Updating WordPress Plugins And Themes The Right Way

So you’re managing a WordPress website yourself, and the plugin and theme update notifications are starting to pile up. It’s time to update, but what should you do?

You may have discovered through previous misadventures that updating the software on your site doesn’t always go well. There can be errors in the update process, or the newer version of a plugin might be buggy and cause problems. The solution to this potential issue is to understand how to back up and delete plugins from the WordPress file system.

Your WordPress themes and plugins are all represented by folders containing files inside your site. Inside your site, you have the wp-content folder, and inside that are the themes and plugins folders. Each theme and plugin is isolated to its own folder.

When you update a theme or a plugin, WordPress downloads the new files and overwrites the contents of that plugin or theme’s existing folder.

Before you do a group of plugin and theme updates, it’s best to do a backup. This way, if your update fails or causes a problem, you can restore from your backed up version of the plugin or theme.

Usually, your web hosting company will offer a backup option, or you can use an external plugin, but those each all have their own particular processes so it’s good to know how to do a basic, manual file backup in case any additional tools aren’t working or are hard to use.

The simplest way to back up a plugin or theme is to locate the folder in the file manager of your web host. Right-click on the folder and select ‘compress’ or ‘zip’ (depending on the file manager) Alternately you might need to select the file then choose ‘compress’ or ‘zip’ from the top menu.

This will create a zip file of that plugin folder. You can then download that zip. When you are done, you can delete the zip from the server to save space.

You can do this with each plugin individually or with the entire plugin folder, depending on what you are planning on updating. The same can be done with themes.

Then you can go ahead and do your updates from the WordPress dashboard. If something goes horribly wrong, access the file manager and delete the folder containing the plugin or theme you suspect is causing the issue.

From there you can upload the zip of the previous version of the plugin to go back to how things were before. Choose the ‘uncompress’ option on your zip once it is uploaded to your site, and the old folder will be restored!

Alternately, if you are stuck and can’t update the plugin without issue, ignore the zip entirely, leave the folder deleted, and assuming you got your site back to a functioning state (just without the problem plugin), go to the dashboard and re-install the plugin from scratch. If it’s a plugin that came with a theme, use the theme installer. If it’s a plugin you purchased or got from the plugin repository, go through the same steps you went through as when you originally installed the plugin.

The same exact process applies to themes as well as plugins – but themes are located in the wp-content/themes/ folder instead.

If you are struggling to keep your website updated then consider the WordPress maintenance and updates package from m2. There are several options to choose from to keep your core files and plugins updated.

5 ways to save money when setting up a new website

When it comes to designing and building a new website, there are a number of things one can do to keep the costs down. As a web design agency, we are going to let you in on a few secrets that will cut $1000’s off your next website design project. The majority of the top 5 factors are all based around saving time, because as the saying goes, time is money, and when engaging a professional web design company to build a website, the hourly rates can often be quite expensive. So do yourself a favour and take note of these handy tips to save yourself some dollars.

Plan out your website

The more information you can provide your web designer the better. Spend a good chunk of time initially working out a solid project plan. Create a sitemap of the pages you require and itemise out a list of required features and “desirables”. Be sure to highlight any features that may require integration with 3^rd party systems. Think of your website project much like building a house, a builder will want to know how big the house is, how many rooms and features are required, the same applies for a website except rooms can be swapped for pages. Sketching up some rough mockups or even just examples of sites you like will really speed up the initial discovery and planning stage for the design team.

Organise your contact

One of the biggest factors in causing delays in a website project is the lack of content. As a web design agency, we are forever putting projects on hold because the client is yet to provide content for their project. This could be text for pages or images for feature graphics and header images. It’s also hard to design a new website without knowing what the content will be. Having the content ready will allow agencies to provide a more accurate quote, it will also reduce the amount of future correspondence and requests for content. Labeling images correctly and organising content in folders based on pages or sections of the site will definitely keep your designer happy and the project flowing smoothly.

