Category Archives for "Wordpress"

Hacked WordPress site? 14 tips to fix for free

Is your Wordpress website hacked?
Is your WordPress website hacked?

Being the victim of a WordPress hack can be a really frustrating situation.

But, like most things in life, taking a step back, breathe and focus on one step at a time can make it all easier for you to get through and make the hack have as little impact as possible.

The term hack itself isn't a very specific term, which doesn't really help much in knowing exactly what happened to your website.

So lets go through a little bit about the symptoms that can mean your site is hacked, which in turn will make it easier to get help via forums or the webhost support. 

These symptoms are otherwise known as Indicators of Compromise (IoC).

Indicators that your wordpress site is hacked

These are a couple of indicators of IoC's that makes it likely that your website is hacked:

  • Website is disabled by host.
  • Search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. have blacklisted your site.
  • Your site has been flagged for being full of malware.
  • You are being contacted about your site being used to attack other sites.
  • Your visitors are telling you that their antivirus programs are flagging your website.
  • Sudden creation of unauthorized new users on your site etc.
  • Defacing of your website, so you can see that your site is hacked, when opening it in the browser. 

There's a lot of ways your site can be hacked, so it's good to at least have a overview of what has happened, when getting help to fix it.

Below you will find a series of steps that are designed to help you start working through the post-hack process.

They are not all encompassing as it would be impractical to account for every scenario, but they are designed to help you think through the process.

Some steps to take

Stay calm, this will be ok in the end.

When addressing a security issue, as a website owner, you’re likely experiencing an undue amount of stress.

It’s often the most vulnerable you have found yourself since being on line and it’s contrary to what every one told you, “Hey, WordPress is Easy!!”

The good news is that all is not lost! Yes, you might lose some money. Yes, you might take a hit against your brand. Yes, you will recover from this.

So, yes, take a step back and compose yourself. Doing so will allow you to more effectively take control of the situation and allow you to recover your online presence.

Here's another good resource for when your wordpress site is hacked: WordPress.org

Documenting the process

The first actionable step you should take post-compromise is documentation. Take a moment to document what you’re experiencing, and if possible times.

A couple of things you want to keep in mind:

  • What are you seeing that leads you to believe you are hacked?
  • What time did you notice this issue?
  • What timezone?
  • What actions have you taken recently?
  • Was a new plugin installed?
  • Did you make a change to a theme?
  • Modify a widget?

You are creating the baseline for what is recognized as an incident report. Whether you are planning to perform the incident response yourself, or engage a professional organization, this document will prove invaluable over time.

We recommend taking a moment to annotate details of your host environment as well. It will be required at some point during the incident response process.

Scan your website

When scanning your website you have a few different ways to do this, you can use external remote scanners or application level scanners.

Each are designed to look and report on different things. No one solution is the best approach, but together you improve your odds greatly.

There are also a number of other related security plugins available in the WP repo. The ones annotated above have been around a long time and have strong communities behind each of them.

Application Based Scanners (Plugins):

  • WordFence
  • GOTMLS
  • Quettera
  • Sucuri

Remote Based Scanners (Crawlers):

VirusTotal online scanner for wordpress
  • VirusTotal
  • Sitecheck

There are also a number of other related security plugins available in the WP repo. The ones annotated above have been around a long time and have strong communities behind each of them.

Scan your local environment

In addition to scanning your website, you should start scanning your local environment.

In many instances, the source of the attack / infection begins on your local box (i.e., notebook, desktop, etc…). 

Attackers are running trojans locally that allow them to sniff login access information to things like FTP and /wp-admin that allow them to log in as the site owner.

Make sure you run a full anti-virus/malware scan on your local machine. Some viruses are good at detecting AV software and hiding from them.

So maybe try a different one. This advice extends to both Windows, OS X and Linux machines.

Check with your hosting provider

The hack may have affected more than just your site, especially if you are using shared hosting.

It is worth checking with your hosting provider in case they are taking steps or need to. Your hosting provider might also be able to confirm if a hack is an actual hack or a loss of service, for example.

One very serious implication of a hack these days is around Email blacklisting. This seems to be happening more and more.

As websites are abused to send out SPAM emails, Email Blacklist authorities are flagging the website IP’s and those IP’s are often associated with the same server being used for email. 

The best thing you can do is look at Email providers like Google Apps when it comes to your business needs.

Be Mindful of Website Blacklists

Google Blacklist issues can be detrimental to your brand. They currently blacklist somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,500 to 10,000 websites a day.

This number grows daily.

There are various forms of warnings, from large splash pages warning users to stay away, to more subtle warnings that pop up in your Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Although Google is one of the more prominent ones, there are a number of other blacklist entities like Bing, Yahoo and a wide range of Desktop AntiVirus applications.

Understand that your clients / website visitors may leverage any number of tools and any one of them could be causing the issue.

