Want a great slider plugin? Try Meta Slider!

Hello friends,

Do you want to know what makes nowadays websites great? Content! Yes, once again you will encounter the famous phrase that “Content is King!”. And, yes – it is! Because without content each website will be just a pile of code. Content is everything on your website that might provide value for your target audience. It may be text, images, video files and other multimedia.

In this post I will present to you one solution that will help you create content in the form of interactive slideshows for your WordPress website. This plugin is extremely popular and has one of the highest ratings. Its name is Meta Slider!

Why do I need sliders on my website at all?

There are many discussions on the topic whether the sliders are necessary or not. There are many pros and cons for both sides, however one opinion summarizes the answer to this question. Sliders are necessary only if they are able to provide great value by solidifying the branding and trust for the website that they are used on.

So, before you attempt to insert one you need to sit down and do some thinking. You need to be creative in order to find the best purpose for every slider that you want to add. You may also need to do some split testing in order to determine if the sliders are great for your website or not (according to your target audience, of course).

But let’s assume that you already have this figured out and you just need the most suitable solution in order to create your sliders. So in this case the most logic questions should be:

How does Meta Slider allow me to create astonishing slideshows on my WordPress website?

First of all let’s start by saying that this popular plugin is extremely easy to use. With that being said you can now imagine the ease of adding various sliders to different parts of your website.

Next is the ability of Meta Slider to allow different slideshow solutions. You can choose from:

In order to create any of these sliders you need to head to the Meta Slider menu in your WordPress dashboard and choose the type that you need (or add a new slider). Then you need to add images from the WordPress Library (either already uploaded ones or to upload new files) by using drag&drop. After you are done with the placement then you have to enter slide captions, links and other SEO meta data that is needed for the search engine bots and that’s it! When you are done you will get a shortcode that can be inserted on any page or post on your WordPress website.

Meta Slider Options

As you can see the usage of Meta Slider is extremely easy indeed. Now let’s focus on the other functionalities of the plugin:

What if this is not enough for me? I want more from Meta Slider!

Then you should consider the Pro version of the plugin. By purchasing it you will get the following functionalities in addition to everything else you have read so far:

I want to see Meta Slider in action!

I am sure that you do! And you can do this from the video below. It shows the way you can use Meta Slider in order to create the most suitable slideshows on your WordPress website:

Where can I get Meta Slider?

You can always install it from the WordPress plugin installer. Additionally you can download it and install as upload from the official WordPress.org page of the plugin.

What are your thoughts, friends? Would you use Meta Slider for your WordPress website? If you have any questions, please use the comment form below. Don’t forget to spread the word about this post for the most popular slider solution for WordPress in social media.

See you soon, friends!

*The image and the video are embedded from the WordPress.org page of the plugin

Improve your sidebar widgets with Black Studio TinyMCE Widget

Hello friends,

In my last post I wrote about TinyMCE Advanced and the various benefits of using it as your main WordPress editor. This means that I have already shown you how to make the content for your posts and pages better and more attractive to the visitors.

But what about the widgets? They are also very important as you can see them (by default) on every possible URL in your WordPress website – posts, pages, custom post types, archives, etc. And while you can choose specific widgets for specific URL’s and even devices, you still have to decide whether you want them to be good-looking and providing valuable information or not.

I know that you’d choose the first option as you want your website to look as great as possible. So in this post I will present to you one WordPress plugin that will allow you to achieve this task. It is called Black Studio TinyMCE Widget.

What does this plugin do?

Black Studio TinyMCE Widget is a WordPress plugin that will allow you to create fascinating sidebar, footer and other widgets by adding rich text and various media objects into the content that they are meant to display for the visitors. In other words this plugin will allow you to edit your widgets as you would do with an ordinary post or page. All of this thanks to the powerful features of the TinyMCE editor.

How to use Black Studio TinyMCE Widget?

First of all you need to install the plugin. You can do this by using different techniques but the most popular option is to use the WordPress plugin installer section in your dashboard. Search for Black Studio TinyMCE Widget and install it. As an alternative you can download this plugin from its official WordPress.org page.

