How to Improve Your WordPress Sidebar?

A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or anywhere in the theme.

Why Should You Improve Your WordPress Sidebar?

The sidebar of your WordPress site is a crucial part that needs optimization with care. When used properly, it can help you get double or more email subscribers, page views, sales, etc.

In the WordPress sidebar, you can certainly add whichever widget you like to achieve your purposes, for example, displaying ads to make money, showing recent posts to generate traffic, and displaying a search box to improve site search. Also, you are able to use as many widgets as you like and arrange them in the way you want.

What is a Good WordPress Sidebar?

While there are no official rules for what a WordPress sidebar should look like, there are a few design concepts you can keep in mind while designing yours:

l  Keep it minimal. Long sidebars look unwieldy and weigh down the page. No one wants to scroll through a sidebar that’s the length of the page! By trimming down your sidebar to the essentials, you’ll have a much better looking and functioning page.

l  Include the essentials. You want to trim down your sidebar to the essentials, but what’s essential? There are no hard and fast rules, but generally, it’s good to include a short bio, a search bar, and contact information.

l  Accomplish your goals. The sidebar is prime real estate that helps you accomplish your goals. Is your aim to get the reader to join your email list? Use a signup form widget. Do you want the reader to be able to donate to you through PayPal? Throw a donation button at the top of your sidebar.

l  Connect with readers. Sidebars provide an ideal way to concisely communicate your site’s mission to the reader. You can use a short bio to tell the reader what you do, and you can include your contact information (social media network profiles, email, etc.) so readers can instantly connect with you.

Learn the Most Popular Usages of WordPress Sidebar

If you are uncertain about what to display in your sidebar or planning to add some more widgets, you can learn the popular usages first, and then select the ones that suit your need. Below are some of the widgets that you probably also want to take advantage of.

#1.Email subscription

If you are careful, you should have found that many popular blogs have put a subscription form in the sidebar to enable their users to receive updates easily. Such a form helps a lot in building a healthy email list and carrying out an email marketing campaign.

#2.Search box

Enabling the search function on your site is important because it contributes much to the user experience. Through the searches, also, more page views are generated. Such a search box is usually displayed near the top of the sidebar. To add one to your WordPress site, use a search plugin or integrate Google Custom Search.

#3.Showcase your content

WordPress sites come with a built-in recent posts widget. This widget does not perform very well. The reason is simple, your recent posts may not always be the best content to describe your site to a new user. You should use a popular posts plugin to display your most popular content. You can also combine it with a related posts plugin to showcase the most relevant content to new users.

#4.Social icons

Going social builds your credibility, promotes your site, and increases the interactions between your users and the site. This is why so many bloggers choose to display several social sharing icons at a prominent position of the sidebar. If you have built up profiles on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, you can do this, too.

#5.Ads

In the case that you are promoting or selling services, you can display ads in the sidebar to gain more revenue easily. However, when doing so, you must pay attention to the design and size of the ads to make sure they fit in the site design and do not upset your readers.

WordPress Sidebar Tips to Get Maximum Results

Tip 1. Choose Your Side Carefully

We commonly see sidebars situated on the right side of the page, but this isn’t always the best option. In fact, studies have shown that the average user tends to focus more on the left side of the screen than the right.

This is particularly true when using very large and wide monitors. Therefore, it’s easy to see that people will be more likely to check out the sidebar and interact with it when it is positioned on the left. We can’t guarantee that a switch from right to left will boost your popularity, but it’s certainly worth a try.

Tip 2. User Engagement Tools

Recent comments, polls and surveys, user rankings, points system, are just some of the ways to boost user engagement on your WordPress site. Displaying them in your sidebar helps boost user engagement on your website. This increases your pageviews and time each person spends on your site.

Tip 3. Add an Archives Widget

Admittedly, very few bloggers understand the full potential of an archives widget. Firstly (and obviously), this widget displays your posts based on time of publication, typically month and year.  Thus, your readers will find it easier to navigate to posts of a particular month. And if you have nofollow links in your sidebar, it may slightly improve your blog’s PageRank as all the link juice is passed to your posts.

WordPress comes with an archive widget out of the box, but there are many brilliant plugins that extend the basic functionality. Using appropriate customizations, you can ensure that the widget doesn’t go back too far but still includes important periods of time you want to highlight.

Tip 4. Use Images

Images are much more engaging than plain text. If you want to grab user’s attention, then use images as banners and buttons. You can link those banners and call to actions to different areas of your website.

