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How to Speed up Your WordPress Site with WP Rocket

New Course: Speed up Your WordPress Site in a Few Clicks with WP Rocket

Does your WordPress site load slowly? Do you want to learn how to speed up your WordPress site with just a few clicks? If so, you’re in the right place!

WordPress is the most popular web publishing software on the planet. But if you visit many WordPress websites, you’ll quickly notice that they often load very slowly. And did you know that more than half of your visitors will leave if your website doesn’t load within ​three seconds?

Making matters worse, a slow-loading site will also impact your ranking in search engine results. If your site loads slowly, it’ll rank lower, and that means fewer visitors to your site. If you run an e-commerce site, that means less revenue.

Over the years, one of the most frequent questions we’ve heard from our members is, “How do I make my WordPress site load faster?”

That used to be tricky to answer. You could speed up your WordPress site by adding more resources to your web server, or migrating to a better Managed WordPress host. Or, you can use a CDN, a more lightweight theme, or remove any large images from your site. Maybe then your WordPress site would load more quickly. Right? But how realistic is that?

Thankfully, that’s where WP Rocket comes in.

Speed up Your WordPress Site with WP Rocket

WP Rocket is the best caching plugin for WordPress, and the ​easiest​ way to make your WordPress site load faster, with just a few clicks. And, unlike other caching plugins, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to get up and running. In fact, you can set up WP Rocket in less than 3 minutes!

You don’t have to waste hours of your time, testing dozens of complicated settings. As soon as you activate the WP Rocket plugin, it ​automatically​ applies 80% of web performance best practices, ​even before you’ve enabled any options!

With WP Rocket activated on your WordPress site, you’ll notice instantly faster page load times. But you can also dive in a little deeper and customize the settings to get the absolute best performance for your site.

Oh, and there’s one more important thing to note about WP Rocket. Most Managed WordPress hosts block you from installing caching plugins on your WordPress site, because most of them interfere with their own server-level caching. But not WP Rocket. It’s the only caching plugin accepted by the top Managed WordPress hosts. That’s why today we only use and recommend one caching plugin for WordPress: WP Rocket

In fact, check out our page speed test results before & after activating WP Rocket on this site:

WP101 Page Speed Test Before Activating WP Rocket

Actual page speed test results of this site before activating WP Rocket.

WP101 After Activating WP Rocket

Page speed test results for this site after activating WP Rocket. Still some work to do on mobile, but what a huge improvement!

Last year, we partnered with the WP Rocket team to create this 10-part video tutorial series, and today, we’re thrilled to make it available to our members!

In this easy, 30-minute course, you’ll learn:

  • Why WP Rocket is the best caching plugin for WordPress.
  • How to download, install, and configure WP Rocket.
  • The best settings to speed up your WordPress site with WP Rocket.
  • How to test that WP Rocket is caching your site.
  • How to measure the speed of your site.
  • How external content slows your site down.
  • How to troubleshoot display issues with WP Rocket.
  • How to exclude certain JavaScript files from being cached.
  • How to set up the Cloudflare add-on in WP Rocket.
  • How preloading works in WP Rocket your site load faster.
  • Plus, much more!

Check out the introductory video…

Best of all, this new course is FREE for All-Access Pass members!

If you already have an All-Access Pass, first log into your account, then visit the WP Rocket 101 course description page, then click the large, green button that says, “Take This Course.” That’s it! You don’t need to purchase anything else. Once you’ve enrolled in the new course, it will appear in your My Courses page.

Don’t have an All-Access Pass yet?

Purchase an All-Access Pass today and you’ll get this new course, plus all of our other courses! In addition to WordPress basics, you’ll also learn how to optimize your site for search engines, sell products from your website, create custom forms, and much more. Get your All-Access Pass today!

Check out the WP Rocket 101 course outline:

View Course Outline

How to Translate your WordPress Website in 5 Minutes with the Weglot Plugin

Many WordPress site owners have asked us how to translate their WordPress website and display it in multiple languages. But there are many translation plugins to choose from, and some can prove more challenging than others… especially for beginners.

Luckily, all that changes with Weglot – the best rated WordPress translation plugin on the WordPress Directory.

Weglot is the easiest and fastest WordPress translation plugin out there. It translates, displays and allows you to effortlessly manage and edit your translated website content, instantly.

This translation solution works with any WordPress theme or plugin – so there’s zero compatibility issues.

We’ll show you how in just 5 minutes, you’ll have a multilingual WordPress website up and running without the use of any code. Perfect for WordPress beginners and those that want a one-click translation solution.

Why translate your website?

If you’re an internationally minded entrepreneur or established company doing business online, it makes sense to tap into the 75% of the internet that doesn’t speak English.

Offering your website in more than one language is essential for many industries. And it makes even more sense if you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur, a tourism or travel provider, or if you offer digital products.

Website translation is one of the quickest ways to reach potential customers in new markets.

Studies suggest that 55% of people prefer to purchase in their own language and 60% of people rarely or never purchase products or services on English-only websites. So, having a multilingual website is quickly becoming a must-have if you want to keep up with the competition.

What’s the difference between Weglot and other WordPress translation solutions?

Simply put, Weglot allows you to have a fully multilingual website up and running in less than 5 minutes. This no-code tool is suitable for any level of WordPress experience.

There’s no finicky behind-the-scenes steps, no string-by-string manual translation, or manual creation of each page in each language. Just click install and Weglot does everything for you.

Weglot allows you to translate the whole of your WordPress site, no matter where the content is coming from. For example, you might have a review plugin installed on your WordPress site. For other WordPress translation solutions, this can prove problematic and require you to install additional plugins to work around this problem.

The way your translations are managed by Weglot is a completely hassle-free process, with just one dashboard needed. Unlike other WordPress translation solutions, Weglot doesn’t require that you master multiple different interfaces to manage different parts of your translated website content.

You can easily access all your translations, edit or approve the automated translation, or even order professional translations within the Weglot Dashboard and fine tune any language nuances.

Another popular feature of Weglot is their ‘in context’ editor, which lets your manage, edit and see all your website translations in a live preview of your site. Any edits you make here will automatically be implemented on your real website. It’s a great way to visually see your translations on the front-end of your site.

Weglot also automatically adds a simple language switcher to your site, which you can easily customize. You can change the design and placement without having to touch a line of code. Other WordPress translation solutions require additional code to add one to your site.

How to translate your website with Weglot in three easy steps:

As we mentioned above, installing Weglot on your site and having a live multilingual website up and running is a simple and quick process. Let’s take a look at just how easy it really is.

Step 1

Go to your WordPress dashboard > ‘Plugins’ tab > ‘Add New’ and search for Weglot.

How to Install the Weglot Plugin

Click install. Once it’s been installed click on the activate button.

How to Activate the Weglot Plugin

You’ll now see a Weglot tab within your WordPress dashboard. Click on the Weglot tab to finalize your configuration.

Step 2

Within your Weglot tab on your WordPress dashboard you can now choose which languages you want to translate your site into.