It’s recommended that you register your site with the various online webmaster consoles like:

  • Google Search Console
  • Bing Webmaster
  • Yandex Webmaster
  • Norton Webmaster

Improve your Access Controls

You will often hear folks talking about updating things like Passwords.

Yes, this is a very important piece, but it’s one small piece in a much larger problem.

We need improve our overall posture when it comes to access control.

 This means using Complex, Long and Unique passwords for starters.

The best recommendation is to use a Password Generator like those found in apps like 1Password and LastPass.

Remember that this includes changing all access points.

When we say access points we mean things like FTP / SFTP, WP-ADMIN, CPANEL (or any other administrator panel you use with your host) and MYSQL.

This also extends beyond your user, and must include all users that have access to the environment.

It is also recommended to consider using some form of Two Factor / Multi-Factor authentication system.

In it’s most basic form, it introduces, and requires, a second form of authentication when logging into your WordPress instance.

Some of the plugins available to assist you with this include:

  • Rublon
  • Duo

Reset all Access

Once you identify a hack, one of the first steps you will want to do is lock things down so that you can minimize any additional changes.

The first place to start is with your users. You can do this by forcing a global password reset for all users, especially administrators.

Here is a plugin that can assist with this step:

  • iThemes Security

You also want to clear any users that might be actively logged into WordPress.

You do this by updating the secret keys in wp-config. You will need to create a new set here: the WordPress key generator. 

Take those values then overwrite the values in your wp-config.php file with the new ones.

This will force anyone that might still be logged in, off.

Create a Backup

You hopefully have a backup of your website, but if you don’t, this will be a good time to create one.

Backups are a critical piece of your continuation of operations, and should be something you actively plan for moving forward.

 You should also ask your host what their policy is as it pertains to backups.

If you do have a backup, you should be able to perform a restore and skill right into the forensics work.

Side note: It’s important you keep regular backups of your database and files. If this ever happens again.

Regardless, before you move into the next phase of cleaning, it is recommended you take one more snapshot of the environment.

Even if it’s infected, depending on the type of hack, the impacts can cause a lot of issues and in the event of catastrophic failure you’ll at least have that bad copy to reference.

Find and remove the hack

This will be the most daunting part of the entire process: Finding and removing the hack.

The exact steps you take will be dictated by a number of factors, including, but not limited to, the symptoms provided above.

How you approach the problem will be determined by your own technical aptitude working with websites and web servers.

It might be tempting to purge everything and start over. In some cases that’s possible, but in many instances it’s just not possible.

What you can do however is reinstall certain elements of the site with little regard to impacting the core of your website. 

You always want to make sure you reinstall the same version of software your website is using, if you choose an older or newer one you’re likely to kill your website. 

When reinstalling, be sure not to use the reinstall options in your WP-ADMIN.

Use your FTP / SFTP application to drag and drop the versions. This will prove much more effective in the long run as those installers often only overwrite existing files, and hacks often introduce new files…

You can replace the following directories safely:

  • /wp-admin
  • /wp-includes

From there, it’s recommended that you be more diligent in updating and replacing files as you move through wp-content as it contains your theme and plugin files.

The one file you will definitely want to look at is your .htaccess file.

It’s one of the more common files, regardless of the type of infection, that is most often updated and used for nefarious activities.

This file is often located at the root of your installation folder, but can also be embedded within several other directories on the same installation.

Regardless of the type of infection, there are will be some common files you will want to keep an eye on during your remediation process.

Common files to keep an eye on:

index.php
header.php
footer.php
function.php

If modified, these files can usually adversely affect all page requests, making them high targets for bad actors.

Leverage the Community

We often forget but we’re a community based platform, this means that if you’re in trouble someone in the community is likely to give a lending hand.

A very good place to start if you’re strapped for cash or just looking for a helping hand is the WordPress.org Hacked or Malware forum.

Update everything!

Once you are clean, you should update your WordPress installation to the latest software. Older versions are more prone to hacks than newer versions.

Change the passwords again!

Remember, you need to change the passwords for your site after making sure your site is clean.

So if you only changed them when you discovered the hack, change them again now. Again remembering to use Complex, Long and Unique passwords.

You may consider to change the database user account and password.

When you changed them, do not forget enhancing them to wp-config.php file.

Website forensics

Forensics is the process of understanding what happened.

How did the attackers get in? 

The goal is to understand the attack vector a bad actor used to ensure they’re unable to abuse it again.

In many instances, it’s very difficult for website owners to perform this type of analysis due to lack of technical knowledge and / or available data. 

If you do have the metadata required, then there are tools like like OSSEC and splunk that can help you synthesize the data.

Secure your site

Now that you have successfully recovered your site, secure it by implementing some (if not all) of the recommended security measures.

If you can’t Log Into WordPress Admin Panel

Enter your text here...

There are times that a bad actor will hijack your administrator account[s]. This is not a reason to panic, there are a few different things you can do to regain control of your account.

