DEV Community: Sam Fitzgerald

Who won in the WordPress development vs. Joomla development war?

Sam Fitzgerald — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 07:33:27 +0000

There has always been debates over which CMS has the best features and functionalities to create an amazing website with all the dynamic features that the user of the website likes. If there are no unique features in the website, then there will be chances that the website is not liked by the web visitors to much extent.

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A CMS helps to develop, design and modify as well as manage the website quite easily. We are here talking about the much popular WordPress Development and Joomla as well as Drupal development which we are comparing in this article. It has always been a hot debate which CMS to choose and why?
This of course needs to look up to the pros and cons of each and every CMS that we have mentioned. Let’s first off start with our very favorite WordPress CMS and what are the valid benefits as well as disadvantages of this CMS?

There are some factors that need to be taken care and based on which we are going to compare the different CMSes:

Cost of development and affordability
Hassle-free use of the CMS
High level of customization
Flexibility and scalability level
Security of the websites being created
SEO and performance

Benefits of WordPress development:

● In terms of cost, WordPress is a free of cost open-source CMS, which allows for most of the people to use it easily and beginners to start learning various WordPress resources.

● Using WordPress development is not at all a hassle. The dashboard of WordPress looks and feels so simple that one can get easily aware of the features and settings available on it.

● There are hundreds and thousands of customization options and you can even hire a WordPress theme customization company to get an exclusive business website.

● The high level of flexibility and scalability for the future surely impresses the users of this CMS. SEO performance levels are also high.
As such, we can’t think of the cons of using this CMS.

Benefits of using Joomla as the CMS:

● Joomla! Founded in 2005 as a second CMS branch, called Mambo at that time. This name comes from God in Swahili, which means "together". This refers to the nature of the open source project maintained by the voluntary community.

● Joomla is the second most popular CMS on the Web. Its market share is 6.3% of the CMS market, equivalent to 3.1% of all Internet sites. This is equivalent to about 58 million websites. All in all, it has been downloaded over 93 million times.

● Like WordPress, Joomla is based on a PHP and SQL database. The other functions are the same as the front end (Website display) and back end (management area).

Benefits of using Drupal as the CMS for enterprises:

● The third competitor of the CMS comparison is longer than two other systems. The first version of Drupal was released in 2001 and is now the third most popular solution for building websites. Its total market share is 2.2%, which means that some 41 million sites run on Drupal in the background.

● Interestingly, this system is particularly popular on large sites. It is actually more popular than Joomla on one million websites. The reasons are explained below.

● Drupal is also the most technically advanced CMS in this series. Like other candidates, its main technology is PHP, which is also a community-driven software project with open source.

Conclusion:

One question that you must answer when you start making important decisions about building a website is what kind of CMS (Content Management System) you are going to use. Nowadays it is easier for people who do not use the web design experience to make small changes to the site, such as adding blogs, uploading new images with WordPress development services from the experts.

Promote your WordPress Website Socially with These Plugins

Sam Fitzgerald — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 10:44:14 +0000

Social Media is acknowledged as one of the most integral parts of online and offline business. Ignoring social media only means that the user is ignoring a vast customer base.

Social Media is like the gem to generate good traffic for the website.

Therefore, there is some fantastic social media WordPress plugin that the user can utilize to promote their website. These plugins tend to enhance the functionality of the website by adding features and capabilities that do not come with standard website creation.

Not only this but these plugins come with an exceptionally outstanding user interface, and it comes with social media presence with excellent designs.

Thus, here are some of the best WordPress plugins that would help you with the task and also with the Wordpress Plugin Development.

Best Social WordPress Plugins to Promote your Website

When you are down the road where Wordpress Website Development is involved, the whole scenario involves plugins that help in the promotion of the website.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast is the all in one SEO plugin that you need for your social promotion. It is one of the highly used and useful WordPress plugins that make the whole process of delivering SEO improved on the website. Yoast is one of those plugins that helps any user to get most out of the site with clean and straightforward XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, content analysis and many integration options that shows how a website performs in different directions.

This is the plugin that identifies and suggests the solution of potential SEO problem in the content. It determines what the user has done, and it then helps to easily edit the snippets, keywords and many other post details.

