Steps To Be Taken For WordPress Security Issues

In this current generation, content management tools like WordPress has transformed our working style into an extremely easy and simple manner that occupies approximately the whole world. But the question comes here is: is using WordPress always an easy and secured option to work with?

Of-course sometimes its not secure while working with WordPress CMS tool. In this fast growing technology era, hackers have made their real business to interfere with user's private data or information on various other illegal websites. So, here in this blog we all need to know what advance steps are to be taken by us in order to avoid data hacking issues by such dangerous hackers to secure the WordPress CMS tool.


Avoid Mentioning of WordPress
Always mentioning WordPress in your website can lead to serious security issues. Hackers have high tendency to exploit all sorts of known vulnerabilities that are already added in your website by identifying the WordPress versions that you are working with which might include themes, plug-ins and other various such issues. This vulnerability can be prevented by removing all plug-in mentions from your WordPress website or other advance themes or plug-ins that have been installed. You can change your default links to protect yourself from WordPress vulnerability issues such as Brute-Force attacks.

Hiding WPPlug-in
Deactivating each and every mentions of WordPress that you are working with, can be quite difficult at times which might lead to time- consuming issues. So, to easily avoid WordPress attack, try to hide the WPplug-in feature that automatically avoid malicious attacks from dangerous hackers by updating users with new vulnerability glitches that might destroy the  WordPress functioning.


Data back-up
Data back-up option should be your first priority to avoid any kind of hacking issues. Apart from back-up option, one should follow a proper scan-up procedure to back-up all the important files. By following a routine back-up process of WordPress site, users can surely get rid of such malicious users to avoid losing all their essential data or a hacker's malicious activity. These below mentioned steps can be followed by users to avoid dangerous malicious activities on your WordPress site:

• BackUp WPFree
• VaultPress
• BackUp Buddy

Regular Updates
Regular updating process will keep WordPress website away from dangerous hackers that might harm your WordPress account. By having obsolete software update softwares, your WordPress database and all related information are highly prone to malicious attacks. If your WordPress website is hacked, its very much essential for users to install all new and fresh WordPress versions as this is the best option to recover and rebuild your WordPress website via FTP process.

Administrator Name Updation
By activating your WordPress default administrator name, its easy for hackers to easily get into your WordPress information, data and files that you have saved very easily. So, make sure that your WordPress account login details are properly changed and create a login by signing up into your account on fresh basis. One can follow this step by just creating a new administrative user account and deleting their old default administrator account.

Password Strength
Creating an account with weak password is more prone to hackers to hack your WordPress account by using special algorithm to gain access to the control panel as this is an easy way to get into your WordPress account details. To avoid this issue, users are suggested to create a strong password across the board. Do ensure that you have created a new account by following a password strength rule that applies to your password creation process while creating or updating your WordPress account. If you think that your account has been hacked, then it is recommended to immediately change your password for future prevention steps.

Back-door Hacking
When your WordPress account has been hacked, then it's quite possible that you might have left some way for hackers to get access to your account. Added code often seems to be an innocent one but at the same time, it will always give access to hackers the code which is often known as PHP code that are known to be eligible for hackers to crack the code and steal away all the information of WordPress account. These codes are often hidden in themes, plug-ins and various uploads that are required by WordPress to function properly. To get rid of such issues, users can always use special malicious scanner applications that are easily available on the Internet for free or for trial version. Once checking process is done, run your browser in incognito mode and later check if there is any threat found.


Sophia is a trained WordPress developer working with WordPrax Ltd. - HTML to WordPress company with global reach. If you're planning to convert HTML to WordPress for a brilliant online presence, she can help you. Some stunning articles related to website markup conversions can be found under her name.

