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The post 18 Pro Tips for Choosing the Perfect WordPress Theme appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

Seeing an error when you load a page makes it very clear that something has gone wrong with the website — But most of us haven’t got the faintest clue about what “405 Method Not Allowed” means, let alone how to fix it.

That’s why we wrote this handy-dandy guide! A 405 error isn’t any reason to panic; there are just a few steps to restore your website back to working order.

Over the next few pages, we will explain what this error is all about and show you how to make it disappear.

What Is the 405 Method Not Allowed Error?

The 405 error is a type of HTTP status code — This means it’s a message that a server sends to your web browser, explaining why it can’t deliver the content you asked for.

A persistent 405 status code is a problem for anyone running a website. If multiple users see the same error, that means there’s something misconfigured on your website.

Until you fix the problem, visitors won’t be able to access the page where the error code is displayed.

This error code may appear as:

• 405 Method Not Allowed
• 405 Not Allowed
• Method Not Allowed
• HTTP 405 Error
• HTTP Error 405 – Method Not Allowed
• HTTP 405 Method Not Allowed

What Causes the 405 Error?

Let’s get a bit more technical.

Whenever you try to visit a specific web page, your browser asks the hosting server to send over the content. Typically, the server sees this request and shoots the page straight to your device in a fraction of a second. Success!

This whole process is regulated by HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This protocol uses a series of status codes to track progress and problems.

Codes in the 400s relate to client-side errors. And the 405 Method Not Allowed error code means that your browser has sent an HTTP request (GET, POST, PUT, etc.) that isn’t allowed for that specific resource, or URL.

In many cases, this is triggered by something the user does. The most common cause is inputting the wrong URL.

However, the 405 error code can also appear when something has gone wrong with the configuration of your website. We will explore some of those issues later.

What Is the Difference Between 404 and 405 Errors?

Both 404 and 405 errors prevent users from accessing content on your website, but they relate to different problems.

The 404 error code shows up when someone visits a URL where no context exists. For example, this sometimes happens when pages are removed, or domains are changed.

In contrast, the 405 error means that your server is rejecting an HTTP request from a browser. The content is there, but the server refuses to provide access because the request was made in the wrong format.

How to Fix the 405 Method Not Allowed Error

Understanding what causes the 405 error is an important step in solving the issue.

However, this status code doesn’t tell us exactly what’s wrong. The only way to identify the precise problem is by troubleshooting.

Ready to get started? Here’s a checklist of potential fixes:

1) Check Your Links

When you spot a 405 error in the wild, there’s a strong chance that you simply visited the wrong page.

For security reasons, web servers are typically configured to accept only specific types of requests on each URL. If you visit a page that is not open access, you may end up seeing the 405 error message.

If visitors to your site consistently see 405 error codes, it might be because they are following a bad link.

One way to prevent this is by checking your site using the Dead Link Checker or a similar free tool. And make sure that none of your social links and landing pages point towards private pages.

2) Check Your Updates

Have you updated your content management system, your theme, or even a plugin recently? That might be why you’re suddenly seeing 405 Method Not Allowed error messages.

Updates are essential for maintaining good website security. They can also fix existing bugs, and give you access to new features. But just occasionally, fresh updates introduce new gremlins.

If you’re unsure if you’re due for an update, log into your admin account and navigate to Dashboard > Updates page. Here, you’ll see a timestamp of the last time WordPress checked for updates. If need be, you can click “Check again” to manually check for updates.

Unfortunately, sometimes an update might break your website. To fix this, you can simply roll back to the previous version of the system, theme, or plugin that might be causing problems.

The exact process here depends on what you need to downgrade. For instance, WordPress users can use the WP Downgrade plugin to revert to a previous version.

For some websites, the easiest route is simply to restore your entire site from a backup — see step 10 for more.

How to Downgrade WordPress Plugins and Themes

If you believe that a specific theme or plugin is causing the problem, we recommend using the WP Rollback plugin. Once activated, this gives you the option to downgrade any plugin or theme you have installed.

