WordPress

Every website should have a contact form on it so that people can contact you. They can have any purpose to contact you like they are looking to send your inquiry for your products or they want to setup a meeting. So you can understand the importance of contact form on your website. In this article I will show you that how can you add a Contact form on your website:

Step 1: Install Contact Form 7 Plugin

In order to install contact form plugin you need to go to Plugins >> Add New from your WordPress dashboard.

Now you will be redirected to a page where you need to search for Contact form 7 plugin. So just write Contact form 7 in the search box and hit the enter button.

You will see Contact form7 plugin. Click on Install and then Activate button.

Step 2: Create a new Contact form

After installing contact form 7 plugin you will see a Contact tab on your WordPress dashboard. Click on Contact >> Add New.

After clicking Add new link, you will be redirected to a page where you will see a contact form created with some default form fields.

At the top, you need to give a title to your contact form. Then you can see some buttons which are used to generated form fields and there are some form fields created by default. You can easily add, remove or delete these form fields.

Step 3: Configure Email Address

You need to configure email address because you need to ensure that your emails are going to correct email address. So click on Email tab from the top and then you will see a To field where you need to enter your email address. You will receive emails to this email address which you will enter in this field.

you will see other fields like Subject, Additional headers, Field attachments which I have explained below:

1. Subject: You can specify email subject here or if you have added [your-subject] in subject field, which you can see at the top, then website visitor will enter subject from the contact form.



2. Additional Headers: You can specify additional email headers here like: Reply-to, Cc, Bcc.



3. File Attachments: You can enable email attachment so that your website visitors will be able to send you attachments with help of this contact form. If you want to know more about setting up file attachments then click on this link for more information.

WordPress powers nearly 25% of all the websites across the world. It is the first choice when it comes to creating any website whether it is e-commerce, business website, blog, educational website or online community website. Once you make your WordPress website live, you know that you have to keep up with the trend of the web development world and make changes to your website almost every year. It could be adding new features, changing the design for SEO compatibility, modification to solve issues and much more. But making changes to a live WordPress site is as dangerous as playing with fire. It may suffer downtime, face configurational issues, give rise to additional issues and all these will contribute towards bad user experience and lower SEO rank. That is where the concept of staging website in WordPress comes into play.

What is Staging website in WordPress and How is it Beneficial?

If you want to make changes to your WordPress website, instead of doing it on your live website, you can do it on an alternate website called staging website. A staging website is a replica of your live website that is tailor-made to implement the changes you want to make on your live website and test them out without affecting your live website. A staging website in WordPress has all the designs and features of your live website and hence, adding new features or solving any existing issue is as good as you are doing them on your live website. After incorporating the required changes and testing them out completely, you can finally implement them on your live website.

The best part is that if your website is based on WordPress, you can create a staging website effortlessly by several methods. The two most popular methods are listed below.

Method 1 – Get A Staging Website With Your Web Host

The easiest of creating a staging WordPress website is with the help of your web host. It is better to choose a web host that has a dedicated staging feature. In case you have already chosen a web host and it does not have this feature, you can go for the second method. Here are some of the features that a web host providing staging option provide that make the method the easiest.

Automatic Backup – Most of the web hosts provide the option to automatically backup the staging WordPress site before you make it live for testing.

One-Click Option – With this option, you can make the staging WordPress live and make it private as required.

Private Option – Web hosts hide your staging site from search engines so that duplicate content does not affect SEO parameter of your original website.

WordPress Web Hosts That Provide Staging WordPress Website-

1. WP Engine – WP Engine provides an in-built staging feature with WordPress plan and the option is available on WordPress dashboard from WP Engine> Staging> Copy Site from Live to Staging. If you frequently make changes to your website, WP Engine is the best choice. Here is the exclusive link to get WP Engine WordPress hosting plan at a huge discount.

2. GoDaddy – Other than Basic plan, GoDaddy offers staging site option for all other plans. The domain name is automatically generated. The staging option is available on GoDaddy account from My Products page> Managed WordPress> Manage All. Click on the three-dot icon and click on Staging. Here is the exclusive link to get GoDaddy WordPress hosting plan at the lowest possible price with free domain.

Method 2 – Create A Staging Website With WP Staging Plugin

If your web host is not the ones mentioned above and they do not offer you the option to provide you a staging website, you can create it effortlessly with the help of WordPress freemium plugin called WP Staging. You can get the staging website of your live WordPress website with WP Staging plugin as effortlessly as getting it from your web host if they had the option. All you have to do is click a button and get the staging website. Furthermore, creating a staging website will not affect the SEO parameters of your original website as the staging website hides itself from search engines and even web traffics.