To do this, enter the unique API key—available on your Weglot dashboard (you’ll need to create an account to get access to this).

How to Enter your Weglot API Key

Then select the original language of your site and enter the new languages you want to translate your site into. Click ‘Save Changes’.

Step 3

And, that’s it. Your multilingual site is now live! A language switcher button will now appear on your site so your site visitors can select their preferred language (or make sure ‘auto-switch’ is clicked on in your Weglot project settings to automatically redirect site visitors by browser language).

Ready to try Weglot? Check out their FREE 10-day trial with access to all the features of a paid plan!

Visit Weglot

New Course: How to Create Custom Forms in WordPress with Ninja Forms

We’ve just released a brand new course for the popular Ninja Forms plugin for WordPress! Learn how to create custom forms for your WordPress site in minutes with the Ninja Forms plugin in this brand new, 18-part video tutorial course by WP101.

Ninja Forms LogoNinja Forms is easily one of the most powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use form builder plugins for WordPress. In this hour-long course, we’ll show you how you to install and use the Ninja Forms plugin to build just about any type of form you can imagine — from simple contact forms to event registrations, file uploads, payments, and more!

Ninja Forms has been downloaded more than 11 million times, and is currently in use on more than a million WordPress sites! And it’s no wonder… Ninja Forms is a breeze to use. You can get download the free plugin and get started in less than two minutes.

And when you dive into it, you’ll quickly find that it’s one of the most powerful and flexible WordPress form builders available for WordPress today! Out of the box, Ninja Forms includes over a dozen pre-built templates to help you quickly create common types of forms for your site with just a few clicks. Or, you can build completely custom forms in minutes using the simple, ‘drag-and-drop’ form builder.

If you’re a site owner, you’ll love how quickly and easily you can design complex forms… with absolutely no coding required.

But there are also dozens of helpful add-ons to extend Ninja Forms, making it even more powerful. In this new course, we’ll introduce you to several of the most popular add-ons for Ninja Forms, and show you how you can use them to increase form conversions, build a mailing list, collect payments, or connect to your favorite productivity tools.

We partnered closely with the Ninja Forms team over the past couple of months to create this 18-part video tutorial course. In just a little over an hour, you’ll learn how to:

  • Download, install, and configure the Ninja Forms form builder plugin for WordPress.
  • Use the easy, drag-and-drop form builder in Ninja Forms to create just about any type of form you need.
  • Trigger and send an email whenever a form is submitted on your site.
  • Add a form to a page, blog post, or widget area on your WordPress site.
  • Create custom, multi-column layouts and styles for your forms.
  • Create multi-part forms to break long forms into smaller sections for your visitors.
  • Use conditional logic to create smart, interactive forms that react to your visitor’s actions.
  • Create a quote request form that changes and adapts to a customer’s needs.
  • Add a file upload field to your form, enabling your visitors to upload and send files to you.
  • Use Zapier with Ninja Forms to connect your forms to hundreds of third-party services.
  • Collect payments with either PayPal Express or Stripe and Ninja Forms.
  • Create an email sign-up form so your site visitors can subscribe to your MailChimp email list.
  • Plus much more!

Check out the introductory video…

We think you’re going to love creating custom forms for your WordPress site with Ninja Forms!

Best of all, this new course is FREE for All-Access Pass members!

If you already have an All-Access Pass, just log into your account, then visit the Ninja Forms course description page and click the large, green button that says, “Take This Course.”

That’s it! You don’t need to purchase anything else. Once you’ve enrolled in the new course, it will appear in your My Courses page.

Don’t have an All-Access Pass yet?

Purchase an All-Access Pass today and you’ll get the new Ninja Forms course, plus eight other courses — 161 videos in total! Plus, you’ll get every new course we release within the next 12 months!

In addition to WordPress basics, you’ll also learn how to optimize your site for search engines, how to sell products from your website, and much more. Learn more and buy your All-Access Pass here.

Ready to get started with Ninja Forms?

View Ninja Forms Course Details

What is Google AMP and How to Implement It on Your WordPress Website

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll know that search engines continue to emphasize page speed in its algorithm. Aside from SEO factors, page speed has a huge influence among your visitors in deciding whether they should stay on your website or not. In fact, studies show that 40% of your visitors will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

While the above statistic indicates the importance of page speed for your entire website, the condition is even more critical when it comes to your mobile visits.

For instance, if your website is comparatively heavier and is not well optimized for faster page rendering, chances are your site consumes more mobile data, which likely turn off your visitors leading to abandoning your website.

If you’re not optimizing your website for speed, chances are you’re losing potential customers.

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Google AMP = Super Fast Mobile Browsing

Google has recently initiated an open source project known as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). This initiative aims at speeding up the mobile browsing experience tremendously. So even if you’re on a mobile device with a poor internet connection, you can load an AMP version of the website almost instantly.

Wondering what makes AMP stands out from the other speed optimization tactics?

Unlike other tactics, with AMP, you’ll be using a separate light-weight template for your website, which is a stripped down version of your existing WordPress theme, built specifically for one single purpose—boosting the page speed.

In order to skyrocket your page speed, AMP forces you to use a streamlined version of CSS and doesn’t allow any JavaScript element on your page. You’ll also need to use off-the-shelf JavaScript library that forces images to lazy load.

Aside from that, once your AMP pages get indexed, it will be cached on Google AMP CDN, resulting in super fast page rendering.

How does AMP work?

While AMP is specifically focused on supercharging the mobile browsing experience, the intention is not to replace responsive design with it. In fact, AMP pages are not served directly when someone visits your website. Instead, it is served only by AMP consumers such as Google search and Twitter.

For instance, you might have already noticed a lightning signal in Google search results indicating that the web page shown is an AMP version of the original page.

Google AMP

So when you click on such pages from SERPs, you’ll be directed to a cleaner, faster and streamlined version of the web pages that instantly loads on your device regardless of the internet speed.

Example of an AMP Page

Similarly, when you click on a link in a tweet from Twitter’s native app, you’ll be directed to AMP pages for faster page rendering provided that the site is integrated with AMP.

Should you implement AMP?

By creating an AMP version of your WordPress website, you’re putting speed and readability as top priorities over anything else. Because you wouldn’t be able to use interactive elements like JavaScript on your AMP pages, you might not want to create an AMP version of all of your existing pages.

For instance, you might not want to create a stripped down version of your landing page just for the sake of increasing speed because speed is not the top priority for your landing page but conversion.

On the other hand, you can create AMP pages for your blog posts or news section in which speed and readability are top priorities.

How to implement AMP on your WordPress website:

1. Install WordPress AMP plugin

First things first. Go to your WordPress admin and install the AMP plugin by Automattic.

Upon installation, you can find the AMP version of your blog posts by appending /amp / to your post permalinks. No further configuration is needed.

For example, your AMP URL will look like this:

www.yourdomain.com/blog-post/amp/

If you haven’t enabled pretty permalink on your site, you can find the AMP pages of your blog posts by appending: ?amp=1 instead.

Do keep in mind that, installing this plugin will not currently create AMP pages for your Pages and archives. That’s totally fine because we need AMP pages primarily for blog posts.