2. Gravity Forms

If any user wants to add a sophisticated and excellent customizable form for the website, then this is the plugin for you. This plugin allows the user to construct multi-step forms that may be used for polls, surveys, quizzes and many more things. The user can easily set up integration with many tools such as Hubspot for the marketing that is there for automation flow.

The most satisfying part about this plugin is that it allows the user to integrate with a variety of other tools like PayPal or stripe so that the user can accept payment directly via the forms. Thus, Wordpress Web Development is sorted and looked after subsequently.

3. Pretty Links

This is the plugin that tends to construct short links. These links are readable, speakable and memorable. With the help of this plugin, the user tends to create better social and affiliate links. They also tend to manage redirects. The user also has the authority to build preetybar that manages to keep the brand front-and-centre while all the visitors are on the external links.

Not only this, but the plugin tends to keep social media links, affiliate links and redirects updated and useful. The best part of this plugin is that it automatically construct short links and tweet into customizable messages.

4. Akismet

If you are a WordPress user, you would know that Akismet plugin is all about fighting against the comment spam. By verifying the comment against the Akismet web service, the plugin tends to intercepts spam. It allows the user to review every comment through the comments section in the admin screen. One of the best features about this plugin that it lets the user gets to see status history to each comment. This allows the user to witness on which ones are caught by Akismet and which ones are moderated.

5. W3 Total Cache

If any Wordpress Experts is looking to improve the performance of the website, then this is the plugin for you. The optimization plugin tends to help all the marketers deliver a better user experience by enhancing server performance, reducing the load time and then presenting CDN integration. This tends to increase the website’s performance and also help in decreasing load time to enhance the user experience.

6. MaxCDN

MaxCDN is the content delivery network that manages to construct images and other static site content. This plugin has the power to load faster, and it then leads to keep the website secure. With the help of MaxCDN, the user tends to get easy WordPress Integration. The plugin offers built-in, platform-wide security, time control and scalability. Some of the best features that the user can get while using this plugin are that it provides full delivery of the security feature, which involves access control and content protection. Note that Google loves those sites that are fast. A site with appropriate user experience ensures that the website does not bounce because every it means that something in the website is taking forever to load.

MaxCDN is the plugin that not only helps with WordPress website speed, but it manages to reduce bandwidth cost and too.

7. RafflePress

Before you Hire Wordpress Developer makes sure that you are aware of all the tricks to promote your website. One of the best ways to enhance the email subscriber list is by running contests and giveaway. RafflePress is one of the best “giveaway” plugins that is used for WordPress. The plugin is accessible to a tool that helps to host these contest on the blog and social media platforms. The user can even let the social media followers and website visitors get multiple contest entries when they complete different promotional tasks.

RafflePress has a simple, streamlined interface with a drag and drops architect that the user can utilize to produce an attention-grabbing giveaway. RafflePress has scam security, distraction-free touchdown pages, and combines with social media programs as well as email marketing assistance and CRM software.

8. Shared Counts

Shared Counts is fast and an easy plugin to use social media plugin. It comes with a limited number of the most popular social media platforms. Social Networks like Facebook, Google+, Pinterest is some of the most platforms that are involved in the list. There are multiple button styles. The user can choose where they need to show the button ( the user can also allow it via custom post types)

The plugin attempts to get social share number for each network. The user can also prefer to show the entire amount of shares on all networks.

In the Nutshell

Accept it or not, but social media marketing is an unavoidable part of working in the website world. The best thing is that if the website is on the WordPress platform, the options would be unlimited. Thus, we have provided you with some of the best social media plugins that are supported by WordPress.

We hope that this article has provided you with all the necessary information and data on social plugins and Wordpress Development Services. If the user has any issues regarding the following topic, then they can write their comment on the comment section below. Our experts would try to solve them and give you the required aid.

Step into 2020 with these 7 Powerful Migration Plugins

Sam Fitzgerald — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 12:36:34 +0000

Gone are those days when coding a fully-functional website was a nerve-wracking task for the developers. Migrating your site to a new website hosting company is a great challenge. While you need to move database, files, themes and structure, so many companies avoid the hassle and cut down the risk of messing things up associated with the manual migration process. Also, at the same time, you must require a solution that reduces the downtime of your website and preserve the SEO ranking of your website.

So how would you make sure that all the things will go smoothly without any hiccup?

