How to Create the Best Landing Page for Your WordPress Site?

 

Landing Page

In Online Marketing, Search Engines play a fundamental role. The direction given by the search engine, to the user, in response to his click, on the Optimized Search Results, to the very first page of the web site, can be termed as, the Landing Page of that particular web site. Landing page is also termed as ‘Lead Capture Page’ or ‘Lander’. Usually the landing page is the probable continuation of the search links. Also it can be a continuation, of any advertisement, or a commercial, displayed in response to the search results.

Horizontal Stripe Layout

There are various time tested ways, for designing the contents of the Landing Page, viz. Grid Based Layout, Fluid Layout, Elastic, Absolute, Equated and Relative. Also some are Full Screen Photo, Side Bars, Boxes. But Horizontal Stripe Layout is considered a unique in today’s scenario for designing the landing page for various reasons.

How The Horizontal Stripe Layout Can Be More Effective In Designing The Best Landing Page?

There are two type of landing pages: - i} Reference Landing Page – It is the landing page that gives the information like images or any text messages. Or it can give the Additional Links of the additional information required. ii} Transactional Landing Page – In this page, the user is prompted to key in, his personal information, for the access of the website, or required service. For both the landing pages the advantages to use the Horizontal Stripe Layout can be summarized as under:  i} Gradual Introduction – Divulging the data, gradually to the user, does not confuse him. It provides with the uniform amalgamation of the data & gives the excellent scrutiny of the information displayed for him. ii} High Data Usage – With the horizontal stripe layout, huge amount of data can be organized, and displayed, to the user, in very small parts, thus making the user more interested, in reading, without appraising him, how much he has read. But the gist will be definitely understood. The basic foundation of the Horizontal Stripe Layout includes, adhering, to the horizontal sequence, and organizing the matter, in order to make a website, or its landing page, more unique & colorful, with increase in the intensity of the colors in the design to give a contemporary look!

Advantages of Horizontal Stripe Layout on A Landing Page

1. The main purpose of the landing page is exclusively for the marketing activity. The effective marketing tool is the basic design of the landing page. How many times the user clicks on that page, is the success of the Landing Page. And if all the information is put on the first page itself, the user will be reluctant to read the same. But in the horizontal layout, the information is popped up slowly, user can continue on the website.

2. The Landing Page can be used to promote, the service or the product and the information with regards to the same can be directed product wise or service wise by the horizontal layout in more convenient manner.

3. Collection of the database of the customers or the potential prospects. Horizontal Layout is one of best way to collect the data slowly, but surely, from the user, in the due course of his web site surfing without making him feel the burden of it.

4. Getting the feedback or opinion of the product/service/company etc. 

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to Create Landing Pages Easily

1. Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder consists of a set of content modules that assists in building layouts of the landing pages. It also supports third-party widgets and shortcodes for creating layouts easily. Moreover, the plugin supports almost all WordPress themes.

Beaver Builder is optimized for mobiles and tablets, creating responsive landing pages, for a better user experience on mobile. The plugin also allows developers to build custom widgets using the plugin system. The "pro" version gives you access to additional documentation and superior support for extending the builder through custom modules.

2. WordPress Landing Pages

WordPress Landing Pages lets you design a landing page for your site with its visual editor which lets you view changes on the fly. You can clone the old splash pages, run A/B tests on the conversion pages and extend the plugin using third-party addons.

The plugin lets you opt from a number of custom landing page designs or implement your blog’s theme on the landing pages. It’s built with the best of inbound marketing techniques that helps you gain and convert high numbers of leads. You can also install WordPress Calls to Action and WordPress Leads to implement and use a lead generation system.

3. Ultimate Landing Page and Coming Soon Page

If you have zero coding skills and are a new blogger or entrepreneur, this one might be right up your alley. You can build landing pages with a customizable permalink for your email list and brand the page with your logo to add value to those pages. For more savvy users, the background image, headline and description are customizable, and you can use Google Fonts with this plugin.

It even lets you collect emails using FeedBurner and helps you stay connected to your leads actively. You possess complete control over the header and footer sections of the landing pages and coming soon pages. The plugin also offers a premium version, with which you can create video landing pages and collect emails using Aweber, MailChimp, etc.

4. Landing Page

Create lovely landing pages and switch between themes to find the right design for your page. All the steps include auto-optimization and requires zero coding knowledge. On top of that, you can even run A/B tests. It also supports MailChimp subscription forms out of the box.

The plugin also offers integrated SEO features to help boost your sales. And you can also create email newsletters straight from your WordPress dashboard for building eye-catching HTML emails for your leads or subscribers. Also in the mix, sales and coming soon pages.