2. Customize AMP pages

Simply installing the plugin will create a basic AMP layout for your WordPress blog. If you’d like to customize your AMP template and make it looks similar to your existing website, you may need to edit the CSS of your AMP template.

Alternatively, if you choose to install a plugin instead of hard-coding the template, all you need to do is to install the PageFrog plugin.

This plugin also gives you additional support such as Google Analytics integration on your AMP page.

After activating PageFrog, be sure to activate Google AMP HTML.

PageFrog

However, if you’re using Yoast SEO plugin on your main site, it is better to install Yoast Glue plugin instead of PageFrog.

3. Check if your page is a valid AMP page

So far we’ve implemented AMP pages on your website and slightly customized its layout.

Now it’s your turn to validate the AMP pages you just created.

The problem with AMP integration with your existing WordPress website is that it is very likely that you’ll find tons of AMP errors in your Google Search Console account just after the integration.

But don’t panic and keep in mind that AMP initiative is in its early days and the official AMP plugin isn’t meant to be an all-in-one solution for your AMP pages.

In fact, it just creates a basic AMP layout for your WordPress website. Due to the fact, you may need to find the causes of AMP errors manually and fix them.

As AMP pages are served only through AMP consumers like Google search, fixing all those SEO errors is an essential task in order to ensure that your AMP pages get indexed on search engines and cached on AMP CDN. This CDN also helps third-party websites like Twitter to easily discover and distribute your AMP page quickly to your site visitors.

You can always find AMP errors by logging into Google Search Console account. Once logged in, navigate to Search Appearance> Accelerated Mobile Pages to find errors.

There are a couple of different ways to validate your AMP pages to fix SEO errors:

  • Browser developer console: Simply append #development=1 to your AMP URL and open it in your browser. Once done, you can check validation errors in Chrome DevTools console.
  • Web interface: Alternatively, go to validator.ampproject.org. Enter your AMP page URLs and find errors.

Refer to this official guide to get the complete list of AMP validation errors and how to fix them.

Final Takeaways

The primary goal of a search engine is to help users discovers the right solution to their pertinent questions as quickly as possible. This is one of the main reasons why Google pushes page speed as their top priority.

Although Google hasn’t marked AMP as a ranking factor yet, 90% of publishers are already seeing higher CTRs on SERPs for their AMP pages. So if you haven’t implemented it yet, you should be.

Below are a few additional tips that you’ll find helpful when integrating AMP with your site.

Advanced AMP customization: For adding Google Analytics and further tweaking your AMP template, do read this read me page of AMP plugin.

Speed test and validate: While you can always customize AMP templates to a great extent like adding videos, ad banners and so on, always speed test your AMP pages with various speed testing tools and ensure it doesn’t affect your page speed. In addition, check for errors on Google Search Console on a regular basis after every customization.

Optimize your post for AMP: Since users can easily navigate to more pages on SERPs by simply swiping the pages, the average attention span on AMP pages will be shorter than usual responsive pages. Try including hero images on top of your blog posts, which is a sure-fire method to aesthetically please your visitors.

Another thing you need to test on your AMP pages is interlinking your existing blog posts in the intro copy of your blog posts. This practice may help users to stay on longer on your website by navigating to other pages.

I hope now you get a detailed idea about implementing AMP on your WordPress website. If you have any questions, feel free to share them by dropping a line below in the comments section.

Nexcess Review: Managed WordPress Hosting that Goes Above and Beyond

Today, dozens of companies claim to offer “managed WordPress hosting.” But what exactly do they manage for you? Do they actually take care of your WordPress site, freeing your time to focus on what you do best? Nexcess does.

These days, every Managed WordPress host keeps your WordPress core software up to date. But what about your plugins? Do they also update your third-party plugins when a new version is released? Probably not.

Does your WordPress host automatically compress your uploaded images so they load faster? Probably not.

Does your host offer support for PHP 7.3? If so, can you upgrade your server with one click to take advantage of the significant speed boost in the latest version of PHP?

Does your host include helpful tools like iThemes Sync Pro to help you manage all your WordPress sites via a single dashboard?

If you run a WooCommerce-powered online store, will your host help you optimize your site so it loads faster? What happens when your site experiences a sudden spike in traffic? Will your host step in to help, or just try to sell you a more expensive plan?

You have to ask yourself… what exactly are they managing?

Many hosts claim to offer “managed” WordPress hosting. But what exactly do they manage for you?

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Have you heard of Nexcess?

As you probably know, we strongly recommend managed WordPress hosting as opposed to generic shared hosting. And we only recommend the best WordPress hosts, depending on your specific needs.

Nexcess LogoNexcess has been around a long time. They’ve invested more than any other hosting company into their Managed WordPress hosting platform, and their Vice President of Products and Innovation is well-known WordPress advisor, Chris Lema.

Chris is passionate about the WordPress community, having spoken at dozens of WordCamps around the world. And over the past several years, Chris has been a trusted advisor to nearly every major WordPress hosting company in the industry. So you can bet Nexcess’s WordPress solution stands to benefit from his considerable expertise, and succeed where others have not.

Nexcess is solving problems other hosts aren’t willing to tackle.

Nexcess’s Managed WordPress product offers customer service, security, and speed — like everyone else. But what sets them apart are the problems they’re focused on solving:

  • Updating all your plugins for you automatically,
  • Resizing and optimizing your uploaded images automatically,
  • Making WooCommerce-powered online stores run faster and take fewer resources, and
  • Syncing your staging and production environments — while you edit both of them.
  • Auto-scaling your server to handle sudden spikes in traffic – at no additional charge!

These aren’t technical problems, they’re business problems.

But no other managed WordPress host has offered solutions to these fundamental problems… until now. Nexcess is finally building a business-oriented WordPress solution for mission-critical sites.

This is why we recently migrated this site to Nexcess. And if you run an online business, you should consider them as well.

Here are 8 Reasons You Should Check Out Nexcess

1. Some of the fastest page load times we’ve seen!

First impressions are everything. And not just for visitors to your site. Page load times are now a factor in where your site ranks in Google search results. Faster sites will show up higher in search results. Nexcess owns their own data center, which can’t be said of many other WordPress hosts. They use SSD storage, and their server stack is purpose-built for the unique demands of WordPress. Which means your site will load faster than ever.

As a test, I recently migrated my personal blog to Nexcess. It was previously hosted on one of the most well-known managed WordPress hosting companies around.

Before migrating to Nexcess, my homepage took more than 5 seconds to load (screenshot). After migrating the site to Nexcess, I was astonished to see the same page load a whopping 4 seconds faster! (screenshot)

That’s without changing anything else! Same theme, same plugins. Significantly faster page load times. Instantly.

2. Free SSL for every site. No action required.

Google penalizes any website that doesn’t use HTTPS. If your site is served over HTTPS, you’ll enjoy higher search engine rankings.

In response, every site on Nexcess automatically gets a free SSL certificate. You don’t need to ask for it. You don’t have to purchase an expensive SSL certificate. It’s just included. With every website. Automatically. What could be easier?