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Top Reasons To Develop Mobile Apps In NodeJS

The Mobile Revolution has brought along a plethora of trends that have worked positively for the design and development of stunning mobile apps. Irrespective of the type of individuals or firms that you intend to target, a perfect mobile app will allow you to attain an outstanding mobile presence for your brand. A good mobile experience will add a tint of excellence in your company's reputation among the global customer base. So, it's time for you to choose the right real-time app development technology like Node.js to get started with building apps that perform brilliantly on all popular mobile devices and platforms. In this post, I've chosen to highlight the key reasons behind the significance of using Node.js for creation of scintillating, best-quality mobile apps. Now, let's dig into these reasons!

1.    Node.js is an open source server-side development framework
Also considered as the second most popular repository on GitHub, Node.js is an open source app development framework that has its code available for free. With Node.js, you can find NPM which is a node.js package manager that's used for installing node programs efficiently. The awesome features available with Node.js make it one of the simplest app development frameworks.

2.    Asynchronous callbacks make way for natural threading

Node.js comes with asynchronous callbacks which create space for natural threading, saving user a lot of time and effort. This Node.js feature plays a vital role in reducing the overall memory usage along with increasing the app's load speed. Plus, a large group of concurrent users are hence capable of utilizing the same amount of memory- making Node.js an excellent backend technology.

3.    Tuning page rendering between client and server becomes a breeze with Node.js
The Page Rendering Node.js will enable you to tune page rendering between client and server, basis the chosen network. While you might be following the typical practice of using the UI or jQuery framework for generating views in front-end, with Node.js, it is possible for you to use the EXACT same code for rendering on the chosen server. With YUI3 completely available for Node.js, you can conveniently optimize both, client and server side rendering efficiently.

4.    If you know JavaScript, using Node.js will be a mere walk in the park
As a front-end web developer, it's not surprising for you to be well familiar with all the ins and outs related to JavaScript. With Node.js using JavaScript, you need not bother about learning a whole new programming language. Hence, you can choose to work as a backend developer and use the popular data exchange format known as JSON. Thanks to Node.js's runtime, you can enjoy rapid development and deployment of mobile apps. Plus, if you're a fan of agile development, then also using Node.js will enable you to develop a mobile apps wherein you are free to work on multiple slices.

5.    Node.js doesn't block Input/Output(I/O)
According to Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, the framework doesn't block input/output(I/O) that can easily result into app crashes. With Node.js, you need not be concerned about the CPU processing time probably because the framework is based on a variety of small processes that consume less memory space.

6.    Node.js hosting works the best for all your mobile and web applications
Today, when a huge collection of PaaS(Platform-As-A-Service) providers have switched to reducing app deployment to just a single command, Node.js has grabbed all the spotlight. Now, even the PaaS giant Heroku is supporting multiple Node.js deployments without any kind of complexity. Hence, choosing Node.js for app development would allow you to rest assured about the perfect hosting of your final web/mobile apps.

7.    Node.js speed and scalability is truly commendable
Based on the asynchronous programming model, Node.js has its traditional web app software that is based on a request-response cycle. In simple words, each time a request arrives, the application routes the same, gets on with building a response via fetching assistance from disks, databases and APIs and finally sends back the completed response to the client. One of the best things about Node is that it exits event loop under a situation wherein no more callbacks need to be performed. This behavior is quite similar to that of JavaScript wherein the event loop is being hidden from the end user. If you intend to build real-time, high-concurrency applications, then nothing can beat Node.js.

8.    Node.js easily interfaces with multiple push notification systems
With Node.js applications, you can use SocketIO which would render real-time communications between server and the client. In other words, Node.js can interface with multiple push notification systems that are available on each individual mobile platform. 

Wrapping it all up
Regarded as one of the most stable and widely adopted app development frameworks, Node.js is backed by a vibrant community which has been working on improving the event-driven application logic and making the framework simple and easy-to-work with.

Author Bio: Arya Stark is a web developer working for an Offshore Ecommerce Web Development Company, Xicom which offers a quality ecommerce solutions. So if you are looking to avail the best ecommerce solutions, you can get in touch with her.

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Is Your Site's Load Time Costing You Conversions?

