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Optimization Websites

Why is my WordPress Site is Slow?

Internet, plugins, website speed, WordPress

How fast should a website load to avoid the risk of losing visitors? Now-a-days, a few seconds difference is enough for users to decide about the website. If the site doesn’t load as quickly as possible within the first few seconds, the users leave the site.

HTML/CSS vs WordPress

html/css

There is quite a difference in how a HTML coded website responds to the users than a WordPress site. Websites that are made of simple HTML5/CSS3 load faster because there is no dependency on plugins and themes. WordPress websites mostly depend on plugins or themes. Using poorly coded plugins and bloated themes can make the site very slow. Since there are a lot of plugins available free to use in WordPress, programmers generally use many of them on websites without much thought. But they don’t realize this will increase the number of http requests and load on the server. Also, sometimes the plugins conflict with each other or with the other site functionality. All this impacts site performance or functionality resulting in nil or slow website response. Let us see some major reasons that contribute to slow loading of a WordPress site.

Cheap or Low Quality Hosting

hosting

 One reason could be the web host service which has put your site on an overcrowded shared server. Check the type of hosting plan that you are using and if possible try to avoid common shared hosting. If the site is sharing server resources with many other sites, the speed will be significantly slow during peak hours or high traffic instances. Also check if the hosting service offers WordPress specific features. The service should provide automatic updates of plugins and themes, host level caching and many other features that are specific to wordpress. Otherwise it will affect the site continuity, speed and performance. To find out if your web hosting service is an issue use a tool like web site monitoring service with server monitoring feature. The service will check the server bandwidth and capabilities and will let you know if it is causing an issue. 

Plugins

plugins

 Not just the speed issues, the site may face many other problems with the wrong choice of plugins. Since the plugins are developed by programmers with varying skills, the quality of each may differ. If the plugin is important for certain site functionality, try to check its performance impact on other plugins and themes. Especially plugins that are free are the primary culprits for slowing down of websites. It is better to avoid outdated and unnecessary plugins. If you are using a third party premium plugin with encryption, remember it goes to a third party server to process the code. Also if plugins are being used for database queries or redirects, make sure to check their performance before using. 

Bloat on Your Website

 Reduce the bloat on your site by decreasing the image sizes, reducing the number of plugins & themes and minimizing the usage of external scripts & add-ons. If you are using bulky images and graphics, compress and optimize files to reduce their size. Unless it is necessary, avoid using plugins for live chats, social media buttons (Like Twitter & facebook), page pop-ups and video embed scripts (like Youtube videos) etc. Avoiding them will reduce the unnecessary load on the server and speed up the performance of the site. 

Caching

 Retrieving the data from the server can become a bottleneck especially during peak hours when traffic is high. When a server is overloaded with multiple HTTP requests the performance of the site will be low. The site will be sluggish if the content is not cached. By caching the plugins and pages as static files, the performance of the site can be improved. This will reduce the repeated HTTP requests and ease the load on the server. Particularly, when WordPress uses database requests to retrieve the content for users, caching will speed up the performance of the server as well as the website. Avoid Bottlenecks by Monitoring Websites

 Mentioned above are just a few reasons for bottlenecks in WordPress websites. To troubleshoot the speed issues of a WordPress site, pinpointing the issue is required. No matter how well you optimize the code or check for errors in detail, you may not identify the real cause. It requires a system that analyzes all aspects of a website for potential reasons including themes, plugins and external add-ons. Website monitoring is one such helpful service for identifying the root cause of your WordPress site. 

Free Website Speed Test

website speed test

To check the loading speed of your WordPress website go to https://www.isitwp.com/free-website-speed-test-tool-for-wordpress/. You simply type in the domain name of your website and it will show you how fast your pages are loading and it will give you suggestions on ways you can make your site faster completely for free. 

Be sure to visit NickMWebDesign.com for any and all of your website needs. 

