Daily ArchivesSeptember 11, 2021

WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform and eventually grew into the comprehensive, featured content management system (CMS) we know and love today. It wasn’t intended to be used as a platform for retail, leaving many businesses and entrepreneurs asking the question – is WordPress good for ecommerce?

Choosing the right platform

First thing’s first. Decide on the right CMS for your site. From highly flexible to user-friendly, CMS options such as WordPress, Magento, and Shopify have unique aspects to consider before subscribing. Are you a small to medium-sized business (SMB) venturing into ecommerce for the first time? Then a WordPress ecommerce website might be right for you.

WordPress vs. Magento

For larger-scale online retailers, the open source Magento platform may be a better option than WordPress. Magento occupies the same preeminent position in ecommerce that WordPress has in the CMS world while maintaining a range of features that WordPress can’t hope to replicate in full.

However, for small-scale retail ventures that don’t require the level of professional features Magento offers, WordPress provides ample ecommerce solutions. There are a number of WordPress ecommerce plug-ins that range from very simple to quite complex in their configuration and features. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to set up your ecommerce site and choose the appropriate plug-ins.

WordPress vs. Shopify

WordPress is an open-source platform, meaning anyone can view, edit, and reproduce its code. On the other hand, Shopify is a proprietary software that makes for a much more templated user experience. If you maintain a small business with limited inventory, you may find the cookie-cutter approach of Shopify useful. But for most growing enterprises, WordPress delivers unparalleled customization features without the high monthly cost of Shopify.

Is WordPress right for my site?

Perhaps you already have WordPress knowledge, but you’ve yet to incorporate ecommerce. One reason to choose WordPress for your store instead of Magento is the steep learning curve: for those already familiar with the world of WordPress, understanding how XML, requireJS, and jQuery are needed to build and edit Magento sites are only the tip of the iceberg. If you’re ready to start a store, the path of least resistance begins with using the tools you feel most comfortable with, and WordPress has a wide variety of plug-in options that can build custom, robust ecommerce stores. 

Keep in mind, other platforms like Magento and Shopify were specifically designed for retail management and may fit your business needs better. But no platform can rival WordPress when it comes to giving you endless options for turning your ideas into a functional site. 

How to build an ecommerce website with WordPress plug-ins

Many different shopping solutions will enable you to add ecommerce to a WordPress site. While there are premium plug-ins available, we’re going to concentrate on freely available plug-ins that can be quickly downloaded, configured, and set up. The following free plug-ins don’t require much integration with third-party software outside of the need for a payment processing service.

WooCommerce plug-in

WooCommerce is one of the more popular plug-ins used to build an ecommerce website with WordPress. Developed by the team behind WooThemes, WooCommerce is celebrated for its ability to add ecommerce functionality to almost any WordPress theme.

WooCommerce sticks fairly close to the traditional posts and pages model of WordPress, so anyone familiar with publishing on WordPress will have no problem getting the hang of managing products. It also includes everything you need to start an online store, including various payment gateway integrations, shipping management, marketing and promotion tools, and retail-specific search engine optimization (SEO).

If you’re a first-time site builder looking for a low barrier to entry, WooCommerce is the perfect plug-in to make your WordPress ecommerce website a reality.

WP-ecommerce plug-in

Any list of WP ecommerce examples wouldn’t be complete without the plug-in WP-ecommerce itself. WP-ecommerce is the granddaddy of WordPress ecommerce. 

WP-ecommerce has been downloaded over two million times, and its widespread use has laid the foundation for a great community that’s focused on helping newer store owners. 

While WP-ecommerce has many of the same core features as WooCommerce, in total WooCommerce still offers more features than WP-ecommerce. Also, WP-ecommerce can be slightly less intuitive to use than WooCommerce.

All in all, both WooCommerce and WP-ecommerce offer great shopping solutions. But if you’re a step or two above novice and you like the appeal of the “original” plug-in, WP-ecommerce is the perfect option.

Easy Digital Downloads plug-in

If you’re selling digital products like software or music rather than tangible goods on your WordPress ecommerce website, check out Easy Digital Downloads. It has many of the features of the other two plug-ins we’ve mentioned, but is specifically tailored to digital goods, with license generation and management built in.

You’ll still have access to hundreds of extensions, themes, and support. For businesses focused on non-tangible goods, Easy Digital Downloads is a better option than WooCommerce or WP-ecommerce.