Limit any new changes to the website

Changes to the website project can cause all sorts of delays and additional costs if performed once development has begun. For this reason, it’s best to spend more time on the planning and design stage to ensure the site design is exactly how you want your website to look and function. It is much easier to change a layout or shuffle content around in the design phase than it is once the pages have been developed. Changes to overall templates and functionality in the development phase will add additional development time to the project and in more cases than not incur additional charges. Make sure you communicate with your designer as much as possible in the early design stages.

Communication

We can’t stress it enough, communication is key. If you don’t like something then tell your designer. Don’t wait until it’s too late in the project to finally mention you don’t like the page layout, or you want to change the colour scheme. You might think these are small changes, but in reality, they can cause a great deal of additional work which will be billed to you the client. Try to respond to any emails or phones calls as quick as possible to keep the momentum of the project going. Lengthy delays in responding to questions from the designer can really slow a project down and projects quotes and timeframes can blow out.

Cost-Effective Web Hosting

With so many web hosting companies available to choose from, there is plenty of opportunities to save money on a hosting package. A simple search for the best web hosting companies will provide reviews and comparisons of the best plans. Choose one that is suitable to your requirements in terms of how much space and features you need.

Use opensource software

If you would like to avoid paying expensive annual licensing fees, then look towards using an opensource content management system for your website. CMS platforms such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal will allow you to run a full-featured, professional website, without the huge ongoing costs like enterprise software. Gone of the days of opensource software being full of bugs or only for running amateur blogs, CMS software has come leaps and bounds and can be customised to suit any new business website. Take WordPress for example, it now powers nearly 30% of all the websites worldwide and has the ability to be scaled cost-effectively via plugins such as e-commerce, forums, contact forms, membership and more.

So when considering your next web design project be sure to take these 5 tips in mind to save yourself both money and unnecessary hassles.

Adding an online store to your WordPress website

Adding an online store or e-commerce component to your website doesn’t have to be as difficult as you think. Website technology has come leaps and bounds in the last 5 years, and with these changes, the cost of implementing features such as online stores into your website has come down. The availability of new payment gateways such as Stripe has made taking online payments a breeze and online accounting systems such as XERO allow integration between all facets of your online store.

So what is the best ee-commercesolution for your WordPress website?

Well ,our answer is Woocommerce.

Woocommerce is the leading ecommerce solution for WordPress and is used on millions of websites worldwide. Woocommerce is capable of running online stores with just one product, all the way up to 10,000. The power of Woocommerce is outstanding and believe it or not, the setup process is not overly difficult. If you are looking to start selling a few simple products with no fancy shipping or billing options, then Woocommerce is a breeze to setup. The installation process will guide you through the required settings and prefill a lot of the tax and shipping rules. Paypal is built in as standard, so you can be up and running in no time and taking payments straight away.

Adding Products in Woocommerce

When Woocommerce is installed a two new menu links will be added to your Dashboard – Woocommerce, and Products. Adding products to your store is much like adding a post or a page in WordPress. The option to “Add new product” is available from the Woocommerce submenu, and from there you are presented with a number of options to fill out. For simple products, it’s just a matter of providing some information about the product. The only required fields are a title or name for your product as you can run your store as a catalogue, and content such as a description, category, photo, price are all optional. To sell products you will require a price and this will then allow products to be purchased.

When adding photos you can  set a featured image, much like pages and posts, and also subimages that act as additional photos shown under the featured image.

Woocommerce Features

The beauty of Woocommerce is its ability to integrate seamlessly with WordPress – and it’s FREE. It’s opensource technology allows 3rd party companies to build plugins or addons for Woocommerce which extend the softwares usability. There are thousands of plugins available for Woocommerce ranging from shipping solutions,  product display, complicated tax scenarios, checkout options and automation. Here are a number of top features:

1. It’s opensource and FREE
2. Thousands of plugins and addons available (free and paid)
3. Minimal setup costs compared to other software
4. Great support and tutorials available online
5. Ease of use. Easily add products and manage orders online
6. Multiple payment gateway options
7. Add 1 product or 10,000
8. Built in reporting and analytics

So overall if you are looking at adding an online store to your website then take a look at Woocommerce. The ease of use and management of products and orders is exceptional and the product is easily scalable.