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Content creation for non-writers, procrastinators, and the stuck among us

Internet Marketing, Marketing, Website Design

The cursor blinks, the time ticks slowly by, the page stays empty and most likely you end up in procrastination hell, the nameless people of the generic photo montage just as entertaining today as it was the first 5 times you watched it. You are not alone. Today I migrated downstairs to the kitchen at least four times beset by a hunger I could not feed. Sadly content ideas do not live in my refrigerator. But oh, the truffle cheese, pickled eggs, and melon bits. I digress.

‘Fast to create’ content

Here are some types of content that don’t need much of your writing or creating but will deliver value. They all begin with the word curation. Curating starts with collecting things that fit inside of a context. This article is a collection of ideas I use and have gleaned from others that fit inside the context of content creation. If you are in the health business you might collect 5 popular articles within a context, like weight loss, prescription meds, or aging in good health. You then package your articles with an intro: who this is for and why you chose these authors but remember to point out where you agree and can add something and where you disagree if you do. Interview someone who has a complimentary service or product that would add value to your tribe members.

fast-to-create-content-ideas

Top ten lists

If you are a social media expert you might interview an expert in offline marketing, aka, networking. If you want to be extra nice, write the top ten takeaways from the interview for people who won’t watch or listen. Speaking of top tens, people love top ten lists, or 20, 50, etc. Say you are a financial planner, you could do the top ten things that rob your nest egg. (Think Starbucks, another pair of shoes, not itemizing tax deductions so you get to keep more of your money at tax time, etc.) About once per quarter I used to compile a list of 3 – 5 Bestselling books I read on health (my lane at the time) and why I recommended or didn’t recommend them.

Not everything needs to be polished

What about taking your readers on a behind the scene tour of a day in the life of you or your product. It can be a fun video or a story about how an especially good—or bad- day went. The bad day, the bloopers, owning the epic fail to your fans will always be a crowd pleaser. Using someone else’s content and giving attribution is okay but not great for SEO. Google doesn’t value duplicate content so less of that and more original stuff. If you are artistic and creating an infographic is easy peasy for you, try that.

How to get over content writers block

The reason to create content in the first place—and all content need not be written—is to provide value to your readers, listeners, viewers. If you are going to write, take the time to write well. If your brain is a dusty dry patch of nothing on the day your weekly missive is due, ditch your usual way of connecting and have some fun. Curate, hold forth, run a contest, record a video, anything is fair game, but stay in touch. Writer’s block is real but it doesn’t have to crush the commitment to your loyal readers, (and the new ones who will happen upon your work) to show up with something good. And breaking from routine is one way to break the spell of “everything has already been said, I’m doomed.” It might also keep you out of the kitchen when you shouldn’t be there.

Nick M Web Design also offers content creation, video editing, online adverts, UI/UX mock ups for apps, website and more. Contact us now for a free consultation.

 

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Avoiding Disaster: Make Website and Business Asset Backups Mandatory

Internet, Business, Web Traffic

Do you have a backup of all your website and business data? A sudden attack on your web hosting or an employee error can cause havoc without warning. The same goes for any information about your business stored on your computer. If your computer suddenly got infected with a virus and you had to format your hard drive, it would likely have a big impact on your business. So what should you do to prepare for data loss?

Backing Up Your website

Sometimes website hacks might not be obvious, and you really have to keep an eye out for any suspicious activity. Sadly, hackers can do more than just break your website. In the past some websites have been secretly hijacked with new info added to them without their knowledge. The reason can be for another website to track your users or to monitor what you’re doing to aid a competing business. Check your pages for any unusual content additions as well as any new plugins you didn’t add yourself. If you notice anything then you have a problem. Without backups of your website that problem can be very difficult to solve.

Try this free malware and security scanner from Sucuri to see if you currently have a problem: https://sitecheck.sucuri.net

With backups you can fix things in a few clicks! Backing up your website could be something already in place without you even knowing it. Check with your webhost and see if you have automated backups already enabled and make sure you understand how to do a “roll back” where you can restore a previous version of your website that was backed up before you encountered an error. By doing this you can literally restore your website with a few clicks and save yourself a lot of stress. 