Whether you want to convert HTML to Wordpress theme or PSD to Wordpress, the process of migration is always complicated, especially when you are not aware of right migration plugins. Usually, the migration process intakes three necessary steps:

●Finding and replacing the database directly with the new interface.
●Export the SQL
●Import the database into your new database with the help of right migration tools to avoid creating a room for any blunder.

However, if you want to eliminate all the hassle and need to expand the functionality of your site, then you must know about the latest Wordpress migration plugins that ensure fast, secure and easy website conversion services.

Here is the list of free and premium Wordpress Migration plugins that help you convert a static website into a fully dynamic site without any struggle:

Duplication or Duplicator Pro

With 50,000 Wordpress plugins, approx 16 Million users have chosen to download duplicators to convert HTML to Wordpress theme. Duplicator plugin can transfer your site from one host to another with zero downtime. The most tempting part about this plugin is, it creates a package that compiles all the site plugins, themes, content, database and files into a simple zip file.

And when you bundle the site in a particular package, you can remigrate the Wordpress site over and over to different locations instantly.

Whereas, the Pro version of Duplicator takes the features of this plugin to the next level. From creating backup files to migrating an entire multisite Wordpress network in one shot to providing professional support, Duplicator Pro provides you with all in one package.

BackupBuddy

Searching for the PSD to Wordpress theme conversion services, look no further than BackupBuddy, as it allows you to make an automatically scheduled backup on daily, weekly or monthly basis as per your requirement. By keeping a regular backup of your website files on the cloud, you can quickly transfer the site with less downtime.

Apart, this plugin offers you excellent cloud storage facilities for storing backup files secure and safe with you longer. Besides, you can transfer back up data directly to your email for the ready use. But this plugin is not available for free. With the one time payment, you can get lifetime access to this plugin.

Read: Advantages for Developing a Custom WordPress Plugin

All-In-One Wordpress Migration Plugin

If you hesitate to migrate the website manually or planning to hire Wordpress developers for the website conversion, then you should know about the All-In-One WP migration plugin. With the help of this plugin, you can export your Wordpress website including the database, multiple files, plugins and themes even with no technical knowledge.

As this plugin use the chunks of the site data with the maximum upload file size to 2MB, you can easily export the database without compromising the quality. As far as community support is the concern, you can watch plugin instruction video and FAQs for instant assistance. For premium support, you need to upgrade the services with the premium version.

myEASYbackup

Since its inception in 2010, it has made the website conversion process far easier and simpler for the developers. myEASYbackup is one of the popular Wordpress plugins that enable you to migrate site by creating a secure backup of the files. The most significant advantage of using this plugin is it comes with scheduled backups, convenient migration features, and a complete package. It helps you quickly transfer your website using a full Wordpress backup.

However, restoring and migrating your site with the features of myEASYbackup is not so easy for the newbies. Also, the license of this plugin comes with a small price.

WP Migrate DB

If you are assuming that all the migration plugins involve the same procedure of site migration, then you are mistaken at this point. WP Migrate DB is designed with the simple aim to make the entire migration process more comfortable with the full support of serialized data and arrays. In other words, it means, you can use this plugin to transfer the site without any risk of data corruption.

With over 300,000 active installations, WP Migrate DB has become one of the best Wordpress Migration plugins in the developers’ community. To get your hands on the full range of features, you need to switch to the premium version of this plugin. The paid version of this plugin you can migrate your website within minutes without any struggle.

After reading about all these plugins, you are wondering what plugin you should pick for the secure website transfer. Let’s find the answer to this question...

Which is the Best Migration Plugin For Your Website?

Over the years, Wordpress has become the most powerful CMS by offering over 50,000 plugins for easy website customization and conversion. However, at the same time, it leaves you in a dilemma that which plugin you should pick to enhance the functionality of your site and for secure migration.

While the choice of Wordpress migration plugin depends on the various factors including, whether you want a free or premium version, what features you want, and so on.

The above listed all the migration plugins are efficient and capable enough to ensure you secure migration of the site. However, you need to keep one thing in a mind that a useful plugin has the power to help you transfer the place with zero downtime and well suited to developers.

Ending Note

Everyone knows that the website migration process is a time consuming and complicated procedure. However, with the right choice of Wordpress migration plugin, it can be done within a couple of seconds. To safely, securely and quickly transfer the site, you need to create backup data before start migrating your website.