5. Parallax Gravity

Parallax Gravity allows you to set the options with respect to sections rather than the whole page unlike other such plugins. With multiple sections support, you can customize various parts of the landing pages with different backgrounds, multiple content such as custom CSS, shortcodes from third-party plugins, and more.

The plugin also allows deactivating and redirecting pages to custom links and generating QR codes for offline campaigns. Lastly, it also offers "Page Analytics" feature to provide insights of the performance of your landing pages.

How to Choose the Best Wordpress Theme for Your Business Site?

As independent media business growing rapidly today, more and more internet users have begun to step out of traditional bulk media and started their own personal blogs. Some of those blogs have a significant followers and profit would be asured. It is the reason why CMS like Wordpress are so much welcomed nowadays. It  is estimated that websites built with Wordpress templates are reaching over 1 million, and growing by hundreds per day.

It is well known that Wordpress allows customizations to your site. But for now the speed of Wordpress themes development are clearly no match for that of Wordpress sites being built, therefore you are guaranteed to see a lot of similar Wordpress blog structures. As for SEO, that is not a good sign. Usually sites with similar structures or headlines are under Google’s careful watch.

So, how to get a Wordpress theme and customize it so it won’t look so identical? Now I share the 9 things you should consider, it will help you choose a perfect WordPress theme for your site. 

#1. Identify the goals for your site

Develop a site plan that outlines the content, features and navigational structure you will need to meet those goals and serve the needs and expectations of your audience. Then browse themes for those that come close to your plan. This is really something about which only people who have good business sense and can understand clients requirement clearly can do. Before choose any themes, you have to think few things first, like:

• Site niche, Business, blog or services
• How site will be use.
• Need something creative and clean or just look good is ok.
• And some more things.

#2. Strive for Simplicity

Many WordPress themes come with lots of colors, complex layouts, flashy animations, etc. Sometimes you may need those things, but in most cases you don’t really need all that. 

Look for a theme that has a design layout that helps you support your goal. It needs to look good but without compromising on usability and simplicity.

Make sure that the theme’s presentation style is not overly complicated. The purpose of web design is to help users find information they need and to help site owners achieve their goals at the same time.

If a theme looks great but does not help you get new business or subscribers, then it is not a good theme. It is also not a good theme when your users can’t really find their way around your website. 

#3. Responsive is Not Optional Anymore

Responsive themes adjust their layout across different screen sizes and devices.

A significant number of web traffic is generated from mobile and other handheld devices. Depending on your website’s topics, this number could go even higher than 50% of your traffic.

Google shows mobile friendly websites on top in their mobile search results. Regardless of your site’s topics and demographics, all websites need to be responsive and fully mobile ready.

Most WordPress themes are already responsive by default. But there are still sellers who are selling fixed width layouts that are not mobile friendly at all. Make sure that the theme you are choosing for your website is mobile friendly.

Testing a Theme for Mobile Readiness

The easiest way to test whether a theme is responsive or not is by resizing your browser screen. As you resize your browser screen, you will notice that the theme’s layout will adjust itself to the screen width.

For more thorough testing you can copy the URL of theme’s demo page and paste it in Google’s Mobile Friendly Test page.

Please note that this test will show some warnings, regardless of how good a theme is. Lookout for any red flags like text too small, content wider than screen, etc.

#4.Browser Compatibility

Your users will be using different browsers. Your theme may look perfect on the browser you use, but there might be something broken in other browsers.

This is where browser compatibility comes in. Most WordPress theme developers test their themes rigorously by using sophisticated browser compatibility testing tools.

They may clearly mention this on their website. But if they don’t, then you can always run some basic tests to check the theme on different browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc. Don’t forget to test on different browsers on mobile as well.

#5. Supported Plugins

The real power of WordPress comes with WordPress plugins. These plugins make it possible for you to do anything with your WordPress site.

While there are plenty of WordPress plugins, some are must-have WordPress plugins for every websites. Like Gravity Forms, Yoast SEO, W3 Total Cache, etc.

Make sure that your WordPress theme supports all popular plugins. If you are unsure, ask theme developer about it.

#6. Translation + Multilingual Ready

A large number of WordPress sites are not in the English language. You may be creating a website in a language other than English. Maybe you have plans to create a multilingual WordPress site in the future.

Make sure that your WordPress theme is translation ready and supports multilingual WordPress plugins.

#7. Page Builders

Page builders are WordPress plugins that allow you to create page layouts using drag and drop user interface.

Many premium WordPress themes come with page builders pre-installed. Some of these page builders are used by that theme developer only.