You can simply upload an image using the media uploader and add the HTML code to display the image in a text widget. If you are not familiar with HTML, then you can use an image widget to add images in your WordPress sidebar.

Tip 5. Floating Sidebar Widget

Usually the content column of your website becomes a bit lengthier than your sidebar. This means that when users scroll down, there is nothing to look at in the sidebar column.

You can add sticky floating sidebar widgets to make sure that there is always a call to action visible to your readers as they scroll down.

Remember, the main purpose of a blog on your website is to increase visibility of the website so that it is found by Internet users. Optimizing your sidebar is just one way to make it easier for users to find your blog. Your sidebar should have a specific purpose. Avoid clutter and banner ads and you should be just fine.

Beginners' Guide: Don't Make 10 Common WordPress Mistakes

Blogging is a process of learning, everyone learns from previous mistakes. In the case of WordPress, the primary focus of a novice is to set everything up and get things running as soon as possible. In this hurry, there are quite a few things that are ignored which may lead to numerous security vulnerabilities and affect your blog/site in the long run. In this article, I’ve outlined 10 of the most common WordPress mistakes that almost every one of us makes in the beginning.

Hopefully, everyone will use this guide to avoid the same blunders and make their WordPress site better, faster and more secure and of course a success.

Installing WordPress Themes/Plugins from a Bad Source

There are plenty of websites available that provide free download links to premium themes and plugins. The important question is that, Why would someone out there will give you a premium or paid stuff for free of cost. The answer is simple, they are using your site as their income source. 

To avoid this common WordPress mistake, if you cannot afford a premium theme, you can choose a free theme from a well-known source like WooThemes.

No Backing up WordPress Files

You can’t predict when will a hacker attack your blog. If someone hacks your blog you will loose everything. If you are regularly taking the full backup of your site, even if someone attacks, you can restore your files without losing any data. 

So it’s important to have a recent backup of your website. You should backup the WordPress files and WordPress database. You should also make sure the database backup is not corrupt, which can occur. There are a variety of plugins which work – some free and others paid. I recommend trying out UpdraftPlus or BackupBuddy. These plugins backup your site on a regular basis, allowing you to keep attention focused on more important things.

Using “Admin” as Your User Login

When WordPress is installed, an administrator is required to control the site. It allows site owners to get WordPress up and running without dealing with database creation and sending files over FTP. The issue with some of these quick install programs is they don’t allow users to change the default WordPress administrator username during the installation, it’s just “admin.” The “admin” username is a hacker’s paradise. It’s the default, so if they want to try and hack into your site, they only need to guess your password.

No doubt, you need to change it immediately. There are a number of ways to do it, but the easiest is to just create a new user, delete the admin username and re-attribute posts to your new name.

Ignoring WordPress Updates

It is necessary to keep WordPress version, plugins and theme up to date. The version of WordPress updates in a regular manner to make it more user-friendly, secure and powerful. With the update of WordPress version, developers also update their plugins and themes to overcome the compatibility issues. Failing to update these keeps you away from using new features added by WordPress and eventually making it harder to use and vulnerable enough to attacked by hackers.

Action step: Always keep your site up-to-date by installing the latest updates. Just make sure to back it up before you do!

Lack of Site Security

With so many blogs and sites running on WordPress, you can imagine how many are hacked on a daily basis. WordPress itself is relatively secure, but when you add plugins to your site, your site’s security is compromised. Plugins are great, but not everyone is coded properly or secure, unfortunately.

So use a plugin to lock down your login page and/or create a lock down wall to increase the security of your site and lessen the chances of it getting hacked.

Not Setting Up The Permalinks

A permalink is a permanent static hyperlink to a specific blog post in your WordPress blog. You would probably have noticed that WordPress default permalink structure is something like www.yoursite.com/?p=123. Not only does this look awkward, but also bad for SEO and users.

A user and search-engine friendly permalink structure doesn’t only help you get ranked higher in search engines, but also shows your professionalism to your readers. After you’ve installed WordPress, never forget to make changes to your permalinks structure, by going under Settings » Permalinks. To get the most out of your SEO efforts, use appropriate keywords in your permalink structure.

Ignoring Image Optimization

One of the worst mistakes we all make is often forgetting to optimize images, while publishing an article. Especially, beginners don’t care at all about it. If you want to make your WordPress site load faster, then make image optimization your first priority.