So now you have to activate Black Studio TinyMCE Widget and then you need to go to Appearance ->Widgets. This section in your WordPress dashboard/admin panel holds the different widget types that you can place in the widget areas of your theme. If you are using a pagebuilder plugin like Site Origin Page Builder then you will be able to insert additional widget areas directly into your content.

However this is a private case so let’s focus on the mainstream usage of the widgets. Each theme has at least one widget area and in most cases this is the sidebar. So let’s assume that you want to add a rich text widget with different media objects there. All you have to do is find the “Visual Editor” widget amongst your widgets and drag&drop it to the sidebar widget area (or any other area).

After this you have to click on the added widget and start editing in order to add your content to it. You will have the opportunity to add a title and then enter your main content for this widget. You will have two sub-options – to use the visual editor or the text editor. The latter is for advanced users who know how to write their own HTML code.

You will also be able to insert media objects. Here you can use the WordPress gallery in order to add pictures, video files, PDF files, etc. You can choose from the already uploaded files or upload a new one and insert it directly into your widget.

Who should use Black Studio TinyMCE Widget?

All users can benefit from this wonderful solution! Beginners may use it in order to ease the creation of awesome widgets. Advanced users and developers may find Black Studio TinyMCE Widget suitable for entering HTML code with further ease than by using the default WordPress text widget.

You can also combine Black Studio TinyMCE Widget with the WP Edit Plugin in order to gain even better ability to create unique content for your widgets.

What else is important for Black Studio TinyMCE Widget?

If you are yet not convinced that this plugin is a must-have for your WordPress website, then you should know that it is compatible with WPML which means that you can use it for any bilingual or multilingual website.

Black Studio TinyMCE Widget is also able to improve the time on page statistics in your Google Analytics. Why? Well, because you may provide your users with valuable additional information for a specific page and thus encourage them to stay a little longer on it.

This plugin is also valuable for the reduction of the bounce rate as you may add links to different parts of your website and thus not allow the visitors to bounce that easily. These two features are very important in terms of On-Page SEO.

And if you are a fan of full-screen editing in WordPress then you will be able to do this when creating your widgets by using Black Studio TinyMCE Widget.

This plugin also adds support for widgets accessibility mode and it is also suitable for usage in WordPress multi-sites. Let’s not forget the support for live preview in the theme customizer. This is an important feature having in mind the bigger role of the customizer in the current WordPress version and the future versions as well.

Last but not least – Black Studio TinyMCE Widget is already translated into more that twenty languages so that you can present it without any problems for the target audiences or if you prefer using a specific language for your WordPress admin section.

This is all that can be said about Black Studio TinyMCE Widget. It is a must-have as I already stated in the post. And what is your opinion friends? Share it in the comment section below.

See you soon and don’t forget the share this post in Social Media!

How to create a bilingual website with qTranslate X

Hello friends,

Do you intend to create a bilingual website using WordPress? Then you need to have an appropriate plugin that can manage the different languages and translations. I am sure that you are all familiar with the true power of WPML. And while it is the most proper way to create a bilingual (or even multilingual) website there are some solutions that are somehow left out in the dark. However they might surprise you in a very pleasant way.

In this post I am going to present one of these solutions. It is called qTranslate X.

What it does?

When you download, install and activate qTranslate X you will be able to configure a multilingual WordPress configuration with extreme ease and functionality. The final result will be a user-friendly website suitable for audiences from different countries who speak different languages.

How to use qTranslate X?

Like I already said you need to have the plugin activated. The next step is to configure it properly. But before you proceed with activation you need to be 100% sure that you don’t rely on any other multilingual plugins. This is extremely vital, friends! Otherwise you risk to have a conflict between these plugins that will result in a bad website functionality.

After these words of caution, you should continue with activation and initial settings. These are made on the Settings -> Languages menu in your WordPress dashboard. There you need to tell qTranslate X which languages are needed for your multilingual website.

Once you click on this menu you will be presented with the options for the “General Settings” tab:

You should add English as one of the languages that are to be enabled. Then proceed with adding more. My personal advice is to limit your website up to 3 different languages. However your target groups might be bigger and you may decide to add more.