Simply open up Plugins > Installed Plugins or Appearance > Themes inside your WordPress Admin area, and you will see a little “Rollback” button under each plugin or theme.

Click this, and WP Rollback will allow you to choose the exact version you want to restore.

Once the downgrade is complete, make sure to hit Activate on the plugin or theme to put the old version into action.

3) Uninstall New Plugins, Modules, and Themes 

Just as updates to existing plugins and themes can mess things up, so can brand new additions to your site.

With this in mind, it’s worth deactivating new plugins, modules, and themes if you start seeing 405 Method Not Allowed errors on your site.

Once again, the process here will depend on the content management system you are using.

In WordPress, you can do this through the Admin area. Navigate to Plugins or Appearance > Themes, and you should see a little red Deactivate button next to every plugin and theme.

Not sure which plugin is causing the problem? You can disable all your plugins within a minute via FTP or SSH:

1. In your FTP/SSH client, head to your WordPress site directory
2. Navigate to wp-content and right-click on plugins
3. Select Rename
4. Change the name of the folder to /plugins_OFF

This will immediately cut off all plugins. When you want to reverse the process, simply follow the steps again and rename the folder as plugins.

If you want to delete themes through FTP/SSH:

1. Visit your site directory
2. Navigate to wp-content/themes directory.
3. Delete the folder of the theme you want to remove

Just bear in mind that you might want to keep a backup of this folder, just in case the theme is not to blame.

4) Restore Your Database 

Plugins and themes usually need at least some access to your database to perform their duties.

Sometimes they get a little unruly and start making changes to parts of the database that are none of their business. These changes can cause 405 errors.

Even if you remove the offending plugin or theme, the changes they made will remain. There are only two ways to fix these issues:

• Look through your database logs for problematic changes
• Restore a previous version of your database

Database Logs

To access the database logs for your website, head to the control panel of your hosting provider. Usually, you will only be able to access logs if you have a private server.

For databases hosted with DreamHost, head to MySQL Databases to find the name of your MySQL Databases, and then get in touch with technical support to get access.

If you know exactly when the 405 errors started appearing, you may be able to find the offending database change by sorting the logs by time. You’re looking for “INSERT”, “UPDATE”, or “DELETE” changes.

Just be aware that you need a strong knowledge of web development to identify potential problems here. If you’re not sure what you’re looking at, avoid making modifications and consult a professional.

Restore Your Database

If you don’t have developer-level skills, restoring your database to a previous version is probably a more realistic option.

As with site data, DreamHost automatically creates a backup of your database every day. To restore one of these backups:

• Visit the MySQL Databases page in your account
• Click the Restore DB button to the right of your database
• Choose the time of the backup you want to restore
• Under When restoring, select option 3 or 4 depending on your CMS; choose option 4 for WordPress

5) Read Your Server-Side Logs

Just as your database logs can reveal problems that will lead to 405 errors, we can also find clues in the server-side logs.

The files we’re looking for here are named error.log and access.log. With DreamHost, you can view them via SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol):

• In your FTP client, visit the /logs directory in your user folder
• Open the site you want to check
• Open the most recent directory with a name that starts with http
• Open the log file inside, using your preferred text editor

When you examine the files, check for errors relating to server configuration or changes to your web application code.

6) Confirm Your Web Server Configuration

As we mentioned earlier, the 405 Method Not Allowed error occurs when a web server rejects a request.

Most of the time, this is helpful. If your server did not block certain request methods, your site could easily be overwhelmed with unwanted attention.

But just like an over-aggressive club doorman, sometimes web servers block the wrong kind of requests, or wrongly restrict access to certain content. This is usually caused by incorrect server configuration. The result is that visitors are redirected to an error page.

To figure out whether this is the problem with your site, you will need to visit your server configuration file. The exact file name will depend on whether your web server software is Apache, Nginx, or Cloudflare.

We use Apache by default at DreamHost, so you’re looking for the .htaccess file in the root directory of your site. On VPS plans, you have the option to switch to Nginx hosting; in this case, your configuration file will be nginx.conf.