If you don’t have backups, see if your CMS (such as WordPress) has a backup tool/plugin you can employ. There are many free options to choose from depending on how your website was built such as UpdraftPlus for WordPress. 

If your website is 100% custom the easiest thing to do is to use a File Transfer Protocol tool such as Filezilla and manually download your website to your PC. Then you can store that in a cloud storage service or an external hard drive in case you ever have any issues and need a functional version of your site. If your website isn’t very big you can even just zip the contents and email them to yourself.

If you would prefer someone else to take care of your website security and backup measures for you, get in touch with NickMWebDesign.com as we have a monthly maintenance plan to ease this burden off your shoulders.

Backing Up Your Business Data

Most entrepreneurs and small business owners have their business on their computer. While many files could be searched for in your email, you won’t want to start combing emails hunting for spreadsheets. So it’s a really good idea to do periodic backups of your computer data. This process is easy and can become a routine habit once you’ve done it a few times.

The first step will actually help with something mentioned in the website backup portion above and that’s to use Winzip or Winrar. These programs compress the files into one file so you have everything in one place. Some emails restrict sending these file types for security reasons so for these files you’re likely going to want to back up the data using a free cloud storage system like GDrive or Dropbox.

  1. After installing Winzip or Winrar you’ll be able to right click on the folder on your desktop with all your business info and simply select to add to the archive.
  2. This will create the crunched copy of everything in that folder for easy storage. Then just head over to your preferred storage point and add the archive file!
  3. You can drag in onto an external drive or add it to a cloud. Either way you’ll have all that information available at your fingertips whenever you need it.
  4. Avoid Disaster and Implement! 

These might seem like trivial things to you or a big hassle to deal with… until you need them. Anyone who has experienced a hacked website or a compromised hard drive knows that hindsight is 20/20 and the words ‘if only I had…” suddenly become regrettably normal. Backups are like oil changes and should be done periodically to ensure your business keeps running without devastating interruptions. If you have any issues navigating any of these steps just let us know in the comments or email us and we’ll make sure you know what to do.

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Improve Your Search Results

Internet Marketing: How to improve organic traffic to your website

Looking at search results for your competitors and seeing these results with images, reviews and extra links in the search results? Welcome to the world of Schema.org based rich snippet markup, an HMTL5 based code which has been shown to provide a positive impact on search engine rankings and increase click through rates for your search engine result listings.

Structured Data

ge schema or rich snippet markup is a way to enable search engines to better understand the structured data contained within these web pages and in turn provide better search results to users.

structured-data

Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are additional data displayed within your ad listing, providing a quick glance at what your page offers without forcing a click from uninterested web surfers. When done properly, the data provided by rich snippets can result in a positive increase in performance by delivering visitors who know exactly what to expect when visiting your page.

WHY SHOULD I USE RICH SNIPPETS?

So why should you use rich snippets? The use of rich snippets is becoming more common & helps increase your sites organic traffic by: 

1. Make your listing stand out – When your listings have rich snippets they will display photos, reviews, telephone numbers, email addresses, links and much more. 

2. Help Search Engines Better Understand Your Content & Increase the Relevancy – The more Google is able to understand about your website the better. When Google is able to better understand your content it increases the relevancy, which in turn helps your site show up in Google for your selected terms.

Learn More

To learn HTML5 or more information on the types of Schema.org markups that are available, check out the tutorial in Google’s support center. Visit the following tutorial on W3Schools.com for more information on HTML5, Rich Snippets & other useful tools. The use of rich snippets will become more common in the near future. So why should you use rich snippets? Rich snippets will help increase organic traffic for your website, blog or other online endeavors.

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Tools to monitor your website

Advertising, Internet Marketing and Web Traffic Tools to monitor your website.