And this post has included some of the trending plugins that ensure you seamless migration of the website. Also, let us know which one is your favourite and prefer to access for the website migration?

Author Bio
Sam Fitzgerald is associated with Wordprax Ltd., a leading WordPress Development Company and handles all major wordpress development projects, Wordpress Plugin Development, PSD to Wordpress conversion, HTML to Wordpress conversion along with his team of designers and developers. As a hobby, I also write Technical Articles related to WordPress development to share my deep insights into this subject.

How Wordpress Breadcrumbs can Improve Your SEO and UX

Sam Fitzgerald — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 11:51:11 +0000

Yes! You read it right, BREADCRUMB!

You might be querying why on earth I am writing about a shred of food in a blog that is related to WordPress and SEO. But let me assure you that the whole write up has nothing to do with it.

The breadcrumb which I am talking about is a useful navigation tool that tends to keep track of the users and locate their current location. It is one of the easiest ways to enhance the user experience.

To be honest, any website should be designed in such a way that if somebody ends up on the product page, they should be able to quickly navigate to your home page, the category page and any other related bar. Thus, here is when the breadcrumb become your supreme saviour.

Understanding the essence of the breadcrumb is relatively easy, and the process of adding them to your website takes no less than a minute. Any wordpress plugin developer can use it.

Here is how!

Why Breadcrumbs?

Before we start discussing this amazing navigation tool, let us go through the points that would convince you on why it is essential.

●Breadcrumbs are perfect when it comes to the multi-hierarchy website or even when it comes to e-commerce websites.
●They tend to improve your SEO by extending the dwell time.
●Breadcrumbs tend to increase boost sales.
●It tends to follow the three-click rule in the web design
●Breadcrumbs are one of those tools that are there in Google's 200 ranking factors.
●Implement a compact variant of the page titles in the path.
●Including symbols between links: ">", "»", "-" and "/".
●Breadcrumbs help in improving the internal linking structure of the website.
●They are said to be an additional means of navigation that does not repeat the main menu.
●They do not hyperlink the main page
●They utilize attribute crumb on the e-commerce website
●Placement is required to verify the position. It is in the top left angle of each page, right underneath the menu.
●Breadcrumbs mobile SEO is also provided; they tend to support the mobile-first indexing provisions.

Breadcrumbs and SEO

Breadcrumbs are considered as an essential part of any website. It is that single line of text which tends to mark the path from the current page back home.

This tool not only helps people to know where they are on the hierarchy of the website, but it improves the search engine to comprehend how the site is structured.

This tool tends to improve dwell time and decrease bounce rate by showing the visitors the link they have explored. Which marks a good start towards SEO. Three different types of breadcrumbs are used in SEO. No matter if it is a custom plugin development, wordpress breadcrumbs would help in every aspect.

The three types are:

1. Location Breadcrumb

This is the most prevalent kind of breadcrumb. Breadcrumb like this informs the user where they are in terms of site structure. The location breadcrumb tends to use the homepage at the start of the path. If you are a user or a crawler, then location breadcrumb is the one for you.

2. Path Breadcrumb
Due to the enhancement of database-driven website, path breadcrumb is becoming popular. It tends to show the user an actual path that the user needs to take on the site to relinquish their contemporary page rather than portraying the hierarchy, related homepage and location breadcrumb.

3. Attribute or Keyword Breadcrumb

Attribute or keyword breadcrumbs use keywords and attributes that tend to describe the page instead of utilizing something similar that resembles page title or another unique identifier. WP plugin development can easily be achieved with it. The website that is e-commerce based tends to be the one that uses this breadcrumb a lot.

NOTE: Know that the last two tend to have duplicate breadcrumbs in it. Duplicate breadcrumbs tend to hurt your website in the sheets of Google, Bing and other search engines. This is because your site might appear thin when it comes to the original content. Therefore, to dodge this, the user can use location-based breadcrumb for the SEO strategy.

Advantages of Using SEO in Breadcrumbs

While you are working in WordPress plugin development organization and you use breadcrumbs in your website, then it tends to affect the SEO. The advantages which it then offers would be:

1. Enhances the user experience

When you visit a website as a potential customer, you have certain expectations. Not getting lost in the midway of your browsing is one of them. Thus, the user needs to keep their audience happy. Breadcrumbs are simple website elements that help the user to get faster while they are browsing through your webpage.