One of these languages has to be set as default. In most cases that should be the English language. If a desired language is not listed you can always add it by choosing a two-letter “Language Code” – see the “Languages” tab.

After you are done with the language selection, you have to decide how your website will handle the different languages. Here you are presented with four different options:

My personal advice matches the recommendation of the qTranslate X creators and it is to choose the Pre-Path mode that is the most SEO friendly solution of them all. When you select this then the URL address for each page will be: domain/language (en/de/fr, etc)/permalink structure for the post or the page.

The next step is to choose how qTranslate X will handle all untranslated content on your multilingual website. You can hide it. Or maybe you might want to show the displayed language prefix when the content is not available for the selected language. Another great option is to show the content in an alternative language when the translation is not available for the selected language.

The great thing here is that you may select multiple options in order to achieve the needed functionality for your multilingual WordPress website.

Two more steps await you on the General settings tab for qTranslate X:

The next tab is the “Advanced tab”.

Here you need to define:

The next tab is called “Integration” and it is intended to ensure the proper integration between your theme and your plugins.

There are detailed instructions available under the official integration guide (a link is provided in the tab).

The main configuration options here are:

The next tab is dedicated to Import/Export.

Here you may choose from the following options:

The final tab is called “Languages” and here you can see and manage all the needed languages for the proper usage of qTranslate X.

You may enable or disable languages as well as add new ones and assign a proper flag to them.

Now that you have done all configurations (and especially if you use the default options) you will get an improved text/visual editor for your WordPress posts/pages with the new language options so that you can easily create stunning unique multilingual content.

And that concludes this short review for qTranslate X. There is definitely a great potential in using this plugin and I would suggest to give it a try. It may surprise you! Please make sure that you read the detailed guides on using this wonderful plugin. They are provided on this URL: click here.

So now I turn to you, friends. Will you try qTranslate X? And if you have already done this, please share your experience with this plugin in the comments below.

See you soon, friends.

All-in-One Event Calendar – review

Hello friends,

Do you want to create a WordPress website which main goal is to promote events? In this case you need to find a suitable event solution that will help you achieve this.

In this post I will present to you All-in-One Event Calendar. This plugin will allow you to list your events and present them to your audience with a style.

All-in-One Event Calendar

Why would I need a website that promotes events?

This is a great way to display your own events and gain a bigger audience for them. They can be free or paid. Such website can also gain revenue by promoting external free or paid events.

How to turn my WordPress website into an event website?

By downloading,  installing and activating All-in-One Event Calendar. When you do this a new section in your WordPress dashboard will appear. It is called Events and it should be located right after the “Posts” section. It even uses the same icon.

All-in-One Event Calendar

In the Events section there are different sub-sections. Let’s review them one-by-one:

1.  All Events

All-in-One Event Calendar

By default this sub-section should be empty since you don’t have any events yet. But when you create even one it will be showed here and you will be able to manage it by editing it (standard or quick edit), deleting it (by sending it to the trash), view the event, clone the event or clone it as a draft.

It is safe to say that the default WordPress way of managing posts and pages is applicable for managing your events with some differences, of course. But we’ll get back on this in a moment.

2. Add New

All-in-One Event Calendar

Here you actually create your event. You can set different details:

3. Organize

Here you can manage your events by assigning them to categories or tags. Each category can have its description, colour and image.

4. Import Feeds

All-in-One Event Calendar

Here you can configure which other calendars your own calendar subscribes to. You can add any calendar that provides an iCalendar (.ics) feed. You need to enter the feed URL(s) and the events from those feeds will be imported periodically.

5. Add-Ons

All-in-One Event Calendar

Here you can extend the power of All-in-One Event Calendar by adding different add-ons.

6. Calendar Themes

All-in-One Event Calendar

Make your All-in-One Event Calendar look awesome by adjusting its design. You can select one of the provided themes that will be most suitable for the overall design of your WordPress website.