Acording to a Kissmetrics infographic, 47 percent of consumers expect a website to load in 2 second or less. Mobile web users aren’t very patient either. They will abandon a website if it doesn’t load in 6 to 10 seconds. To make matters worse, for every extra-second your site doesn’t load, your conversion rate decreases by 7 percent. (For example, if your mobile website takes 12 seconds to load, you’ll lose 14 percent more conversions than you would have if it loaded in 10 seconds or less.) Because load times also impact search engine rankings, it’s crucial you employ the strategies listed in this guide to improve your site’s load times. 

Subscribe to High-Speed Internet

If you’re not already, you should be connected to a high-speed Internet provider. How else are you going to test your current speeds and get an accurate answer? If you’re relying on slow methods (dial-up, mobile WI-FI, satellite, etc.), you’re not accurately measuring your load times. Of course, it’s good to test many connection methods, but most people want high-speed load times; therefore, high speed Internet is necessary for successful web development.

For the best price, compare different Internet service providers. For example, CenturyLink Internet offers three different plans with “distinct speeds.” Choose the plan that fits your needs best and will help you develop your website, so your design is streamlined as much as possible. 

Choose a Reliable Host

Choosing the wrong web host can cause significant delays in page load times. Do your best to research and review different providers, and choose one that’s highly-rated for its speeds. Shopping around is imperative to selecting the right host. Review the plans offered by your potential hosts, and don’t be suckered into a low cost plan that includes shared hosting for lower rates. This can significantly increase load times. 

Lighten the Load

In terms of design, your absolute first course of action should be to take out the trash. “Remember, the smaller a web page is, the faster it will load,” writes William Johnson, a contributor for Small Business Trends. “If there are images and videos that are absolutely not relevant to your content, delete them immediately.”

It’s also a good idea to compress your site using a compression algorithm. Data doesn’t have to suck up all your site’s bandwidth. By compressing it, you’re freeing up virtual memory and improving load times (without losing any of your data). There’s no downside to this method, so employ it often to keep file sizes small.

Perform Regular Maintenance

Regular maintenance checks will help you ensure your page is loading at optimal speeds. Not only are users impatient, but Google’s search engine algorithm is also in a hurry. You could end up losing your rankings on search engine results pages if you’re not careful. So, stay up to date on your site’s load times by performing regular checks and maintenance.

Eliminate Coding Errors

Coding errors can bog down load times, as well as causing the search engines to snub your site. Therefore, it’s essential you use clean code, or code that can be easily interpreted by another person. Not only is clean code easier to maintain, it’s also going to ensure your website loads fast. Use basic HTML principals, and keep it as readable and maintained as possible.

People online are almost always in a rush; they don’t want to wait around for your website to load, and they’ll abandon the site if it takes too long. The solution is a simpler, cleaner website that provides valuable content and information in a time-sensitive manner. If you’re able to accomplish this feat, you will receive a small consolation prize from Google. Google rewards websites that load in two seconds or less with a slight boost in rankings. 

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Ways You Must Follow To Expedite Your WordPress Site Speed

Despite putting in a considerable amount of efforts and time in building a WordPress website, you might still fail to attract visitors towards the site if it loads slowly. After all, even your aesthetically pleasing design won't help you if it can't even load.

In this post, I’ll share some of the best ways that will help speed up your WordPress site:

1. Pick Up a Good Web Hosting Provider

You will find plenty of web hosts available online, however, the majority of hosts meet limited WordPress requirements. Remember that choosing a wrong web host for hosting your site can slow it down. However, selecting a hosting plan from the crowd can be challenging. Thankfully, WordPress makes it a little easier for you to pick a good host and recommends using Bluehost as your hosting provider.

Apart from Bluehost, there are several other great hosting providers worth considering, such as:

• SitePoint
• Hostgator
• InMotion

2. Choosing The Right Type of Hosting Plan

As a startup, choosing a shared WordPress hosting plan may appear as a good bargain to you. But, keep in mind that though you can get shared web hosting for low rates, but it might hurt your site loading time. However, you can make your website blazing fast by choosing managed hosting plans offered by WP Engine.


