Tips & Tricks Archives

How To Know If Your Website Slider Is Slowing Down Your Website

General, Latest Post, Tips & Tricks, Updates, WordPress

While surfing through the internet, how long would you wait for a site to load completely? Sure, the time wouldn’t be quite long. Well, accordingly, a majority of people don’t even wait up to two seconds for the website to pop out the content.

That’s one of the primary reasons why businesses want their websites to deliver nothing but an appreciative user-experience, irrespective of the niche or industry they are operating in. If your website manages to delight returning or new customers, it’s likely to achieve better than your expectations.

Considering how the behavior of customers keeps evolving over the period of time, you must not overlook the website loading speed importance. There are several reasons to make your website speed optimum. However, not all the time you would know what’s making it slower.

Having said that, most of the time, you use a variety of elements to make the website aesthetically appealing. Talking about elements, the slider is one such thing that can completely slow down your website, without your acknowledgment.

So, if your website’s performance is going down and your other aspects are up-to-the-mark, it’s time to analyze your slider. Here’s how you’ll get to know how website slider is slowing down your website.

Media Not Loading Faster:

Whether you use videos or images, the truth is that a slider is nothing without media. Hence, if that’s the only thing that isn’t loading properly, you must know that your website slider is making things tardy.

For some non-informative beginners, nothing relevant to media optimization exists out there. This is one of the primary reasons that they upload the full size of the media on website sliders. As a result, it starts causing a lot of trouble.

Anyway, your slider images have to be big. If you’re using a full-width slider and a 300px wide image, it’ll pixelate and appear out to be fuzzy. Even if one megabyte of size is excess, your entire website can slow down as it takes a longer time to download all the files of the website. The recommended threshold is 1MB for entire page size. Hence, optimizing is quite important. If done correctly, you can increase the speed of your site seamlessly.

Less Traffic After You Installed Slider:

Sometimes, there are some signs that must be paid attention to while assessing whether your website is slowing down or not. One of the most interesting cautionary indications would be a significant decrease in traffic.

If you were receiving a consistent amount of traffic, which apparently declined after you’ve installed a slider on your website, it’s time to rethink about the side-effects that the slider has brought along for your website.

You can test this reason by removing the slider from your site for a day and then either testing the speed or letting the visitors decide. If a slider turns out to be the hassle, try replacing the plugin with something lighter, like SlideDeck.

If the Slider Is Hefty:

The chances of your selected slider being a hefty code piece can be higher sometimes. Contrasting to a text box along with an image, a slider is a bit fancier that can easily replace its content with animated transitions.

And, it takes more time to load that transition. To do this task effectively, your browser works on its own pace. With each slide, media content keeps changing. And, that would take more time to load. Even if you have a basic slider on your site, it would surely have animated transitions, multiple images, and navigating controls.

To prevent this problem troubling you or your visitors, make sure that you are using such a slider that isn’t coded heavily and has a quick loading time like SlideDeck

If SEO Rank Has Dropped Down:

There is a direct relation between the loading speed and the search engine rank of your website. As obvious as it may get, Google has made the speed an important aspect of ranking the website higher. Hence, if your speed isn’t good enough, you may find your website at the last pages of search engines.

If your website had managed to grab a considerable rank on any search engines, you’d do everything in your power to maintain it, right? Coming back to sliders, if you see an unexpected decline in the page rank after installing the slider, you must know that there is something wrong with this element.

So, consider either eradicating the slider or replacing it with another plugin to ensure that your site’s rank doesn’t get impacted at all.

How to Choose the Best Slider?

Apart from the ones mentioned above, there is a myriad of other ways through which sliders can reduce the speed of your website. In such a scenario, it’s quite important to avoid compromising while choosing the best slider. So, here are some factors that you must look into the slider plugin-

Responsiveness:

One of the primary things that you should be assessed in the slider is its responsiveness. Unless it isn’t supportively responsive, it won’t show appropriately on devices that come with a small screen, like mobile phones, tablets, and more. Thus, make sure that the slider is responsive and supports different kinds of devices.

Simple & Light:

To prevent unnecessary load on the website, you must make sure that the plugin is well-coded and is light in the entire structure. In this way, the plugin won’t be impacting the speed of your website in any case.