Payment gateway plug-ins

Payment gateway plug-ins enable your ecommerce store to accept online payments. Third-party service providers such as Square, PayPal, and Stripe offer some of the most popular payment gateway plug-ins.

When considering which payment gateway is right for your site, be sure to evaluate cost. Most payment gateways charge a transaction fee and may have additional fees as well.

Hosting for WordPress

While your CMS is what allows you to build your site, your hosting provider runs the servers that enable your website to be seen on the internet. When it comes to WordPress ecommerce sites, choosing the right hosting provider is an important step.

Speed, security, scalability, and support are the major aspects you’ll want to consider when looking for a hosting provider. How does your host ensure that your site will run fast, regardless of traffic spikes? Will they provide necessary security updates and offer 24/7 support?

Conclusion

Whether you’re new to WordPress ecommerce or looking to optimize your site, Hostdedi is the hosting provider that guarantees a smooth site experience for you and your customers. Managing WordPress, Magento, and WooCommerce hosting, Hostdedi ensures secure, scalable, and speedy connections to the platform of your choice. Choose a plan that’s right for you and start growing your business today!

Transactional email are the emails that a WordPress site sends out to its users in response to some action they have taken. Newsletters and other promotional emails are considered to be bulk mail rather than transactional mail. Transactional email includes responses to users submitting their email addresses, commenting or getting a reply to a comment, registering on a site, and various other automatic responses. It’s one of the most important ways that a site communicates with its visitors.

Most bloggers put a lot of work into getting their bulk email looking good. The newsletter is one of the major marketing tools for a lot of sites. However, they don’t tend to give such careful attention to their transactional email; they rely on the standard WordPress functionality for notifications, which, while adequate, can lead to missed marketing and engagement opportunities.

Customizing transactional email to add a bit of personality is a powerful step towards making a site appear professional and giving it a cohesive brand message. Transactional emails can also be used to publicize calls to action or marketing messages for premium content and other monetization strategies, as well as to just make users aware of content on the site that they may not have previously come across. Read More »

I think cron is a wonderful creation. It is simple in what it does while being extremely useful. Allow me to present a short introduction to it for those unfamiliar, then I will show you a handy trick you may need someday. Keep reading this blog to learn about cron and the crontab command — and why you should run crontab at the end of the month.

Brief Introduction to Cron & Crontab

You can set any command to run at any time (or repeatedly at a set interval) by using cron. The name comes from “chronos” — the Greek word for time. If you have Linux, you’re going to have cron. Run the command “crontab” to edit or create the jobs for your user.

Related reading: Cron Job for Every Three Days

The syntax seems a little cryptic at first, but it is very straightforward. You enter a series of numbers and symbols followed by the crontab command you wish to run. The numbers and symbols state the desired time and day to run the command. They are separated by a space as follows: Read More »

There are many blogging platform choices and fully researching and analyzing each can be a little overwhelming, not to mention the management often required after the blog is set up. Luckily, Pingdom has done some research for would-be bloggers and determined what platforms the Top 100 Blogs are using.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, they discovered the most popular blogging platform (and Content Management System) is WordPress, a platform for which Hostdedi offers Managed WordPress hosting.

Pingdom’s study utilized Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and investigated from there to identify the platform in use for each of the sites. This study was also done in 2012 and a comparison between the two sets of data shows WordPress increasing its share of the 100 by four blogs. Custom blog platforms and Drupal come in a distant second and third, respectively.

WordPress is also highly popular among Hostdedi customers for their blogging and CMS platforms. With our Managed WordPress Hosting, customers find that the speed, reliability and security of their service improves greatly. Our highly trained technicians are experienced in WordPress and ready to optimize what customers get out of hosting, no matter when they need it. Access to our fully managed, 24/7/365 support also includes peace of mind provided by our full hardware and software management and access to a number of additional security incentives to ensure that our customers’ WordPress sites are shielded from attacks and running optimally at all times.

Fully Managed WordPress Hosting with Hostdedi includes:

• One-click WordPress Installs
• Scale Up or Down at a Moment’s Notice
• Guaranteed Speed & Protection from Tier-1, Secure Data Centers
• Knowledgeable 24/7/365 Heroic Support from Highly Trained Technicians
• 100% Uptime or 10x Compensation for Time Lost, Guaranteed
• The Fastest Response Times in Web Hosting, Guaranteed
• Highly Specialized Teams for Your Convenience
• Security and Peace of Mind

Choosing a blog hosting platform can be overwhelming, but Hostdedi provides a complete solution to make the choice easier. In addition, WordPress’s ranking as the most popular platform for the Top 100 blogs demonstrates its wide array of applications. The team at Hostdedi can take control of the reins of your WordPress sites and provide a safer, more dependable environment.

