Too many websites have a poor look and feel to them. The user experience of your website needs to be awesome.

One easy way to improve the user experience is by having your pictures displayed beautifully. How? In this post I’ll talk about the best WordPress Lightbox plugin, and a few alternatives. For other great plugins be sure to check out The Best WordPress Plugins to Kick-Start your Blog.

Ok, lets talk about Lightbox.

A great way to improve your website is by having beautiful pictures that look even better when a user clicks on them and they open up smooth and seamlessly to a larger picture.

Being seamless is the key idea here. You don’t want a user to click on a picture and they are taken away from your website.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

You click on the above picture, and you are taken away from my website. The picture opens and to go back you need to click your back button. Hopefully you do click on your back button and continue reading this!

That’s a problem. I’ve essentially left the website I was on to look at a picture. Will I come back? Will your visitor come back?

How to fix this bad user experience?

Lightbox has been around for several years. It is a way to display images (and video) by filling the user’s screen and dimming the rest of the webpage. (Thanks Wikipedia)

The Best WordPress Lightbox Plugin

WP jQuery Lightbox

The WP jQuery Lightbox (free) WordPress plugin is extremely simple to use. Just install it, change a few settings and everything else is automatic. All your pictures will automatically be displayed using Lightbox and look great.

Also, the resource usage is very light compared to other Lightbox plugins. Your website will continue to load fast for your visitors.

Give it a try now, with the Lightbox effect enabled. Doesn’t it look so much better than the first time you clicked on it? You can even have a caption displayed with the picture.

Two other alternatives:

Simple Lightbox (free). Also easy to use, but uses more JavaScript/code than WP jQuery Lightbox so it is heavier on resources and page loading time.
WP Lightbox 2 (free/premium). Has more options if you pay for it. Also needs more resources.

These all work for pictures, but what about video?

Another plugin to the rescue. WP Video Lightbox (free) can handle youtube and vimeo videos in a Lightbox display. Is it worth adding another plugin to do this? In my opinion no, it is not needed. The built-in WordPress support for embedding works well enough.

Notable mention

Gmedia Gallery (free) is another alternative which can do images and local video. The one nice thing about this plugin that I really like is the thumbnail view. It looks great. If you need something more advanced this is the plugin to use.

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Conclusion

Adding the Lightbox effect to your WordPress website can really enhance your pictures and overall user experience. The best WordPress Lightbox plugin is WP jQuery Lightbox. It is easy to use, and light weight on resources and page loading time.

If you need something more advanced (with a very nice thumbnail view effect), try Gmedia Gallery.

What do you think about the Lightbox effect? Have you found a better plugin? Let me know in the comments.

The post The Best WordPress Lightbox Plugin appeared first on Ryan Daniels.

In this post I’ll talk about how to make a WordPress backup for your website.

Nobody wants their website to go down. But if it does you will need a backup of your website to get up and running. Don’t get stuck in a situation of being without a backup when disaster strikes.

Did you make a change and lock yourself out? Did you make a change and the only way to go back is from a backup? Make sure you have a WordPress backup!

What is a WordPress Backup?

Creating a scheduled backup is one of the most important maintenance tasks you can perform. Most hosting providers (including SiteGround) offer an option to back up your WordPress website. However, just to be safe (and so you can quickly have access to your backups), you should also take your own backups.

There are two items you need: Your database and the files on your website. The database contains all of your posts, pages, links, etc. The files contain the core WordPress installation, all of your plugins, themes, and pictures.

How often you perform a backup is up to you. If you post once a week, then a weekly backup is probably enough. If you have a very busy website and you post more often, you’ll also want to create backups more often. Think of it this way, realistically, how much data are you willing to lose?

Also, be sure to store your backups in two or three places. Only keeping them on your local computer isn’t recommended. It’s best to keep a backup in a few places, including on your local computer, “in the cloud”, and in your email (if size permits). By keeping backups in multiple locations you can ensure at least one will be available.

File Backup

The files on your website can be very large. So emailing them isn’t an option. To easily backup your files, I recommend the free plugin WordPress Backup to Dropbox. It gives you the option to specify how often you want to take a backup. Plus, once your files are on Dropbox, you can copy them to your local computer so you store your backup in a few places.

Database Backup

Backing up your database is just as important as backing up the files on your website. An easy solution to back up your database is the free plugin WP-DBManager. You can set a schedule to send the database backup as an email. The database backup size shouldn’t be too big so emailing it won’t be a problem.

Premium Solution for File and Database Backups

The last option I recommend is VaultPress. They offer premium solutions starting at $5/month. If you don’t mind spending $5 per month this option is even easier than the above mentioned plugins. In addition, if you use the Jetpack plugin (which you really should) there is already built-in integration with VaultPress so you don’t need to install another plugin.

Conclusion

Keeping a recent WordPress backup will save the day if your website goes down. Having a simple solution is important to ensure you have a WordPress backup and the above solutions will give you that simplicity.

If you don’t have a WordPress backup yet, create one right now!

The post How to Make a WordPress Backup appeared first on Ryan Daniels.

In this post I will show you the most helpful plugins you should use when starting a WordPress blog or website.

Now that you have a website or blog started and have installed your WordPress theme, it’s time to install all the plugins you need. I will show you the best WordPress plugins to get your blog functioning so it does exactly what you want it to.

Plugins can do lots of different things, from making your content more shareable to making your website load faster and improve search engine ranking. See those social media icons at the top of this post, those are from a plugin.