Using HD images can have a tremendous impact on your site speed, while optimized images can improve the overall performance of your site in a dramatic way. So don’t forget to optimize images before uploading them to your WordPress site.

Using Too Many Plugins

When using a plugin, you should make sure you need it. There is no definite amount of how many plugins WordPress can handle, but just because a WordPress plugin is available, doesn’t mean you need it. Often website owners use too many plugins that are poorly coded leaving their website slow or because they have too many plugins installed, they have a hard time keeping them all up-to-date, which leads to an insecure WordPress installation.

Using The Default Favicon

The Favicon is considered as the identity card of your website. It’s a little icon associated with your site, typically displayed in the browser’s address bar or next to the site name in a list of bookmarks. Mostly WordPress newbies ignore their favicons, so their blogs/sites usually have favicons displayed by WordPress as default, or provided by their Theme Company or Web Hosting Provider.

To look more professional, you really need to change your favicon right now if you haven’t already. You can either make a favicon by yourself, or create one using one of the free favicon generators available around the web. Once you’ve generated your favicon, you need to upload it in the images section of your theme in order to replace the default one.

No XML Sitemap

Sitemap is basically a list of contents & their links in XML format which tells the Google or other search engine bots about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the website. It is necessary for faster indexing of your posts and pages. Not providing an XML sitemap is another mistake done by newbies. There are plenty of plugins for generating an XML sitemap for you. You may use the sitemap feature of  WordPress SEO by Yoast or Google XML Sitemap plugin.

How to Backup WordPress Files for Beginners?

If you are a WordPress user, then you definitely know the importance of keeping backup copies of the Wordpress files because there is always a risk of losing your data. Sometimes your site might get hack, and then you could lose all the files and databases. That’s horrible, right? There are a lot of ways to secure your WordPress site, but I still think one of the best way is to backup regularly so that you can re-install your files or content and roll backed to your post in no time.

First of all, let’s learn about WordPress Files, all the WordPress sites consist of the following files:

Ø  WordPress Core Installation

Ø  WordPress Plugins

Ø  WordPress Themes

Ø  Images and Files

Ø  Javascripts, PHP scripts, and other code files

Ø  Additional Files and Static Web Pages

Accessing WordPress Files and Directories

First, you will need a FTP client to connect to your WordPress server. An easier alternative to FTP is File Manager. It is a web based application that comes built into cPanel dashboard of your WordPress hosting account.

Once you have connected to your WordPress site either using FTP or File Manager, you will see a file and directory structure that looks like this:

Files and folders in the red squares are the core WordPress files. These are the files and folders that run your WordPress site. You are not supposed to edit those files on your own.

Here is a list of core WordPress files and folders you would see in your WordPress site’s root directory.

WordPress Configuration Files

Your WordPress root directory contains some special configuration files. These files contain important settings specific to your WordPress site.

Ø  .htacces – A server configuration file, WordPress uses it to manage permalinks and redirects.

Ø  wp-config.php – This file tells WordPress how to connect to your database. It also sets some global settings for your WordPress site.

Ø  index.php – The index file basically loads and initializes all your WordPress files when a page is requested by a user.

If you don’t see .htaccess file in your root directory, then checkout our guide on why you can’t find .htaccess file in your WordPress root directory.

Depending on how your WordPress site is setup, you may or may not have the following files in your root directory.

Ø  robots.txt – Contains instructions for search engines crawlers

Ø  Favicon.ico – A favicon file is sometimes generated by WordPress hosts.

Inside wp-content Folder

WordPress stores all uploads, plugins, and themes in wp-content folder. 

It is generally assumed that you can edit files and folders inside wp-content folder. However, this is not entirely true.

Let’s take a look inside wp-content folder to understand how it works and what you can do here.

The contents of wp-content folder may differ from one WordPress site to another. But all WordPress sites usually have these:

Ø  [dir] themes

Ø  [dir] plugins

Ø  [dir] uploads

Ø  index.php

WordPress stores your theme files in /wp-content/themes/ folder. You can edit a theme file, but it is generally not recommended. As soon as you update your theme to a newer version, your changes will be overwritten during the update.

How to Backup Your WordPress Files?

#1. Backup WordPress Manually

WordPress is a web application based on PHP and MySQL. As such you need to backup all its files and its database to have a full copy of your site. The easiest way to copy your files is via FTP. To do this follow the instructions in our tutorial on how to use FTP. Make sure that you save all the files and folders in the directory WordPress is installed in (public_html if it's the main application for your site).