Woocommerce is the eCommerce software of choice at M2media and has been used on many clients website projects. M2media can take care of all the installation and setup along with any customisation that you might require.

Getting started with Affiliate Marketing and your WordPress website

WordPress is after many years one of the most popular platform for designing and developing websites. It has shown itself worthy especially when it comes down to developing affiliate blogs. If you want to reliably earn money online, affiliate marketing is the best way for that. It is a proficient method for bringing revenue into the bloggers’ wallets.

However, making an original, converting product is a challenging and difficult process, and on the other hand, it is much easier and more profitable to sell a product instead of making it. This article brings together the basic guide to Affiliate marketing and WordPress in order to make a great website that will sell products from various niches.

The Pros of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing site takes the time to start blooming and generating revenues. But, once it starts it will be your main source of income and while it will not only generate traffic but also improve your site’s SEO. Good quality and a great command of technical SEO generate great quality leads and make your brand, your product (in case you have one) reach out. The great influence of your brand supports the selling of other products that are not part of your affiliate program.

The more popular your program becomes around the affiliates the more marketing costs will turn into the costs of managing your affiliate program. With a steady and smoothly running program, there will be a lot of marketers that are reaching out towards you, and most likely they will commit to promoting your product and/or brand.

The Cons of Affiliate Marketing

Like you’ve seen in the subheading above, affiliate marketing with all of these advantages should give you all the reasons to start your affiliate site today but, this is not any near an easy task. While nearly WordPress user might think that this is a great choice for him or her, there still are things that you should be cautious about.

Starting and designing a WordPress site is genuinely easy, even running it is somewhat easy. But what is the key to making it successful? Not every WordPress site is successful from simple reason because it needs some technical knowledge after all. You will feel that you started very swiftly and painlessly but after a while, you’re going to figure out that there’s a long road to take before the site becomes successful. You can’t start earning in a day, at the start no affiliate site will gather you enough money for the living or even a decent stack of money. Without the benefits listed above, this indeed looks like a spooky decision.

Yes, Affiliate Sites are great, and they offer a lot of advantages. It indeed sounds great to generate sales selling other people’s products and brands but, you should all take into the consideration that it takes the time to grow, a lot of cherishing and dedication. Even the biggest affiliate brands started out small and had a long path to develop enough to be called successful.

This is not to scare you but, more likely to encourage you to be more cautious and careful. Moreover, perform some in-depth analytic research that will help you improve the understanding of this matter.

Making an Affiliate Marketing Website

# Step 1 Choose your product(s)

It is essential and of utmost importance to find a product that people need, a product that converts.

There are many products available in the world, but you need to find the one selling for, which will meet the demands of all your affiliates and be necessary for potential customers. There are affiliates that have their own product but they invested a lot of time and hard work for getting it. Promoting an inferior product can end up badly for you, which means losing the trust of your affiliates and that is the dead end.

Moreover, the poor product will result in customers requesting refunds, which results in a lot of headache in money transfers. Choose your product smart, and you won’t have to deal with these headaches. Poor management of affiliate site either leads to losing money, affiliates or customers. Losing all three can be much, much worse.

#Step 2 The Right Affiliate Program Saves the Day

After you’ve found your dream product and niche, now it’s time to choose the right affiliate program.

Whether you will use a platform or a plugin there are advantages and disadvantages. If you choose a platform, the affiliate program will be stored outside the WordPress folder but, going along with a plugin means that either product and affiliate program is run by the WordPress admin.

#3 Recruit Affiliate or advertise your website on social media networks and other websites

After you’ve created your website, it is important that people hear about you. If you already own a product, you will need to find an independent method that will bring sales upon your product(s).

You can promote your product easily, through social media marketing, email marketing and a suitable banner ad that will be eye-catching and will resonate with your potential customers and clients. Sending e-mails, making blog posts such as reviews of the product can reach out for more affiliates and generate trusted partners in your favor.

#4 Optimize your Website

There are various tools that can support you in tracking, managing your audience and provide general optimization to your affiliate program. This can cost depending on how much of an audience you want to generate. Even if it is more expensive and time-consuming, the right optimization and maintenance can help you maintain the excellence in your affiliate program and make it grow.

