Archives

One of the great aspects of WordPress is the amazing range of plugins available to add functionality for just about every type of requirement that you can think of.

While there are plenty of paid plugins, there are so many really good free plugins to choose from.

Everyone has their personal favourites, so here is my list of the top 10 WordPress Plugins for 2012.

1.  Yoast WordPress SEO

Plugin Name:  WordPress SEO

Author: Yoost De Valk

Summary: Aids with on-page SEO, eg:  titles, meta description etc.  Also has control over link structure, RSS and XML sitemaps.

Price: Free

Source: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

There are a number of WordPress SEO plugins available.   Probably the most well known is All In One SEO Pack (AIOSEO), as it has been around for a while.

I used to use AIOSEO on all my sites, but switched over to Yoast WordPress SEO, as there were a number of benefits including:

1. Better performance.  I tested the speed of both plugins  and found that Yoast SEO had slightly better performance and less overheads compared to AIOSEO.
2. Flexibility.   In most cases, you only need to fill out the title and description, but it is useful to have the advanced features such as complete control over meta robots options, 301 redirects, and keyword page analysis.

Yoast WordPress SEO has options to control the following functions:

• XML Sitemaps.   No need to install a separate Sitemap plugin.
• Breadcrumbs.   If your theme doesn’t have inbuilt breadcrumb support, this is a handy feature to enable.
• Permalinks.  Additional options to fine tune permalinks.
• RSS.  Ability to insert content into your RSS feeds.
• Social.  Ability to add Facebook Open Graph meta data and Twitter Meta Card data to your site.

2.  Pretty Link Lite

Plugin Name:  Pretty Link Lite

Author: Blair Williams

Summary: Shorten, beautify and track links

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pretty-link/

Pretty Link Lite has been a favourite with marketers since the plugin was released.

It comes in Lite (free) and Pro (paid) versions.  The main difference between the Lite and Pro version is that the Pro version has the ability to cloak your links.   Cloaking links (via an iframe) is NOT recommended as it is against the TOS for many affiliate networks.

The Lite version has everything most people need.

It is particularly handy for making your affiliate links look more friendly.

So instead of having a link like:

you can turn that into:

The Pretty links are set up using URL redirects.  You have the option to use 301 permanent or 307 temporary redirects.   You can also set them to be “nofollow”.

Another important aspect of using Pretty Link Lite is that it has great tracking so that you can see exactly what links are being clicked on and work out how effective they are.

3.  TinyMCE Advanced

Plugin Name:  TinyMCE Advanced

Author: Andrew Ozz

Summary:  Adds additional formatting options to the standard WordPress Editor.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

While the default WordPress editor is sufficient for most purposes, there comes a time when you want to have greater control over the style of your article without having to switch over to HTML mode and hand code the raw HTML.

TinyMCE  Advanced adds a load of useful options to the editor, including:

• Advanced image control
• Advanced link control
• Emoticons
• Full font and style control
• Search and replace
• Tables

Even if you rarely use those options, one reason a lot of people install TinyMCE Advanced is to prevent WordPress eating up your blank lines.

I’m sure you’ve tried to create a post where you hit the enter key a few times to insert blank lines, only to have WordPress effectively turn it into a single blank line.   TinyMCE has an option that will prevent WordPress from doing that so that you preserve all your blank lines.

4.  Duplicator

Plugin Name:  Duplicator

Author: Cory Lamie

Summary:  Plugin to backup, copy or clone your WordPress sites.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/duplicator/

In the past, I tested a lot of different WordPress Backup Solutions.  While some of those plugins/products are still very effective, I find that I use Duplicator on most of my WordPress sites as it is very flexible, easy to use and more importantly works well.

I’ve cloned, copied and restored various WordPress sites many times.   On one occasion where I came across an issue with Duplicator not working correctly after doing a WordPress update, the developer was very responsive and came out with a fix within a day.

While Duplicator works very well as a backup solution, I wouldn’t recommend it if your WordPress site constantly changes as the backup process is manual.   However, if you are updating your site once a week or month, then it is a great option as you can also use the backup to copy your site to a new domain for testing or if you need to move to a new web hosting provider.

5.  WP Super Cache

Plugin Name:  WP Super Cache

Author: Donncha & Automattic

Summary:  Speeds up your WordPress site by caching your content and reducing processing load.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

If you aren’t using caching on your site, you should do so.  It is the single quickest and easiest way to improve the performance of your site and reduce the processing load (this is particularly important if you have a shared hosting account).

There is much debate as to which is the best WordPress caching plugin.   I’m not going to get into that debate.  What I will say is that some caching is way better than no caching.

I’ve used the three main caching plugins that are currently the most popular, ie:

1. WP Super Cache
2. Quick Cache
3. W3 Total Cache

They all have their advantages and disadvantages.

W3 Total Cache is the most comprehensive caching plugin, but it can take quite a bit of effort to set up efficiently and I’ve had compatibility issues in the past with some WordPress setups/plugins.

Quick Cache is definitely the easiest of the three to set up and use and I would recommend it as a good alternative to WP Super Cache.

WP Super Cache does have good support and is actively developed.  Both Quick Cache and w3 Total Cache were last updated in 2011, whereas WP Super Cache was last updated (at the time of writing) in October 2012.

6.  Socialize

Plugin Name:  Socialize

Author: Jon Bishop

Summary:  Adds social media buttons and call to action boxes to your site.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/socialize/

If you do a search on WordPress.org for social media plugins, you will come back with a huge list of plugins.

I started using Socialize a while back and it is still one of my favourite social media plugins.

One of the main reasons I like Socialize is its flexibility.