#2.Website Host Provided Backup Software 

Most website hosts provide software to back up your site. Check with your host to find out what services and programs they provide.

#3. Create Synchs With Your Site 

WinSCP and other programs allow you to synchronize with your website to keep a mirror copy of the content on your server and hard drive updated. It saves time and makes sure you have the latest files in both places.

To synchronize your files in WinScp:

Step 1 - Log in to your ftp server normally using WinScp.

Step 2 - Press the "Synchronize" button. Remote directory will automatically be set to the current ftp directory (often your root directory). Local directory would be set to the local directory as it was when you pressed Synchronize. You may want to change this to some other directory on your computer. Direction should be set to "local" to copy files FROM your web host TO your machine.
Synchronization Mode would be set to Synchronize files.

Step 3 - Click "OK" to show a summary of actions.

Step 4 - Click "OK" again to complete the synchronization.

#4.Use WordPress backup plugins

These plugins are used to take a back up of your critical data, files, tables and save them to your archives or any of the online storage for free or for a nominal price. Schedule the storage automatically and manage your entire database with these.

BackupBuddy

If you regularly update your site, then it wouldn’t be possible to always keep your backups up to date. This is where BackupBuddy comes in. It is a WordPress backup plugin, which allows you to automatically create complete backups of your WordPress site and save them on multiple remote locations like a cloud storage service, your computer, FTP server, etc.

WP Database Backup

WP-DB-Backup plugin creates a backup of your core database tables and also other tables in the database and gives you an option of saving your back up data either to your server or download to your computer or save get you backup file e-mailed to you.

BackUpWordPress

BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site, including your files and your database, at a schedule that suits your needs. It requires no setup and works on low memory – an excellent advantage if you’re operating on a shared host environment. The plugin also gives you the option to use zip and mysqldump for faster backups. That can be a significant benefit if time is of the essence.

blogVault

This plugin offers an automated backup solution directly to Dropbox, if that’s your tool of choice for online file storage. However, blogVault requires some setup, though the documentation claims that the setup is “easy” and that it will require a minimal investment of your time.

How To Avoid SEO Ranking Traps Before Re-designing a Website?

When it comes to creating a website, one of the first questions you should ask yourself is, “Should I focus on a fantastic design and user experience or on search engine optimization?”

Today, websites are marketing hubs and content publishing platforms. The problem is that the web design industry still creates websites as if they were digital brochures. Designers should work together with SEO specialists and developers to find a formula that would meet both the preferences of users and the requirements of search engines.

Moreover, the bridge between Design and SEO has a common trap that we need to avoid: SEO-friendly sites that are going through a big re-design requires careful monitoring, as the impending design can hurt the site’s SEO.

What are such design errors from web designers?

ERROR #1 – Splash Pages

Eye-catching splash screens can be a cool addition to your site but it can actually be a barrier between search engines and your website. Flash, Java applets, and all the non-textual content is often devalued or even ignored by search engine spiders. A homepage with no content and navigation will not be favored by search engines because it causes an improper indexation of the entire site.

It is recommended that you either entirely abandon the inclusion of a splash page or, if it is an absolute must-have, add plenty of textual content to the body of the page.

ERROR #2 – Too Much Flash

Though undoubtedly pleasing to the eyes, Flash is still badly indexed by search engines. Doesn’t mean that your site should contain zero Flash though; just avoid applying it for important content and navigation.

ERROR #3 – Frames

Paradoxically, there are still websites designed with the use of frames. In addition to the fact that they have become obsolete years ago, they also will not offer any help with the betterment of your site’s SEO. The use of frames will make it difficult for search engines to find all the valuable content within your site. Note that framed websites use three html files instead of one, causing all kinds of conflicts with indexation.

ERROR #4 – Images Instead of Important Elements

Using images as a primary form of navigation will be identified by search engines without their functional purpose. On the other hand, navigation through pure text isn’t a good practice as well. The solution? Simple. Use text-over-image techniques with CSS.

It is also not recommended to include images when using headers. Content replaced by beautiful graphics with text may look outstanding, but it will not work for SEO. Because header text is meant to highlight the important keywords, opting for images as an alternative will hurt overall content.

ERROR #5 – Lack of Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumb trail matrix that’s perfectly constructed will significantly increase your site’s search engine performance. Not only are text links easily read by search engines, but they also provide a transparent hierarchical navigation structure.

Unfortunately, designers sometimes forget about breadcrumbs despite the fact that they noticeably increase the user friendliness of a website.