Supporting Different Media:

Out of all the factors, this one is quite an essential one. If your slider plugin allows you to play with video and a variety of media content, the negative impact on the website speed will be considerably lesser. For example – if videos don’t work out, you can post GIFs. Or, if images are creating a nuisance, you can post text. Likewise, experimenting with slide content always turn out to be helpful.

SEO-Friendly:

And, last but not the least, the slider plugin that you choose should be SEO-friendly so as to help you with search engine rankings as well. Further, a plugin like this will also ensure that your site never comes under the black stigma by Google.

Conclusion:

A website slider is one appreciable element that has been used by innumerable website developers and owners. So, if you’re also choosing to follow suit, make sure that things don’t go wrong for you. Being attentive and cautious will help you make the most out of your slider.

January 15, 2019/0 Comments/by Sanjeev Pandey

WordPress Tips – 7 Things You May Not Know WordPress Can Do

Here are some WordPress Tips you may not know WordPress can do.

Collecting Customer Feedback

On the themes section, you can find many kinds of choices to select from. If your focus is on interacting with customers and collecting feedback, you will find themes designed specifically for this purpose. Some of the WordPress themes are also hosted outside the platform as it is possible for developers to create themes for the site. It is often a difficult task to get your customers to interact with you without a proper communication channel. WordPress themes that are designed specifically for feedback collection thus bring a whole new experience to the platform.

Establishing a Support Desk

While still on the topic of customer interaction, WordPress is a site that can also help you give support services efficiently. This is possible through the many knowledge base themes that are found both within the platform and from outside third-party developers. The support desk themes available have everything from ticketing functionality, chat capabilities, quick-response systems, and many other features. Creating support desk websites is usually a tough process which might gobble up your resources. The WordPress themes available are capable of giving you just the necessary power.

Creating Real Estate and Business Websites

Many people who want to venture into business often consider the forex trading and real estate markets as the primary options. If you are keen on getting into these markets, establishing a website is one of the things you will think of down the line. WordPress is undoubtedly the best platform to consider for this task as it has all kinds of themes that can be linked with maps, market charts, news feeds and so much more.

Video Hosting

Creating platforms that host videos is still a huge challenge. Most platforms either lack the capacity to provide fast services or they simply have outdated designs. This is not the case with WordPress. With this platform, you can be able to create a fully-functional video portal where users can upload and share videos with others. You can use such a platform to promote your own products or the products of others.

Forum Hosting

Up until recently, the only way to create online forums was through dedicated software. WordPress however now has forum themes that are not just basic sites but fully functional apps. There are many third-party WordPress developers who have established forum themes that include front-end control and administration among other things. The great thing about creating a forum website with WordPress is that you get all the functionality of the platform in addition to saving time.

Directory Hosting

As mentioned previously, it is possible to incorporate maps in many WordPress themes. What this means is that users can add any kind of information they want to their websites. It is for this reason that WordPress is a powerful platform that can be used to create local directories. The platform has various themes that feature modern designs and incorporates tools that make it possible to effectively offer directory services. WordPress is widely known for making sophisticated websites but most people often do not immediately think of directory hosting when they think of the site.

Job Boards

As the world moves online, so does most of the business. WordPress is an impressive tool that can help you create fully-functional job boards. Job boards require a design that is responsive, dynamic and versatile. This is exactly what the WordPress platform is built to be. The platform not only has themes that are great options for creating job boards, but the various developers outside the platform have created impressive job engine themes. There are many themes available which feature infinite scrolling and Ajax filtering among other features that a proper job board site should have.

January 6, 2019/0 Comments/by Sanjeev Pandey

7 Proven Ways to Monetize Your Blog

General, Tips & Tricks

For many people, blogging is a passion and there’s more that comes with it. Aside from providing an ideal platform for one to share ideas on a certain field, with like-minded people, it also creates a slew of avenues through which one can earn some extra cash. But the sad truth is not many know how to monetize your blog.

If your blog gets several thousand or even million unique visitors each month, monetizing it and creating a somewhat steady revenue stream is easy. But how exactly can you achieve that? Well, here are 7 proven ways through which you can turn the massive traffic to your site into revenue:

Selling ad space on your blog is one of the most intuitive and straightforward ways of monetizing your blog. Here, you can work with businesses or advertising network, who will be delivering ads directly to you. The advertisements are typically displayed in the header and/or sidebars of your website.