Some of the options include:

• The ability to choose which social media sites you want to use, eg:  Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Digg, Pintrest etc.
• Changing the button sizes and styles.
• Three locations for buttons:
  1. Inline
  2. Alert Boxes
  3. Floating
• Include a call to action box at the bottom of each post.
• Override settings on a global or per post/page basis.

7.  WP-Table Reloaded

Plugin Name:  WP-Table Reloaded

Author: Tobias Bäthge

Summary: Allows you to easily create and manage tables for your WordPress posts/pages.

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-table-reloaded/

Creating tables in WordPress has always been a bit of a pain as you usually need to write the raw HTML.

WP-Table Reloaded remove the need to know any HTML to create tables.  Instead you use simple forms to input and manage your table data.   You then include the table on your post/page via a simple shortcut or by using the insert table icon added to the WordPress editor.

You can see an example of WP-Table Reloaded in action on my IM Discounts Page.

Each of the columns can be sorted and you have control over the widths, colours etc.

8. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Plugin Name:  P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

Author: GoDaddy

Summary: Tests the performance of your WordPress Plugins

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/p3-profiler/

While plugins are one of the greatest assets of WordPress, using too many or using badly written plugin can have a significant performance impact on your site.

P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) is a plugin (which you could probably say is a little ironic) that will test the performance impact of all your plugins so you can see which ones are potentially slowing down your site.

You can read my detailed post about how I used P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to detect a plugin hog that was slowing down my site.

9. Paid Downloads

Plugin Name:  Paid Downloads

Author: Ivan Churakov

Summary: Protect you paid downloads with a temporary encrypted download link

Price: Free

Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/paid-downloads/

While there are many solutions that protect your downloads from unauthorized access, Paid Downloads is a great free option if you are on a budget and want to protect your downloads.

It works by issuing a temporary, encrypted download link whenever someone buys your product (eg:  PDF guide), which expires after a set number of days.

Paid Downloads supports:

• PayPal
• Payza/AlertPay
• InterKassa

The “Pro” version includes support for:

• Authorize.Net
• 2Checkout
• Skrill/Moneybookers
• EgoPay
• Liberty Reserve

10. Hybrid Connect

Plugin Name:  Hybrid Connect

Author: Paul McCarthy/Shane Melaugh

Summary: Creates Opt-in Forms, Squeeze pages and more

Price: $39

Source: http://hybrid-connect.com/

Hybrid Connect is the only paid plugin that I’ve included in my top 10 plugins list.   I do purchase various WordPress Plugins when I think they have something very useful to enhance my sites.

In my opinion Hybrid Connect is the best optin plugin that’s currently available on the market.   It is very easy to use and is incredibly flexible.

Some of the features that I think makes Hybrid Connect special are:

• Optin forms can be placed anywhere, eg: sidebar, footer, inside a page/post etc.
• Apart from the traditional forms, you can also use Hybrid Connect to display lightboxes, slide ins and squeeze pages.
• The ability to automatically do sign ups via regular name/email or by Facebook Connect button.
• Large range of form templates that are very easy to customize via the Hybrid Connect form builder.
• Integrated split testing function that will automatically select your highest converting form.

I wrote a review of Hybrid Connect a short while ago not long after I had purchased the plugin and had it running on a few of my sites.   Note that since I wrote the review, Hybrid Connect has had the slide ins, squeeze pages, split testing and a whole bunch of other stuff added.

Support and development of this plugin is top notch and is just one of the reasons I recommend it.

Summary

Remember that this plugin list is based on my personal opinion based on all the WordPress sites I own and maintain.

If you have any really good plugins that you’ve come across in 2012, please leave a comment below and let the world know.

Cheers

With such a huge range of WordPress plugins to help build your mailing list, you might wonder what Hybrid Connect has to offer that makes it different to all the other similar plugins.

Over the last few years I’ve used a number of popular plugins to handle email opt-in forms, popups, popunders etc, but I’ve settled on using Hybrid Connect for all my sites.

You’ve probably already noticed that I use Hybrid Connect forms in various locations and designs on this website.

To find out how I came to the decision to use  Hybrid Connect exclusively on all my sites (and for clients), read on…….

Hybrid Connect Summary

Official Website:   http://hybrid-connect.com

Publisher:  IM Impact – Shane Melaugh & Paul McCarthy

Price: $39 for Single Site, $57 for Multi Site and $127 for Professional License

Guarantee: 30 day money back guarantee

Video Review

For those of you that prefer the visual medium, the video below gives a good summary of using Hybrid Connect.

Hybrid Connect Features

I’m not going to bore you with all the features of Hybrid Connect, as it does a lot of the stuff most other similar plugins do.   Instead, I’m going to cover the features that I considered to be major factors in my decision to purchase Hybrid Connect.

Facebook Sign Up

Firstly, the main selling point of Hybrid Connect is its ability to show an opt-in form with either the traditional email address sign up, or Facebook connect, depending on whether the visitor is logged into Facebook or not.

Note that this hybrid feature is entirely optional.   On one of my client websites, I turned off the Facebook option as their target audience weren’t big Facebook users.

You have complete control over how you want Hybrid Connect to operate.

Form Designer and Customization

While my web design skills are OK, anything that makes the task easier is most welcome.

Hybrid Connect comes with a range of pre-designed templates that you can use as your starting point for building your forms.

The screenshot below shows a small selection of the various templates.

Once you have chosen your template, you can edit the text and images.

To get the form looking exactly how you want, there is an extensive list of customization options that you can tweak.   If I was being nitpicking, I’d say that the customization options might be a little overwhelming for some people and it would be nice to see a basic/advanced settings for customizing.