3. Choose a Lightweight Theme That Guarantees Performance


Most of the people (if not all) prefer installing a pre-built WordPress theme for setting up their website. You can easily find hundreds to thousands of free and premium themes over the web, however, not all of them ensures good performance. Especially, the free to download themes usually scores low in terms of speed, as they contain bloated code. But this doesn't mean that each and every free WP theme is bad. But the point is, you must carefully select a ready-made theme that is lightweight and contains only essential features.


4. Leverage Browser Caching

One great strategy that will help in improving your WordPress site speed is browser caching. Well, as you know fetching resources from the server over and over again can be expensive and increases overhead. However, browser caching helps in storing files on the local system when a user visits your web page, and make the user reuse cached pages. This helps in improving page speed. W3 Total Cache is one of the best plugins that can help in performing browser caching effectively.

Moreover, you can tools such as Pingdom or Webpage Test to know how well your chosen themes perform.

5. Implement a CDN (a.k.a Content Deliver Network)

When choosing a standard web host, all your website files will be kept on a single server in a single location. Your website will load quickly and users will be able to access the files if their location is near to the datacenter – where your files are stored. But, your site will run slowly when visitors distant from datacenter will try to access the files. However, you can avoid such a situation from happening by implementing a CDN.

A content delivery network, basically, helps distribute your website files to different data centers across the world. And thus, increases the chances of making the server closer to each website visitor. This will ensure that your all your visitors are able to download files from your site as fast as possible.  My personal favorite is Max CDN, however, you can also use content delivery networks like CacheFly, CloudFare and many others.

A Few Other Nitty-Gritty Yet Important Considerations To Boost Website Speed

• Make sure to keep your WordPress website updated, as it will help in fixing bugs found in previous versions and will also provide new performance enhancements. This will eventually help in improving the performance of your website. 
• Avoid installing too many plugins, as it cause your website to crash. Also, remove any unwanted plugins from the site and keep the plugins up-to-date.
• Reduce the size of image files, as they can make your website slow down. Luckily, there is an excellent plugin that can help in optimizing your images, called as WP Smush

. Additionally, minify your JavaScript and CSS files.

Wrapping Up!


You'll find plenty of recommended ways and techniques to optimize the speed of your WordPress site, ranging from themes, plugins, to making changes to the code and so on. In order to save your time from having to find such ways, I've covered some of the most important and best ways that help in improving your website speed.

Author Biography:
Samuel Dawson is working in Designs2html Ltd where he has lots of responsibilities on his shoulder. He is responsible to convert psd to wordpress website. Above he has shared some valuable points on how you can speed up your website.

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The potential of Big Data in Digital Marketing

Big Data is a solution to the problem of ever increasing data volume and variability.  For marketers Big Data is like a gold mine for its ability to handle complexity of information.  The ability to take data driven decisions based on Big Data analytics is a powerful resource for digital marketers.

Big Data serves four major purposes for any organization in terms of digital marketing.

1 Customer Engagement

Big Data allows you to collect as much as data possible about the customers. You can learn about who your customers are and where they are from. You can gain insights on their interactions with your online store or website. Learning about the demographics and preferences helps you to provide them a user experience which would be most suited for them. For example Big Data can help you find that most of your customers from a particular age group and when they like to be contacted and which marketing collateral will be appropriate for them.

2 Customer Retention and loyalty

Big Data can help you learn about what is the reason behind the return visits of the customers. Is it the price, the product display, the brands, the offers or any other contributing factor which is helping your customers in making a decision to return to your store? This is the most powerful insight that Big Data can give you which will help you in retaining your customers and design a well planned customer loyalty program.