3. Automatic Plugin Updates

Nexcess automatically monitors your website for updates — not just to the WordPress core software, but also for any plugin you’ve installed. Whenever a plugin is updated, they take several visual snapshots of your site (see example), then update the plugin automatically. They take another set of snapshots and then visually compare the two. If anything changes, the update is automatically rolled back and you’ll receive a notification email, inviting you to review the changes for yourself.

Finally. Automatic updates to your WordPress plugins — complete with peace of mind.

4. Automatic image compression.

Look, your site will load more quickly if you don’t include full-size images in your blog posts and pages. But today’s digital cameras shoot very, very large images. If you upload those images to your WordPress site without first editing them, you could potentially have several 3-5 MB images included in your blog post. And that will impact your page load times negatively.

So Nexcess automatically compresses those images, shrinking the file size dramatically, and improving your page load times. So if you forget to crop and resize your images before uploading them, Nexcess has your back.

Just look at how much space the bulk image optimization tool saved my site:

Nexcess Bulk Image Optimization
Does your managed WordPress host automatically optimized your uploaded images?

5. No surprise charges for overages!

Some hosts charge you for every page view — even if it comes from bots or unwanted traffic! We know this because it happened to this site. We became the targets of a Russian bot attack, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unwanted, illegitimate hits to our website.

As a result, the hosting company we were using at the time automatically charged us hundreds of dollars more — without any notice to us whatsoever. They wanted to use those inflated traffic numbers to charge us for overages and force us to upgrade to a much more expensive plan.

What if this happens to your site? Or what if your site gets mentioned on Reddit? Why should you be penalized if your site becomes temporarily popular?

Nexcess doesn’t charge based on pageviews. They don’t use your traffic as a way to charge more. The price is the price. Every single month. Isn’t that what you expect from a hosting partner?

6. Premium tools for managing ALL your WordPress sites!

Do you manage more than one WordPress site? Then you’ll love iThemes Sync Pro. It enables you to monitor all your WordPress sites at a glance, and even generate reports for WordPress maintenance.

You can limit what your clients see in their WordPress dashboard, monitor your site’s uptime, downtime and performance, and even track and view SEO or Google Analytics data.

Best of all, you get all the Pro features of this powerful administration tool (normally $130/year) with your Nexcess hosting account. That’s right. It’s included with every Nexcess hosting account.

iThemes Sync Pro

7. Site Stencils so you can rapidly spin up new WordPress sites.

If you build new sites often, you’ll love Site Stencils. This innovate feature lets you set up a basic WordPress install with all your favorite themes and plugins, and then save it as a “stencil” — a snapshot you can use to spin up new sites quickly.

Imagine the time this can save you as a freelancer, rather than installing and configuring the same core themes and plugins every single time?

8. Sales Performance Monitoring for your WooCommerce store.

If you run a WooCommerce store, how do you know if your site suddenly begins to load slowly? What about if your payment gateway stops working and purchases have slowed? If you’re only being notified when your store is completely down, you’re missing critical alerts when your store’s performance is costing you sales.

Nexcess’ Sales Performance Monitor will track your sales, measuring them against a predictive model that’s based on your site’s historical performance on a daily and weekly basis. When your store’s sales are slowing down or disappearing in a way that appears abnormal to your specific store’s trends, the monitor will send an alert to the WooCommerce inbox and emails will be sent to the store’s Admin(s).

All this, plus the features you’ve come to expect:

  • WordPress already pre-installed.
  • Automatic nightly backups for peace of mind.
  • Automatic updates, ensuring your site is always up to date.
  • 24/7 security monitoring for malware or attempts to hack your site.
  • Server stacks that are optimized for hosting WordPress sites… fast!
  • Staging servers to make changes to your site offline, without affecting your live site.
  • Developer tools like phpMyAdmin, SSL, SFTP, and command line.
  • Heroic support from people who love WordPress — not just fumbling through a script.

We don’t want you to ever have to call support, but if you do, you’ll love them.” — Chris Lema, Nexcess

Migrate your Site to Nexcess for FREE!

Want to move your existing site to Nexcess? Simply ask for a free migration and they’ll handle it for you!

Do you want a hosting company or a partner you can trust to manage your site?

Nexcess is not for every site owner. Nexcess is for people whose website is their business. It’s for people who need enterprise-level features — at more affordable prices.

Simply put, if you rely on your website to earn money, Nexcess is your best choice. It’s designed specifically to serve business owners, agencies, and freelancers who run mission-critical sites. And no other WordPress host is innovating and adding new features for WordPress site owners as rapidly as Nexcess.

Shawn Hesketh on Nexcess

Get 50% OFF your first 3 months of managed WordPress hosting from Nexcess with coupon code: WP101-50

Check Out Nexcess

StudioPress Sites: Hosting + Themes Included

The all-new StudioPress Sites is more than just WordPress themes. And it’s more than managed WordPress hosting. It bundles everything you need to run a successful website:

  • Blazing Fast WordPress Hosting
  • 20 Mobile-Optimized Themes
  • Premium Plugins Included
  • Advanced SEO Included
  • 24/7 Security Monitoring
  • Maintenance and More
  • All-in-one Solution!

We’re ridiculously excited to tell you about StudioPress Sites, the latest offering from the Rainmaker Digital team. This new, hybrid product was purpose-built for bloggers and podcasters, and anyone who wants to sell physical products, digital downloads, or even full-blown memberships!

“WordPress is free,” they said. Sound familiar?

But then, after you download WordPress, you’ll quickly realize that you also need a host — preferably a managed WordPress host. And that can cost anywhere from $3.99 to $29.00 per month. But you’re just getting started…

…because you’ll also want your site to look unique — to better represent your personal brand. And that requires searching through thousands of themes. How do you know where to begin? Worse still, maybe you bought a gorgeous premium WordPress theme — only to discover that it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to make your site look like the demo. And premium themes aren’t cheap. You’ll pay anywhere from $39 to $79 for a decent WordPress theme. But it doesn’t stop there.

Once you’ve got WordPress installed and your new theme activated, you may also need to add features to your site beyond what WordPress provides out of the box. There are the basics like social sharing buttons, contact and opt-in forms. But you may also want to sell products on your site. Or create a membership with protected content for paying members only. What then? To add each new feature, you have to purchase a plugin. And how do you know which one is the best?

Finally, where do you turn when you need help setting up all of these moving pieces? If it’s a hosting problem, you’ll need to reach out to that support team. But if your issue is with one of the premium themes or plugins you’ve purchased, well, they’ll redirect you to the support team for each individual product. Or, you could hire a monthly maintenance service to handle updates and resolve bugs for you. But that costs even more.

When the smoke clears, you can easily find yourself spending $1,500 or more per year on what was supposed to be a “free” WordPress site!

Thankfully, there’s a better way.

With StudioPress Sites, all of those moving parts are a thing of the past. It’s the first hybrid solution that gives you the ease of a website builder with the flexibility of WordPress. Everything’s included!