The screenshot below gives you an idea of the types of elements you can change.

It is important to note that while there are a large number of options to tweak, as you get a preview of the form that instantly updates whenever you change the settings, you can easily see what affect each option has.

Flexibility of Form Placement

I really like that you can display Hybrid Connect forms pretty much anywhere you like on your site, either via the built in settings, shortcodes, widgets  or the raw code you can insert anywhere on your theme.

Hybrid Connect allows you to create:

• Forms on any post/page
• Forms at the bottom of any post/page
• Widget to add forms to the sidebar
• Lightbox form
• Squeeze page
• Slider Forms

Hybrid Connect Support

Quite often, one major factor that is commonly overlooked when purchasing software is the level of support and upgrades you get.

Too many times I’ve purchased software from seemingly reliable sources, only to find that when it comes time to get a response to a support ticket, the reply is either not helpful or in a lot of instances, it is non-existent.

I’ve been using Hybrid Connect since it was initially released as a beta product.   As it was an early release, I did find some bugs and limitations with it, but I was highly impressed with the level of support I received and a number of suggestions I made to improve Hybrid Connect were incorporated into later releases.

Additionally, because  this product was created by Shane Melaugh, I have a very high level of confidence that the support and development of Hybrid Connect is solid.   I can base that opinion on Shane’s previous excellent track record with looking after his clients.

Summary

Given my very favourable impressions of Hybrid Connect so far, I have great confidence that you’ll find it one of the best list building plugins out there.

I encourage you to try it out for yourself.

[button size=”large”  link=”http://umstrategies.com/hybrid-connect” linkTarget=”_blank” color=”blue”]  Click here to visit the Hybrid Connect website [/button]

Cheers

With the massive growth of smartphones and tablets in the last couple of years, if you aren’t optimizing your website for these devices, then you are potentially alienating your audience.

In this article, I’ll explain the concepts of mobile aware sites and the best options available to ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices.

Firstly, let’s look at the chart below which shows smartphone penetration in 2012 as a percentage of population.

Source:  Our Mobile Planet

With a few exceptions, most major countries have a smartphone penetration rate of around 30%-50%.

Increasingly, people are getting rid of their traditional laptop or desktop computer and solely utilising their smartphone or tablet device.

Main Approaches To Serving Mobile Content

Broadly speaking, there three main approaches to serving up content for mobile devices.

1. Separate Mobile Site

This was the most common approach used when mobile devices first came on to the market and is still used by a lot of major websites.   The website is effectively duplicated, onto a separate website which is optimized for mobile devices.

There is no particular standard for the domain name for a mobile version of the website.   Say example.com was the main website, then some of the naming formats typically used for the mobile version re:

m.example.com

wap.example.com

example.mobi

Advantages

• The user gets to choose which version of the website they want to view.
• The mobile version of the website can be heavily optimized to ensure good response times for viewers using mobile devices via a mobile network.

Disadvantages

• Effectively two versions of the site need to be maintained.
• Some sites rely on the user manually selecting the mobile version of the website.

2.  Adaptive Design

This is where the website automatically detects what type of device you are using and serves up an optimized version for it.    As this is done automatically, it means the URLs are the same whether you are browsing via a traditional laptop or a smartphone.

Advantages

• The process is transparent to the end user.
• You can do different types of optimization depending on the type of mobile device being used to view the site.
• Bandwidth savings for mobile users.

Disadvantages

• Additional maintenance is required to produce an optimized version of the site for all supported mobile devices.

3.  Responsive Design

With responsive design, you have a single version of your website that serves up the same HTML regardless of the device, and the CSS is what dictates how the site will look.

Effectively a site that uses a responsive design will resize correctly to be viewable on any screen size.

Advantages

• You have a single version of your website.
• Your layout will respond to any screen/device size.

Disadvantages

• It does offer a truly optimized mobile version of your website in terms of bandwidth or navigation.
• Relies on mobile devices that support CSS3 and Javascript

Video Demonstration

The short video below shows the differences between responsive and adaptive website designs.

Google’s Recommendation

Google has two types of crawlers:

• One for regular websites
• One of mobile content

Google recently issues their set of recommendations for building smartphone optimized websites.

The three different types of configurations they support are:

1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.

2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.

3. Sites that have a separate mobile and desktop sites.

Note the sentence in bold that Google recommend responsive web design.  Of course, this is only their recommendation and there isn’t any evidence to suggest if you use the other methods that Google will look on your site unfavourably.

Testing How Your Site Looks On A Mobile Device

The most obvious way is to simply use your smartphone or tablet and view your site.   However, not everyone has a smartphone and it is difficult to cater for large variety of devices out there.

That’s where an emulator comes in handy, as it let’s you easily test the look of a site using various devices.

Note that there are some limitations (mainly they don’t have a zoom option) with emulators as they won’t always give you exactly the same result as using the actual device itself, but in most cases, emulators provide a quick and easy way to check your site.

In the video below, I cover the best smartphone emulators and testing tools that I’ve found.

Screenfly

Screenfly by QuirkTools is the best online emulator I’ve found.  It emulates:

1. Desktop devices from a 10″ notebook up to a 24″ desktop
2. Tablets including Samsung Galaxy, Apple iPad and Morotola Xoom
3. Mobile devices including Blackberry 8300, iPhone, Google Nexus and ASUS Galaxy 7
4. Television including 480p, 720p and 1080p

The screenshot below shows the Microsoft homepage being displayed on an iPhone 4.

Mobilizer

If you prefer to run an emulator on your own computer, then Mobilizer is about the best one I found.  It runs on Adobe AIR, which means you can run it on PC or a Mac.