Advertisements come with different models, which you as a blog owner can leverage. The first one is Pay-Per-Click, which generates income every time a visitor clicks on the ad. Second is Pay-per-Impression, also known as Cost per Thousand (CPM), where you get paid every time a reader views an advertisement on your site.

The third one is pay-per-action, where the advertiser pays you whenever a reader performs a certain action (agreed upon by you and the advertiser) like registration, newsletter sign up and/or contact request.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing entails promoting third party products or services through a certain link for a commission. Ideally, when a visitor clicks on the personal link(s) given to you by the marketer and makes a purchase, you get a cut on the transaction(s). Affiliate links can be placed anywhere on the website including within a blog post or along the sidebar.

The amount of commissions bloggers receive may vary depending on specific product or service niches and of course, the number of readers they are able to convince to buy. Many forex or online trading companies, for instance, have decent commissions for their partners. So if you’re running a website about finance and have a loyal following, you should definitely consider this.

Selling Products

Another way to increase the revenue stream from your blog is through selling your own products directly to customers or audience. Since you have a niche platform and a decent following, getting the product to the market won’t be that hard. The products here can be physical like apparels, party invites, planners etc or can be in a digital form such as e-books, apps, photos, online courses or digital subscriptions.

If you’re interested in selling physical products though, be sure to have the facilities and channels through which you can fulfil orders. Some of the critical aspects you may need to think about include:

Stocking
Accepting payments

Shipping

Handling returns

Selling Services

Selling a service, just like selling a physical product, can be lucrative to any blogger. Here you’ll be dealing with intangible stuff. Some of the services in this category that can generate some reasonable amount of revenue include graphic design, copywriting, photography and consulting/coaching. Technical setup for selling the service online is also required to facilitate swift delivery and smooth payments.

Donations

If you have a fairly large loyal fan base as a blogger, chances are regular readers or those who love your exceptional content may want to support you by making little donations once in a while. Some of them might not say it but would surely want to contribute. So why not create sort of a ‘donate button’ or a channel through which readers can leave a tip on your blog once in a while. It can be a great reminder to those who would wish to give you a boost in terms of finances.

The good thing with this model to monetize your blog is that there are no strict terms between you and those donating. Hence you don’t have to deliver something in return. But it should come naturally that you need to keep the standards of your content high in order to maintain the loyal readers, who’ll be donating some cash.

Selling Your Blog

Having an established website presents many avenues of making money online and to monetize your blog. And since setting up a website and optimizing it to the brink takes a lot of work, many people (with interest in certain niches) prefer buying websites or blogs that are already up and running.

For a fully established blog with a sizable audience, you can cash in a huge amount when you sell it. You can make several other blogs and sell them if your endgame is really to make money out of creating blogs.

Conclusion on to “Monetize Your Blog”

It is a wrap! Those are the major channels through which you can make extra money on your blog. You can always mix and match some of them in order to increase your revenue base. Try these strategies and you’ll see your blogging transitioning from a hobby into a successful business.

December 18, 2018/0 Comments/by Sanjeev Pandey

The 6 Best Android VPN Apps For Maximum Data Security

Latest Post, Tips & Tricks, Tools, Updates

The Android store has come to define modern standards when it comes to app variety. While it is not the oldest app platform around, it is undoubtedly the most equipped. In the cybersecurity world, many different app choices exist for Android users. Even though the Android OS is quite secure by itself, up to 25% of internet users still prefer to have a VPN service running.

VPN apps are known to be the go-to choice for most people who are concerned about their privacy and security when browsing. There are a number of great picks in the Play Store for security needs. We will look at the 6 top VPN apps in the Play Store to keep your data secure.

1. IPVanish

This Android VPN Apps shines in a lot of areas but the one area where it shines above the rest is the speed realm. IPVanish is one of the fastest apps on the market. The performance of this app is so good despite the app coming with several added tools and features. Some of the other features that are notable include a great selection of pricing tiers, a no logs policy and a superb encryption service. IPVanish also has a great customer support service that keeps in touch with the app users.

2. ExpressVPN

ExpressVPN is one of the best VPN apps when it comes to security. This app is creatively designed and it has one of the best user interfaces. Apart from that, the app also comes with a set of tools that make it useful to a wide range of users. The speeds and performance of the app are also noteworthy. There are a total of 3 simultaneous connections supported by the Android VPN Apps. ExpressVPN is an overall great choice for an all-around great service. Even though the service is a bit pricey, the various benefits that come with the app are worth it.