Here’s what’s included in every StudioPress Site:

Showcase Theme1. The Genesis Framework — Your new StudioPress Site is powered by Genesis, which includes optimized code for search engines, airtight security, instant updates, customizable widgets and layouts, and a massive community of developers you can turn to when you need customizing your site. Genesis is the framework that makes WordPress easier. So it’s no wonder it already powers more than 500,000 WordPress sites.

2. 20 Mobile-Optimized Designs — No more scouring hundreds of cheap, poorly-coded WordPress themes with little or no support. You want a gorgeous, professional website design — without having to pay a fortune. StudioPress Sites include 20 mobile optimized, modern HTML5 designs from which you can choose. Plus, you can personalize any of the included themes by tweaking the CSS. Or if you prefer, you can even use a completely custom Genesis child theme!

3. Fast-Loading WordPress-Specific Cloud Hosting — Because managed hosting is also included, your StudioPress Site is already optimized to make WordPress load as fast as possible. You already know that site speed and page load times are important. Google ranks sites in their search results based (in part) by how fast they load. So why would you want your site hosted on a shared web server that’s also hosting hundreds of bloated WordPress websites? Even better, your site will never crash just because you succeed in getting more traffic!

4. No Upcharges for Bandwidth, Storage, CPUs, or RAM — Not only will you enjoy superior speed and performance with a StudioPress Site, you’ll also avoid the hassle of self-hosted WordPress, like surprise expenses for bandwidth up-charges, storage, CPUs, and RAM. Your StudioPress Site will not only remain solid during those surprise traffic spikes, you also won’t pay extra simply because your site is enjoying some well-earned higher traffic.

5. Advanced SEO Functionality — The Genesis Framework is already optimized for SEO, which is why it’s become the industry standard among WordPress developers. But StudioPress Sites takes this even further, with support for the new Google AMP, advanced schema control, XML sitemap generation, robots.txt generation, asynchronous JavaScript loading, enhanced Open Graph output, breadcrumb title control, and more.

6. Automatic Updates — Let’s face it. Getting hacked is an ordeal. And the easiest point of entry for hackers is through outdated themes, plugins, or old versions of WordPress. Now, you can spend $79/month or more for an outside service to keep your site updated and safe. BUT, StudioPress Sites takes care of WordPress and Genesis updates for you at no extra charge! That’s peace of mind.

7.24/7 Security Monitoring — Beyond the security features that are already built into Genesis, and the included automatic updates and maintenance, StudioPress Sites also provides 24/7 continuous security monitoring, scanning for malware, distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, and more.

8.One-Click Install of Premium Plugins — No more worrying about which plugins are trustworthy! StudioPress Sites provides one-click installs for the new functions you need for your site. Choose from a growing library of carefully-vetted, hand-picked plugins like: WooCommerce, Design Palette Pro, Beaver Builder Lite, OptinMonster, AffiliateWP, Soliloquy Lite, Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro, Ninja Forms, WPForms Lite, and more to come!

9.World-Class Support from Friendly Experts Who Love WordPress — First of all, StudioPress Sites has been meticulously designed from the ground up for drop-dead simple ease-of-use. That means less confusion for you. But, when something does go wrong, their friendly support team is standing by 24/7 to help you get back on track. Best of all, you won’t have to reach out to separate teams for hosting, theme, or plugin support. One point of contact for support. That’s a welcome change!

This post contains affiliate links. But remember, we only recommend products we use and think you’ll find valuable.

Is StudioPress Sites right for you?

If you’re overwhelmed by the climbing costs of running a WordPress website, or are tired of spending hours installing WordPress, finding themes and plugins via trial-and-error, and getting little to no support… a StudioPress Site might be the perfect solution for you.

StudioPress Sites are ideal for busy entrepreneurs who want to focus on running their business — not their website.

Check out StudioPress Sites for yourself…
Check Out StudioPress Sites

Why Do You Need a WordPress.org Site Over a Free WordPress.com Site?

You’ve decided after a great deal of research and recommendations from friends that you’re going to use WordPress to power your personal website. So you head over to WordPress.com, excited at the possibilities.

As you begin going through the setup process, you start noticing tiny details that you didn’t notice before. For example, your site exists at mysite.wordpress.com rather than the mysite.com domain you bought. You may also learn that in order to use that domain, you’ll need to pay WordPress $8.25 month on top of the domain name costs. Then, once your site is running, you notice that you can’t install plugins or customize your theme.

What is going on?

In this article, we’re going to cover the key differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. We’re also going to show you why WordPress.org is the best choice for setting up your WordPress website.

How is WordPress.org Different from WordPress.com?

If you’re looking to build your own WordPress website, the most important difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com is the ability to customize almost anything. WordPress.org lets you do it, WordPress.com does not. That’s it.

What is WordPress.org?

WordPress.org is home to the original, customizable content management system (CMS) itself, commonly referred to as “self-hosted WordPress”. WordPress.org is where you go to actually download the WordPress files to use on your site. When people refer to having created their site “using WordPress”, they are usually referring to WordPress.org.

Since the WordPress CMS exists on your own server, you are free to customize it as much as you want. You are also responsible for installing and hosting the WordPress platform on your own server, that you pay for. This includes installing any theme you want (free or paid themes are available), installing any plugin you want (free or paid options as well), and customizing any code.

What is WordPress.com?

WordPress.com exists on WordPress.com and nowhere else. You do not control the server or hosting, which is why you cannot customize a WordPress.com site beyond choosing from a selection of free themes.

This is also the reason why default WordPress.com sites contain advertising and exist on what is known as a “subdomain”. A subdomain is effectively a part of a primary domain. For example, mysite.wordpress.com is a subdomain of the primary domain, wordpress.com.

WordPress.com does offer a WordPress.com Premium package that starts at $8.25/month. It includes some features that make it somewhat more customizable, but nowhere near the level of a self-hosted WordPress.org site.

Why WordPress.org Over WordPress.com?

There are several reasons why we strongly advocate hosting your own WordPress website from WordPress.org over a WordPress.com blog:

1. Complete Theme & Plugin Control

Select and customize any WordPress themes and plugins you like. You can install free themes and plugins or use paid premium themes and plugins. Then you are free to modify and customize those themes and plugins in any way you like.

With WordPress.com you are limited to only a select set of free WordPress themes. You are not allowed to modify any fonts, colors, styles, or layouts on your site.

Once you have your self-hosted site set up, we highly recommend taking advantage of these premium WordPress theme creators:

  • Elegant Themes — 87 beautiful, premium WordPress themes for only $69!
  • ThemeForest — The largest selection of premium WordPress themes!
  • The Genesis Framework — The first and most popular theme platform for WordPress.
  • WooThemes — One of the largest selections of professional WordPress themes.
  • Headway Themes — Drag and drop theme builder for WordPress.
  • Array — 16 of the most gorgeous, best-designed WordPress themes for just $89!

2. Marketing Control

Whether you plan to launch an ecommerce site or a simple blog, you are going to want to market yourself somehow to grow an audience, traffic, or customer base.