At the time of writing, it only emulates four different types of smartphones, but it has some additional features that make it worth while using, including:

1. The ability to open multiple devices at once and simultaneously see the differences one each device as you navigate the site.
2. Export a screenshot of the device and web page it is displaying.

The screenshot below shows the Microsoft home page again in the Mobilizer iPhone 4 emulator:

Mobile Support For WordPress

As WordPress is so popular, I wanted to cover the main options for improving your site so that it is compatible with smartphones and other mobile devices.

The options for WordPress come down to two main approaches:

1. A Responsive theme
2. A mobile specific theme that is either displayed automatically (Adaptive approach) or manually selected by the user.

Responsive WordPress Themes

More and more WordPress themes are being designed to be responsive.   This means you don’t need to install any additional themes or plugins to make your website compatible with mobile devices.

There are a range of free responsive themes in the WordPress Theme Repository, but if you are after a premium responsive theme, then I personally think the two best sources are:

1. StudioPress
2. Themeforest

WordPress Mobile Themes

While there are a large number of WordPress mobile themes available, the best option I’ve found is to use the WPtouch plugin, which automatically detects mobile devices and displays a mobile. optimized version of your site.   WPtouch can be classified as an Adaptive design.

You can use WPtouch with any WordPress theme, even responsive themes.   It is particularly useful if you are using a WordPress theme that has no mobile support at all as WPtouch will turn your site into a mobile compatible site without changing your existing theme or any other settings.

WPtouch comes in two versions:

1. Free version available in the WordPress plugin repository.
2. Pro version available from the BraveNewCode website.

The main differences between WPtouch Pro and the free version of WPtouch is the Pro version has full support, better admin features and additional customized options.  There is a full table listing the differences on the WPtouch Pro website.

Cheers

Undoubtedly one of the best aspects of WordPress is the huge range of plugins available to enhance the functionality of your site.   There are plugins that cover almost every function you can imagine.

However, there is a downside of having access thousands of freely available plugins and that is some of plugins can be real resource hogs and slow down your site.   Not only is that undesirable from a user perspective, it also has an impact (albeit small) on your SEO, as site load times are one of the factors that Google uses in its ranking algorithm.

So how do you determine if there are any plugins slowing down your WordPress site?

Funnily enough, there is a plugin that can do the job called P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) that was developed by GoDaddy (don’t let that put you off), that tests all of the plugins you have enabled on your site and gives you some handy charts and tables that allows you to easily see if you have any plugin hogs.

Video Overview

In the video below, I go through the elements of the P3 Plugin Performance Profiler and show how I found that one particular plugin on my old site was using a huge amount of resources compared to all the other plugins, the WordPress Theme and WordPress core combined.

Using The Plugin

You install the plugin the usual way by going to Plugins->Add New, specifying p3 plugin profiler and clicking on the search plugins button.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can access it under Tools->P3 Plugin Profiler.   Then you simply need to click on the blue Start Scan button and then click on the Auto Scan button.

The scan will take a few minutes depending on the content on your site and the number of plugins you have enabled.

Analyzing The Results

When the scan is complete, you will see a summary page like the screenshot below:

Looking at the pie chart above, it is immediately obvious that one of the plugins (Simple Lightbox in this instance) is using a lot more resources than all the other plugins put together.

The other useful figure to look at is the Plugin Impact percentage.  In the above example, this figure is 70.2%, which is quite excessive.   There isn’t any magical figure this should be, but in general lower the better (I aim for 20% or lower).

The other useful information to look at is under the Simple Timeline tab.  This shows you a a graph with the amount of time used up by:

1. WordPress Plugins
2. WordPress Theme
3. WordPress Core

In general, you want them to be more or less even.

In the screenshot below, it makes it clear the impact the WordPress plugin load times are having on the site.

What To Do Once You’ve Identified Problem Plugins

If you discover one of more plugins on your site taking up a lot of resources, there are a few courses of action you can take.

1. Determine if you really need that plugin.  In some instances, you’ll find a particular plugin doesn’t really give you any benefit, in which case, just delete it.
2. Check to see if there are any updates to the plugin that fix performance problems.
3. Check if there is an similar plugin that does the same job, but has better performance.
4. Check if your WordPress theme offers similar functionality to the problem plugin.    If you have a plugin that performs the same function as your theme, you are wasting resources by having duplicate functionality.

Remember that if you are adding, upgrading or changing your plugins, it is always a good idea to check what impact they are going to have on your site.

Cheers

There are so many different WordPress Themes in existence and people spend a lot of time hunting down the “right” theme to use.

Typically a person will come across  a WordPress site that they really like and are interested in using the same theme, but find there is no information or links in the footer as to what WordPress theme has been used.

If you know what to do, you can look in the HTML source for the site you are interested in, but I decided that I would create a free tool to make this process super simple.

What WordPress Theme Is That?

So I created the site  called What WordPress Theme Is That?

It’s very easy to use.  All you do is enter a domain or URL and click on the “Check Site” button.

Here is a screenshot showing you the type of results you’ll get.

There will be a minority of WordPress sites that have their theme obscured, so the tool won’t get all the details for those sites, but for the vast majority of sites, it should correctly detect all the details.

Below is a short video showing you how it works.

Hope you find it to be a useful tool when building your WordPress Sites.

Cheers

Given the huge popularity of the SEOPressor plugin, I thought I’d do a comparison with some recent competitors.

The basic premise of an on-page SEO plugin is that it gives you suggestions for improving on-page SEO and an overall score.

In theory, if the score that is reported by the on-page SEO plugin is high, then you should have a highly optimized page.