Conclusion

This brings our general guide to the end. There are a large selection of themes and plugins that will make your website look more vibrant and eye-catching to the potential clients. Using the right method, and implementing the WordPress platform with the sufficient amount of plugins can greatly enhance the quality of the product or convince the potential buyer to use your affiliate link to buy the product. Like mentioned before, it is a long and challenging task but, with the right time invested, persistence and hard work it can succeed. Have you ever tried affiliate marketing? How did it work out for you?

3 easy ways to add reviews to your WordPress website

Reviews have become an important factor in the world of e-commerce, and as such, they are important elements in modern life. People use reviews to express their opinion about various things, from products such as books, makeup, and sports equipment to the movies, cinemas, and restaurants. Reviews are also used in affiliate marketing where writers will review products and earn commissions if a visitor purchases the reviewed product.

Various surveys have been published regarding the reviewing and even 90% of the participants admitted that the vast majority of their buying decisions are based on the reviews left on the product sites. At the same, another survey has reported that people prefer trusting online reviews far more than a personal recommendation. [3]

With so many reviews available on the internet, you can easily make a lot of money if you can make the right use of them. Amazon can thank its amazing reviewing system that boosts the sales, as the customers can easily trust the verified reviews. Also, bloggers in-depth rely on reviews when they’re out of writing ideas.

In order to make your reviews look genuinely nice and professional, you will have to make them look functional. If your website runs on WordPress, there are five very useful WordPress reviewer plugins that can make your product and/or product review look very useful and helpful, enough to make someone purchase the product, and this article makes a compelling list of plugins and describes their most important features in the process.

#1 WordPress Reviewer Plugin

This amazing reviewing plugin designed by EvoG is available on CodeCanyon for $25. Reviewer has an amazing design, followed with a sleek and user-friendly interface that is very intuitive in the process. It comes with a great variety of features that allow you to present your review as accurate as possible. The contemporary reviews are split into seven parts. This includes overall rating, user rating, a thumbnail, pros and cons and the summary of your review.

Just like most of the other plugins, the Reviewer is fully customizable. It comes with a user-friendly, handy rating system and offers an unlimited selection of colors. Reviewer also sports nine templates and, each one of them has a unique style and layout and additionally, customizable accordingly.

This is not the end of the Reviewer’s features. The Reviewer allows you to compare tables without a sweat. You can easily put review scores side by side allowing your readers to more thoroughly approach the given reviews. The plugin as well can take its pride in a large high functioning community. While the user reviews can be left through the comments, they’re also enabled to share their opinions through three options: Overall rating, criterion-by-criterion or either a star or slider rating function. There are also seven fully customizable widgets that make the sidebars very functional while making navigation between the reviews piece of cake.

#WP Review Pro

WP Review Pro belongs to one of the top-rated reviewing plugins. You can easily get it on MyThemeShop for just $29. The price also includes proficient support for one year. If you’re looking for a way to make your reviews professional and as if they have some kind of attitude, this is the right plugin for you. The plugin includes great CSS animations that easily grab attention from the audience.

WP Review Pro offers customizable reviews that feel soft to the eye and allow the user to choose among the unlimited selection of colors, size of the boxes for reviewing and numbers of criteria.

There are various review systems available through the WP Review Pro: stars, points, circles or percentages. WP Review Pro enhances the navigation with additional tabbed review widget which is of great help to those who are not completely friendly with using computers. Moreover, readers can easily express their opinion through a single-click rating. Some people prefer leaving a professional and analytic review which includes more details and they can do that via the comments that are placed at the bottom of the post.

Rich snippets help the search engines enhance optimization. And in order to more boost the SEO, the plugin is agile and running lighting fast. To those who would like to perform a detailed plugin testing, there’s a free trial version but it doesn’t come in its full power.

#3 Taqyeem

Taqyem can be bought for just $17 from CodeCanyon. Together with the plugin, you get six months support. The plugin has a dark and light theme included. Additionally, both themes can be customized with an unlimited choice of colors. Along with this feature, you can customize the typing with 600 and more Google fonts. Also, you can choose between two sizes of summary boxes: full and half-width. You can choose between three review systems: star, percentages, and points, while the readers are also able to leave user ratings.