After finding the relevant file, open it with your preferred text editor. Next, search for Rewrite commands. These are associated with Apache’s mod_rewrite module.

This module allows you to modify URLs that are requested by users, before they are processed by your server. This can be useful when you want to redirect users to a different page, divert certain types of traffic, or just display a more user-friendly URL.

The problems usually involve commands like this in your configuration file:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http: //example.com [R=405, L]

This makes the server return a 405 HTTP response status code when someone visits the URL mentioned in the command.

If you’re struggling with persistent errors, try commenting out such commands in your config file. You can do this by adding a # at the start of the line you wish to comment out.

Alternatively, you can change the directive from RewriteEngine ON to RewriteEngine OFF.

7) Fix File Permissions

Another reason why a server might be blocking access to certain content is because your site permissions are misconfigured.

For instance, your server may allow an admin to use a specific HTTP method. But when a general site visitor tries the same request, they are blocked and handed an error code.

The fastest way to check and manage permissions is usually through your panel. DreamHost users can utilize the built-in file manager:

• Visit Manage Websites and tap the Manage button
• Open the directory for your website
• To view permissions, right click on any file and choose CHMOD

You may just discover that one of your important files does not have public read access.

If you’re running your own private server or VPS, it’s also worth checking the configuration settings. Your server might be set up to accept only certain HTTP request methods for specific file types.

8) Debug Your Code

Ultimately, the cause of your 405 errors might be that something is wrong with the code of your website or web app.

To diagnose such problems, you will need to follow a full debugging process. This usually involves creating a complete local copy of your website, and then trying to recreate the error. Alternatively, you can use an online development environment.

The exact process you will need to follow is dependent on the CMS, scripts, and programming languages you’re using. If your site runs on WordPress and you are confident in the command line, you could try using WP-CLI.

9) Restore Your Whole Website

Sometimes in life, you need to know when to accept defeat and, as the kids say “take the L”.

If you’ve tried other fixes and nothing seems to work, you might just need to restore your site to how it was before the client errors arrived.

When you host any website with DreamHost, we always recommend making regular backups and keeping a copy of those files offline. But we do keep daily backups of every website that is hosted on our servers.

This means you can restore your website to how it was yesterday with a couple of clicks.

To achieve this, head to Hosted Domains, and click the Restore button on the right-hand side.

Then, choose how far you want to go back in time, and select the “Make backup copy live” option. This will replace your current live site with your chosen backup.

If you’re using DreamPress, you can complete the same process by visiting Managed WordPress and tapping the Manage button beside your domain.

Next, select the Backups tag and hit Restore on the archived version you want to use. Confirm with Start restore, and your site will soon be back to the way it was, without the 405 error.

10) Double-Check Your A Records

One final tip: make sure the A records for your domain are configured correctly.

In some cases, you may see 405 errors if your A records are pointing towards the wrong server. For instance, a server that is set up for hosting your website might have different rules than one set up for hosting an API (Application Programming Interface).

If your domain is registered or managed via DreamHost, you can check your A records by visiting Manage Websites:

• Tap on the three dots
• Select DNS Settings from the menu

Bonus: Stop 405 Errors on Your API Calls

If your site relies on a connection with an external API, you might come across a 405 error because the API server is refusing your request. This is often down to incorrect request formatting.

To prevent this from happening, make sure to include a “Content-Type” header with your POST requests. Here are some examples:

• Java/PHP – Content-Type: application/json
• HTML – Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
• XML – Content-Type: application/xml

It’s also a good idea to include an “Accept” header:

• Java/PHP – Accept: application/json
• HTML – Accept: text/html
• XML – Accept: application/xml

Be sure to check API documentation, as well. You might find out that the type of request you’re making is not supported by the API. Likewise, your site or application logs may reveal the underlying problem here.

How to Stop the 405 Error From Returning

Working through all of the steps mentioned above is no small task. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, you should be able to banish all 405 errors that are showing up on your website or app.