You can follow these steps to reset your password

Tools like phpMyAdmin and Adminer are often made available via your hosting provider.

They allow you to log into your database directly, bypassing your Administration Screen and resetting your user in the users table wp_users.

If you don’t want to mess with password hashes or can’t figure it out, simply update your email and go back to Login Screen, click forgot password, and wait for the email.

Best WordPress Booking Plugins

Calendarize it! Wordpress booking plugin

If you have just started your own WordPress website or blog you are possibly looking for a great WordPress booking plugin or calendar, like the ones used on booking.com. A WordPress booking plugin allows you to add events and bookings to your site to make them easy to see by everyone who visits. In some instances, you can even add a plugin that allows visitors to add their events to the calendar for others to see. The only problem is that we are spoilt for choice. Throughout this article, we will take you through the pros and cons of some of the best calendar and booking plugins.

EventOn – WordPress Event Calendar Plugin

EventOn is a number one best selling WordPress booking plugin. EventOn uses a sleek tile layout, making all of your calendar events easy to see. This is a calendar that you can use for almost all of your needs, with a shortcode generator, event repeating options, maps and location information and social media share icons. You can even create events lists, making scheduling easy and efficient. Alternatively, you can create an event card when you have something special coming up; this allows you to add an image, a basic PayPal button and even offers directions to your event. Offering 200+ feature, customizable design, and browser responsiveness it is no wonder this is a best selling WordPress booking plugin. Once purchased you are given six months support with an option to extend to 12 months. From all reviews and feedback about the responsiveness and amazing ability to solve problems, we would suggest you take advantage of the extended help.

  • Create Multi-Day Events
  • Sort Events by Categories
  • Get Directions to an Event

EventOn WordPress Booking Plugin

Click here to check EvenOn out!

Calendarize it! For WordPress

Calendarize it! Is the most flexible and feature-rich WordPress booking plugin available. Calendarize it! has eight predefined layout templates which take the hassle out of creating your calendar and ensuring you don’t have to fight with shortcode just to get started. One great feature that Calendarize it! offers is for your visitors to create events from the front end, you can even charge visitors to create an event that they add to your calendar. When it comes to choosing WordPress booking plugin one of the things that you have to consider are the add-ons that the plugin offers, Calendarize it! offers hundreds of free and nominal fee add-ons allowing you to customize your calendar for your needs; payment options, community events, member profiles, a rate, and review option and even advertising banners. Everything you could need in a calendar can be found in this plugin and the add-ons it offers.

  • Expandable Event Details
  • Month View & Event List View
  • One Site for Every Screen

Calendarize it! WordPress booking plugin

Click here to check out Calendarize it!

Bookly Booking Plugin

Bookly is a WordPress booking plugin that is suited for a business where you need appointments. This WordPress booking plugin has rich scheduling capabilities allowing a buffer around appointments, varying meeting times, and ability to sync with a Google Calendar. There is an unlimited number of staff, appointments, and services that you can offer within this plugin making it customizable to every business type and service. You can also customize the actual booking form with different colors and fields. You can also add the booking form to multiple pages or domains. Bookly also offers customizable payment options, where you can choose a different price point for various services or even different staff members. You can also utilize multiple secure payment methods like PayPal, Stripe, iDEAL, PayU. You can also book multiple appointments per session, and there is an option for transactional emails and text messages to be sent out to clients, and you can manage all of these activities online.

  • Group Bookings Available
  • Form Builder Included
  • SMS and E-mail Notifications

Bookly WordPress booking plugin

Click here to check out Bookly!

Team Booking

Team booking is a fantastic WordPress booking plugin because they decided not to reinvent the wheel with this plugin. It is completely synchronized with Google Calendar. This means that you use your Google Calendar to create blocks of time where you want the appointment or event to be placed, then as they are filled up by visitors your Google Calendar is automatically updated. This WordPress booking plugin gives you an unlimited amount of events that can be scheduled with different people and also an infinite number of individuals who want to attend the event or appointment. For some people, this fantastic integration is the bugbear of the plugin, as you actually have to have a Google account to use it. However, this is what it was designed for, so it really isn’t a drawback at all. The plugin also offers timezone selection and allows each of your service providers to plan their own schedule.

  • Customizable Forms for Collecting Customer Information
  • Collect Payments with PayPal and Stripe
  • Frontend Calendar that is Perfectly Suited for Mobiles

Team Booking frontend_list

Click here to check out Team Booking!

Booked – Appointment Booking

The Booked WordPress booking plugin is a simple appointment plugin. Allowing you to add as many calendars as you need and customize each calendar to suit each agent. Booked WordPress booking plugin lets users book appointments whether they are a registered or guest user on your site. One great feature is the ability to customize your booking form to allow you to collect any and all information you may need. The plugin is also customizable in terms of time slots available and color choice. The frontend calendar widget or shortcode can be displayed in a small or large format on your site, and it is extremely responsive on all devices. Booked makes it easy to view all of your appointments and lists pending appointments waiting for your approval, taking the stress of planning your day. All of this can be synced with iCal or Outlook, with the only drawback being that it is not a two-way sync.