There are also an additional three widgets that make this plugin very functional. The best, recent and random reviews. In order to make your plugin more functional, the developers have released two extensions.

• Taqyeem Button Addon that costs $6 which adds buttons to your review box allowing you to choose any color that you like and roughly 500 icons. This addon appeals to the affiliate sites owners.
• Taqyeem Predefined Criteria Addon which allows you to re-use the criteria you regularly use without wasting your time. It can be found for $7.

#4 WP Product Review Lite

This review plugin will help everyone with a tight budget or people who have just started their business and need a reliable plugin that will introduce them to the system. Despite being free, this plugin has a lot to offer.

Aside from fantastic looking review boxes, the plugin contains a rating out of 10, pros and cons, thumbnail image and two affiliate links. Reviews can be fully customized with an offered choice of typography, positioning, and selection of colors. Ratings can depend on color. For instance, green color serves the good-quality review while the orange and red represent the lower quality of the review.

Aside from the free version, the plugin offers a couple of really useful add-ons but that means spending more money than you’d normally spend on a paid plugin.

Summary

All the review plugins we have listed allow you to create a unique, stylish review box that includes a significant rating system, pros and cons schema markup for rich snippets. They are very useful in the ever-growing world of e-commerce where the product and marketplace matter the most. Which plugin do you use? Which one is your favorite?

How to make WordPress posts

Are you new to using WordPress? Take a look at this overview of the WordPress post editor to get a feel for how you can create your own blog posts, news, and articles.

Need more help with building a WordPress website? We can help.

Contact us today

First steps for your new WordPress website

Are you setting up a WordPress site from scratch for the first time?

If so there are a few critical things you should do first – which you can find out in a new video which will show you exactly how to get started.

If you have any questions reqarding the setup, talk to Brisbanes leading web design team – M2media

WordPress.com and WordPress.org – what’s the difference?

This is a common beginner question that trips up almost everyone who starts looking into using WordPress to manage their website. When you google ‘WordPress’ for the first time, you are presented with two official homepages for WordPress – wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

What’s going on? Why are there two official homepages, and why do they seem to offer different features and pricing? The easiest way to understand this is to first understand exactly what WordPress is.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a Content Management System or CMS. It is software that lets you manage your website, allowing you to post content, change how your site looks, and much more. WordPress is versatile and can be expanded with Themes and Plugins, which let you add features and change the look and feel of your site.

The core WordPress software itself is free for anyone to download and use how they see fit. However, in order to actually get the WordPress software up and running, you need what we call web hosting, your own place on the web where your website is stored. Web hosting is critical – every website needs it!

WordPress.org: Just the software

WordPress.org is where you go if you want to download WordPress for your own use. Here you can download WordPress in all its glory.

However, wordpress.org doesn’t give you any hosting options. You can download the WordPress software, but it’s up to you to seek out a web hosting service where you can install the software and start building your site.

WordPress.org is also where you will find information and documentation on the WordPress software, as well as a collection of free themes and free plugins you can use on any standalone WordPress site.

WordPress.com: the whole package (with a catch)

WordPress.com pricing in 2017

WordPress.com is the whole package, sort of. As the WordPress software itself is free, there needs to be a way for the creators to make money somewhere – and wordpress.com is it.

WordPress.com allows you to sign up for free and start building a WordPress website instantly. It provides the WordPress software as well as web-hosting, so your website has a place to live. On wordpress.com you can instantly sign up and have a WordPress up and running in a couple of minutes.

The cost

WordPress.com starts out as free to get you involved – but quickly costs begin to appear. If you want your own domain name – for example, you want mycoolwebsite.com instead of mycoolwebsite.wordpress.com, you need to pay. If you don’t want your website to show ads, you need to pay. If you need more storage space for your website content, like videos and images, you need to pay. If you want to integrate Google Analytics, you need to pay.

The Limitations

Even once you have paid for all the features you need on wordpress.com, you will find you are still limited. In order to create a straightforward website management experience for a non-tech savvy audience, WordPress.com removes one of the core features of WordPress, which is the ability to add custom plugins. As a result, if you have custom website requirements that are not met by the default features included in WordPress, you are stuck.