WordPress Web developer

 You can’t just put your website on the net with right keywords and all the right touches and expect your traffic and ranking will remain constant. As the web is an ever changing landscape, you have to keep track of your own web results like what is happening with the competition and also the best and highest ranked sites. 

There are many useful tools to help you find out what exactly is happening.

1. A tool which you can use to test your own website links or other websites for broken links:

https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/

2. With this tool you can check search engines for the number of back links to your URL i.e. other web pages linking to your site:

https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker

3. It sometimes becomes important to know where the servers of your hosting company are physically located. Because, some search engines like Google have the ability to filter search results based on their physical location called geotargeting. This could be used to determine why your site is showing in only a certain country. This link can also be used to research the country location of a particular competitor’s website:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/website-country/ 

4. In order to track the location of the visitor or a customer to your website:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/ 

5. Here is a link to check the web ranking of a website using a Mac or Apple computer:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/ 

6. This link will take you to a cooperative advertising network where you can join to display and share your ads with other website owners:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/ 

7. You can add the Search Functionality on your website which uses Google. This works only if your site is listed in the Google Index.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/ 

8. Here is a link to free a website counter which you can use on your website to track your traffic and hits: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/counter/ 

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5 Tips to Make Your Website More Visible Online and Get More Clients

You’ve done all the hard work in establishing your business online. You’ve built a website, created social media accounts, and started to create a following. What’s next? How do you get more clients without spending tons of money on advertising? This is where content marketing comes in. Content marketing is basically just creating useful and relevant content for your audience that will attract new leads. But how do you know what kind of content to create? And how do you make it stand out from the rest of the noise that’s out there? Here are some tips for effective content marketing to help you gain more clients!

Why use content marketing

There are many reasons why you might want to create content marketing. One of the most important is to gain more customers. People like to be recognized for the work they’ve done, and having content that is genuinely helpful or useful to the consumer is a powerful marketing tool that will give you a leg up on all your competitors.

Creating useful content also helps you get more visibility online. To be an expert in your industry, you need content. Content marketing is important because it answers your audience’s questions and helps you build trust, develop relationships, improve conversions, and generate leads. In today’s age, customers expect high-quality, consistent content from their favorite brands. You are giving other people the opportunity to learn from you and offer you the chance to interact with new potential customers.

WordPress web developer

How to create the perfect content

The best way to create content is to speak directly to your audience. And don’t be afraid to build your content around a clear value proposition. For example, if you run a business that sells videos, you might want to create a blog with tips about how to edit videos so they look better and how to create a powerful video voiceover.

One strategy you might want to take into account is “show, don’t tell.” What’s the difference? Showing your audience something is better than telling them. For example, you can take a picture of a dog and upload it to your social media account. People will see the photo, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is how it looks and the owner’s caption. What’s important is that your photo is eye-catching and conveys a clear message.

The three types of content you should use

The first and most important thing to note about content marketing is that there are three types of content you can use, and you should use all three. The main types are:

Branded content – This content comes from your brand or business. This could be a blog post on your website, a newsletter, a whitepaper, etc. This content comes from your brand or business. This could be a blog post on your website, a newsletter, a whitepaper, etc.

Niche-targeted content – This content is targeted at a specific industry or audience. For example, you might create a podcast about the UX industry, or a blog post on screenwriting strategies. – This content is targeted at a specific industry or audience.

General audience content – Writing for a general audience means writing for educated adults who are not a part of your field. The first step is to recognize jargon within your writing and rewrite to avoid or clearly explain such concepts. The second step is to eliminate unnecessary words and make your writing simple, concise, and direct.

How to get noticed and stand out online

Get a strategic marketing plan. Before you start creating content, decide on your strategic goals. Do you want to get more business, grow your social media presence, or both? How much money are you willing to spend on marketing your business? Do you have your core audience in mind? Is it all about getting new clients, or attracting new followers and content creators? There is a difference. You can write valuable content about your niche if you’re a hair colorist for example, but the content would still reach a huge audience, because everyone and his brother wants to know how to color their hair. You can create different kinds of content too. Do you have an expertise in, say, natural skin care? Create a blog on that. Don’t forget about video marketing too! You can do a lot with video.