The six on-page SEO plugins I’m comparing are:

1.  SEOPressor – This is the most well known on-page SEO plugin.  It was developed by Daniel Tan and has been on the market for some time.

2.  BloggerHigh SEO – This is a free clone of the SEOPressor plugin.

3.  ClickBump SEO – This is a recent entrant into the on-page SEO plugin space.  It is developed by Scott Blanchard.

4. WP SEO Beast – This on-page SEO plugin arrived on the screen just after ClickBump SEO.   It is developed by Prashant Sharma.

5.  Easy WP SEO – This is the highly popular on-page SEO Plugin that is developed by Chris Landrum.

6. Measure My SEO – This is the newest on-page SEO Plugin on the market and is developed by Jason Fladlien and Wilson Mattos.

Demonstration of the On-Page SEO Plugins

The following video gives a brief overview of what each of the plugins do and how they compare to each other.

Please note that when I recorded the original video, WP SEO Beast wasn’t available, so the WP SEO Beast review is in the video below:

The video below shows a quick overview of the Easy WP SEO plugin

Note that in the Easy WP SEO video above, this was using Easy WP SEO version 1.5.  Since then Easy WP SEO v1.6 was released and has a number of major improvements, including:

• Copyscape checking
• Export/Import of Easy WP SEO settings
• Ability to check membership/protected pages
• Ability to check any URL on your site, eg: archives, categories etc
• Ability to fine tune what SEO checks are used in the ratings
• Better SEO report option.

Looking at the Plugins In More Detail

SEOPressor

I was a reluctant purchaser of SEOPressor as I really didn’t think $97 was particularly good value for what it does (particularly if you already know the elements of on-page SEO).  However, given I review products, I ended up buying a copy as at the very least, it’s a useful reminder for particular on-page SEO elements I might have forgotten.

Good Points

• Has a central administration menu for defining keywords and viewing page/post scores and descriptions.
• Works with auto-blogs by giving it a list of keywords and SEOPressor will automatically “decorate” the keywords, ie: bold, underline, italics.

Bad Points

• Price!  In my opinion, $97 for a plugin like this is way over priced.  I think somewhere between $30-$50 is much more reasonable and realistic.
• Nags you about not having an H1 tag, when the vast majority of WordPress themes automatically use H1 for the post/page titles.  Of course you can ignore the suggestion, but it’s something that really irks me.

Click here to access the SEOPressor website

BloggerHigh SEO

BloggerHigh SEO is essentially a rewritten version of SEOPressor.

The actual author and origins of BloggerHigh SEO is a little mysterious.   It appears to be a product of the “Masked Guru”.  Whatever the origins, the big plus of BloggerHigh SEO is that it is free and rebrandable.

Good Points

• Can’t argue with the price as it’s free!
• The plugin is rebrandable, so you can rebrand it yourself (with some limitations) and give it away or sell it.
• Pretty much does the same things as SEOPressor.

Bad Points

• No central administration page.  You need to go to each individual page/post to check the score and suggestions.
• If you don’t have the “hide attribution” option checked, then you’ll have an ugly footer added to each of your pages that have links to the various BloggerHigh sites.  Although, to be fair, as it is a free product, you can’t really blame them for wanting backlinks to their sites.

Click here to access the BloggerHigh SEO website

Clickbump SEO

I recently bumped (bad pun) into Clickbump SEO on the Warrior Forum.  The plugin itself is not currently promoted so much as a standalone plugin, but usually offered as part of the Clickbump Engine Bundle.

Scott did mention that he had registered a domain for Clickbump SEO, so it will be offered as a standalone product very soon.

As I wasn’t that interested in the Clickbump Engine, I purchased just the Clickbump SEO plugin.

Good Points

• It’s less than half the price of SEOPressor.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1, H2 and H3 tags for headings.
• Doesn’t have any overheads of processing a page to add auto-decoration.
• Has a LSI function to grab related keywords.  Very handy reminder of what keywords/phrases to sprinkle into your article.
• Customisable keyword density settings.
• Keyword/Score summary from the Posts/Page manager.

Bad Points

• Can’t really think of any.

Click here to access the ClickBump SEO website

WP SEO Beast

I bought the WP SEO Beast plugin when it was first released so that I could add it to the list of other plugins to compare it to.

I found a few issues with version 1.0 of the WP SEO Beast plugin, so I contacted the author (who was very prompt with his responses) and waited until version 2.0 was released.  This is the version I’m basing my review/comparison on.

Prashant Sharma has obviously studied the other on-page SEO plugins that are available as WP SEO Beast seems to borrow a few ideas from all of them.

WP SEO Beast is probably best described as a cross between ClickBump SEO and SEOPressor.  It does however, have a SEO settings option (similar to all-in-one SEO) which none of the other plugins don’t have.   This has good and bad points as I’ll detail below.

Good Points

• Costs $37, for a plugin that offers more than SEOPressor at more than twice the price.
• Has an option to generate LSI keywords.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1 tags for the post/page title.
• Has summary pages for post and page scores.
• Has support for mobile devices.
• Has inbuilt SEO options to set the meta Title, Description and Keywords so no additional SEO plugins are needed, eg: all-in-one SEO.   Note that I’ve also listed this feature in the bad points

Bad Points

• Probably my biggest gripe with WP SEO Beast is that it forces you to use it’s SEO settings for title, description and keywords.  This means you have no choice to use another SEO plugin like all-in-one SEO or Platinum SEO.  If you do have one of these plugins active, you will end up with two sets of clashing SEO meta data.
• Your score is marked down if you don’t use SEO Beast title, description and keywords, but more importantly, your score is marked down if you don’t use the auto-decoration options (bold, italics, underline).  That means if you manually decorate your keyword, WP SEO Beast doesn’t recognise it.