2. Decrease Bounce Rate

Kudos to organic search, your audience does not directly enter the homepage. With every single page on your website being a landing page, there needs to be a way that directs your guest to the other side of the site, especially when the main entrance page has them wanting to explore the website.

3. Featuring small size with massive functionalities

Breadcrumb is one of those tools that takes up very little space on any website. This is the advantage that becomes essential and vital if someone visits the site on any mobile handset. With more than 50 per cent of the traffic on the internet that tends to come on internet traffic, the user gains a lot of elements.

4. Luring Google and the search engines

The information is obtained with the guidance of a tool that tends to prove the number of visitors and thus, so does Google. Breadcrumbs help the search engine to decipher the whole hierarchy of the website that tends to let it decide which page is essential. One of the several major benefits of employing breadcrumb is that they can appear Google search results by either adding structured data or setting them up with YOAST SEO.

Some of the Most Popular Breadcrumbs Plugins in WordPress for SEO

Breadcrumbs plugins are considered to be the plugin development for wordpress, they have different benefits and different advantages. Here are some of the most common and useful ones.

1. Breadcrumb Trail

This plugin has unique qualities, and they can detect the permalink structure and use it to construct trails for the pages on the website. Custom post types, taxonomies and many related things can be can easily be detected and provided a solution for them.

The breadcrumb trail plugin is viral in the market and has a good reputation among the developers that offer hook for plugin and theme developers to customize object-oriented programming.

2. Breadcrumb NavXT

This is the plugin that is a successor to extremely popular Breadcrumb NavXT. The plugin can generate locational breadcrumb that is totally based on the user's path. The plugin can be customized easily for those who wish to modify their settings.

OOP actions and filters being customizable actions. The default value would work well with the most cases as well as for the plug and play functionality.

3. RDFa Breadcrumb

This is one of the most sorts after and unique breadcrumb that tends to link back to the user visits in a hierarchical structure. It tends to create customizable breadcrumb trails essentially. The plugin tends to provide the customer with additional and new templates that can be placed anywhere in the template file. This then allows the content markup to get recognized by Google and then get displayed on the SERPs.

4. Yoast SEO

Yoast is well known for SEO plugins. The user had to download a separate plugin for the functionalities of breadcrumbs. Still, now the user can simply download the Yoast SEO Plugin and get everything they need for on-page optimization. This makes the functionality in one convenient place.

How to Enable Breadcrumbs Plugins on WordPress Website

If you wish to add breadcrumbs to your current website for wordpress plugin and theme development, then you can follow these following steps. This would help the user to add they are desirable plugins. The steps involved in the entire process are:

Step 1: Addition of SEO breadcrumb plugin to your website.

Step2: Initializing and activating advanced settings. The breadcrumbs setting aren't displayed, so the user needs to tap on the dashboard settings.

Step3: Adding the breadcrumb codes in the website files. Some of the most common places where the user can add the codes are:

●In your single.php file.
●In your page.php file (above the page's title).
●At the end of the header.php file.

Conclusion

Secure user experience and SEO both are concluded to be the influential factors that are provided by breadcrumbs plugins. This then makes a significant impact on the website. The breadcrumb plugin is one of the most straightforward factors that implement a simple, yet useful feature in the website design. The user can simply install and download the breadcrumbs which they which to enable in their website.

We believe that this piece has given you an idea about the aspects of a Wordpress plugin. It has given you a deep understanding of the things you need. If you have any doubts with the following topic, then you can write your review on the comment section below.

Author Bio

I am working as Sr. WordPress Developer at Wordprax for the past 10 years. I have several years of experience in developing different kinds of customized WordPress websites, WordPress theme customization, PSD to Wordpress Conversion, HTML to wordpress conversion and WordPress plugin development. I am an expert in Core PHP and all areas of WordPress front-end and WordPress back-end development. I also have rich experience in implementing different WordPress features and functionalities by using various WordPress plugins. I have experience in developing many popular and scalable WordPress e-Commerce websites using WooCommerce and other required plugins.

As a hobby, I also write Technical Articles related to WordPress development to share my deep insights into this subject. Many of my articles on WordPress CMS technology have received thousands of visitors and loved by the international WordPress community of which I am an active member for over a decade.