 

ERROR #6 – Pop-Ups

To begin with, designers that include pop-ups are regarded in bad taste not just by their fellow designers, but also by visitors and search engines. They are annoying and usually closed by most users the moment they… pop up. Moreover, they immediately evoke prejudice about the website and search engines do not even index them as a part of the website. With that, it can be said that it’s best to forget about pop-ups forever for everybody’s sake.

ERROR #7 – Neglecting the navigation standards

There are probably a few designers out there who believe that creating a totally weird site with no regular navigation elements or footer links would attract users and seem original and unique to everyone. This is unfortunate. A navigation that is properly organized is essential both for visitors and search engines.

Creative art, if not applied properly, will be treated like a poor internal linking structure, harming your rankings and reputation. The global navigation bar must be present on each page; otherwise users might get lost within the website.

ERROR #8 – Improper 404 Error Page

Creating a custom 404 error page is always a cute way of sneaking in a bit of humor within your website. However, this intention for creativity might lead to the neglect of more essential factors, such as the link to return to the website.

Not only will it improve the user experience, but it will also complement the overall SEO value. Otherwise, search engines will identify your website as one with broken internal links, reducing its search rankings as a result.

Putting The “Design” Part Of Web Design Into Perspective

Managing the balance between design and search engine optimization is the key to a successful inbound marketing strategy. Seth Godin sums it up a post where he says that pretty websites rarely convert as well as unpretty ones.

As with any new project, you should always focus on getting the foundation right. Here are some thoughts to get your website re-design project off on the right foot: Best-selling author Ann Handley says that you should get the content people in the room early, rather than trying to shoe-horn content in after the fact.

Content is what drives SEO these days, not back links. Your website needs to be structured as a content publishing platform and as the hub of your marketing efforts. Keep in mind that people come to your website for its content, not for its design.

Remember that there is no perfect web design. In fact, there are an infinite number design styles your site can have and still get the same results as long as the design is professional and SEO friendly.

Focus on the website re-design to make your website look clean, attractive and easy to navigate.

Your new site must include a content management system (CMS). WordPress is the best CMS on the planet and there are many reasons why WordPress is the best CMS for small businesses. Launching a new website is just the beginning. You will need to feed it with great content all the time for it to grow and work for you.

The reason why many website re-designs fail is simply because content and SEO are addressed after the fact. There is nothing more discouraging for a business than when a new website loses valuable Google rankings, or when a company finds out they have to go back to the drawing board make a new site search engine friendly.

How To Avoid The New Website Ranking Blues

1. Keyword research will help you determine content and pages, thus, will impact site navigation, content and page count. Keyword research isnot as hard as it sounds. Yet, almost no one considers keyword research when drafting website content.

For basic keyword research, you can use a free tool within Google AdWords called the Keyword Planner to search for specific keywords that are being searched in your niche. The great thing about this tool is that you are not only able to find the words most searched, but also how much commercial competition there is for each word. With this data, you can develop a list of words to include in your website copy and content marketing plans.

2. The content people need to know what to write about.

Once you do the content research, you have to get it to the “write” people – as in the content writers. It’s important that they understand the goal of weaving your keyword targets into the copy while delivering your own messaging. It’s not that you want to write for Google or the search engines – that is a terrible idea. It’s just that you do want to forget about the search engines when you are writing or structuring your website.

3. SEO coding best practices should be addressed by designers and developers early on.

After your keyword research is done, you’ll need to pay close attention to SEO coding best practices to make sure the re-design is optimized from the first line of website code. Moz has an awesome resource for this called the Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet. This is extremely important and should be addressed early on.

4. Website layout and page elements, such as content placement above the fold and elsewhere are important for SEO and for conversion optimization. We’ve talked about including the right words, writing the right kind of copy and using the best code, but you also need to consider how much content to include and where it should be placed.

For example, the content at the top of your page has more search engine weight than the content at the bottom. Also, a page with 100 words of content is less likely to rank than one with 500 or 2500 words of quality content.

You want to make sure that the message and goal for each website page is clear at the top of the page, and that a call to action or purpose for each web page is clearly defined.

5. Other content besides text copy should be included on your website.

Rich media on your website not only helps for search engine optimization, but also for conversion optimization. Consider embedding videos from YouTube, embedded podcasts, downloadable PDFs and of course images.

Each one of these pages element can be tagged with structured data for SEO to give the search engines context to these page elements.