Why would I use WordPress.com?

WordPress.com is great if you want to start building your own website from scratch, and you don’t have much technical know-how. It is free to start and is a great place to start your personal blog or homepage.

However, a site built with wordpress.com will not allow you to install additional plugins, or install custom themes. You are limited with what you can do on wordpress.com. Even if you understand code, you can’t make any modifications to your site.

Why would I use WordPress.org?

WordPress.org is where you go to get the WordPress software – and from there, the sky’s the limit. Once you secure your web hosting and install WordPress, you have the whole functionality of WordPress available to you, including the ability to add themes and plugins. It will be possible to edit the code that makes up your site and everything can be customised, tweaked and changed.

What should you do?

Here at m2media, we steer clients away from wordpress.com – most often we have clients who want fully customised sites with specific feature requirements and custom branding, colours, and more. For this, we use the wordpress.org sourced WordPress software, and we customise it using themes and plugins to our clients’ needs. However, if you are an individual with no budget looking to get your small website off the ground, wordpress.com can be a great place to get started.

One last thing to remember – it is easy to migrate content from a WordPress.com site to a standalone wordpress.org site. So you can always get started on wordpress.com and when you have outgrown that site or start needing new features, you can easily migrate to a standalone website with all the options at your fingertips!

Top 5 Security Plugins for WordPress

Keep your WordPress site secure with these security plugins

A gigantic share of about 26.4% of the global websites accounts for WordPress powered websites. As far as the content management system based websites are concerned, WordPress stands top on the list with over 59.4% of the entire websites based on CMS platforms. To augment the features and capabilities of WordPress based websites, over 40 thousand plugins are available in the marketplace.

The WordPress platform is developed with solid security capabilities, but that does not guarantee that the websites based on the WordPress platform are 100% secure from hackers. To cope with the security concerns of WordPress designed websites, hundreds of security plugins have been introduced. This article is an attempt to figure out the top 5 security plugins to choose for your website.

Connect to WP Admin via a VPN

For even more security, WordPress users can use a VPN service when connecting to WordPress. This will prevent any unwanted stealing of passwords or other sensitive user data.

Please note. The first step in keeping your website secure is by always having a secure password. Consider the use of a password manager if you choose to use a complicated password. Secondly, choosing a quality WordPress hosting company with good security is recommend.

1. Wordfence

WordFence security plugin is one of the top-rated security plugins in the marketplace. The number of downloads of this plugin has crossed the 15 million mark. The active install counts over a million. The average customer rating is about 4.9 stars. The latest version of this plugin (6.1.8) has numerous features that make it one of the premium security plugins are given below.

• Intuitive GUI interface with real-time scanning results
• Threat auto-blocking capabilities
• Supports 2-step security via mobile SMS
• Available in both free and premium versions
• Provides detailed information on the origination of the attack
• Improves website performance substantially due to its caching features
• Able to scan open-source plugins, themes, and other installed software tools
• Able to recover the infected website

2. All in One WP Security & Firewall

This security plugin is very popular for its rich features and capabilities. The download count is more than 2 million with over 400 thousand active installs. The latest version (4.1.0) has been rated as 4.8 stars by the satisfied users. It has numerous security features as given below.

• Robust security augmented by the reliable firewall capabilities
• Many industry-standard security features incorporated
• Supports security points grading feature to assess the level of website security
• Separate security rules for basic, intermediate and advanced purposes
• Very intuitive and easy to use interface
• Password strength assessment feature
• Powerful security against brute force login attacks
• Supports the list of brute force locked users along with their IPs

3. BulletProof Security

With a high rating of 4.7 stars, BulletProof Security plugin qualifies itself as one of the best security tools in the WordPress marketplace. This plugin has been downloaded for more than 2 million times with over 100 thousand active installs. The latest version of this WordPress plugin (.53.7) has numerous features as listed below.