Before you start publishing content, take a look at the following plugins that I recommend.

Best WordPress Plugins – Anti-Spam

You are probably familiar with email spam. There’s also a high chance of receiving spam on your website.

Akismet

To help combat this, use the plugin Akismet. It automatically filters out spam from the comments people leave on your post so you don’t need to delete them manually.
Akismet actually comes installed with WordPress, you just need to activate it by following the instructions from this post.

Best WordPress Plugins – Contact Form

A contact form is needed to allow your visitors to contact you. The plugins below range from simple to advanced, depending on what you need to accomplish.

Fast Secure Contact Form

You have many options when it comes to contact forms but my favourite is Fast Secure Contact Form. It looks intimidating at first, but most of the default options are fine and it’s easy to modify. One thing I really like is how flexible it is. It also has Akismet spam protection support built-in to combat spam in your contact form.

Alternatives: More advanced contact form plugins include Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms.

Best WordPress Plugins – SEO and User Experience

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and user experience are both very important. You want search engines like Google to generate traffic to your website.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast helps drive traffic to your website from search engines like Google. It helps search engines easily find the important items on your website, making your website rank higher in Google search results.

Google Analytics by Yoast

You want to be able to track how many visitors you have to your website and Google Analytics is one of the best ways to do so. Google Analytics by Yoast allows you to easily have your Google Analytics code in every page of your site. This will show you important statistics on how people interact and find your website.

W3 Total Cache

A fast website is great for SEO and user experience. W3 Total Cache optimizes your site behind the scenes to make it load faster and boost your SEO. It’s truly a must have plugin.

Best WordPress Plugins – Social Media

Social media plugins are important for promoting your website. They give your website visitors an opportunity to easily share your content, helping to drive more traffic to your site.

Jetpack

Jetpack is one of those plugins that keeps getting better. More and more features are being added to Jetpack and now it is a “must have”. It has many different features: 36 at the time of writing. My favourite is the “Sharing” module – a customizable way to add buttons to your posts or pages that your visitors can click to share your website to social media.

Alternatives

• Simple Share Buttons Adder. If you don’t want to use Jetpack (you really should at least try it), this plugin is another way to easily add all the social sharing buttons you need.
• Digg Digg has many different options, including floating and static buttons.
• Social Warfare is a premium plugin, but with this you get what you pay for. It has a lot of options, including floating and static buttons, link shortening, analytics, click to tweet, and frame busting. It is relatively cheap for all the features you get.

Simple Social Icons

Simple Social Icons puts links to your social networks on your website. This gives your website visitors an easy way to find all of your social networks. On my site they are on the top right with icons that link to Twitter, Google+, etc. Some themes have this feature built-in, but if the theme you use does not, then use this plugin.

Best WordPress Plugins – Security and Maintenance

WordPress Security isn’t a very exciting topic, but you can’t ignore it. With WordPress being such a popular platform, many people will try to take advantage of easy ways to get into your website.

Plus, along similar lines, you need to have backups of your WordPress database and files. This is just in case a hacker gets in, or in case you need to rollback a change.

iThemes Security and/or Wordfence

These are the standard in security plugins. They offer many features that are considered security best practices for WordPress.

iThemes Security can do many things, from removing the admin account to renaming your database table prefix. You can uninstall this plugins after it does its magic.

Wordfence offers firewall protection along with scanning the files on your website for any changes compared to the original files. It also scans for any malicious looking files.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox or WP-DBManager

Backups are a must. There are two things you should backup: Your database and the files on your website (including pictures). Keep in mind when backing up your files, the backup can get pretty large, so email doesn’t work for that.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox will back up your database and files directly to Dropbox. Once in Dropbox you can move them to a local file system (to free up some space on Dropbox).

If you only need to back up your database (maybe because you use a hosting provider like SiteGround to backup your files) then you can use WP-DBManager to email your database backup to you.

Limit Login Attempts

People will try to get into your WordPress admin panel. To slow them down, use the Limit Login Attempts plugin to ban them after X number of failed log in attempts.

Alternative: Jetpack also offers a “Protect” module. Also, Wordfence has a similar option. Both help against brute force attacks on your WordPress log in page. So if you decide to use one of those options, then this plugin isn’t needed.

WP-Optimize

Keeping your WordPress database running quickly helps with the overall speed of your website. WP-Optimize is great for database cleanup and as a database optimization tool. It can be scheduled to clean up all your post revisions (which takes up a lot of space), remove comment spam and make your database faster by optimizing it.

Optional: P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

If you have a lot of plugins your website can run sluggish and cause slow loading times for your website visitors. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) can help to identify which plugins are slowing your website down.

Conclusion

WordPress has many plugins available to do pretty much anything you want on your website. Just keep in mind that it is always better to add the desired functionality inside a theme (or better yet a child theme) if possible. Having too many plugins can cause performance issues, and they can also have security implications.

You need to keep your plugins up-to-date, since often the author will fix security vulnerabilities. Having many plugins means a bad guy has more ways to get into your website. Also, keep in mind that if a plugin hasn’t been updated in two years, it might be abandoned by the author and would no longer be getting the needed security fixes.

What plugins do you use, and why do you like them?

Need Help?

Feel free to contact me if you need any help choosing, or configuring your WordPress plugins. Make sure your website stands out from all the rest. I can help!

The post The Best WordPress Plugins to Kick-Start your Blog appeared first on Ryan Daniels.