Marketing a website can mean many things, including sign-up forms to get people to subscribe to your blog posts or newsletter or account creation capabilities to allow people to purchase your products.

With a self-hosted site, all of these options are available to you via theme features and plugins. With a free WordPress.com website, your options are extremely limited, mostly to a small blog subscription or contact form.

3. Size & Speed

By hosting your own WordPress site, you can select the best web hosting for you. This means you can choose how much space you want to purchase for your site, how fast your server will be (site speed is vital for SEO), how you want to handle your email, and how secure your website will be.

An additional benefit is being able to set up WordPress managed hosting. Managed hosting provides servers built for WordPress sites, 24/7 security, updates your version of WordPress and your plugins, backs up your site automatically so nothing is ever lost, and repairs problems if they ever arise.

We recommend the following WordPress managed hosting providers:

  • EasyWP — The easiest and most affordable managed WordPress hosting we’ve ever seen. New to WordPress? Start here!
  • Kinsta — The first managed WordPress host to be exclusively powered by Google Cloud Platform.
  • Pressable — World-class managed WordPress hosting provider built on the same data network as WordPress.com and WordPress VIP.
  • Nexcess — perfect for business and ecommerce sites with unique performance monitoring and automatic plugin updates with visual comparison.
  • WP Engine — Great for business and ecommerce websites that need fast speed, scalability, and security.
  • WP Engine — We trust Cloudways to host this site, because they provide managed cloud hosting, with your choice of underlying hardware and more control over your server, when you’re ready to step up your game.

4. SEO

As we mentioned earlier, using WordPress.com’s free site option means your site is going to be on a subdomain like mysite.wordpress.com rather than a primary domain you own such as mysite.com.

Data shows that subdomains and free website platforms do not perform as well as primary domains. Think about the last time you saw a subdomain ranking on a search engine for any keyword as opposed to a primary domain? While having a free site as a subdomain on the wordpress.com network does drive traffic to a site thanks to the exposure the wordpress.com domain brings, it is rare when a subdomain out-ranks a primary domain website.

Additionally, a self-hosted website can be fully customized. Meaning you can optimize every single page on your site to make it more attractive to search engines for the keywords you want to rank for. With a free WordPress.com website, you are not able to customize at that level.

5. Make Money From Your Site

Free WordPress.com sites do not allow you to place any advertising on your website until you reach 25,000 pageviews per month. Even then, you are limited to using the WordPress Ad Control feature, which has few options and allows for little control of the advertising shown on your site.

With a self-hosted site you can advertise in any way you wish. You can place Google AdSense ads or any other type of text-based, link-based, or display advertising anywhere you like. The ability to implement this type of advertising can offset hosting and domain costs, making your website more profitable.

Reminders When Choosing to Self-Host

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when deciding to self-host your website:

  1. Paying for your site: Domain costs, web hosting, email, third-party marketing costs, etc. All of these services are generally very affordable, but keep in mind that they can add up. If you are planning to self-host, make sure you have the funds necessary or have a plan to monetize your website through selling products, services, or through advertising.
  2. Development may be needed: Though you can choose from many amazing themes and plugins on a self-hosted WordPress site, customization is almost always needed. If you are not comfortable working with code like PHP or CSS, you may need to consider budgeting for a WordPress developer to help take your site to the level you are aiming for.

Wrap Up

We hope this post has shown you why a self-hosted WordPress.org site is preferable over the free WordPress.com version. Our entire WordPress 101 course is based on self-hosted WordPress.org sites, after all.

And if you’re interested in creating your own WordPress website, you might also check out this list of the best WordPress training courses.

3 Must-Have Image Plugins for Your WordPress Site

Images are a critical part of your website, no matter what platform you use. A good website demands high-quality, relevant images be delivered to your visitors quickly and easily. Unfortunately, high-quality images take up a lot of server space, can often increase website loading times, and are sometimes difficult to present in the format you want.

Out of the box, WordPress makes it easy to manage images for your website, but there is still room for improvement.

In this post, we’re going to cover three image plugins that tackle the most common issues and requests associated with WordPress and image management. Basically, these plugins can make your WordPress website look and perform a whole lot better.

Special Note: These plugins are all easy to install and simple to use, but if you’re looking for basic information on working with images in pages or posts, check out Part 9 of our WP101 video series, “Adding Images”.

envira gallery logoEnvira Gallery Lite (Free)

Envira Gallery Lite is the free version of the Envira Gallery premium plugin. The premium version has more features and functionality, but for a basic blog or photography website the free version of Envira Gallery provides all the features you need to easily create beautiful, responsive image galleries.

Per the plugin’s page on WordPress.com, Envira Gallery and Envira Gallery Lite have been downloaded over 300,000+ times, making them one of the most popular image gallery plugins available.

Plugin Features

  • Drag and drop functionality
  • Lightbox image presentation
  • Fast loading and optimized for SEO
  • Select number of columns
  • Pagination
  • Image proofing

Why We Like It

  • envira lightbox example

    Envira Gallery’s Lightbox feature in action.

    Lightbox Features: Envira image galleries all come complete with Lightbox functionality, which makes for a much more smooth, pleasing image experience. With Lightbox, visitors can click on your images to see them in a larger format.

  • Easy To Use: Once you’ve installed the plugin (see Part 17 of our WP101 video series to learn how to install plugins) you simply go to “Add New”. Then you upload or drag/drop your photos in, adjust the gallery and Lightbox settings, and your gallery is created.envira gallery main menuThen head over to your page or post and click on the new “Add Gallery” button. Select the gallery you want to add, and you’re done!envira gallery add
  • More Options Than Default WordPress Gallery Functionality: The default image functionality in WordPress allows you to insert a gallery into pages or posts, but Envira Gallery provides you with more customization options (such as column and row sizing) and insures that your images are mobile-friendly and have Lightbox features.

wp smush logoWP Smush (Free)

Images take up a lot of space on a webserver and can slow down your site’s performance severely. WP Smush is a free plugin that reduces (or “smushes”) image file sizes through compression and improves your website’s load time, a major SEO performance factor.

According to the plugin page, WP Smush has been downloaded over 400,000+ times, making it the most popular image compression plugin available.

Plugin Features

  • Optimize your images using advanced lossless compression techniques.
  • Set maximum width and height and large images will automatically scale before being added to your media library.
  • Auto-smush your attachments on upload.
  • Manually smush your attachments individually in the media library, or in bulk 50 attachments at a time.

Why We Like It

  • Very Easy To Use: Once the plugin is installed, you really only need to push the “Bulk Smush Now” button in order to compress all of your images. The default settings are correct for nearly all websites.wp smush it interface
  • No Loss In Image Quality: The plugin compresses your image sizes without reducing the image quality, causing pixelation, or cropping your images.

responsive lightbox logoResponsive Lightbox (Free)

Responsive Lightbox allows you to add mobile-friendly Lightbox functionality to all images on your site, making for an improved image experience for visitors to your site on both desktop and mobile devices.

The plugin has over 200,000+ downloads, making it one of the most popular Lightbox plugins out there.