3 Optimizing Marketing

Big Data will also help in keeping track of your marketing efforts. It will give you insights about which social media channel is best suited for your marketing campaign. It will help you understand how much effectively your marketing efforts were able to create desired results for you.  You can easily tweak your marketing campaign based on insights gain from Big Data analytics. For example you were able to learn through Big Data analysis that most of the audience responded to your videos than your email marketing or posts.  The next time you can channelize your efforts more towards creating videos for your brand rather than investing time in email campaign.

4 Forecast

Big Data will help you forecast when would be the best time to develop & implement marketing plans.  Big Data helps derive meaning and trends from large volume of data. With the analysis of past purchase behaviour of your customer you would be able to predict when the demand rises and when there is fall in demand. You can use this insight in making better marketing related decisions.



Conclusion

Big Data is becoming very important part of your digital marketing efforts as more and more organizations are becoming data driven.  Big Data will be able to provide value from this data which was not utilized earlier. Big data will provide competitive edge to the marketers as they will be able to make better decisions and will be well informed about the customer’s preferences. The businesses that will be not using Big data will be bring a knife to a war which is fought with guns.

About the Author:


Vaishnavi Agrawal loves pursuing excellence through writing and have a passion for technology. She has successfully managed and run personal technology magazines and websites. She currently writes for intellipaat.com, a global training company that provides e-learning and professional certification training. The courses offered by Intellipaat address the unique needs of working professionals. She is based out of Bangalore and has an experience of 5 years in the field of content writing and blogging. Her work has been published on various sites related to Big Data, Business Intelligence, Project Management, Cloud Computing, IT, SAP, Project Management and more.

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10 E-Commerce Marketing tricks you'll regret missing

Today, driving maximum traffic and sales for your e-commerce website has indeed become a difficult mission. Its not that easy to woo your customers to a level that they choose to purchase your products and/or services. Fortunately, we have an easy access to some brilliant e-commerce marketing tricks, which if put into action can shoot up your conversions by an astonishing level. So, here I'm with ten simple marketing tips and tricks that can encourage customers to visit you repetitively in addition to making huge purchases.

1. Get rid of abandoned carts immediately

There are some online shoppers who irrespective of adding items to their carts, choose to abandon the carts during the checkout process. Such abandoned carts can pose as a loop hole in your e-store. Hence, it is recommended to reduce/eliminate these abandoned carts on an urgent basis. You can always choose to convince such customers for completing their product purchase by sending them emails regarding the same.

2. Create exciting exit offers

Even the best-designed e-commerce websites can easily lose potential customers if the product prices seems to be sky-touching. A simple solution to prevent such a situation is to offer free shipping or tempting discounts that can refrain the customers from navigating to an entirely different e-store.

3. Don't delay in capturing maximum number of Email Subscribers

Email is an excellent channel for communicating with potential customers and prompting them to make regular purchases from your e-store. Sending marketing messages via emails is perhaps the best method of making people aware about any coupons or discounts that are available on your product range. Ensure that maximum number of e-store visitors opt for subscribing to your newsletters and emails.

4. Leverage Social Proof

Customers carry a mindset of purchasing from a site which has excellent product reviews and ratings on different social networking websites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. You can opt for installing the 'Product Reviews' app(designed by Shopify) which would offer you a convenient way of adding reviews for different products featured on the e-store.

5. Make it convenient for your customers to receive what they're looking for

Well, a badly designed e-store can make you lose multiple customers. Whether it's about the deficiency of a clear value proposition, non-impressive product descriptions or a tedious navigation, all such factors can easily ruin the credibility of your e-store. Therefore, it is recommended to pay attention to each minute detail associated with your e-commerce website. If you've an ill-fitting theme, check out downloading one which can suit your site's purpose in the best way.

6. Incorporate a 'Gifting' section within your e-store

The trend of exchanging gifts has always proved beneficial in nurturing relationships among human beings. As an e-commerce merchant, selling gifts can boost your sales by an amazing level. There are multiple apps that can be installed within the e-store for integration of a perfectly-designed 'Gifting' section that can impress prospective buyers.