Want WordPress without the hassle? Check out Managed WordPress, with one-click staging, one-click backup restoration, automatic updates, automatic backups, and free SSL.

Magento is, at its core, an open source and freely available eCommerce solution. Coupled with optimized Magento hosting, the Community Edition incorporates all the basics that new online retailers need to get a store up and running. However, there are several distinct advantages to choosing to deploy a Magento Enterprise Edition store.

Support

The Magento community is awesome. It’s a tremendous resource for online retailers, but the community model has restrictions. Users are limited to searching through forums and other resources to find information that may be crucial for the success of their business.

Some of those resources are excellent, but some are of mixed quality. If a business has very specific needs they may not be able to find what they want. Time-sensitive support can also be difficult to source from the community. They’re a generous but busy set of people, and they have no obligation to help. Purchasing a Magento Enterprise licence guarantees expert and immediate help for whatever issues might arise. Read More »

When it comes to load-times for web pages, faster is always better. It doesn’t matter how incredible a site’s content is, or how effective their social media and advertising strategies are at drawing visitors to a site. If those visitors have to wait for more than two or three seconds for the page to load, it’s increasingly likely they’ll bounce right back to where they came from and continue on to another site.

Slow sites mean lost advertising impressions and clicks, lost opportunities to make a sale, and a poor first impression that is likely to stick with users and influence them to avoid a site in the future.

There are numerous ways to speed up PHP applications like WordPress and Magento, and we’ve talked about many of them before, but for this article we’re going to concentrate on content delivery networks.

If you’re familiar with the idea of caching, then content delivery networks should be easy to understand.

In almost all cases, a site will be hosted on a server or a cluster of servers located in a data center somewhere. There might be secondary backup sites in case of a problem with the main site, but usually sites have one location to which their IP address points.

System administrators and site owners can implement various strategies to get their sites to perform very quickly but having all requests, from everywhere in the world, routed to one place imposes speed limitations that are almost impossible to overcome.

No matter what system administrators do, they can’t overcome the speed of light, and most network infrastructure gets no where near that speed. Round trips that span the globe, or some significant proportion of it, can add seconds to a page’s load-time.

The networks that lie between a site and the user’s browser also impose a time penalty. Every time the signal has to pass through a router or network switch, it experiences a small delay. Sometimes, signals have to pass through dozens of routers, on both the inbound and outbound trips, adding a little bit of time for each one.

The solution is the Content Delivery Network (also known as a Content Distribution Network). To get around the inherent limitations of the Internet, copies of a site or of its static assets are placed in dozens or hundreds of locations around the world. When a browser makes a request for content, it is sent from one of the “edge nodes” rather than from the main server. By routing requests to the nearest of the edge nodes, round trip times can be reduced by orders of magnitude.

Having the site replicated in numerous locations also has other advantages: it reduces the likelihood that a problem with one part of the network is going to knock a site offline, it reduces the load on the main server or cluster, and load can be intelligently distributed around the nodes if there’s a traffic spike.

Sites that rely on advertising revenue and product sales, will more than likely see conversion rate increases that offset the cost of using a content delivery network.

If you’ve used a CDN and had good (or not so good) results, feel free to start a conversation in the comments below.

Image Credit: rexbogg5

Update, Update, Update!

Everybody has seen this over and over again, and with good reason. WordPress is one of the most widely used Content Management Systems (CMS) for blogging and the security patches provided in their updates can help keep your site secure. The older your WordPress version is the more time there has been for hackers to try and find a way in. Remember to keep your themes and plugins as well.

Remove unused plugins and themes

Even if you keep everything updated, you will want to make sure that every old plugin or theme you do not use is removed. A common, unused theme could still serve as an entry point to your site. As long as the theme/plugin is installed the files are on your site they are potential risks, so cutting back the amount of entry points is key to keeping your site secure.

Hide your wp-config.php file

Your wp-config.php file contains extremely sensitive information (such as your database connection). Because of this, WordPress added the ability to move your wp-config.php file one directory above your webroot so it is no longer visible to the public.

So, instead of [code]/domain.com/public_html/wp-config.php[/code], you would have [code]/domain.com/wp-config.php[/code].