Plugin Features

  • Automatically add lightbox to WordPress image galleries.
  • Automatically add lightbox to WordPress image links.
  • Automatically add lightbox to WordPress video links (YouTube, Vimeo).
  • WooCommerce product gallery support.
  • Option to set gallery images title from image title, caption, alt or description.
  • Option to conditionally load scripts and styles only on pages that have images or galleries in post content.

Why We Like It

Loads Of Options: Responsive Lightbox has more options than any other Lightbox plugin available, particularly the ability to add Lightbox functionality to links and the option to enable the Lightbox on only certain pages.

Adds Lightbox To All Images: By default, WordPress images do not have Lightbox features. If you use Envira Gallery Lite, Lightbox features are enabled for images in galleries only. With Responsive Lightbox, you can add Lightbox features to every image on your site, whether in a gallery or not.

Wrap Up

Images have always been a challenging part of running a website, but WordPress and the community at-large are always working to improve the platform in any way they can. We hope you try out these image plugins and see improvements in the performance and use of your WordPress site.

How to Use the New MonsterInsights Plugin for Google Analytics (Part 2 of 2: The Dashboard)

We’ve covered how to add Google Analytics tracking to your WordPress website. Then in our last post we covered how to configure the MonsterInsights plugin (Formerly Google Analytics by Yoast) on your WordPress website. Now we’re moving right along into Part 2 of our two-part MonsterInsights series. In this post we are going to show you the Dashboard and Reports features from the free version of this great plugin.

The MonsterInsights Dashboard

The beauty of the MonsterInsights plugin is it’s ability to pull the most relevant metrics from Google Analtyics directly into your WordPress admin area. This means you can view your website’s data without having to login to Google Analytics separately. Let’s take a look at what the MonsterInsights Dashboard offers.

monsterinsights question mark explanationsTIP: As we mentioned in our last post, if you are ever looking for more information on a feature or a metric, simply click on the question mark symbol next to each area of the plugin.

The Overview Tab

The Overview tab is where you will start when you first go to the Dashboard. Here you will find two very straightforward metrics: Sessions and Bounce Rate.

monsterinsights dashboard overviewSessions: A Session is a group of interactions that take place on your website. This metric used to be referred to as a “Visit” in Google Analytics.  A single session can contain multiple pageviews, multiple clicks, and even multiple conversions or purchases.

Think of it as a bigger picture or “forest” metric, rather than a “tree” metric. Every interaction a visitor has with your website takes place within their single session. This is why there are more pageviews than there are sessions when you are looking at analytics data for a website.

The session metric is great for getting a general sense of how much traffic your website is receiving and is usually the best place to start with analytics.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is a percentage measurement of how many times a user viewed only a single page (i.e. the first page they landed on) before leaving the site entirely.

For example, if a visitor finds your website via Google, clicks on your search result, lands on your homepage, and then leaves to go back to Google, that would count as a bounce. Depending on how you have your tracking set up, the length of time the visitor spends on that single page does not matter. Unless they visit a second page on your site, it will count as a bounce.

Bounce rate is a great metric to help you determine if visitors like the experience and content of the first page they land on. While the metric is somewhat useless unless combined with the actual pages and the source of your visitors, it is a good barometer for the overall usability and content quality of your website.

For example, if you know that your homepage has a high bounce rate for visitors that came from a Yellow Pages listing on YP.com, you may want to take a look and see what content or information your homepage may be missing. Perhaps you are missing a phone number or other contact information. Perhaps you are not describing your services clearly enough.

Also keep in mind that, depending on what an individual page is about, a high bounce rate might not be a bad thing. For example, say your “Contact Info” page has a high bounce rate. If that page contains strictly contact information (address, a map, phone/fax number, email, etc.,) then it is likely visitors are landing on the page, getting exactly the information they want, and then bouncing off the site, which is a positive.

TIP: As a general rule, a bad bounce rate is 75% and above, a good bounce rate is 50-75%, and anything below 50% means you are doing well.

The Reports Tab

monsterinsights select a dimensionThe reports tab offers you three different kinds of traffic dimensions: Traffic Sources, Popular Pages, and Countries. Each one is accessed via the “Select a dimension” dropdown.

TIP: When it comes Google Analytics, remember that a “Dimension” often refers to a name, while a “Metric” refers to a numerical value. For example, if your website has had 100 Sessions from Search Engines, “Sessions” would be the metric, and “Search Engines” would be the dimension.

Traffic Sources Report

The “Traffic Sources” report shows you the various traffic sources for your site and their respective session counts. This data is useful because it is important to know what source is driving the most traffic to your site.

You are likely to see search engines at the top of this list, simply because they are likely including your website in search results for particular keyword searches, thus driving traffic to your site.

monsterinsights traffic sources reportOther sources might include websites that have a link to your site on one of their pages. If you see a website you don’t recognize, try looking it up to see if it seems like a legitimate website and link. Often spammers will create links to websites that can skew your traffic data.

If you begin to see a lot of these spammy or unrecognizable sites driving traffic to your site, you may want to consider filtering their data out in Google Analytics. You can learn about how to set up a filter here, though we recommend you get in touch with someone familiar with Google Analytics.

Below is an explanation of the Traffic Sources report features:

  1. In the screenshot you can see that Google drove 67 sessions to the website last month.
  2. You can expand the list to show more rows.
  3. You can also search for a traffic source if you are looking for one in particular.

monsterinsights popular pages reportPopular Pages Report

The “Popular Pages” report shows you just that. The most popular pages on your website based on number of sessions.

The URL of each page is shown and you can search and sort in exactly the same way as the Traffic Sources report.

This data is useful because it shows you which content on your website performs strongest. If you begin to notice certain pages focused on particular topics driving a majority of your traffic, you may want to consider creating similar or related content.

Countries Report

This report is extremely straightforward. It provides you with the countries that drove traffic to your website.

Honestly, this data is not very actionable. However you can take note of any countries you do not want to receive traffic from and then work to block that country’s traffic using an IP blocker.

Wrap Up

The current reporting options in MonsterInsights are fairly limited at the moment, though the data provided is enough to give you a sense of how your site is performing overall. As we mentioned in previous posts, MonsterInsights was formerly known as Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast but was recently acquired by Syed Balkhi, creator of the OptinMonster and WPForms WordPress plugins.

Thanks to that acquisition, we are looking forward to some added functionality and options in the MonsterInsights plugin in the near future. Of course, if you would like to experience more features from the plugin right now, consider purchasing the Pro version, which includes several additional features to help you monitor your website’s performance.

Happy Tracking!

How to Use the New MonsterInsights Plugin for Google Analytics (Part 1 of 2)

In our previous article, “How to Add Google Analytics on your WordPress Site,” we recommended the new MonsterInsights plugin (formerly known as Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast). In this first of a two-part series, we’re going to take a deeper dive into the functionality of MonsterInsights and show you what this amazing plugin offers and how it can make your website tracking easier.

What Is MonsterInsights?

MonsterInsights is a plugin that allows you to easily add, customize, and manage the Google Analytics website tracking services on your WordPress site. In a nutshell, it makes tracking your website with Google Analytics simpler.