7. Theme Options

All-in-One Event Calendar

In case you need to further change the design of the selected theme, then you can go to this sub-section for All-in-One Event Calendar. Here you can set:

8. Settings

All-in-One Event Calendar

Maybe one of the most important sub-sections for All-in-One Event Calendar. Here you actually define how the plugin will behave on your WordPress website. You need to pay special attention and choose the most suitable options so that you can be satisfied from the final result.

9. Widget creator

All-in-One Event Calendar

In case you want to embed your events on external websites you can create an embeddable widget by using this sub-section for All-in-One Event Calendar. You are provided with some options and when you set them you will receive a code that needs to be embedded into the external website. Below you are also presented with a preview of the widget.

The creators of All-in-One Event Calendar suggest that you should not use this code on the website that is running the plugin as this might cause conflicts.

What else do I need to know about the usage of All-in-One Event Calendar?

You can use shortcodes. All of them are described in details on the FAQ section of the plugin on WordPress.org.

Each event is optimized for SEO which will serve for better website performance. The plugin is available for different languages which makes its usage international.

Can I see All-in-One Event Calendar in action?

Of course! There is a nice video that shows the functionality of the plugin. You can see it below:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/135004810

And that’s it, friends. What do you thing of All-in-One Event Calendar? Will you use it in order to create an event website on WordPress?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Feel free to ask questions as well and don’t forget to share this post in social media.

See you soon, friends!

WP-Pro-Quiz – solution for online quizzes and tests

Hello friends,

Have you ever wondered what are the benefits of having an online quiz or test on your own website? Well, to be honest they are plenty, but I will share the most important ones:

Having this in mind you might want to consider the integration of such quiz or test. Of course if your website’s goal is entirely test-orientated (i.e. its aim is to provide different tests) then you are obliged to find the most suitable and cost-effective solution.

In this post I will present such solution for WordPress. It is 100% free and twice as powerful. This plugin is called WP-Pro-Quiz.

What WP-Pro-Quiz does?

It allows you to create different quizzes with unlimited questions of different types. The solution can also provide users with grades based on their scores and even send them via email.

WP-Pro-Quiz offers you the following question types:

Each quiz can be set up for a specific time limit. You can also disable this functionality. WP-Pro-Quiz offers the ability for random answers or random questions.

Each quiz can have a category. The same applies for the questions as well. You can see results for specific categories of questions or to display them according to their categories when filling out the quiz.

The might of WP-Pro-Quiz is the ability to add HTML in both questions and their answers. This will allow you to create great-looking quizes with multimedia content in them.

When a user starts filling out the quiz they might want to go back to the previous question in doubt of an error. WP-Pro-Quiz provides such option which is turned off by default but can easily be turned back on. Besides this you can also have other forms of navigation:

You have probably noticed that WP-Pro-Quiz works with “right” or “wrong” questions. This is the default state and in most cases you might want to keep it. You can provide optional HTML for both correct and incorrect answers as well as hints.

But what if you are preparing a personality profiling quiz that does not require right or wrong answers? Simply turn this functionality off and that’s it.

Now let’s talk about question points. WP-Pro-Quiz needs them in order to calculate percentage of successful answers. By default a correct answer will give 1 point. You can alter this and even set different points for the different answers (extremely useful when there is no right answer). The possible scenarios for points are: 0 and whole positive numbers (1, 2, 3, etc).

When WP-Pro-Quiz finishes its calculations based on the settings for all questions it can display graduation texts. In order this to happen you need to divide the different grades in percentages. For example one graduation may be shown when 1 or more than 1 % of the quiz is correct. The next may show when the result is >= 29% and so on. The possible scenarios for percentages are 0% and whole positive numbers (1%, 20%, 64%, etc).

The result text can contain HTML as well and therefore it is entirely under your control since you can insert text and multimedia.

WP-Pro-Quiz offers different valency for each question. This plugin also provides you with a nice preview-function and statistics for the right and wrong answers (if you activate them). You can also turn on leader boards and even add custom fields.

And now two EXTREMELY important and useful features – templates (for both quizzes and questions) and import/export functionality. The first one is needed when creating similar quizzes/questions and the second can allow you to clone questions between quizes and even export a quiz to another WordPress website with WP-Pro-Quiz.