Limitation Of Free Plugin – With the free version of WP Staging, you can create a staging website and make all the required changes but you cannot push the changes you made in the staging website to your original live website. Making the changes manually once again on the live WordPress website is time-consuming and your website may suffer downtime and a mistake while making the changes manually once again can be fatal. As it is already present and tested on the staging website, it is a wise decision to push the exact changes seamlessly. For that, you can purchase WP Staging Pro to avail the feature. Here is the exclusive link to get WP Staging Pro at the lowest possible price.

How To Use WP Staging?

Step 1. Take a backup of your live WordPress website.
Step 2. Install WP Staging by going to your Dashboard> Plugins> Add New option and activate the plugin.
Step 3. Go to Dashboard> WP Staging tab. Click on the button Create New Staging Site button.

Step 4. In the next screen, you need to give a name to your staging website and then click on Start Cloning button. The cloning process will start and take some time to complete.

Step 5. Then you need to click on Open Staging Site button and this will take you to the staging website.

You can login with the same credentials as your live site. Then you can make all the changes you want to. You can find the difference of your staging website with your live WordPress website by looking at the color of the top admin bar which is orange if it is the staging website. Do not worry about duplicate content as your staging website stays private to the search engines and visitors. Once all the changes are done, transfer the changes automatically on your live website by purchasing WP Staging Pro.

Do you want to change your WordPress password from database or PHPMyAdmin? In this article, I will explain to you that how can you reset or change your WordPress password from the database.

Step 1: Login to your Cpanel and you will need to click on PHPMyAdmin. you can see PHPMyAdmin under DATABASES section.

Step 2: It will take you to PHPMyAdmin from where you need to select your database.

Step 3: After selecting your database, you need to select wp_users table.

Step 4: Once you will click on the wp_users table it will show you the list of users. You need to select the user for which you want to change the password. Click on Edit to select the user for which you want to change the password.

Step 5: After clicking edit link it will open a form. Here you need to change your wordpress password.

You need to remove the value of user_pass field and replace it with your new password. You can see I have written newpassword but you can choose any password and after this, you need to select MD5 from the dropdown under Function column. MD5 is used to encrypt password using MD5 hash. After entering you password click on Go button.

Congratulations, your password is changed. Now you can log in using your new password.

You can remove website URL field from comments form in two different ways:

Method 1: Remove website URL field using functions.php
Method 2: Remove website URL field using plugin

Method 1: Remove website URL field using functions.php

You just need to write this below code in functions.php file.

function websoft_disable_comment_url($fields) {
unset($fields['url']);
return $fields;
}
add_filter('comment_form_default_fields','websoft_disable_comment_url');

After adding this below code you will see that URL field will be removed from comments form.

Method 2: Remove website URL field using plugin

In order to remove URL field from comments form, you need to install Remove Comment Website/URL Box plugin.

After activating this plugin you will see that URL field will be automatically removed from comments box.

An autoresponder is a service which automatically sends out emails to the people who submit forms from your website. The main benefit of this service is that you can send a pre-written message or you can send offers as well.

Contact form7 is most popular contact form plugin. So in this article, I will show you that how to setup autoresponders in Contact form7.

1. Scroll down on your contact page and you will see Mail(2) section.
2. Select Use Mail checkbox and then copy email shortcode [your-email] and paste it into To textbox. We need this shortcode to send autoresponders. (You can see below image for reference.)
3. This [your-email] shortcode will catch users email which he will enter in email box while submitting a contact form.
4. Then enter your message which you want to send via autoresponder and then click on save button. Now your autoresponder is setup.

If you are facing any issue with Contact Form7 autoresponder then please comment below.

Suppose you want to change colors, fonts or any other styling in your WordPress theme but you will see that these styling options are not available in your theme. So at that time, there will be two methods to change or add custom CSS to your WordPress site.

Method 1: Customize CSS using a Plugin

In this method, you need to install a WordPress plugin to add or customize CSS. There are many plugins available for this task but personally, I like to use Simple Custom CSS. I am using this plugin for a long time and I have used it on many websites. Even orange titles on my websites are created using this same plugin.

So firstly you need to install this plugin. After installing this plugin you need to go to Appearance >> Custom CSS. You will see a Simple Custom CSS Panel where you need to write you css.

You can see in the below image that how I have added my CSS and you can see my orange heading code as well.

After adding your CSS code you need to click on Update Custom CSS button. Then your new CSS will be applied to your theme. So this was the first way to add or customize CSS to your WordPress website through Plugin.

Note: Sometimes your Custom CSS will not overwrite your existing CSS so in that case you need to use !important tag. If you will see above image, I have used !important tags many times in my CSS so that my custom CSS will work.