The plugin was originally created by Yoast, the creator of the WordPress SEO plugin, widely regarded as the best WordPress SEO plugin available. The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin by Yoast was recently acquired by Syed Balkhi — creator of the brilliant OptinMonster and WPForms WordPress plugins — and renamed “MonsterInsights”.

There are two versions of the MonsterInsights plugin: Free and Pro.

The free version allows you to install Google Analytics easily, track all the data you need on a basic website, and includes the following features:

  • Simple installation
  • Turn on/off different types of tracking with a single click.
  • Visitor metric dashboards and reports within your WordPress admin.
  • Track outbound links or downloads on your site.
  • Anonymize IPs so traffic from countries with stricter privacy regulations can be tracked.

The Pro version includes all of the above, plus these additional features:

  • Popular post/page tracking.
  • Track 404 error pages on your site.
  • Track custom dimensions like pageviews per author.
  • AdSense tracking.
  • Create custom reports.

Though the free version of the plugin more than fits the bill for the majority of WordPress site owners, consider the Pro version if you are looking for more customizable reporting data from within your WordPress dashboard.

There is even an eCommerce Addon for eCommerce website owners that connects with WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads.

Installing the MonsterInsights Plugin

In our last post we covered how to create a Google Analytics account and install Analytics onto your site via the MonsterInsights plugin. In that post we covered two methods to connect your Google Analytics account to the plugin. The first method is to “authenticate” your Google account within the plugin. The other method is to manually copy and paste your Google Analytics user account number into a field within the plugin.

We recommend that you use the first option, “Authenticate with your Google account”. By connecting your account this way, you will be able to access the reports and dashboards features of the plugin.

monsterinsights plugin authenticate not manual

Configuring MonsterInsights Settings

Once you have the plugin installed and your Google Analytics account authenticated, it’s time to configure the plugin for what you want to track. This is done in the “Settings” section.

monsterinsights settings

We’re going to run you through the main settings to get you set up at a basic level within the free version of the plugin.

General Settings

The general settings are where you can customize the functionality of the plugin. This is where you determine which Google Analytics profile to track and how you want it to track traffic to your website.

TIP: You can hover over the question mark icon next to any setting in the plugin to view an explanation of that setting’s functionality.

monsterinsights question mark explanations

 

1. First you need to tell the plugin which of your Google Analytics profiles should be connected. You may have multiple profiles within your single Google Analytics account, so the plugin needs to be sure which one to pull data from.

Once in the General Settings tab, simply use the dropdown and select the appropriate profile you would like to connect.

monsterinsights choose ga profile

Now let’s configure some settings.

monsterinsights general settings2. Track Outbound Click and Downloads: This tracking option will allow analytics to track clicks and downloads on your site as events. Essentially, if you check this box, you will be able to see what and how many times links on your site were clicked, along with any downloads of PDFs, images, or other documents that can be accessed via a link. You can find this data under Behavior >> Events in your Google Analytics account:

3. Allow Tracking of Anonymous Data: This is not really a tracking option, but rather an option that will allow the plugin to track the themes and plugins you use in order to provide a better user experience. We recommend you check this box.

4. Anonymize IPs: As mentioned above, checking this box will allow Google Analytics to track data from users in countries where privacy restrictions may not allow for data tracking. We recommend you check this box.

5. Ignore Users: This option allows you to add in user types so that they are not tracked when logged in and visiting the site. By default, “Administrator” and “Editor” are included. This option helps you get clean analytics data. After all, you don’t want all the time you or your editors and staff spend on the site to be counted since have to be on the site. We recommend leaving the default settings as is, but some may want to add in “Author” or “Contributor” if they want to further clean their data.

6. Disable Analytics Dashboard: This will turn off the dashboard functionality of the plugin and stop the plugin from showing you the latest analytics data pulled. You can still access all of your data by logging into Google Analytics, but we recommend you leave this box unchecked. A great feature of this plugin is that you can see your website traffic data immediately after logging into your site, and we think you should use it.

Universal Settings

There are two types of Google Analytics tracking: Universal and Asynchronous. They both refer to the type of tracking code implemented on your site. Universal Analytics is the latest iteration of analytics and it provides you with the option to gather more data about visitors to your site. We always recommend that you use Universal Analytics over the older Asychronous version.

monsterinsights universal analytics1. Enable Universal Tracking: This turns on Universal Analytics tracking and we recommend you check this box.

2. Enable Demographics and Interests Reports for Remarketing and Advertising: By checking this box Analytics will be able to pull demographic and interest-related information about your website visitors to give you a better idea about your audience. This information can be used to fuel new content ideas. MonsterInsights has a great explanatory document about how to first enable the Demographics and Interest Reports within the Google Analytics interface.

3. Enhanced Link Attribution: Checking this box will enable analytics to tag your pages and pull enhanced link-tracking information. Some of this enhanced information includes:

  • See separate information for multiple links on a page that all have the same destination. For example, if there are two links on the same page that both lead to the Contact Us page, then you see separate click information for each link.
  • See when one page element has multiple destinations. For example, a Search button on your page is likely to lead to multiple destinations.
  • Track buttons, menus, and actions driven by javascript.

Advanced Settings

There are several advanced tracking options you can implement with MonsterInsights. Many of these options will likely not be necessary if you are running a straightforward WordPress site, so we are only going to cover the settings you need to know about. You can find additional documentation on these advanced settings in the “Docs” section of MonsterInsights located here.

monsterinsights advanced settings1. Track Downloads As: This setting allows you to specify how a download on your website is tracked. As mentioned earlier, downloads could be any links to PDFs, .doc files, or even images where clicking on the link results in the download of a file. We recommend leaving this setting as is, otherwise your data may be skewed. If you would like to track these downloads as goals in Google Analytics, we recommend you create a new goal and use “Event” as the goal type rather than changing any settings here.

2. Extensions of Files To Track As Downloads: This is where you can specify the types of files that will count as downloads. Again, we recommend you leave this setting as is since pretty much every major file type that can be downloaded on a site is included.

3. Track Full URL of Outbound Clicks or Just The Domain: This setting controls how links to other sites from your site are tracked. For example, if you have a link to a Wikipedia page in one of your blog posts, Google Analytics can show you how many times that link was clicked and from what page.

By default, Analytics will only track the domain (wikipedia.org), but if you change this setting to “Full links” then you will be able to see the full URL of the outbound link.

In Google Analytics, you can find this data by going to Behavior >> Site Content >> Content Drilldown. For more information on how to dig deeper into this data, Yoast has an excellent guide here.

Wrap Up and Part 2

Don’t be intimidated by some of the configuration settings in the new MonsterInsights plugin. The plugin is designed to be simple to set up with default settings that cover pretty much everything a basic WordPress website would need.

In Part 2 of our MonsterInsights series, we’ll cover the Dashboard and show you how to interpret the data it provides and how to pull specific metrics and dimension data to give you more insight into your website’s performance.

Stay tuned, and happy tracking!

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