Want to make sure you don’t go through the whole thing again? Here are a few key tips:

• Test your site – Whenever you install new plugins or themes, make sure to run some tests. If the change is going to cause 405 errors, it’s good to know early!
• Pay attention to authentication – Always keep an eye on who has access to what resources on your server.
• Help your users to troubleshoot – In the majority of cases, 405 errors are isolated to a specific user. Consider setting up custom error pages that include information about how users can fix the problem themselves.

With a little persistence, you can conquer the 405 error once and for all, and provide a seamless browsing experience for your visitors!

The post Your Guide to Fixing the 405 Method Not Allowed Error appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.

What happened?

Hackers gained access to Target through a third-party vendor that lacked a CAPTCHA or any kind of authentication to ensure there was a human — not a malicious bot — entering their system.

From there, it didn’t take long for the bot to infiltrate this third-party vendor’s organization and work its way into the major retailer’s payment network.

What’s the lesson here?

If bad actors want a way into your website, a CAPTCHA can be a powerful first line of defense, and even convince them to move on to an easier target (pun *highly* intended).

Intrigued by this CAPTCHA concept?

Then read on to learn:

• The difference between CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA (and what all those letters mean!)
• The core types of CAPTCHAs in use today
• How CAPTCHAs can help website owners avoid spam and abuse
• A few downsides to consider with CAPTCHAs
• Two ways to add a Google reCAPTCHA to your WordPress site

What is reCAPTCHA?

Get ready folks, because this one’s got layers.

Let’s start with a basic definition: “reCAPTCHA is a service from Google that helps protect websites from spam and abuse.”

reCAPTCHA from Google is a popular, branded version of CAPTCHA. The original idea of CAPTCHA was envisioned at Carnegie Mellon University around 2000. reCAPTCHA was also created by developers at the same university, then purchased by Google around 2009.

Now for the next layer: What do all the letters in “CAPTCHA” actually mean?

The phrase CAPTCHA is short(ish) for “completely automated public Turing Test to tell computers and humans apart.”

And that explanation brings us to a final, logical layer to peel back: What’s a Turing Test?

If you’re like us, your primary exposure to the Turing Test comes from the 2014 movie The Imitation Game, featuring mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing.

Alan Turing developed the Turing Test (which he originally dubbed the imitation game — humble) to answer the question, “Can machines think?”

Today, Turing Tests are primarily used to tell humans and bots apart by testing a bot’s capacity to display the same intelligent behavior a human would. Bots, in this case, refer to automated software programs, often powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

CAPTCHAs help prevent spam and abuse on websites by blocking bots with challenges that are relatively easy for us humans to figure out and accomplish, but often expose bots for the programs they are.

Now that you know enough to definitely write a novel on the background of the CAPTCHA, let’s talk about all the different ways we see this concept appear in everyday life.

Different Types of CAPTCHAs

CAPTCHAs have developed in various directions over the years in an attempt to make the distinction between humans and bots. Today, there are several common types of CAPTCHAs which require different forms of reasoning and input.

Text-Based CAPTCHAs

Text-based CAPTCHAs show characters in odd arrangements, using unusual fonts, and on colorful backgrounds.

These CAPTCHAs require reasoning and translation to sort out what each letter and number is meant to be — an intelligent task that many pre-programmed bots can’t do.

Image-Based CAPTCHAs

With an image-based CAPTCHA, the website user must identify which displayed photos match the provided prompt. By using similar-looking photos that require a level of logic to distinguish, this option can also outsmart bots.

Google’s reCAPTCHA tests use this method quite often — which makes sense considering its vast source of photos from Google Street View.

Audio-Based CAPTCHAs

With audio-based CAPTCHAs, sound is the medium. This method is often paired with others, like text and visual CAPTCHAs.

Audio CAPTCHAs are not only more accessible to people with vision impairment – they are also a powerful bot-blocker as they rely on how tricky it can be to distinguish actual words from background noise.

Checkbox-Based CAPTCHAs

While these CAPTCHAs may seem simple on the surface, they’re actually assessing how website users interact with the checkbox itself.