A new approach

When it comes to content marketing, sometimes the best approach is to do it in a totally different way. Instead of creating an article like you would for a traditional blog post, consider publishing a video. It’s a much more captivating way to share information and can often be more effective. If your audience likes videos, they’re much more likely to watch an entire video rather than skim through an article full of text. You can then use that information to add more value to your website, or any other content marketing platform for that matter. This can help increase the traffic to your website by at least three to five times, potentially even more. A 2016 study by Hubspot reported that video and interactive content can drive up leads by as much as 25% over other types of content.

 

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5 Tips to Get More Clients

You’ve done all the hard work in establishing your business online. You’ve built a website, created social media accounts, and started to create a following. What’s next? How do you get more clients without spending tons of money on advertising? This is where content marketing comes in. Content marketing is basically just creating useful and relevant content for your audience that will attract new leads. But how do you know what kind of content to create? And how do you make it stand out from the rest of the noise that’s out there? Here are some tips for effective content marketing to help you gain more clients!

Why use content marketing

There are many reasons why you might want to create content marketing. One of the most important is to gain more customers. People like to be recognized for the work they’ve done, and having content that is genuinely helpful or useful to the consumer is a powerful marketing tool that will give you a leg up on all your competitors.

Creating useful content also helps you get more visibility online. To be an expert in your industry, you need content. You can’t just be a complete jerk and expect people to listen to you. Getting over the fear of being offensive or unpopular is another reason why content marketing is such a good marketing strategy. You are giving other people the opportunity to learn from you and offer you the chance to interact with new potential customers.

How to create the perfect content

The best way to create content is to speak directly to your audience. And don’t be afraid to build your content around a clear value proposition. For example, if you run a business that sells videos, you might want to create a blog with tips about how to edit videos so they look better and how to create a powerful video voiceover.

One strategy you might want to take into account is “show, don’t tell.” What’s the difference? Showing your audience something is better than telling them. For example, you can take a picture of a dog and upload it to your social media account. People will see the photo, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is how it looks and the owner’s caption. What’s important is that your photo is eye-catching and conveys a clear message.

The three types of content you should use

The first and most important thing to note about content marketing is that there are three types of content you can use, and you should use all three. The main types are:

Branded content – This content comes from your brand or business. This could be a blog post on your website, a newsletter, a whitepaper, etc.

This content comes from your brand or business. This could be a blog post on your website, a newsletter, a whitepaper, etc. Niche-targeted content – This content is targeted at a specific industry or audience. For example, you might create a podcast about the UX industry, or a blog post on screenwriting strategies.

– This content is targeted at a specific industry or audience.

How to get noticed and stand out online

Get a strategic marketing plan. Before you start creating content, decide on your strategic goals. Do you want to get more business, grow your social media presence, or both? How much money are you willing to spend on marketing your business? Do you have your core audience in mind? Is it all about getting new clients, or attracting new followers and content creators? There is a difference. You can write valuable content about your niche if you’re a hair colorist for example, but the content would still reach a huge audience, because everyone and his brother wants to know how to color their hair. You can create different kinds of content too. Do you have an expertise in, say, natural skin care? Create a blog on that. Don’t forget about video marketing too! You can do a lot with video. 

A new approach

When it comes to content marketing, sometimes the best approach is to do it in a totally different way. Instead of creating an article like you would for a traditional blog post, consider publishing a video. It’s a much more captivating way to share information and can often be more effective. If your audience likes videos, they’re much more likely to watch an entire video rather than skim through an article full of text. You can then use that information to add more value to your website, or any other content marketing platform for that matter. This can help increase the traffic to your website by at least three to five times, potentially even more. A 2016 study by Hubspot reported that video and interactive content can drive up leads by as much as 25% over other types of content.

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