7. Hone your Ad Spending 

It is a good idea to try out minimal variations on bids available for keywords that can help you identify a perfect business niche. You can opt for Google AdWords which will ensure top ranking for your e-store everyone a user types in your keywords in the Google search box. In addition to this, you can also try advertising on Facebook- a popular social networking website accessed by millions and millions of users all over the world.

8. Engage your customers with Instagram

Your decision to integrate Instagram with your e-commerce website can fetch you maximum customers from different parts of the globe. As per a recent study, it has been found that as compared to other social media platforms, Instagram has the competency of giving a 25% lift to user engagement on your brand. By using the right kind of filters, hashtags and posts, it can become quite convenient for you to build a huge following on Instagram.

9. Opt for up selling your products

Up selling i.e. the concept of selling a product at a slightly higher price while its being considered by a customer is something that will prove a whopping 20 times better as compared to cross-selling via the web. Do ensure to emphasize on how your product is better than the one available at a different online outlet. Don't forget to make your product best fitting for the customers.

10. Make it a point to do excellent market research for anticipating future sales

If you're planning to expand your product line, then it is imperative to evaluate the product demand in the targeted market. Go ahead with doing a detailed keyword research and checking out the latest social media trends. You can also try your hands on pre-selling specific items or listing some products as 'out of stock' to check the number of people who place their order request for the products under focus.

Wrapping Up

I seriously hope the roundup of best e-commerce marketing tricks covered in this post would allow you to make the most of your online presence and help you reach out to targeted customers instantly.



About the Author: Amanda Cline works with Xicom Technologies Ltd- A reputed IOS/Android App Development Services with an excellent track record. When not busy developing great iOS apps, she feel proud in blogging and rendering IT support to individuals and enterprises.

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The Top Five Customized Summer Promotional Products

Summer time is here and it is way easier for you to enjoy it with having the increase in sales in your market and the right products for your brand these days. With this said, you will want to figure out what works for your marketing and what makes it really easy for you to get in touch and make sure that you have the right items to make it all work for your branding.

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Top Reasons To Use Grunt - A Leading JavaScript Task Runner

Though web development has evolved into one of the most promising fields of career, the majority of mundane work associated with the same has often refrained students from choosing the same. Fortunately, we can rely on a good task runner which can automate the tasks(for eg: compilation, liniting, minification, unit testing etc.) which need to be performed on a repetitive basis. So, if you're a JavaScript developer who's in a fuss about the effective execution of multiple tasks which need to be performed repetitively, then using the popular Javascript task runner called Grunt can work for you. Keep on reading the paragraphs that follow in this post to get a bigger picture of Grunt and reasons behind using the same as an individual and/or a team.

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How To Configure WhatsApp Service For Web

The most popular messaging service WhatsApp is now able to communicate with friends from their Computer. WhatsApp has launched this web service yesterday.

Last month, it was leaked that WhatsApp was working on a web service and finally from today they are introducing it to the public. The feature is called "WhatsApp Web," which provides it's users the ability to read and send messages directly from their web browsers.

The feature currently works on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry, however sadly, there's no web solution at this time for iOS users because of limitations of the platform.

"Today, for the first time, millions of you will have the ability to use WhatsApp on your web browser," WhatsApp wrote in their blog. "Our web client is simply an extension of your phone: The web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device — this means all of your messages still live on your phone."

How To Configure 

1. Update your WhatsApp if you haven't updated, open the application > open WhatsApp menu > tap on WhatsApp Web.

 2. Now you will be asked to scan the QR code give in WhatsApp web, tap on OK, GOT IT and scan the QR code.

TADA! Here we go!

Keep in mind that you need an active internet connection both in your phone and your computer.

The web version supports desktop notifications so you will be notified when you receive new WhatsApp messages even when you're not checking the web page. The Facebook-owned company is also working on a voice calling feature that WhatsApp will soon launch.

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