Bots fill out forms and complete checkboxes instantly, whereas humans navigate through this process more slowly.

This method may be combined with other CAPTCHAs if you want even more assurance that a user isn’t secretly a software program cleverly disguised as a human wearing sweatpants and drinking Starbucks.

Behavior-Based CAPTCHAs

The thing is, software has gotten so smart that a lot of the above CAPTCHAs can be bypassed these days.

That’s why the newest version of reCAPTCHA — Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 — changed the game with a CAPTCHA method that runs in the background.

reCAPTCHA v3 is a mostly invisible reCAPTCHA, which uses a JavaScript API and machine learning-powered, adaptive risk analysis engine to score users based on their behavior as they interact with your web pages.

Behind the scenes, reCAPTCHA v3 gives each user a score that attempts to determine whether they’re human or bot. Of course, in some cases, this monitoring may not be enough to stop the really intelligent bots.

In addition, in an age when the pendulum is swinging back toward privacy on the internet, this method can be controversial as it monitors your on-site activity, with the only warning often being the small reCAPTCHA badge.

What we’ve talked about here are just the most common CAPTCHAs. Other types of programs do things like ask the website user to drag objects to a specific point on the screen, play a “microgame,” and so on. Check out more CAPTCHA examples here.

Use Cases: Where to Apply CAPTCHAs to Prevent Spam

AI-powered automated software has a lot of extraordinary applications, such as helping businesses complete mundane, repetitive tasks to save workers time.

However, hostile actors have certainly found ways to use this technology to attack websites.

Here are some of the best use cases, where applying CAPTCHAs can protect your site from spam and abuse.

Polls and Questionnaires

Businesses use polls and questionnaires for all kinds of reasons.

Externally, they can help you gather feedback and new ideas for products, services, marketing, branding, content, and everything else user-facing.

Internally, polls and questionnaires can help ensure employee happiness and collect insights on new policies and offerings.

You wouldn’t want to skew those results with an overwhelming number of automated, false responses, now would you?

Well, bots certainly might.

User Logins

Bots are often deployed to help hackers access websites through existing accounts that users have already set up.

Typically, they do this via brute force attacks that use software to automatically guess hundreds of passwords in seconds.

Why would they want to access these accounts? Sometimes it’s so they can steal information from accounts and use it to hack into other online properties. Hacking often happens in sequential events.

Other times, it’s so they can use the account to post promotional material or other information they know they’ll get quickly blocked for.

Comment Sections

You’ve probably seen plenty of spam popping up in comment sections across websites and social media.

Bots are used to leave comments en masse to spread advertising, a particular point of view (such as a political one around election time), or links to nefarious sources where hackers are waiting to steal visitor information.

Forms

Just like comment sections, forms that aren’t protected using CAPTCHAs can be overrun with false submissions from bots programmed to try to sell you something, spread a specific narrative, or even phish for sensitive data.

Checkouts

There are several reasons hackers would want to sic their bots on a website’s checkout page.

The first is obvious: buying out tickets or other inventory at a rate humans can’t keep up with. And then, probably, reselling them elsewhere for higher prices. (We’re not bitter about missing out on Taylor Swift tickets at all…)

Secondarily, bots can use unprotected checkout flows to do something called card testing. This is when they run automated scripts in your checkout system to test whether stolen credit card numbers are usable or not.

By requiring CAPTCHAs to be solved before the above actions are completed — your website should be able to identify and shut down most automated abuse carried out by bots.

Potential Downsides of Using CAPTCHAs

While CAPTCHAs clearly have their benefits, there are some downsides to consider when you’re setting up this system on your website:

• CAPTCHAs can make your website less accessible for people with hearing and/or vision impairment, or those who don’t know the language your CAPTCHA features.
• CAPTCHAs may interrupt the user experience, and if they’re too difficult, they may prevent engagement even from human users.
• CAPTCHAs are not completely foolproof, so website owners shouldn’t be lulled into a false sense of security — we still need to remain watchful for signs of spam and attacks.