This plugin also allows quiz summary and it can also notify the website admins when a quiz is completed via email. As for restriction – each quiz can be limited to registered users or set to public and also each user may be forced to take the quiz only once.

Finally let’s talk about the design. WP-Pro-Quiz is looking fascinating by default. The plugin is also compatible with many other important WordPress solutions such as the caching plugins WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.

OK – how to use WP-Pro-Quiz?

Install and activate the plugin. Then head to the new menu bearing its name in the WordPress dashboard and click on its first item (still having the same name). From there you can create your first quiz, set its options and create a template if needed.

WP-Pro-Quiz - add/edit quizzes

Then save this quiz and return to the WP-Pro-Quiz menu once again. Hover your mouse on the created quiz and select “Questions”. From there you can add questions, set templates and set options for the different questions.

Add questions for WP-Pro-Quiz

When you are done return once again to the main menu of the plugin in order to copy the shortcode for the quiz you want to display on your WordPress website and then paste it in a page or post.

WP-Pro-Quiz Quiz Overview Section

And that’s it! You can also check the Global settings menu and the Support & More menus of WP-Pro-Quiz.

Global settings for WP-Pro-Quiz

Now it’s your turn to try this plugin, friends. Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments below.

See you soon!

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for WordPress

Hello friends,

In my last post I presented to you one solution that might be useful for both Facebook’s instant articles and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). In this post the focus will be on the latter and I will present to you the current plugins that will allow your website to provide such content.

But first things – first! Let’s see what AMP are and why we need to optimize our websites for them.

The Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project that will provide a faster and open mobile web. So if we are to compare them to the Facebook’s instant articles they are basically identical – both projects want to provide mobile users with extremely fast loading of web content on their devices and in the mean time to keep the focus on the multimedia in this content.

However the major difference is that Facebook’s instant articles are designed for the Facebook’s mobile application only while the Google Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project that aims to serve Google users while searching the web via their mobile devices as well as the integration of the AMP project to multiple platforms.

So the main points behind the AMP project are:

Why we need to optimize our content for AMP?

This is a project that Google stands behind. If you are trying to optimize your website for better position in the search results then you are obliged to take the AMP optimization into consideration when planning your SEO strategy. There is already a section in the Google Search Console regarding the state of AMP content on your website and if there is none you should be getting errors/warnings. Sooner or later the AMP will be mandatory and I will not be surprised if there will be an update that will penalize all pages that are not accelerated for mobile devices.

So now that you are familiar with the AMP project let’s see how we can integrate it on WordPress.

In my last post I described Page Frog as a solution for both Facebook’s instant articles and Accelerated Mobile Pages. So the first option for your WordPress website is installing and activating this plugin and then follow the instructions in order to get your content optimized for AMP. Again you will be presented with a preview of what your posts and pages will look like when they are prepared for accelerated loading on the mobile devices.

This plugin is quite handy and many users are happy with it. However providing AMP content does not mean to forget about the genuine On-page optimization and integration of specific meta data in order to get your website indexed and better positioned.

And here comes the first problem – Yoast SEO users might have problems while integrating Page Frog with the SEO plugin. According to Yoast you might experience browser crashes when using the two plugins together and this will prevent your from creating great content and staying focused. Not to mention the possible data loss which might occur on such crash. It is extremely rare to happen but why to risk it?

That is why Yoast recommends using a combination of two other plugins:

So the total number of SEO plugins will be 3 when you count the Yoast SEO plugin as well. This might seem uncomfortable at first sight since we all know that having too much plugins on one WordPress website might cause loading speed reduction and other potential problems.

Nevertheless everything should be OK and Yoast are making tests and keeping us informed on their website about the progress regarding AMP integration. And to calm you down – they will be providing an AMP feature in their main plugin Yoast SEO soon. In the mean time we all have to wait until this happens and to use the current 3-plugin solution.

Now let’s see how to use it – install the AMP plugin and when you activate it you will be provided with an AMP version of your content if you add /amp/ to the end of the post’s URL. And when you install and activate the Glue for Yoast SEO and AMP you will be provided with a proper connection to the Yoast SEO plugin and thus you can be sure that your accelerated mobile pages will be using the proper On-page metadata.