Using such a page builder to create landing pages can produce a lot of unwanted code. If you ever switch the theme, then those pages will require a lot of cleaning up.

You should choose themes that are shipping with one of the most used page builder plugins. You can also purchase these page-builders separately to use with other themes as well.

#8. Support Options

One downside of using a free WordPress theme is that there is no guaranteed support. While some developers provide excellent support for their free themes, many free themes have no support option.

If you mess up your WordPress theme, then you will have to figure it out on your own. You can also end up paying a third-party developer to solve the tiniest problems.

Make sure that you select a WordPress theme that has good documentation and support option. Most premium WordPress themes offer detailed documentation with 1 year of email based support.

#9. SEO Friendliness

Your WordPress theme plays a crucial role in your site’s SEO friendliness. A good looking theme can still generate poorly coded HTML, this could affect your site’s performance on search engines.

It could be difficult for beginners to analyze a theme’s source code on their own. This is why many premium WordPress theme developers will let you know that their pages are optimized for SEO.

You can also take a look to see if the page generates proper HTML5 by checking it with W3C Markup Validation service. However, please note that the W3C tool will generate many warnings which are nothing to be worried about.

#10. Ratings and Reviews

Another solid indicator of a WordPress theme’s quality is ratings and reviews provided by their users. If the theme is sold on a third-party marketplace, then you will see customer reviews.

For free WordPress themes, you will find the ratings section just below the download button. It will show the number of reviews and stars given by users. If you click on 5 stars, then it will show you all the reviews that gave the theme 5 stars.

Almost all WordPress themes can get a few bad reviews. but if the number of bad reviews is unusually high, then you should read them carefully.

How to Secure Your WordPress Website from Hackers?

According to the latest news, in 2014 we may see the highest amount of Internet virus increase in record history, it would seem that our Internet security is not as strong as we hoped, especially now that self-media has taken up a big chunk of  Internet media, many of which are without a professional security methods, these self-media, such as personal blogs, private sites, small business retailing sites, are main targets of attacks.

 

It is especially so for Wordpress. As the biggest blogging platform, Wordpress has the major target for hackers. It is most vital that users from Wordpress to increase their level of security. Most content publishers may not even know that a successful attack has taken place before it is too late and they lose their visitors and search engine rankings. Don’t let this happen to you. These are the simple security measures that any blogger can implement today to properly secure their WordPress blogs, help prevent hacking attacks and keep your content safe.

#1. Create a new user account

It is harder for a hacker to break into your site when both username and password have to be cracked. That is why you should create a new user and delete the WordPress default “admin” user. This is one of those things I do as soon as I setup a new site. Usernames such as the default “admin” are the most common target of these attacks so they should be deleted and not used.

You create a user by going into “Users” then “Add New” in the WordPress menu. When creating the new user, make sure to give it the role of an “Administrator”. That will ensure that you have the full authority over your site. Now simply log out from your default “admin” account and log in with the new user details. In “Users” delete the default admin username. Make sure to choose the option to transfer your old posts to your new username when deleting the “admin” account. Do this first before going to the next step.

#2. Use a strong password

Do not use simple passwords on your WordPress. Simple passwords might make it easy for you to remember it, but they are also easier for a hacker to crack. Use stronger and more secure passwords instead. Your password should be at least eight characters long, it should include numbers, it should include special characters, and uppercase and lowercase letters. Change your password now before going to the next step. This is a tool that helps you create strong passwords.

#3. Set a new nickname

You do not want your new username to be the author name that is shown on all posts. Set the nickname WordPress uses as author name to something different than your username. You do this in “Users” under “Your Profile” in the Nickname field. Choose a new nickname and set “Display name publicly as” to your new nickname.

#4. Disable logins from certain IP addresses

Brute force attacks on your WordPress blog admin login page are the most common way of hacking WordPress and this type of attack is increasing as can be seen by the graph below from Sucuri. There’s a simple way to stop these attacks. Keep reading.

Login LockDown plugin records the IP address and timestamps of every failed login attempt to access your WordPress /wp-login.php page. If more than a certain number of login attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that IP range. An alternative for this plugins is Limit Login Attempts and does the same.

BruteProtect is another plugin which monitors all failed login attempts over the network of blogs that use the plugin and automatically blocks the failed IP’s. If you actually review what login tries have been done on your blog you will recognize why the step number one is key. Most login tries are done by using “admin” as the username so please do make sure to remove it and use a different username.

Alternatively to this you could enable two-step authorization which you may know from Google, Facebook and others. One option is Google Authenticator and the other is OpenID.