In addition, there are some elements of Google’s reCAPTCHA in particular that website owners should know about:

• reCAPTCHA v3 can feel invasive to users because it monitors site-wide behavior in order to work, which may cause privacy-minded individuals to avoid using your site.
• Google’s business model is using or selling data for advertising, which can put off website owners (and users) who don’t want their behavior or data monetized.
• reCAPTCHA capitalizes on user labor by harvesting data from user interactions to train Google’s visual identification systems, with which some people may be uncomfortable.
• Google is sometimes blocked in countries such as China, so installing Google technology can severely limit a website’s global reach.

How to Add reCAPTCHA to WordPress via Plugin (6 Steps)

Preface: CAPTCHAs of all varieties can be added to websites of all kinds.

However, since WordPress is one of the most popular website platforms and reCAPTCHA from Google is powerful, free (up to a million assessments), and very popular — integrating these two is what we’re going to focus on today.

Now, let’s get to protecting your site.

Step 1: Register Your Site

First things first, register your WordPress site in Google’s reCAPTCHA admin panel. To complete this step, you must sign into or create a Google account.

During registration, you’ll fill out information like what you want to call your website, which type of reCAPTCHA verification you want to use, etc.

Step 2: Grab Your Keys

With registration submitted, Google will provide both a site key, and a secret key. These are how you’ll get your Google reCAPTCHA to talk to your WordPress website.

Copy them, because we’re going to put them to use soon.

Step 3: Install WordPress Plugin

Now, log into WordPress.

If you don’t already have a reCAPTCHA plugin installed, head to Dashboard > Plugins > Add New and search for “reCAPTCHA.” reCaptcha by BestWebSoft, CAPTCHA 4WP, and Contact Form 7 are all popular options.

Once installed, most of these plugins will walk you through connecting your website to your Google reCAPTCHA. We’ll carry on the rest of this tutorial using Contact Form 7 as an example of how approachable it can be.

Step 4: Turn on reCAPTCHA

With Contact Form 7 installed, head to Contact > Integration in WordPress. Locate the reCAPTCHA integration box and begin the setup process.

You will be asked to paste in the site and secret keys you just got from Google. Once those are added and changes saved, reCAPTCHA will be up and running on your site.

For a walkthrough of setting up Contact Form 7, check out our Knowledge Base article on Troubleshooting WordPress contact forms.

Step 5: Add reCAPTCHA to a Form

Now that your reCAPTCHA functionality is turned on, you’ll need to add it to any forms you want to protect from bot submissions.

To do so, go to Contact > Dashboard in WordPress and add a new form.

Here, you’re going to lightly edit the code of the form template to inject a reCAPTCHA.

Add “[recaptcha]” right before the “[submit “Submit”]” line. Once you save, you should see a shortcode appear under the form title.

Step 6: Publish Your reCAPTCHA Form to Your Website

Copy that shortcode you just created.

Now, go forth and paste that code into posts, pages, or text widgets to install a new form complete with a reCAPTCHA!

How to Add reCAPTCHA to WordPress Manually (4 Steps)

As an alternative to the plugin route, you can add a reCAPTCHA manually to any form on your website.

This will take a bit of code tinkering. If you’re squeamish with things like head tags and JavaScript snippets, then you may feel most comfortable sticking with an out-of-the-box option.

But if you’re ready to roll up your sleeves, getting things set up is pretty easy on a scale from super easy (launching a new website with DreamHost) to super difficult (solving the three-body problem).

Let’s get into it.

Step 1: Register Your Site and Grab Your Keys

Just like with the plugin route, you’ll need to start by signing up for reCAPTCHA from the Google website.

You can do that in two quick steps:

1. Register your WordPress site in Google’s reCAPTCHA admin panel and select the reCAPTCHA type.
2. Copy both your site key and secret key for future use.

Now, let’s get back to the website at hand. There are three core pieces that make reCAPTCHA work:

• The JavaScript library (reCAPTCHA API)
• The HTML form element
• The response verification code

We’ll kick things off with the reCAPTCHA JavaScript library.

Step 2: Add the reCAPTCHA JavaScript Library

To get started, we need to add the JavaScript library to your website. This is a small snippet of code that needs to be added to every page that will use reCAPTCHA:

“<script src="https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js" async defer></script>”

The easiest way to make sure this is accessible on all of the necessary pages is to add it to your universal header before the closing “</head>” tag.

You can do this one of two ways:

1. Manually, by accessing the header.php directly within the WordPress admin, or the file manager inside your hosting dashboard
2. By using a plugin to add the code to your header

Adding the Code Manually

If you choose the first route, you’ll need to use either the theme file editor inside WordPress or your file manager to access the header.php directly.

Important Note: Editing your theme files directly could break your website, and your changes could be overwritten whenever you update your theme. If you’re not experienced with editing the theme files directly, skip ahead to “Using a Plugin to Add the Code” for a less risky solution.

Your file manager will look different depending on your host, but if you’re using DreamHost, navigate to WordPress > Managed WordPress in the sidebar. Find the domain to which you want to add a reCAPTCHA and select Manage.

Then, click on the Manage Files button in the Details section.

Open the folder that has your domain name on it. From there, you’ll navigate to wp-content > themes and find the folder for your current WordPress theme.

Find the file called header.php, open it up, and find the closing <code>“&lt;/head&gt;”</code> tag within the code.

Copy and paste the reCAPTCHA JavaScript snippet right before that line.

Using a Plugin to Add the Code

If the above seems like too much, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered.

Instead, you can install a WordPress plugin that will automatically add code directly to your header with no hacking required.

Using a plugin like WPCode, you can easily add relevant code snippets to key parts of your WordPress theme.

From your WordPress admin panel, go to Plugins > Add New and search for WPCode.

Click Install, then Activate.

Once WPCode is activated, you should see a new section in your left-side menu called Code Snippets.

Go to Code Snippets > Header & Footer.

Inside the Header & Footer page, paste the JavaScript code into the Header section and save your changes.

Boom — code added!

Step 3: Add reCAPTCHA to Your Form

Now, we’re going to adjust the code on the actual form where you want to see your reCAPTCHA.

Again, you can use a file manager, the WordPress editor, or even FTP.  It should live inside the wp-content folder, which houses all your plugins, themes, and media.

In the form code, paste the following code before the submit line to add the reCAPTCHA:

“<div class="g-recaptcha" data-sitekey="your_site_key"></div>”

Here’s an example of how it might look:

Replace “your_site_key” with the site key you received from Google.

Step 4: Handle the Response

Perhaps the trickiest part of the process is adding code to handle the response from reCAPTCHA. This basically tells your site whether to process the form or block it.

To configure this, you’ll need to add another snippet of code to the form (the callback function):

$secretKey = "your_secret_key";
$response = $_POST['g-recaptcha-response'];
$remoteIp = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

$url = "https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/siteverify?secret=".$secretKey."&response=".$response."&remoteip=".$remoteIp;
$response = file_get_contents($url);
$responseKeys = json_decode($response,true);

if(intval($responseKeys["success"]) !== 1) {
    // Handle reCAPTCHA validation failure
} else {
    // Process form submission
}”

In this code, you’d need to replace “your_secret_key” with the secret key provided by Google.

This is just one example of an implementation that would allow you to customize how the submission is handled. There are many other methods for handling the server-side validation and callback functions.

For more info on how to handle this part of the process, refer to the official documentation from Google.

Goodbye Spam, Hello Security

While we must reiterate that reCAPTCHA and CAPTCHAs are not the be-all and end-all when it comes to website security, they’re a crucial step in helping you fend off automated bots and hackers with ill intent.

For more tips on securing your WordPress website and beyond, stay tuned to the DreamHost blog. We’re always posting resources to help you keep your website safe, fast, and online so you can impress site visitors and search engines alike.

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The post Say Goodbye to Spam! A Complete Guide to reCAPTCHA appeared first on Website Guides, Tips & Knowledge.