  • Booked Payments with WooCommerce
  • Lifetime Updates and Support for 6-Months inc.
  • Calendar Feeds that Display your Appointments

If you are looking for a WordPress booking plugin that will suit your needs, event planning or appointment booking you are sure to find exactly what you are looking for in one of these extremely responsive, well supported and easy to use plugins. EventOn offers fantastic event cards to display on your site, while Calendarize it! offers easy to use layout templates. Or you might be looking for a more appointment based WordPress booking plugin. Bookly has great scheduling capabilities and is amazing if you are using different service agents, but Team Book is perfect for Google Calendar users. Check it out today and get your calendar running.

Booked WordPress Calendar Plugin

Click here to check out Booked!

Did you find the best WordPress booking plugin for you, or do you have other suggestions? Comment below:

How to Setup WooCommerce

setup woocommerce pages

Setup Woocommerce

The most utilized plugin for WordPress eCommerce websites is WooCommerce. If you are running a store or have your own digital products if you set up WooCommerce, it is pretty easy for you to get started and maintaining, and if you want to expand it, it has lots of extensions.

Though it’s relatively simple compared to many other available solutions, WooCommerce needs to be configured to perform every function precisely. A few pages must be set up for the whole buying process to work correctly. This example will reveal how you can turn your WordPress website into a fully functional web shop.

After installing the plugin, it usually creates the necessary pages. But sometimes issues like a conflict with the theme or any of the other plugins arise and those pages don’t get created automatically. In this situation, you have to set up the WooCommerce pages yourself. Otherwise, your store won’t be operational, and buyers won’t be able to purchase. These are the most relevant pages you must have, to get WooCommerce up and running properly.

  • Cart
  • Checkout
  • My account

Cart: When a visitor clicks add to cart on a product it’s gets added to the shopping cart. Every product he wants to acquire first goes to the shopping cart. You can conceive of the cart like the basket or trolley we use at supermarkets to put all the products in it. When the buyers go to the shopping cart page, it will show all the goods they added in the cart and from there they could remove it if they want and increase or decrease the quantity of each item.

Checkout: This is the final step of the purchase, and is where the customer input the payment details and pay for the goods. Similar to the cash counter at real stores, it works the same way. The buyers, if given a choice, can choose from multiple payment options. If you want, you can use a coupon code field on this page as well.

My account: This page is the account page of a buyer and isn’t strictly necessary for the store to be fully operational, but having this page is the usual way of doing it. This page makes it much easier for buyers to check their previous orders and keep track of their info.

Having the cart and checkout pages is necessary. If your store’s shopping cart and checkout buttons don’t work, it is a need to check if these pages are present from the ‘All Pages’ tab and if you can’t see these pages you have to create them. Now setting these pages up isn’t that complex, and you don’t have to be a code wizard to do this. To guide you through how to configure the WooCommerce pages, I have made a step by step guide. Just follow it, and you will have them done in no time.

Setup Woothemes Cart:

CartCart

Click ‘Add New’ under Pages tab. Give a page title and paste ‘[woocommerce_cart]‘ on it. Don’t copy the inverted commas, just from one bracket to the other. Then click publish.

Checkout: 

Checkout

Similar to the last step create a new page and paste ‘[woocommerce_checkout]’ without the inverted commas. Next, just click publish.

 

My account: 

My account

As it was with the earlier step go to ‘Add New’ under Pages and paste ‘[woocommerce_my_account]’ and click publish.

Now that you have these pages created you just have to point to them from the WooCommerce settings. It’s easy, and you just have to follow these steps:

First, go to ‘Settings’ tab under WooCommerce and click ‘Checkout.’
Wocommerce settings page

Next step is to scroll down, and you will see the ‘Cart Page’ and ‘Checkout’ fields just under ‘Checkout Pages.’ Then Select the pages you created earlier on both fields, scroll down and click ‘Save changes.’
Wocommerce page setup

Finally, we need to The final step is to go to the ‘Accounts’ tab, in the ‘My Account Page’ field select the page you created in the previous steps, that is the account page.

Woocommerce my account setup

Don’t have the payment methods set up yet? Do it from ‘Checkout Options’ which is on the ‘Checkout’ tab.

When you have done these steps, you should be able to set up woocommerce pages without any extra trouble correctly. Now you just need to add products and they are finally ready to be sold!

How to Embed Youtube Videos in WordPress Posts

How to embed youtube videos in WordPress posts

As the saying goes ‘an image is worth a thousand words’. Having youtube videos in your posts makes it more rich and users become more engaged to watch videos that can describe or show something more vividly rather than reading about it. But most of the time users get confused about embedding youtube videos the way they want to. I am about to show you a few easy ways of how to embed youtube videos in WordPress posts.