Method 2: Using CSS default theme customizer

Most of WordPress theme has default CSS Customizer option where you can add or overwrite your existing CSS. In order to use Theme Customizer, you need to go to Appearance >> Customize.

After clicking this link you will be redirected to theme customizer page where you will see many options related to your theme but you need to click on Additional CSS option but it can be written as Custom CSS on your side. Because it depends upon theme developer what name he/she wants to give to this tab. On my side its Additional CSS but I can be something else on your side like: Custom CSS.

After clicking this link we will be redirected to a page where you will write your CSS code. You can see an image below where I have written my CSS code and you can see that after adding my code, menu background color is changed to Red.

Conclusion:

In the end, we can say that there are two easiest methods to write your own CSS code to WordPress. The first method is via plugin and second is by using default theme customizer. So its depends upon your choice that which method you want to use but I personally like to use plugin to customize theme.

If you have any question please comment below:

We have installed WordPress in our previous article. Now, we need to do some essential settings to our website to make it fast, efficient and secure. Here is the list of these essential settings which we should do after installing WordPress:

1. Remove Dummy Content
2. Change Site Title, Tagline and Time Zone
3. Select www or non www version of website
4. Configure WordPress Permalinks
5. Enable/Disable User Registration
6. Configure Reading Settings
7. Install Nice Looking Theme
8. Improve Page Load Speed
9. Secure Your Website
10. Media Files Settings
11. Setup User Profile
12. Optimize Your Images
13. Configure Ping List
14. Setup Google Analytics
15. Install SEO Plugin

1. Remove Dummy Content

After installing WordPress you will see a dummy post (Hello World), a dummy page (Sample Page) as well as a dummy comment. It is highly recommended that you should delete this dummy content. You can easily delete this from your WordPress Dashboard. You can see below images:

(Delete WordPress dummy Hello World! post)

(Delete WordPress dummy Sample Page)

(Delete WordPress dummy Comment)

2. Change Site Title, Tagline and Time Zone

In order to change Site Title, Tagline and Time Zone we need to go to Settings >> General from your WordPress Dashboard. We have to change the Site Title and Tagline because it will appear on Google Search results.

(Change Site Title and Tagline in WordPress)

(Change Time Zone in WordPress)

3. Select www or non www version of website

You will see some websites with www prefix like www.inderbia.com, www.google.com on another side you will see some website without www prefix for example yoursite.com. You can use anyone you want but most of the big companies use www prefix with their domain name. If you will not use www prefix then it will not affect your website SEO. So it means it’s completely your personal choice that you want to use www prefix to the domain name or not. In WordPress if you want to use this prefix then you need to go to Settings >> General. Then you will see this page.

You need to add www prefix and then click on save button. Then you will be automatically logged out from WordPress and then you need to log in again. Now you will be able to see www prefix with your domain name.

4. Configure WordPress Permalinks

You need to go to Settings >> Permalinks to change permalinks structure.

Default permalinks structure is – http://yourwebsite.com/?p=123

We need to change it because it’s not friendly to search engines. So we need to change it to Post name.

5. Enable/Disable User Registration

If you will enable this option, only then users will be able to register on your website. You need to enable this option if you want to use guest blogging on your website. You can set their default role. You can see a list of roles and permissions which they will have so that you will be able to decide if you want to enable user registration or not.

Administrator – Administrator will have access to all admin features on the website.
Editor – Editor creates and manages posts. They can manage posts of another user as well.
Author – Authors can publish and manage their own posts only.
Contributor – Contributors can write and manage their own posts but they can’t publish them.
Subscriber – Subscribers can manage their profile only.

There will be a chance that you will receive spam registrations so there are some plugins available which can help get rid of this spamming issue. I have used WangGuard plugin to stop spam user registration and it works very well.

6. Configure Reading Settings

Reading settings are very important if you want to use a static page as a front page of your website or you want to increase/decrease posts per page. For reading settings you need to go to Settings >> Reading. If you want to use a static page as a front page of your website, then select A static page option and then select a page from the list of pages. If you haven’t created any page yet then you can go to pages >> Add new where you can create pages and if you want to increase/decrease the number of posts per page then you can change it from Blog pages show at most option. You just need to enter a value here. By default, it’s 10 but you can change it.

7. Install a Nice Looking Theme

It’s time to install a nice looking theme for the blog. WordPress provides many free and nice looking themes which you can use on your blog. In order to install new theme you need to go to Appearance >> Themes

You will see list of Themes which are installed. If you want to add new a theme then you need to click on the Add New option then you’ll see below this screen:

You can see that you can install a theme from this page and you can add your search keyword as well. You have some filters like Featured, Popular, Latest, Favorites and you can see upload theme options. Upload theme option allows you to upload a theme zip file from your computer.