Now, even if permissions aren’t set correctly, or there is an exploit within your version of WordPress, your wp-config.php is not accessible in a browser and your database information is safe.

Remove “admin” user

Often times hackers won’t be guessing your password. They will use a program that attempts to figure out your credentials by using common usernames and passwords over and over again until it logs in, called a brute force attack. Since “admin” is the default username, it is often at the top of the list. Removing this username and switching to unique usernames can help prevent these types of attacks.

Don’t use the default database prefix

If somebody is able to compromise your site using an injection attack, they might be able to input information into your database without even looking at it first due to using the default prefix. By default your database will use “wp_” as a prefix, and if it is left as that hackers will instantly know what tables your user information is in and change your password to gain access for themselves or even create their own user. If you change your prefix to something random, let’s use “h97gw_” for example, your “wp_users” table is now “h97gw_users” and a hacker will not be able to guess his way into your database.

Use an IP whitelist for wp-admin

One of the best steps you could take is adding more verification layers to your admin login. Using the .htaccess file you are able to make a password prompt show up in the browser before you can access the login screen, or even block everybody but yourself or your developers based on IP address.

Here is an example you can modify and use in your /wp-admin/.htaccess where either your IP address to be on the list, or a password is required to access the login screen:

[code]AuthType Basic
AuthName “Please Log In”
AuthUserFile /path/to/password/file/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 111.111.111.111
Allow from 111.111.111.112
Satisfy any [/code]

Using this, everybody will be required to enter an additional username and password to even view the login screen, unless your IP address is allowed. If you change the Satisfy option from “any” to “all” you will only be able to access the login screen if you both have the username and password, and your IP address is allowed.

Limit login attempts

Another useful method to prevent brute force attacks is to limit the amount of times a certain IP address is allowed to try and log in. Unfortunately as of yet WordPress has not added this as part of their default functions, so you will need to find a suitable plugin. I personally use Login Security Solution for my sites, but feel free to find one that fits you best.

Hide your wp-plugins directory

Depending on how your hosting environment is set up (and, with our server configuration standards, this is not required on any Hostdedi hosting plan; I only mention this as a courtesy), you may be able to go to domain.com/wp-plugins/ and view a list of installed plugins as well as their versions. This is a very simple way for a hacker to find out what plugins are installed so they can search for exploits, and another reason you will want to make sure you remove plugins you no longer use. You can prevent this by placing a blank index.html file within your wp-plugins directory, so when attempting to view that directory in a browser you would just get a blank screen.

Prevent search engines from indexing your admin login screen

It is never a good idea to allow a search engine to index your wp-admin login screen, because that can provide a direct link to your login screen when somebody is simply searching for your site. To stop this from happening you can put the following line within your robots.txt file:

[code]Disallow: */wp-admin/[/code]

Set proper file permissions

Permissions can often be a large issue, and often times they are set incorrectly which, in turn, can lead to security concerns. If a directory is set to 777, that means anybody in the world is able to read, write, and execute any file within that directory. The proper and safest permissions for most environments are going to be 755 for directories and 644 for files, so anonymous users don’t have the control required to make changes to your site. You can view a full breakdown of the numeric value permission system.

Backup regularly

Even if your hosting company is providing backups of your site, make sure you create your own backups on a regular schedule as well as before making major changes. Sometimes a site will be compromised but will lay dormant in an attempt to outlive the available backups (I’ve personally seen malware lay dormant for over two years). In that scenario it is good to have backups from when you know when your site was fine and not have to rely on the time frame of your hosting company’s backup policy.

Virus scan your computer often

Another one of the largest entry points is actually your personal computer. If your computer has a virus that logs your passwords somebody can gain access to the FTP account you’ve been using for your uploads/backups, or corrupt your site files on your local computer so you end up uploading pre-infected files that can grant them access to your site. No matter what length you go through for securing your WordPress blog, if the computer you use to work on your blog is infected the hacker may gain access to your site.

Unfortunately, there will always be people out there trying to hack into websites, but the more steps you take to secure your own computer and website, the less likely you will be forced to deal with it.

WordPress has long worn the laurels as the most popular content management system in the world. With its 10th birthday on the horizon, WordPress has become the platform of choice for a huge range of content producers, including solo bloggers, large media organizations, and corporations. Even with strong competition from other platforms, the top performers in the publishing market are consistently choosing WordPress.