I think it is only fair to point out that Prashant Sharma is extremely keen to take on board any suggestions to improve the plugin (unfortunately he didn’t address my gripe with the plugin recognising manually decorated keywords though), so you may well find the issues I’ve brought up have been dealt with.

Click here to access the WP SEO Beast website

Easy WP SEO

Easy WP SEO was the latest of the on-page seo plugins that I had a look at.

My first impressions were very favourable as Easy WP SEO has a very professional and polished look and feel.   This certainly extends through to the very extensive documentation that is available with the plugin.  There are instructional videos for every single function of Easy WP SEO.

One big feature that only Easy WP SEO has, is the ability to specify multiple keywords.   This is really useful as most of the time, you want to optimize for your main keyword plus a selection of secondary keywords.   With Easy WP SEO, you can easily select which keyword you want to see the analysis for.

Good Points

• Very clean and professional design.
• Ability to handle multiple keywords.
• Has an LSI function, where you can list LSI keywords and drag/drop them into your article.
• Able to fine tune a large number of settings, eg: keyword density, minimum number of words, title length etc.
• Only on-page seo plugin to include a readability index.
• Has a Copyscape check function.
• Extensive documentation including a manual and video guides.

Bad Points

• Can’t think of any.

Easy WP SEO is not currently available to the public via the main website, however you can grab a discounted copy below.

Click here to access the discounted copy of Easy WP SEO

Measure My SEO 

I recently came across the Measure My SEO plugin, but haven’t had time to personally review it.  I’m including it here for completeness.

Note that I’m basing my information about the Measure My SEO plugin from the Measure My SEO website.

At first glance, Measure My SEO looks like a much more pretty version of SEOPressor or BloggerHigh.  The core functionality doesn’t appear to be much different, but there are a few key differences that make it stand out.

Good Points

• The settings page allows you to control exactly what SEO features you want to measure.
• Has a live checker that automatically updates the SEO page score without you having to update the page.

Bad Points

• Not as fully featured as WP SEO Beast, Clickbump SEO and Easy WP SEO.

Click here to access the Measure My SEO website.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an important part of on-page SEO, but you should be aware that there are a few different ways to calculate it and you will get different results depending on what tool you are using.

There are two main ways to calculate keyword phrase density.

A=Total occurrences of the keyword phrase in the article

B=Total number of words in the article

C=Number of words in the keyword phrase

Keyword density calculation 1 uses:

(A / B) * 100

Keyword density calculation 2, uses:

(A * C / B) * 100

Let’s have a look at an example and the difference in the keyword density score those two formulas can make.

Let’s say we have a article with 1000 words and using keyword phrase of “search engine results page” (4 words) where there are 10 occurrences of that phrase.

So using the first formula, that gives us:

(10 / 1000) * 100 = 1% keyword density

and using the second formula, gives us:

(10 * 4 / 1000) * 100 = 4% keyword density

That’s quite a difference depending on which formula you use.  (Note: the differences only apply to keyword phrases and not when you use a single keyword).

All the on-page SEO plugins I tested use the first formula apart from BloggerHigh SEO.

With Easy WP SEO you have the option which keyword density calculation to use, where the default is the first formula.

There is a good explanation of keyword density calculations on Wikipedia.

So Which is the Best Plugin To Use?

My recommendation is if you already have SEOpressor and are relatively happy with using it, then there’s probably not a compelling reason to throw it out in favour of BloggerHigh SEO, ClickBump SEO,  WP SEO Beast, Measure My SEO or Easy WP SEO.

If you are on a tight budget, then BloggerHigh SEO is a good option.

Of the other four plugins, my pick would be for Easy WP SEO.  With the version 1.6 update, Easy WP SEO is now well ahead of the pack.

Of the other on-page SEO plugins, my next pick would be ClickBump SEO,  followed by WP SEO Beast or Measure My SEO.

Hopefully all these on-page SEO plugins will be further developed and I’ll update this review page if there are any major changes.

If you come across any other similar on-page SEO plugins, let me know and I’ll add them to this review.

Cheers

Whether you are an Internet Marketer or just have your own personal WordPress blog,  most people know that they really should have a backup, but haven’t quite got around to doing something about it before it’s too late.

Backups aren’t the most exciting thing, but without a proper backup system in place, it can hurt really hard with all the work you may loose.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been doing adhoc backups of my main WordPress sites, but had no real backup plan in place.

I got motivated to look at WordPress backups in more detail after the disk in my laptop failed (yes, I did have a backup and yes I was able to completely restore everything).

So I’ve spent the last few days trying out pretty much every WordPress backup solution I could find.   I didn’t bother with some of the WordPress backup plugins that were very old and abandonded.  I’ve concentrated on the free WordPress backup solutions, but do list a few of the paid WordPress backup solutions as well, although I haven’t personally used them.

WordPress Backup Solutions Reviewed

The following is an alphabetical  list of the WordPress Backup solutions that I personally tried out:

1. Automatic WordPress Backup
2. BackWPup
3. EZPZ One Click Backup
4. myEASYbackup
5. Online Backup for WordPress
6. PressBackup
7. Snapshot Backup
8. Updraft
9. Xcloner

Additionally, I  have included some information on the following WordPress Backup solutions that I haven’t had a chance to try yet:

1. Backup Buddy
2. VaultPress
3. WPTwin
4. Blog Zapper

The information in this review is based on my own personal experiences and on the versions of the software available at the time.  You may get different results on your server depending on the environment.