3. NordVPN

NordVPN has a fair chance of being declared the best VPN for Android in 2019. This application has been around for a while now and every aspect of the service has been impressive. The app is not only greatly designed but the service that is bundled with it is also remarkable. NordVPN has a double data encryption service, making it the only app that offers such a service. Users who are very concerned about their privacy will find the Android VPN Apps to be the most secure option. Other than this feature, the app also has a great performance and the usability is great. NordVPN has a number of packages that are fairly priced.

4. VyprVPN

VyprVPN has several features that keep its clientele locked to the app. To start with, the app is well optimized and it has some impressive speeds. In addition, the overall performance and speed are great. Compared to the rest of the options in the market, this app has one of the best combos of great speed and security. Even though the app keeps some logs, the overall privacy of the user is guaranteed. The pricing plans, great performance, and top-tier service make VyprVPN a great VPN choice for all kinds of users.

5. CyberGhost

For the budget users, CyberGhost is one of the best apps you will find on the market. This application has a great speed and the monthly service costs less than half of the market average. The VPN service has servers located in various locations around the globe but the main jurisdiction is in Romania. The VPN also features some of the most common protocols and the data that comes with it is commendable. Considering the positive reviews from actual users, this Android VPN Apps is a great option to consider if you are on a budget.

6. TunnelBear

Finally, TunnelBear caters to an often overlooked section of VPN users – beginners. While the largest chunk of VPN users are in the top and mid-tier sections of the market, there is still a huge number of first-time users every single year. TunnelBear is a greatly designed app that offers easily accessible VPN services for all beginners.

The app boasts of a simple and user-friendly interface and simple subscription plans. When using TunnelBear, you can expect to enjoy adequate protection with just a few bucks. Even though the service is slower than others on average, you will be able to enjoy free plans and other great features that most apps do not have.

November 29, 2018/0 Comments/by Sanjeev Pandey

ScrapeBox Review – Best SEO Tool For Link Building, Keyword Research & Much More

Execute Search Engine Optimization with ScrapeBox:

For those who are just trying their luck in the world of online business, investing a huge amount of SEO might not seem to be possible. After all, the money crunch is always hovering over the head for beginners, right?

Hence, in such a scenario, to help you out of the mess without compelling you to spend enough, there are amazing tools that can help you execute SEO in just the right way. Keeping everything aside, ScrapeBox is one such tool that has been acquiring accolades and appreciations from the masters of SEO as well.

So, let’s move forward and dive into ScrapeBox features. Here, you’ll get to know everything that you can expect from this worthwhile tool.

Considerable Features of ScrapeBox:

Web Page Meta Scraper:

One of the most effective features of this tool is this Meta scraper. It allows you to load a massive list of URLs and enables you to extract the descriptions, titles, as well as the keywords from every URL of the list.

Since it is a multi-threaded feature, you can use this scraper to procure this data from hundreds of web pages just within a minute. Once you are done with the extraction, you can then filter out those URLs that either has some sort of error or don’t feature meta keywords.

After this extraction and filtering, exporting this data to a .csv, .xls, or a .txt file wouldn’t be a tough task for you. This data can help you amazingly when it comes to either conducting research on your competitors or auditing your own website with competitive metadata.

RSS Submit:

Since search engines make use of RSS feeds to discover new content, submitting your content for the same will help speed the indexing of recent URLs and will make your content easily available for your readers as well.

Hence, with the help of RSS submit feature of this tool, you would be able to submit or ping the list of RSS feeds to several RSS Feed aggregators without facing any hurdles. Generally, ScrapeBox has up to 150 services to submit RSS feeds. However, if you want, you can easily add, remove, and customize this list as per your own choice.

Moreover, if your website doesn’t support automatic creation of RSS feeds, or you would want to have custom RSS feeds with URLs from different domains, then this tool even offers RSS Feed creator. This function can help transform a raw list into an XML feed, making the submission easier and instant.

Comment Scraper:

If you were looking forward to finding such a tool that can help you extract every single comment from a post, then ScrapeBox is the one you should be relying upon. Its comment scraper feature is as simple as a cakewalk.