In a recently released survey of the top 100 blogs, Pingdom revealed that 52 of the top 100 are using WordPress. That’s a growth of 4 sites from last year’s 48. WordPress competitors are barely a blip on the radar, with custom sites making up 12 of the top 100, and Drupal, the highest ranked content management system apart from WordPress, managing only 7 sites, having dropped one from 2012.

The custom site figures exclude the Gawker publishing empire, which uses its own custom-made platform and has 8 sites in the top 100.
Up and coming SaaS platforms made a relatively poor showing. Tumblr, which hosts over 100 million blogs on its platform and had a recent tremendous growth spurt of 7 million blogs in 25 days, managed only one site among the elite. Blogger, Google’s venerable blogging platform, snagged one more of the top 100 compared to last year, moving from 2 to 3 blogs, placing it just below TypePad and just above Ceros.

It’s instructive to look at the range of organizations that choose to use WordPress as the foundation of their publishing activities. Unsurprisingly, a lot of tech and tech culture blogs plump for WordPress, including GigaOM, TechCrunch, Mashable, and Smashing Magazine.

Four years ago, there were many superstar bloggers in the list, including Chris Brogan, Perez Hilton, and Robert Scoble, all resting on WordPress foundations. But in the intervening years many of the individual bloggers appear to have been pushed out of the list by large publishers.

Media giants like the New York Times have risen up the ranks as they supplement traditional journalism with blogs. NYT has its popular The Lede, Bits and Paul Krugman blogs on WordPress. Reuters is also in on the WordPress action with Felix Salmon’s blog making the cut.

Comparing the figures from 2009 with this month, we also see some platforms have dropped out of the ranking altogether. Scoop and Bricolage just made it into the top 100 at the end of the last decade, but they no longer make the list.

We’re sure that next year we’ll see more changes among the smaller content management systems, but, given the trend, it’s likely that WordPress will continue to dominate the list into the foreseeable future.

If you’re pondering creating a blog or website, whether its because you’re an entrepreneur starting a business, you want to make money blogging, or you simply have a creative itch to scratch, you can’t have failed to come across WordPress. It’s the world’s most popular content management system, can be modified to create sites of almost any sort, and, best of all, WordPress is free.

However, while WordPress itself won’t cost you anything, there are costs associated with creating a WordPress site. We’re going to have a look at what you can expect to pay to set up a simple WordPress site or blog.

We’ll be concentrating on self-hosted WordPress sites, sometimes referred to as WordPress.org sites, as opposed to WordPress.com sites. I’ll explain the difference shortly. Read More »

WordPress is perfectly capable of providing a standard ticketing system for customer support, but adding a forum brings a number of benefits that a ticketing system does not.

• Community Involvement – Your customers and clients are often your business’s best advocates and they can provide free support to other members of the community. As users of your products, they have experienced it in the real world, and are frequently quite happy to share that knowledge for free.

• SEO – A well-moderated forum provides a great source of fresh, keyword-rich content that captures exactly the search queries that are relevant to your product or service’s users. It’s far better that users end up back on your site when they search for queries related to your product than on a third party site or social media.

• Free Content – User-generated content requires a lower investment than any other SEO-aware content, including blog articles.

• User Engagement – Providing a place for a community to gather around your business can help increase user engagement, brand awareness, and loyalty.

We’re going to have a look at three ways that you can implement a forum on your WordPress site.

 

Simple:Press is a full-featured forum plugin that integrates nicely with WordPress. It uses templates and themes and so can be easily modified to blend in with a site’s design and has numerous plugins available to extend its functionality.

 

Mingle Forum is very easy to set up and yet it certainly isn’t lacking in features. It will integrate well with most themes and provides media embedding, user levels, moderation, email notifications for replies and new topics, and CAPTCHA verification to help fight spam.

 

bbPress is probably the most popular WordPress forum plugin available. It’s developed by the same company that is behind WordPress and is fully integrated with the WordPress dashboard.

One of best features of bbPress is that it has Akismet support built-in. Akismet, also from Automattic, is the spam filtering software that you probably already have deployed on your site to stop spam comments. Additionally, bbPress has a large selection of plugins so that it can be configured to provide any additional functionality that you might require, including social media integrations and logins, moderation addons, language specific customizations, and customer relationship management tools.

There are many forum plugins for WordPress, and we’ve shared three that we think are among the best, but we’d love to hear what your experiences with these plugins are and any other suggestions your might have.