I’ll will endeavour to update any information if there are major changes to the WordPress backup software.

Backup Features

When looking around for a good WordPress backup solution, you need to keep the following points in mind:

• Is it robust?  This is critical for anyone wanting reliable backups.  I came across a few products that I wouldn’t want to rely on for backing up my sites.
• Is it easy to install and configure?  There’s no point in installing a backup solution if it is too complex and time consuming to set up.  On the other hand, it is good to have enough configuration options to make it flexible.
• Does is backup everything?  Not all WordPress backup solutions backup absolutely everything.  There’s really not much point in doing a backup if it isn’t 100% complete.
• Can you schedule backups?  Not all WordPress backup solutions have a scheduling function.  They are more designed for adhoc, manual backups.
• What storage options are available?  Some WordPress backup solutions only allow you to backup to the local server and let you manually download to your computer.  Others have options to transfer the backup to a FTP server or cloud storage service like Amazon S3.
• Security.  Some WordPress backups create a full backup that you can download, but unless you have some restrictions around that like a unique backup name and/or password protected access, it means anyone can potentially download your backups.
• Restore process.  It’s one thing to backup your site, but if you need a bullet proof and easy way to be able to restore the backup or clone the backup to another site.

Backup Storage Options

The following are the most common options for storing WordPress Backups:

1. On the Webserver

Almost all WordPress backup solutions directly or indirectly store the backups on your local webserver.  This is OK for most purposes, but to be really robust, you should have a copy stored off site.

2.  Via Email

This method is OK for smaller backups, but if the backups get too large, mail servers will start to reject them.  Additionally, it isn’t very secure as anyone can potentially access your backup if it is unencrypted.

3. To a FTP Server

This is one of the most common options to store your backups on another server.   You just need to make sure you have access to a server with FTP access.

4.  To a Cloud Storage Service

A cloud storage service is place where you can store any data you like (backups, videos, files etc) on storage servers provided by a company.  These services give you very high bandwidth access to your data and very high reliability.

The most common services are:

• Amazon S3 – this is a very popular service and is very cheap to use
• Rackspace Cloud Files – Very similar to Amazon S3

Another storage option which is quite popular is Dropbox

Dropbox gives you 2GB of free storage for storing whatever files you want including backups.

Automatic WordPress Backup – by Dan Coulter

This was one of the first WordPress backup plugins to support Amazon S3.

Version 2 of the plugin was released in late 2010 (there have been some minor updates since then) which added an easy option for restoring your backups.

You must have an Amazon S3 account to be able to use this plugin.

The screenshot below shows the options you can set with Automatic WordPress Backup.

The steps are pretty straight forward:

1. Add your AWS keys
2. Select or create an S3 bucket name for the backups
3. Set the backup schedule
4. Select which parts of the blog to back up (in most cases you want all options selected)
5. Select whether to delete old backups (not really an issue unless your site is huge)
6. Select whether you will have a credit in your footer or write a review of the plugin.

That’s all that’s required.

You can click on the “Save Changes and Backup Now” to do an immediate backup (highly recommended after first installing the plugin).

Automatic WordPress Backup has a simple menu to restore from a backup where you select the particular backup you want to restore and click on the “Restore from backup” button.

It then displays a message saying it is restoring from the backup and will be finished when the page refreshes.  This is a little concerting as you don’t get a nice bold confirmation when the restore has finished, but in my reasonably limited tested, the restore function worked just fine.

Good Points

• Simple to install and set up.
• Has an option to do manual as well as scheduled backups
• Has a simple restore function.

Bad Points

• Limited to users with Amazon S3 accounts.

BackWPup – by Daniel Hüsken

BackWPup has quite a number of configuration options.

It works by creating a ZIP (other formats supported) file of your site (includes the database and all the files) into a unique folder name under the wp-content folder.

Once the backup has been created, you have the option to send it to:

• A FTP server
• Amazon S3
• Microsoft Azure
• Rackspace Cloud
• Dropbox
• SugarSync
• Email

This gives you quite a bit of flexibility as to how and where you like to store your backups.

The configuration options are quite detailed, which may put some people off if they like the options to be simple and more limited.

The following screenshot shows a portion of the options to set up a backup job.

Good Points

• Very flexible with how you want to set up the backup.
• Supports many different methods for storing the backup.
• Good logging.

Bad Points

• Might be a little too complex for some people.
• The restore process is semi-manual.

EZPZ One Click Backup – By Joe Cook

The premise behind EZPZ One Click Backup is that you can install it and start doing backups without setting anything.

There are options for scheduling the backups, along with filters to exclude certain folders, but these are optional.

By default, EZPZ One Click Backup creates the WordPress backup on your server.  You have the option to manually download the backup or you can purchase an EZPZ One Click Backup extension for $2.95 that will enable an option to save your backups to your Dropbox account.  Alternatively, you can specify a FTP server to send the backup to.

The following screenshot shows the output the plugin generates when it creates a backup.

Good Points

• Very simple to set up and use.
• Fairly simple restore process.

Bad Points

• Limited options for storing the backup off-site.

myEASYbackup – by Ugo Grandolini

myEASYbackup is designed to do manual backups of your WordPress site with the option to send the backup to email, FTP or use a storage service created by plugin author.

On first glance, the interface looks very slick with nice graphics and layout, however I didn’t find it that intuitive when I started using it.

Here’s a screenshot of what myEASYbackup looks like:

Good Points

• Allows you to store the backup outside your web folders for better security.

Bad Points

• No scheduling option.
• Slightly confusing interface and mode of operation.