Or if you want to purchase a nice looking theme then you can purchase from these websites.

1. Themeforest
2. Mythemeshop
3. Template Monster

8. Improve Page Load Speed

Page load speed is very important, if your website has slow page loading, this will stop visitors to come to your website. So, page load speed plays a very vital role to attract new visitors. In WordPress, there are many plugins available which can help to increase website page load speed.

Here is some free plugins:

1. Wp Total Cache
2. Wp Super Cache
3. Smush Image Compression and Optimization
4. Wp Lazy Load

We’ve used one premium plugin as well (Wp Rocket). It works very well to increase page load speed.

9. Secure Your Website

You need to do some settings on your website to protect your website from hackers and spammers. So, you need to do activate settings like disabe directory access, change admin panel url, Limit login attempts,and change your password.

1. Disable directory access: In order to disable directory access you need to go to .htaccess file from your hosting cpanel and add this code Options All -Indexes at the bottom.
2. Change admin panel url: Changing admin panel url will protect your website from those hackers who are trying to login to your website via admin panel. There are some plugins available with which can easily change your website admin panel url. Here are some plugins: Protect Your Admin, WPS Hide Login.
3. Limit login attempts: If somebody is trying to guess your website password then this plugin will be very helpful as it restricts user by limiting them with login attempts. If somebody attempts to log in multiple times, this plugin will block their ip address so that they’ll not able to access admin for next some time. You can change your password during this time.
4. Change password: If you are using an easy password it’s time to changed it to a more complex one. You can change it by going to users and clicking on edit link under the username. Scroll down and there you can change your login password.



5. Update themes and plugins: It is strongly recommended that you should check and update your WordPress themes and plugins regularly.

10. Media file settings

Whenever you upload an image to WordPress media library, then at that time WordPress automatically generate thumbnails of that image in different sizes. Means it will add unnecessary files to your uploads folder of your website and it will start consuming more space on the server. So if you don’t want these images to generate automatically then you need to go to Settings >> Media. Then you will see this page:

You can set these numbers to zero so that it will stop generating unnecessary image files on the server. On the other side, you can set image size according to your choice as well. Like you can see in this image you can set a default size for the thumbnail, medium and large image size as well.

11. Set up user Profile

It is very important to set up user profile because if you want to change user login password or you want to change default display name or you want to show your more details like First Name, Last Name, Nickname, Email and social media profiles then you need to click on Users tab and click on your username.

12. Optimize Your Images

Images also play a very vital role in page loading speed. If you upload large images then it will put a heavy load on the server which will affect page load speed of your website. This is what makes your site slow down and prevents visitors from viewing all the content on your site. So, it’s very important to optimize images of your website. There are some plugins like WP SMUSH and EWWW Image Optimizer available in WordPress which will help you optimize your website images very easily.

13. Configure Ping list

If you want to index your blog posts to search engines quickly then you need to use these ping services. For this you need to go to Settings >> Writing. Then you will see this page:

Copy and paste this ping list to your website:

http://rpc.twingly.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.feedsubmitter.com
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://www.pingerati.net
http://www.pingmyblog.com
http://geourl.org/ping
http://ipings.com
http://www.weblogalot.com/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://ping.fc2.com/
http://blogs.yandex.ru/
http://rpc.bloggerei.de/
http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2
http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2
http://ping.rss.drecom.jp/
http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/
http://rpc.odiogo.com/ping/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

14. Install Google Analytics

Integrating google analytics is very important for your website because with google analytics you will have all statistics of your website like how many visitors are coming to your website, how much time they are spending, what is their location, what devices they are using to explore your website, how many users currently viewing your website and you will get more stats as well. So that you will be able to create your marketing and promotion strategy accordingly. Now you can understand how google analytics plays very important role in your website. Now I will tell you steps to integrate google analytics to your website.

Step 1: Go to this url: https://www.google.co.in/analytics/
Step 2: Click on Google analytics link from this page

Step 3: You will be asked to login to your gmail account. Now you need to login to your gmail account. Then you will redirect to this page:

Step 4:

You need to fill this form and then you need to click on Get Tracking ID button. You will get a Tracking ID and you need to add this tracking id to your WordPress website. There are many WordPress plugins available with which you can add google analytics code to your website.

These are some plugins which you can use to add google analytics code to your website:

1. GA Google Analytics
2. Google Analytics

15. Install SEO plugin

Search engines are another big source of traffic for websites. That’s why it’s very important to install SEO plugin your website so it’ll be able to drive traffic to your website from search engines. We recommend some SEO plugins which will help you to drive traffic to your website such as:

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Yoast SEO