There are two methods when it comes to, how to embed youtube videos in wordpress posts. One is simple as 1,2,3 and the other with more customization options involve a tiny amount of coding. With the following steps on how to embed a youtube video is going to be much easier than you can imagine.

 

The simple way:

1.  Go to the youtube video’s page you want to embed. I am using an example video in the following. Than copy the link.

Simple youtube embed

2. Now paste it in the post editor.

Simple youtube embed 2

3.  In seconds the video will load on page and ready for users to view.

Simple youtube embed 3

The downside of this method is that you can’t change the alignment and the resolution.

 

Customized way:

1. Go to the youtube video’s page and click ‘share’. You can see three options: Share, Embed and Email. Click on ‘Embed‘. Then you will see a line of code just below. Copy the full code.

Simple youtube embed 4

2. Now paste the full line of code while you are in the ‘Text‘ mode of the post editor. Make sure you are in the ‘Text’ mode otherwise the code won’t work.

Simple youtube embed 5

3. After pasting the code move back to ‘Visual‘ editor, there you can see the video.

Simple youtube embed 6

4. By default the video size will be 560X315.  If you want to change it’s resolution it’s a very simple edit. Head back to ‘Text’ mode and in the embed code change the ‘width‘ and ‘height‘ values according to your needs.

Simple youtube embed 7

5. If you want to center the video simply go to ‘Text’ editor and add ‘<center>‘  just before the beginning of <iframe> tag.  And add </center> just after the last <iframe> tag.

Simple youtube embed 8

With the <center> tags the video will be precisely centered on page.

Simple youtube embed 9

After doing this few a times you should be able to get the hang of this method. Among the two described methods of how to embed youtube videos in WordPress posts, I personally suggest using this one mostly because of the customization options it gives you.

So the next time you want to embed a youtube video in your wordpress website, you know how to do it like a pro. Having appropriate videos in your posts will give users a much better experience and they will become more engaged and return to your website.

How to Modify Contact Form 7 Design

With today’s web 2.0 standards every website needs a contact form. A contact form let’s your users to engage themselves more with your website and stay in touch. And if you are running an online business than a contact form is a must have feature.

There are many wordpress contact form plugins available to use both free and premium ones. Some of the highest rated ones include Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Fast Secure Contact Form, Contact Buddy, and Ninja Forms. Among these Contact Form 7 is one of the most highly used and it’s free as well without any upgrade plans, so you have all the features in your hand to deploy.

Contact Form 7 is very easy to configure and run compared to many other contact plugins. It’s very light weight in terms of resources for your hosting account, as a result your page won’t have any extra loading time or lag.

Though Contact Form 7 is easy to use and maintain, one biggest problem of it is the design. The form design that comes with it appears very plain and it isn’t device responsive. Meaning on cell phone and tablets the form fields don’t auto resize which can be problematic for users. If you are running a website with dynamic theme Contact Form 7’s average design layout very likely won’t blend in and the responsiveness issue adds more to it.

Now don’t worry a bit, luckily Contact Form 7 design can be modified and given a nice looking appearance and auto responsiveness functions with correct customizations. You don’t have to learn programming or anything else to do this. We have made a nice step by step tutorial to help you accomplish this.

  1. Assuming you already have Contact Form 7 installed in your wordpress admin panel. In case you don’t already have it, just install it from ‘Add New’ under Plugins.
  2. Next go to ‘Add New’ under ‘Plugins’. In the search bar write ‘simple custom css and js’ and search for it.

Contact form 7 step 2

3. Now you can see the Simple Custom CS and JS plugin as shown in the picture below. Click ‘Install Now’.
Contact form 7 step 3

4. Then when the installation is complete, which only takes a few seconds you have to activate the plugin in order for it to work. Click ‘Activate Plugin’.Contact form 7 step 4Contact form 7 step 4

5. After the plugin is active you will see ‘Custom CSS and JS’ on the left side of the admin panel. Put your mouse pointer on it and you can see more options. Click ‘Add Custom CSS’ from the options.Contact form 7 step 5