Online Backup for WordPress – by Backup Technology

[Updated details on 12 Oct 2011 with the release of new version]

Online Backup for WordPress is a backup solution produced by Backup Technology that allows you to backup your WordPress securely to Backup Technology’s storage servers.

Version 1 of the plugin only backed up the database, but since the release of Version 2, it allows you to also includes all the WordPress files (eg: plugins, images, themes etc) with the backup.

Before you can start any backups, you need to create a free account on the Backup Technology site that gives you access to 100MB of free storage.  You need to set up one account per WordPress site.

The following screenshot shows you the single configuration and backup page for the plugin:

Good points

• Simple to install and use.
• Encrypts your data.
• Includes a restore process.

Bad Points

No real bad points to speak of.

PressBackup – by Infinimedia Inc.

PressBackup is available as a free plugin if you backup to your computer or Amazon S3.  They also have a subscription if you want to use their storage service.

Setting the backups is very easy to do via the PressBackup wizard.  Once you’ve run the wizard, you can either run a manual backup or wait for the scheduled backup to run.

The interface is straight forward as the following screenshot shows:

Good Points

• Very easy to set up.
• Has a built in restore option.

Bad Points

• No support for FTP servers.
• Can’t specify the S3 bucket name the backups get stored in.

Snapshot Backup – by Jay Versluis

Snapshot Backup is a simple plugin that backups up your WordPress site and sends it via FTP.

There’s not really much else to describe as there aren’t many options as you can see in the screenshot below:

Good Points

• Simple to use.

Bad Points

• No automated backups.
• The configuration options are found under the Dashboard menu (last place I’d expect a plugin config to be)
• The backup is stored locally in a non-unique folder which means it could potentially be downloaded by someone else.
• No restore option.

To be fair, this plugin is quite new and there are a lot of features on the roadmap, so you may find some of the issues above are addressed in later versions.

Updraft – by Paul Kehrer

Updraft gives you the options of manual or scheduled backups of your WordPress site to your local server, email, FTP server, S3 Amazon or Rackspace Cloud.

The configuration options are quite straight forward and there is context help for each option.

The following screenshot shows the single configuration/backup/restore options:

Good Points

• Good selection of backup destinations.
• Easy to use interface.

Bad Points

• After playing around with the backup directory location, the Updraft got confused as to what backups were available.
• Hasn’t been updated since July 2010, although the author mentioned he’d release a bugfix in Feb 2011.

Xcloner – by Liuta Ovidiu

Xcloner is a backup and restore application  that will backup any PHP/MySQL website and is available as a native plugin for WordPress and Joomla.

The software is free and there is an option to pay for professional support.  If you don’t want to pay for support, there is a free forum available to get help.

Xcloner has options for backing up to your local server, FTP server, via email and to Amazon S3.

You can restore your backups or clone them to a new site by specifying the FTP details of the new site and database details (this part is a manual process).  The restore script then does the rest for you.

As the Xcloner works on generic websites, Joomla and WordPress, the interface is a bit different to most WordPress plugins.

There quite a few options, but it doesn’t take too long to be familar with the setup.

The following screenshot shows the main configuration page:

During my testing of Xcloner I did have some issues with the backups not fully completing.  The support for Xcloner seems to be good, so I posted on the Xcloner support forums and will hopefully get an answer as Xcloner does look very promising.

Good points

• Can use on generic websites as well as Joomla and WordPress sites.
• Good range of backup options supported.
• Has an easy option for restoring and cloning WordPress sites.
• Good documentation.
• Support forum.

Bad points

• Can take a little time to learn how to use.
• Scheduling has to be manually set up.

Paid WordPress Backup Solutions

The following is a list of WordPress backup solutions that either have a one off payment or a subscription payment.

I haven’t personally used any of these backup solutions, but I am providing them for completeness.  The information I’m giving is based on what’s available on the products website.

BackupBuddy – by iThemes

BackupBuddy allows you to backup your WordPress site to a FTP server, Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud.

It is a complete WordPress backup solution as you can schedule backups and either restore them if your site is corrupted or migrate/clone them to a new site.

Pricing is based on the number of WordPress sites you want to backup:

• $45 for 2 sites
• $75 for 10 sites
• $150 for unlimited sites

VaultPress – by Automattic

VaultPress allows you to have realtime backups of your WordPress sites.  That means whenever a new post,  comment or any other content is changed or added to your site, the changes are synced to the cloud storage services.

Pricing is based on a monthly fee.  Currently this is set to:

• Basic – $15
• Premium – $40
• Enterprise – no pricing available at the time of writing.

WPTwin – by Jason Fladlien and Wilson Mattos

WPTwin is primarily designed to clone WordPress sites and costs $97.

It is not a WordPress plugin.  To clone a site requires FTPing a script onto the source and destination servers.

WPTwin does have a very good reputation and I haven’t seen any bad experiences with it.

As WPTwin doesn’t have a scheduling option, it is better suited to one-off or adhoc backups.   This means it wouldn’t be very suitable for auto-blogs.

Blog Zapper – by Carl Ringall

Blog Zapper works in a very similar fashion to WPTwin in that it is a standalone utility that you can use to copy, backup and clone your WordPress sites.

The cost of Blog Zapper is $37.

Conclusions On The Best WordPress Backup Solution

I can’t tell you precisely which WordPress backup solution to use because it depends on your budget, the number and type of WordPress sites you operate, the amount of data you have to backup, how often your content gets updated etc.

Hopefully the information I have given in this article will help you make a decision as to which backup solution to choose.

I would love to hear your experiences with whatever WordPress backup solution that you are using.

If you know of any good WordPress backup solutions I haven’t covered here, please leave a comment and I’ll endeavour to add them to this review.

Cheers