• Offers a complete solution, such as login, firewall, and database
• Supports idol session logout ISL feature
• HTTP error and security logging
• Database back features
• Real-time monitoring of files and databases
• Available in both free and premium versions
• Support for auto-restore and quarantine ARQ IDPS

4. Sucuri Security

Sucuri Security is a comprehensive security platform for WordPress based websites. It is very well known for its multi-featured security capabilities. It offers four layers of security, such as integrity monitoring of files, remote scanning of malware, activity auditing and security hardening. Its current version (1.7.17) is rated at 4.6 out of 5 stars. This professional-grade security plugin has recorded over 1.3 million downloads with over 200 thousand active installs. The major features of this security plugin are given below.

• Multi-level security approach
• Supports add-on security firewall
• Immediate security notifications
• Quick remedial actions after any hacking activity
• File integrity and blacklist monitoring
• Professional grade activity auditing
• Very powerful security hardening capabilities
• Powerful scanning engine to accomplish remote scanning
• Supports customized security hardening to safeguard your valuable data

5. iThemes Security

iThemes Security is the new name of ‘Better WP Security’. It offers numerous ways to protect your website from security threats. The current release (5.5.0) is a highly rated WP plugin with a score of 4.7 out of 5 stars. The current number of active installs of this plugin is over 700 thousand. It has been downloaded for over 7.2 million times across the globe. The main features of this plugin are given below.

• • Offers 30 different ways to secure your website
  • Available both in basic and pro versions
  • Powerful password strength calculator

Supports Google reCAPTCHA and two-factor authentication and password age features

• Tracks user activities
• Blocks malicious users who have already tried to break into other websites
• Super security for Brute Force Attacks

Based on the features and capabilities, the above-mentioned security plugins stand far apart from many other security plugins in the marketplace.

Top reasons to build a WordPress website

WordPress intends to make the process of website design & building simple and hassle-free.

Now, you don’t have to spend hours finding the HTML code that is required for creating a website design. Instead, you can use various tools available in WordPress to make the process of website creation and management an easy one. There are many benefits of using a WordPress website, out of which some key ones are listed below-

1. 1. WordPress is Free- WordPress does not charge you anything and there are no hidden fees also. You can design your website for free as per your needs and specifications. So, save the money that you would otherwise have to pay to the designer.
   2. Ease of Use and Accessibility- In WordPress, you can make changes or edit the content on your own. It is very easy and simple to use. You will have a website design, which you can easily maintain on your own without any expert. Furthermore, to access WordPress, all you need is a computer with an Internet connection.
   3. Works for Blog and a Website Both- Initially, WordPress was used only for blogging but with time it has grown into a full-fledged web content management system. So it is best to use both for your blog and website.
   4. Abundant Themes- A lot of well-designed themes are available that you can use to enhance the visual appeal of your website. You can go through various options and choose the one that you like the most. You can go for an affordable pre-designed theme or get one custom designed for your business branding. Free WordPress themes are also available.
   5. SEO-friendly – Search engine optimization becomes very simple when WordPress is used. Using some plugins like All-in-One SEO Pack and SEO Ultimate plugins, you can easily get good search engine ranking.
   6. Flexibility of usage- WordPress is a complete CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to design a site with immense flexibility. It offers you loads of components like buttons, images, contact form, etc. that you can incorporate in your WordPress website design.
   7. Plugins for additional functionality- By adding a few plugins, you can add additional functionalities to your blog or a simple website design transforming it into a multi-level, full-service site. You can even develop a fully functional e-commerce system through WordPress by inserting a few plugins.
   8. Open Source- It is open-source and is not bound by any restrictions. This gives you the freedom to choose and host your website, anywhere you want, hence, giving you complete control over your website.
   9. Makes Website Mobile Ready- WordPress automatically gets to know where the person is viewing your site, on a mobile or any other device and displays the content accordingly.
   10. Popularity and a good support system- It is the most popular web platform, and almost over 27% of all websites are powered by WordPress. Moreover, if you are stuck anywhere while experimenting with its elements, you can easily get help and support because WordPress has a huge community of reliable users who are always ready to help each other.

We assure you that these are just a few of the many benefits of WordPress website design Brisbane and once you decide to use it, you will experience its other advantages as well. Contact m2media for a free quote or view our wordpress web design services