6. Now give a title to it (ex: Contact Form 7) and in the body delete any existing text first. Then copy the following code into it:
#responsive-form{max-width:400px;margin:0 auto;width:100%;}.form-row{width: 100%;}.column-half, .column-full{float: left;position: relative;padding: 0.65rem;width:70%;-webkit-box-sizing: border-box;-moz-box-sizing: border-box;box-sizing: border-box;color:#222;font-size:17px;font-weight:600;}.clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}/**---------------- Media query ----------------**/@media only screen and (min-width: 48em) {.column-half{width: 70%;}}.wpcf7 input[type="text"], .wpcf7 input[type="email"], .wpcf7 textarea {padding: 8px;border: 1px solid #ccc;border-radius: 3px;-webkit-box-sizing: border-box;-moz-box-sizing: border-box;box-sizing: border-box;background-color: #eee !important;border: none !important;width: 70% !important;-moz-border-radius: 0 !important;-webkit-border-radius: 0 !important;border-radius: 0 !important;font-size: 14px;color: #222 !important;padding: 16px !important;}.wpcf7 input[type="text"]:focus{background: #fff;}.wpcf7-submit{color: #002060 !important;margin: 8px auto 0;cursor: pointer;font-size: 20px;font-weight: 600;-moz-border-radius: 3px;-webkit-border-radius: 3px;border-radius: 3px;padding: 6px 20px;line-height: 1.7em;background: transparent;border: 2px solid #000;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;-moz-transition: all 0.2s;-webkit-transition: all 0.2s;transition: all 0.2s;}.wpcf7-submit:hover{background-color: #eee;border-color:#eee;padding: 6px 20px !important;}span.wpcf7-not-valid-tip{text-shadow: none;font-size: 12px;color: #fff;background: #ff0000;padding: 5px;}div.wpcf7-validation-errors {text-shadow: none;border: transparent;background: #f9cd00;padding: 5px;color: #9C6533;text-align: center;margin: 0;font-size: 12px;}div.wpcf7-mail-sent-ok{text-align: center;text-shadow: none;padding: 5px;font-size: 12px;background: #59a80f;border-color: #59a80f;color: #fff;margin: 0;}

Contact form 7 step 6

After copying the code click publish.

Personal customizations

Now if you want to change the colors of different elements to match with your website, you can do that too.

To change the font color, font size and background color of the fields, you have to modify the following elements described and marked in the picture below:Personal modifications fonts and fields

Under ‘.wpcf7 input[type=”text”], .wpcf7 input[type=”email”], .wpcf7 textarea {‘ modify the following elements for your personal changes.

‘background-color’ refers to each fields background color. If you want to change it just replace the #eee color code with your own. But don’t delete ‘!important;’ text. Otherwise it will malfunction.

‘font-size’ refers to the size of the font in the fields. Just change the number text next to it for increase or decrease.

‘color’ refers the font color itself. If you want to have different color just change the ‘#222’ color code with your own color code.

To modify send button, customize the following elements under ‘.wpcf7-submit’:

Personal modifications send button

‘color’ refers to the text color on the button. If you want anything different simply change the ‘#002060’ color code with the color code you want.

Font-size depicts the font size of the text on the send button. Simple change the number if you want smaller or larger font.

Border is the border of the button. If you want to increase it change it from 2px to more and vice versa. It currently has black color(#000). You can change it with your own as well.

Now the ‘Send’ button has hover effects too. It changes color when you hover the mouse pointer over it. To change the hover effect colors as well, just change the following under ‘.wpcf7-submit:hover{‘Personal modifications send button hover

background-color here means the color of the background during hover.

border-color also refers to the color during mouse pointer is over the button.

There you go! You now know how to modify Contact form 7. I hope you enjoyed the article and are well on your way to modify Contact Form 7 to your liking.

Download Contact Form 7 by clicking here.

Educational WordPress Themes

Educational Wordpress Themes

Educational WordPress themes

Every educational institute must have a good, well designed and well maintained website, and that is solved with Educational WordPress themes. Be it a school, college or university, having a nice website is essential for them as it reflects your institute’s success, importance and value. It has been noted that nowadays interaction between students and teachers through email and social networking websites has increased showing good results and better learning.

In fact you can see that the better the institution is, the better is its rating on web. But having good professional website being made can be really expensive. So how can you build cool website of your institute without spending a lot of money? Well, the answer is really simple: by getting a well suited WordPress theme! WordPress is the most popular and widely used platform for making websites, and the awesome thing about it is that a plethora of themes in many different categories are available out there. Most of the times, themes are especially designed to meet the specific requirements and functionality of a certain type of websites.

Apart from the availability of themes, a lot of plugins are also available, which further makes customizing a website really easy. These plugins can be used for enhancing your theme’s functionality, taking security measure to protect your website, increasing its usability or speeding it up etc. Having a good photo gallery about your institute and the life in it also attracts more students. Many portfolio plugins are present, which can help you display your images in a better way.

So if you are planning on creating a new educational website or you wish to revamp your old one, you should definitely check out pre-designed educational WordPress themes. A huge amount of educational themes is available and finding the good ones is not an easy task. So in order to help you find the best ones, without even spending your time, today we have a collection of some really amazing themes. Most of the themes in this collection are paid, but a few are also free of cost. Check them out and pick the ones you like the best!