This quick and multi-threaded feature allows you to load a list of WordPress URLs from where you can extract comments very easily. Furthermore, the feature even comes with several options to make things even easier for you.

Right from skipping comments with links or URLs to ignoring comments with a smaller number of words and neglecting such comments with words mentioned in the blacklist, there is so much you can do with the help of this feature. Since these comments get saved in a text file, you can use them in several ways.

Sitemap Creation:

There is no denying the importance of sitemaps when it comes to making URLs discovered. These sitemaps not just help search engines locate your content but also crawl all of your web pages so that they can rank higher on search engines.

ScrapeBox comprises a powerful XML sitemap creator that can transform a list of raw URLs into an XML sitemap files. With this feature, it is even easier to execute this process as you can set your priorities and even experiment with settings.

And the best part about this feature is that it doesn’t even consume a lot of time. The sitemap creator of ScrapeBox boasts of completing this process just within 15 seconds. Amazing, isn’t it?

YouTube Downloader:

Another amazing feature that this tool offers is the YouTube downloader and scraper. With this feature in hand, scraping essential information from YouTube, downloading soundtracks or videos, and even scraping video metrics will become nothing less than a plain-sailing.

The way this feature harvests video URLs by using YouTube options, you would be able to customize the parameters of search completely. For instance, you can even harvest such videos that were uploaded in the last entire day, week, month, or year.

Once the videos are scraped, you can then assess them on the basis of the title, author, duration, number of views, number of likes & dislikes, published date, video genre, video quality, audio quality, top comments, and several other metrics.

If you want, you can even sort videos by highest or lowest views, likes, dislikes, etc. This is surely one of the best ways to find popular videos, and you would even get to know the kind of videos that are attracting your target market the most.

Name & Email Generator:

ScrapeBox doesn’t even provide amazing SEO services but can even be used as a perfect name and email generator. This feature fulfils the need to generate bulk names or email IDs. When it comes to the name generator, it provides an extensive list of female and male first as well as last names. And, believe it or not, this list can range up to half a billion with several combinations.

If you want to scrape email IDs from web pages but don’t really know how to do it, then this is the feature that will allow you to execute this task very easily. Not just it harvests email addresses from web pages but can also keep your identity hidden or averts websites from blocking your IP address, thanks to its proxy support.

Moreover, you can even customize the settings as per your own wish. Furthermore, if you wish to generate fake email addresses, this feature can fulfil that requirement for you as well. All you have to do is choose any @domain.com, and this feature can generate millions of email IDs just within a few minutes.

Furthermore, the email generator can even add random numbers to provide uniqueness. However, one thing that you must keep in mind is that this feature only provides ideas and does not create email IDs for you.

Platform Popularity Analyzer:

Moving forward, ScrapeBox even comes with an amazing platform popularity analyzer. With this feature, you can easily scan through the list and find out which CMS was used to build that particular web page.

The way of identifying the platform for this feature includes analyzing the source code of HTMP and searching for different footprints. Also, this feature can analyze all those platforms where it supports posting comments automatically.

The list of platforms includes 4image, AkoBook, Advanced Guestbook, ASP Blog, Aska BBS, Ard Guestbook, BeepWorld, Basti Guestbook, Burning Book, Blogengine, Bella Guestbook, cms2day, Chinese Blog, and much more.

Bulk Image Downloader:

If you are looking forward to getting a quick and lightening image downloader that can help you download bulk images from URLs or websites, then look no further. With the amazing feature of ScrapeBox is all you would require for this task.

This image downloader is proficient enough in assessing multiple URLs and downloading every single image available on the pages all at once. Thus, if a page has a specific gallery of images, you would be able to download it on your computer efficiently.

Since this feature doesn’t necessitate a web browser, downloading bulk images simultaneously would be fast and error-free. At a time, you can download images from approximately 200 web pages or websites.

Conclusion: is ScrapeBox best SEO tool:

Understanding the importance of search engine optimization and knowing some tricks and techniques can surely provide significant exposure to your business. And then, of course, it can help you in several ways.

So, keeping this in mind, you would not have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to crack SEO for the best of the use. Just use ScrapeBox, which requires only a one-time payment, and you will be good to go with your business development.

November 8, 2018/0 Comments/by Sanjeev Pandey