Simple as that.

What should we do now?

I will once again share my personal intentions regarding these new optimizations – I will wait a little longer before optimizing my content for AMP and Facebook’s instant articles. The reason is that I consider both projects to be young and they might need to be tested and developed further. So while waiting I will be keeping an eye on their development and I will be paying special attention to the connection to WordPress as well. Also I will be making local tests as well. And sooner or later I will optimize my content for AMP and Facebook’s instant articles.

However if you want to start doing this right now you already have two great solutions that will aid you. Don’t forget to keep an eye on the Yoast website for more information about AMP and to take into consideration the future guides and tips that they will be providing for all of us.

And also don’t forget to share your experience with the rest of TheCMSPlace’s community.

That’s all for now friends. I hope that you find the presented solutions for AMP suitable for your WordPress websites.

See you soon!

Facebook instant articles for WordPress

Hello friends,

Nowadays everything is about speed! Not only in terms of SEO but mainly in terms of usability. The search engines are strict about these requirements and monitor each website so that only the optimized ones will be on top.

But this is no longer a specific task reserved only for the crawling bots. The other major traffic source (social media) has joined the party with similar requirements. And in this post I will present to you some solutions for optimizing your WordPress website for the instant articles of the biggest player so far – Facebook.

What are instant articles?

This is a website content that is shared on Facebook as you would do normally. However when clicking on it the user will still remain in Facebook and load it instantly leveraging the same technology that is used to display photos and videos in the Facebook mobile app itself. According to Facebook the loading times are 10 times better compared to the standard mobile web.

So the instant articles can be considered an optimized website content that is instantly available for the Facebook mobile app users. They are interactive and immersive. With this technology each publisher can improve the user experience by bringing a new life to their content. In order to find out more about this program you should visit the official website instantarticles.fb.com

Also you can see how they work from this video:

https://youtu.be/HVEksGDABko

How is WordPress involved in all of this?

You need to optimize your content for the instant article program so that you can leverage its powerful features and provide your Facebook followers with great mobile content that is loading instantly on their mobile devices using the mobile app.

How to optimize WordPress for Facebook’s instant articles?

There is an official way to do it and some unofficial (yet effective) solutions all in the forms of plugins, of course.

The official plugin is created by Facebook and Automattic (the company that is behind WordPress.com). You can get it from GitHub by clicking here.

What it does? It interacts with your content so that you can get your text and multimedia loaded instantly and properly displayed in the Facebook mobile app. For example your images will be available for full screen viewing after a simple click on them. See the example below:
 wp-foreign-policy1

This plugin also adapts the video player so that they can fit beautifully and instantly in the instant articles.

And basically this is all regarding the official solution. You can read more about it here: Introducing a WordPress Plugin for Instant Articles. Bear in mind that this plugin is still in BETA phase.

What other options do I have?

Since the instant articles program is yet to fully arive on the scene you should be aware that all of the solutions are still having some potential problems. However some of them are quite fit for the task at hand and I will present them to you.

The first one is PageFrog. You can get it from WordPress.org and install it. It will optimize your website not only for Facebook’s instant articles but also for Google’s accelerated mobile pages (don’t miss to check the article on the topic for AMP).

PageFrog

After you activate the plugin you should go to “Mobile Formats -> Setup” and then follow the instructions on the screen in order to optimize your WordPress content for the specific mobile pages (instant articles in our current case).

After this you will receive a live preview while editing your content so that you can be fully aware how it will end up looking when loaded on the users’ mobile devices.

screenshot-2

If you are happy with PageFrog’s presentantion and functionality (see the reviews for the plugin) then I suggest that you read this great guide on how to set it up correctly. It is created by socialmediaexaminer.com and it will also present to you what is needed to start on the instant articles program.

There are also other solutions but currently they are not rated quite high and this means that you might have some potential problems with them. Of course you should keep an eye on their development as they might turn to be the most suitable options for your WordPress website in the near future.