Grand College – WordPress Theme For Education

Educational WordPress Themes - Grand College WordPress theme

Peekaboo WordPress Theme

Educational WordPress Themes - Peekabo WordPress theme

EduBLOG WordPress Theme

Educational WordPress Themes - Edublog WordPress Theme

Education Theme

Educational WordPress Themes - Education WordPress Theme

Kid’s Voice School WordPress Theme

Educational WordPress Themes - Kid’s Voice School WordPress Theme

EducationTime

Educational WordPress Themes - EducationTime WordPress Theme

Graduate THEME

Educational WordPress Themes - Graduate WordPress Theme

WordPress University

Educational WordPress Themes - WordPress University Theme

EduPress

Educational WordPress Themes - EduPress WordPress Theme

Enterprise Theme

Educational WordPress Themes - Enterprise Theme for WordPress

University WordPress Theme

Educational WordPress Themes - University WordPress theme

Govard WordPress Theme

Educational WordPress Themes - Govard WordPress Theme

Lexington WordPress Theme

Educational WordPress Themes - Lexington WordPress Theme

Education Style WordPress Theme

Educational WordPress Themes - Education Style WordPress Theme

 

Speed up wordpress

Speed Up Wordpress

Speed up WordPress

There is some secrets you need to know to speed up wordpress, and I’ll share what I did with IVYthemes in this article.
IVYthemes had a decent page load time, in most countries, but it wasn’t as snappy as I would like, and in some countries it was pretty slow, with a page load time of over 8 seconds for our homepage. This is actually pretty horrible, and there are studies done that states that anything above 3 seconds is unacceptable for most visitors, they give up and go away from your site. We of course want our visitors to stay as long as possible and have a great experience on our site, so getting the page load time down was a high priority for us. We managed to get below a 1 second load time on our homepage by doing the following tweaks:

So, how to speed up WordPress?

DNS
There are some options but first you should make sure your DNS is reliable. If your registrar don’t have stellar reputation for their DNS, then a service like Cloudflare would be a great option, they have a free account, which covers both great DNS, security and some speed optimizations as well, but we’ll get back to those later.

Improving your WordPress efficiency by even 10 percent won’t matter if your DNS is not reliable.

Hosting
Next is a good web host. There’s lots of poor choices out there, with badly managed, oversold shared hosting accounts. I already had this covered by hosting the site at Liquidweb, which I have good experience with from before, after trying a lot of hosting companies over the years. Check them out by clicking here. 

Theme
Then you need a clean, no bloat theme. Thrive themes is my personal choice for this site, and I also used it on 3dprintviking.com, but Genesis is a widely used theme framework which is also a great option.

Plugins
The next area you should focus on, is unused and unneeded plugins. Keep only the plugins that you really need. And only the ones with with solid, proven code behind them that are actively supported. This prevents uneeded load requests and keeps your plugin list nice and tidy. (Yes, I’m a neat freak)
WordPress is reliable and stable, and it can handle 40 or more plugins if they are all the right ones. But it only takes one badly coded plugin to make your site slow or unstable, get it fixed now!

Image optimizing (automatically)

Yahoo! has a great image optimizer called Smush.it that will reduce the file size of an image drastically, while at the same time keeping the quality.

However, doing this one image at a time would be a pain in the ass, and take too much time. I’m a fan of automatization so using the free plugin WP-SmushIt  was perfect for saving a lot of time! It does slow down uploading images a bit, but it’s still well worth it.

Download WP-SmushIt here

Caching
WordPress origin caching can be done with several plugins, but the two plugins that is most recommended is WP Super cache and W3 Total Cache. WP Super cache is the easiest to use of those, and speeds up your website immensly, but W3 Total Cache is more advanced and has more possibilities, but keep in mind that many features are limited due to your server configuration and you need to sign up to external CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks), like Amazon S3, Akamai etc.

Which of them you’ll use, depends on how much configuration you want to do, what your server supports etc. I’ve used both on this site and got great results with both, but I’ve landed on W3 Total cache as it was the fastest of the two, but you can’t go wrong with either one in that regard. However, if you prefer the easiest option, you should go with WP Super Cache.

Download WP Super Cache here

Download W3 Total Cache here

Tools
I use and recommend Pingdom Tools to check my site load time. I recommend doing one before you start optimizing wordpress, so you see where your coming from, and of course several times during optimization, so you can get inspired by the ever faster wordpress load times.

I hope you are inspired to speed up wordpress by this article, we all want a faster web experience.

Convert more of your traffic to revenue

Convert more of your traffic

Convert more of your traffic to revenue

If you’ve ever tried to earn revenue on your WordPress website, then you probably know that conversions are king. Website traffic is a good thing—but leveraging it to turn a profit is another ballgame entirely. There are many tools to convert more of your traffic.

Turning web traffic into revenue is a lot like closing a sale. There are a lot of elements to consider, and all of them need to be in the right place at the right time. Getting people to sign up for your mailing list, gathering numbers for text-blasts, attracting followers on social media, and selling products to online visitors are just a few of the many things that need to be done right if you’re hoping to turn larger profits on your ecommerce WordPress site.

Of course, every site and company will be different—so some parts of your strategy might differ from those used to convert traffic on other websites.