#5. Blacklist IP addresses from logging into your admin

A better and even stronger solution to the step 4 that may be preferred by some bloggers is to blacklist everyone from logging in to your admin except yourself. You do it by going into the /wp-admin/ folder of your WordPress installation and opening the .htaccess file. Add this code anywhere in the file and make sure to add your IP numbers in there (type “what is my IP” in Google to find your IP address):

[sourcecode]

order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from YOURIPNUMBER
# whitelist work IP address
allow from YOURIPNUMBER
# whitelist holiday IP address
allow from YOURIPNUMBER

[/sourcecode]

You can put different IP addresses in there if you are a nomadic blogger and move quiet a lot but if one is enough for you, that is fine as well. Now when someone tries to access the login page of your site they will get this message:

Forbidden. You don’t have permission to access /wp-admin on this server.


The only downside of doing something like this is that if your IP address changes you would need to go into your FTP and update the document with your new IP. This can become a boring thing to do especially if your IP address changes often. Another negative is if you travel a lot of use internet from different locations. Basically every time you would need to login to FTP, find your IP address and put it into the .htaccess file. Still, if you’re happy to live with this you will have an unbreakable WordPress blog.

#6. Block bots from accessing WP-Admin login page

This is actually simple to do and means that if and when a bot stumbles upon your site and tries to login to your WP-Admin it will be blocked and won’t be able to do any damage. To block the bots you just need to locate your .htaccess file on your server in your main directory (not the one in /wp-admin/ folder like in the step above) and paste this list at the top of your file.


Alternatives to this are plugins such as Lockdown WP-Admin and Stealth Login Page that hide your login page so bots cannot access it similar to the step above.

#7. Do not allow guest user registrations

If you do not have a membership site, then there is no reason to allow visitors to register for a guest account on your site. To check that you’ve got registration turned off, click “Settings” and make sure that “Anyone can register” option is not checked.

#8. Do not allow pings

WordPress sites that have pingback option enabled can be used in DDOS attacks against other sites. This option is enabled by default so it is important to disable it. In “Settings” go into “Discussion” and in “Default Article Settings” tick off “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)”.

#9. Activate a security plugin

There are several security plugins that can help protect your site and prevent any hacking attempts. Two of the best options are Wordfence Security and Better WP Security. They both do quite a few things to make your site safer including forcing you to use stronger passwords, making you delete the admin username and they also do block bot traffic and help you do regular security scans.

#10. Keep an eye on the Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a valuable resource even for your site security. The “Security Issues” section of your profile notifies you if Google have detected malware or any other security issues with your site. Keep an eye on this and act quickly.

#11. Always upgrade your WordPress and the plugins

Always upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, latest version of your theme and latest version of plugins you use. One of the reasons developers upgrade their software and plugins is the security vulnerability found in older versions.


With WordPress all of these upgrades are simple, automated, one-click processes within the WordPress interface. When there is a new upgrade available, WordPress will give you a notice on top of your dashboard. It will say “WordPress X is available! Please update now”. Click on it and your upgrade is a simple one-click away. No excuses not to upgrade. Since WordPress 3.7 the upgrades are now automated with automatic background updates so you may find that your WordPress upgrades to the latest version while you sleep.

If you are afraid to upgrade because of some old WordPress theme you are using that you think is not compatible with the new WordPress, then please switch over to something more modern and something that you know has a developer and a community behind it.

Speaking of plugins and themes it is recommended not to download them from any unknown source other than the official WordPress directory and the official websites of premium themes and plugins. Quality signs to look for in a plugin or a theme are:

• A high number of downloads
• Regular updates
• Recent last update
• Good reviews

#12. Backup automatically

Taking regular backups of your content and database is important. Any upgrade of WordPress could possibly lead to an unforeseen situation. The site’s database may become corrupted for example. Although hosting providers execute their system backups on their part, we should take personal responsibility in doing regular backups as well. WordPress site consists of two parts:

• Database: a place where all settings, pages, posts and comments are stored
• Files: which comprise of media, attachments, themes and plugins.

It is always recommended to perform a full backup of the entire site, which means both database and files. In case something happens to your site, you can always use the backup to recover your files.

The most convenient and most acceptable way even for non tech-savvy users is doing backup by using plugins. There is a plethora of available plugins. One of them is BackWPup. Activate the plugin and set it to automatically backup your site and send the backup file to your email address. Two minutes work to install it, activate it and set it so it sends you a new email with a new backup automatically every day, every week or whenever you decide.


Do the first backup, right after you read this article, if you haven’t done that already. Really. You will continue building and growing your website with a much bigger confidence.

In summary, the current problem of Wordpress hacking mainly can be prevented with enough security measures. Hope these little tips can help you more or less to keep your website a bit safer.