Here is a list of the WordPress plugins for Facebook Instant Articles that you might also consider:

What is next?

Patience and optimization! The instant article program is a great thing and each publisher should be utilizing its powerful features. This will improve traffic and conversions as well as overall user experience and brand awareness. This will also gain you more Facebook followers, comments and likes (and other emotions/reactions as well).

Currently my personal choice is to wait a little bit longer before I activate instant articles on my websites. However waiting does not mean doing nothing. I am preparing by selecting content that is to be provided initially to the program. But if you consider yourselves ready then you can go ahead and try some of the solutions mentioned above.

Please don’t forget to share your experience with them in the comments below. This will be extremely useful for our community here at TheCMSPlace.

See you soon friends!

Why you should use Jetpack for WordPress

Hello friends,

In this post I will present to you one extremely popular solution for WordPress. It is called Jetpack and here you will find out several reasons why you should give it a try for your website.

What is Jetpack?

The short answer is a WordPress plugin. However it is not just any regular plugin – it is a complete booster for any self-hosted website (downloaded from WordPress.org).

It provides you with many modules that are absolutely free for use. You can activate all of them or just choose the ones that you really need. And there are some of them that are absolutely necessary for any WordPress website.

Jetpack is 100% free and all you have to do is just download it, install it, activate it and login with your WordPress.com account. And if the modules and their functionalities are not enough for you, you can always consider a premium upgrade that will provide you with even more power.

That’s great, but what is this WordPress.com account for Jetpack? I thought that it was a solution for the WordPress.org websites?

And that is correct! It is a solution for the self-hosted variant of our beloved WordPress, however it provides it with all the great features from the WordPress.com solution for free. That’s why you need an account for it. You can create one for free. It is not needed to create a blog there – just an account. Then after you have installed Jetpack you will be able to connect your website with that account and start using the powerful features of the plugin.

OK – which Jetpack modules do I really need?

I will answer this question with a question – How much power do you want for your website? If the answer is “as more as possible” then you should activate as much modules as possible.

However having too much power isn’t always the optimal solution. So my advice is to check out all modules and then select the ones that will provide you with the features that your website is lacking.

While you are considering what to choose, I will help you with a hint – there are 7 modules that are very needed so you might want to start with them.

Module 1 – WordPress Stats

This an absolute must-have. This is an analytics solution that will provide you with information on the activity of all non-logged-in users. All you have to do is to be logged in your administrator account and then view your stats. This solution will provide additional information so it is absolutely OK to have it running alongside with your Google Analytics account. The more data you have – the better.

Module 2 – Publicize

This module will automatically ping your social services (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and will post the new content on your behalf.

Module 3 – Sharing

This is an absolute must-have for your WordPress website. I have already reviewed it in details in this post, so go ahead and find out why you need it.

Module 4 – Contact forms

Every modern website needs contact forms. And here you have a complete functionality absolutely for free. So why don’t you give it a try?

Module 5 – Jetpack comments

This is another must-have. It improves the default WordPress comment system and allows your visitors to either comment with their accounts on your website, or to log in using social media and then comment. Of course you can allow them to write their e-mail and name and comment without registration or a social media profile as well.

In my opinion this module also helps reduce spam comments. However if you want even better protection the premium upgrades of Jetpack are there for you.

Module 6 – The Jetpack mobile theme

I used to love one non-responsive theme. It looks great, however Google did not liked it while it was not mobile-friendly. So I had to change it. But while struggling to choose a new theme and decide on its design I had to stay with the old non-responsive one. And what saved my ranks and provided my visitors with mobile visits was the Jetpack’s mobile theme. It is absolutely simple to activate and use. And if you like keeping things simple you may find the combination of any non-responsive theme and Jetpack’s module to be absolutely great and efficient. It basically transfers any mobile-unfriendly website to a mobile-friendly one.

Module 7 – Photon

Speed is another very important SEO factor. And to improve it you have to start by optimizing your images. Now, you will find some articles here that I have written about image optimization. But no matter what you do, you will find out that having a CDN is probably the most favorable solution. And Jetpack provides you with such option in the form of its free Photon module. It will make your website faster, so you can consider giving it a try.

And these are the 7 modules that you should start with. You may also consider the following ones as well:

So, dear friends, that is why you should use Jetpack for WordPress. What do you think? Please share any questions or feedback in the comments below.

See you soon!

Google Analytics by Yoast

Hello friends,

Do you want to keep track of all visits on your website? Then you should use a system like Google Analytics. And do you use WordPress and wonder how to integrate the analytics tracking code to your website?

In this post I will show you one extremely easy to use, yet quite powerful solution. This is the Google Analytics plugin by Yoast.

Google Analytics by Yoast

What does Google Analytics by Yoast do?

Its first and most important functionality is to add the tracking coder for Google Analytics into your website in order to start getting insights about visits, page views, audience information, bounce rate, acquisition, etc right into your Google Analytics account.

So before you begin, please make sure that you have created one and added the information about your website correctly. Then you can start using the plugin.

How to use Google Analytics by Yoast?

First of all you need to search for the plugin into your WordPress “Add new” plugins section. That is one way to get it. The other is to download it from the official wordpress.org page (click here to do this) and then upload it manually and install it.

No matter which option you’d choose you have to activate the plugin when installed in order to start using it. So far so good (and easy, right?) – now you need to make some minor settings and you are basically done.

How to adjust the plugin?

After its successful installation and activation Google Analytics by Yoast creates a stand-alone menu in your WordPress dashboard called “Analytics”. Go to its “Settings” sub menu and then under the General tab you need to either authenticate with Google Analytics (i.e. to allow the plugin to get the needed info automatically) or to enter your UA code manually.

Google Analytics by Yoast settings

My personal favorite is the second option but both of them work flawlessly. However you should be aware that if you enter the code manually you won’t be able to use the dashboards of the plugin.

Google Analytics by Yoast

So here you need to make up your mind and decide whether you only need to have the tracking code integrated into your WordPress website or you want to see useful information in its dashboard as well.

If you only need option 1 then you need to paste your UA code and that’s it for now. Next you need to choose whether to track outbound clicks and downloads (you’d want this option as it improves the time tracking of Google Analytics by adding events).

Then you need to decide if you want to help Yoast improve their plugin by providing them with anonymous data collection or not.

After that you can choose to anonymize IP’s and you can even set the WordPress user roles that won’t get tracked when logged in to WordPress. This is absolutely awesome because you don’t want to mix your statistics data with visits that are generated by yourself. In the past the only possible way to do this was by adding a filter to Google Analytics telling it not to track visits from your home or office IP. But when you had to visit your website from another IP your visits were tracked once again. And it was frustrating but now this bad experience is gone for good. All you have to do is to add the user roles that you don’t want to get tracked and you are done. Just keep logged in whenever you use your website and that is it!

Last on the General tab is the option to disable completely the analytics dashboard.

The next tab is the Universal tab and there you can enable Google Analytics universal tracking and different reports.

Pay special attention to the Advanced tab.

There you need to define how the downloads on your WordPress website will be tracked. You can choose between events or pageview but I’d use Events if I were you. Again – the idea is to improve the time tracking results for Google Analytics.

Define the extensions of the files that you want to track as downloads. By default the values are set for:

Add as many as you need. Then decide how to track the outbound clicks. You can choose to track only the domain or the full URL link.

Then decide how to track subdomains and you can also set path for internal links that you want to track as outbound links. Next is a field that allows you to set a label for those links. You can also tag links in RSS feed with campaign variables, allow anchor, add custom code and add _setAllowLinker.

Now this tab might be confusing for beginners so you can skip it if not sure what to do. The default values are good enough.

Google Analytics by Yoast - Advanced tab

If you want to track custom dimensions you have to upgrade to the premium version of the plugin. Under the Debug mode tab you can enable/disable debugging.

And that’s it friends! Your tracking code is integrated and you can start tracking your website visits using Google Analytics.

So let’s summarize what this plugin does:

And now it’s up to you friends. Would you use this plugin? Share in the comments below.

See you soon!

*The images are embedded from the WordPress.org page of the plugin