But with that being said, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the main, core principles don’t apply to your business too. There is an art to getting visitors to buy from you—and unless you can find a way to tap into this mentality, you’re going to end up frustrated and disappointed.

How can Thrive Themes help?

This website basically offers subscribers a wide range of different WordPress themes, plugins, and tools that are specifically designed with traffic conversion in mind. The themes are lightning fast, the plug-ins are smart and intuitive, and the mailing list tools are cutting-edge and easy to use.

If you’re thinking about overhauling your WordPress site in an effort to make it more profitable (or are thinking of building a new WordPress website and need a theme and some plug-ins), then I would definitely recommend ThriveThemes.com for several different reasons.

They focus specifically on conversion

According to this article on nngroup.com, users often leave web pages after 10 to 20 seconds.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with ecommerce statistics—but to put it simply, that’s not a very long time.

You don’t have hours to get customers to commit—and when they do decide to commit, you need to make the process fast, easy, and simple.

That’s why conversion-focused tools are so important. If you don’t focus on conversion, you’re simply going to lose the customer. It’s pure mathematics.

Their themes look amazing

The WordPress themes offered by Thrive Themes are beautiful (We use thrive themes ignition on our site). I understand that the main focus of these tools is to turn visitors into customers, but they really seem to make an effort to do this with style.

The layouts are clean, the tools are seamless, and the workflow within the builder is nearly perfect.

Giving your website a professional look is extremely important. If your site looks sloppy, then you’re going to be much more likely to lose customers—especially if you have any kind of competition to speak of.

But Thrive Themes offers themes and a builder that can really help to offset this challenge. Creating professional looking WordPress websites with these tools is surprisingly simple—and to be honest, the results are often very attractive.

Have a look at the best school for hypnosis in Norway: Hypnoseutdanning – For a great example of a site using Thrive themes.

They maintain an awesome blog filled with relevant news and ideas

Another awesome thing about ThriveThemes.com is that they maintain a blog on their website—and do a great job of it! If you’re looking for tips that’ll make you better at turning visitors into customers using their WordPress themes and tools, then this is definitely a resource that will help!

I realize that hosting a blog isn’t necessarily a ‘big deal’ anymore, but I’m always disappointed when the blogs I visit are lame, dull, or full of mindless SEO filler. This definitely isn’t the case with the blog hosted by ThriveThemes.com. In fact, as I was looking over the topics, I bookmarked several of them for my own research purposes!

In Conclusion

If you’re looking to create or improve your own WordPress website, and need to focus more on conversion so that your visitors can start earning you more revenue, then I would definitely consider giving ThriveThemes.com a try. Their themes are awesome, their tools are intuitive, and their website is easy to navigate and use.

Even a complete novice could use these tools—so make sure to check them out before choosing your next plug-in or WordPress toolbox.

Click here to go to Thrive Themes.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons

ExtraNews WordPress theme

Extranews wordpress theme

ExtraNews WordPress theme is a uniquely responive news theme for all sorts of publishers. Great for review, news and blog sites, with integrated reviews, video, slideshows, and galleries in each post.

Author:

ExtraNews WordPress Theme Features:

extranews-wordpress-featuresMore Features

  • WordPress 4.4 Compatible
  • Responsive Design: Tablet and Mobile Optimized
  • Easy Review System
  • 3 Review Styles
  • Unlimited Review Criteria
  • Unlimited Post Slideshows
  • Featured Post Videos
  • 300+ Google Fonts
  • XML and SQL files included to load default content.
  • Schema SEO Rich Snippet Review Microdata
  • One or Two column blog layouts
  • Slim or 300px sidebar layouts
  • Boxed or Stretched Layouts
  • Author Pages
  • Built-In Related Posts
  • Built-in Social Sharing
  • 7 custom WordPress widgets
  • Powerful Theme Options Panel
  • Working Contact Form – right out of the box
  • Multiple Dropdown Menus
  • Shortcode Buttons: one click and your done.
  • Extensive Documentation and Dedicated Support Forum
  • Child Theme Support for Advanced Users
  • Translation-Ready .po/.mo files inlcuded
  • Much More! Check out the live preview!

Info:

Inspired design
Inspired by popular news readers, the Extranews WordPress theme wow’s your visitors with stunning images for your articles, and gives them a rich experience they will love – and return again for.

Easy Review System
No difficult shortcodes or complex format creators. Just enter your criteria, drag your score and pick your review layout. Easy, fast and awesome.

Dynamic Headline Loader
Usability is key when it comes to keeping your visitors on your site. Your visitors can quickly find the articles they care about, right from the homepage.

Multiple Review Styles
Like percentages? Points? Or maybe you’re a stars person? You choose the style of your reviews to best suit your audience.

Schema Search Microdata
Schema rich snippets let you get more recognized on search engines, by showing the review right in the results. Search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display or search results.

Demo:

Click here

Download: