How To Change The Fonts On Your WordPress Site

WordPress Beginners, WordPress Plugins

how to change fonts on your wordpress site

An extremely common request by WordPress users is how to change the font in their posts, pages and themes. Many themes, especially premium ones, provide a set of options in the dashboard that lets the user easily modify the fonts the theme is using. But in cases where the theme does not provide this functionality, it can be implemented by using plugins (of course!!).

This tip is geared for non-technical WordPress users who want some extra control over their site’s appearance by selecting from the vast library of Google Fonts. If you are a WordPress theme developer that wants to include Google Fonts in your theme, you’ll want to read up on how to enqueue the fonts into your theme, and how to provide a theme options panel for your users.

Here are 2 plugins to consider for your font-y needs:

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Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins For Beginners

Audience: Beginners
WordPress Plugins

The Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins for Beginners

Ah contact forms….such as a standard feature of a website aren’t they? One would think that WordPress would have tons of great, easy-to-implement choices for this. And indeed there are TONS of choices, it’s just that most of them have pretty cryptic interfaces, especially for newbies.

For contact forms and anything data collection oriented I prefer Gravity Forms but it’s not free and for some bloggers there really wouldn’t be any point in buying it. But a basic contact form is something most WordPress users want so it’s important to find a good, simple and easy to use solution. And by “easy to use”, I mean something that can be figured out by a new blogger fairly easily. Not the kind that’s “easy to use” once you’ve spent hours figuring it out.

So I’ve done some testing of some of the most mentioned contact form plugins – the ones that show up in the plugin directory search, along with ones mentioned by other bloggers. Honestly, most of them made my skin crawl. They called themselves things like “fast” and “easy” (which sounds like a recipe for a great time) but hurt my brain to look at them. Instead of list them anyway (it is, after all, my job to filter the chaff on your behalf), I’ve picked just a couple that I think are actually useful.

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Should You Use the Jetpack WordPress Plugin?

WordPress Plugins

Jetpack WordPress Plugin

What Is Jetpack?

Jetpack is a plugin created by the team at WordPress.com. It is one super-plugin that contains a whole suite of features – mini-plugins, if you will. It was created to make available to self-hosted WordPress users some of the convenient features that WordPress.com users enjoy. Some of the features that Jetpack includes are:

  • a widget to display your latest Tweets
  • WordPress stats about traffic to your blog
  • Email subscription to blog posts and comments
  • Facebook Like box widget
  • mobile theme
  • “Carousel” to turn image galleries into slideshows
  • image widget – to easily add an image to your sidebar

Speed Up and Secure Your Site With CloudFlare

Online Marketing, WordPress Beginners, WordPress Plugins

Speed Up and Secure Your WordPress Site With Cloudflare

The speed at which your site loads is becomig increasingly important. Not only does a speedy site provide a good user experience, but it’s becoming increasingly important from an SEO perspective – site speed is a factor that Google considers in its rankings.

One of the easiest and most effective ways you can speed up your site, particularly if you are on an inexpensive shared web hosting plan is to use a service called Cloudflare. Cloudflare, which you can use for free, will speed up your site, help protect it from spammers AND help make it more secure. Here’s how it does that:

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

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How To Securely Remember Your Online Account Passwords

Blogging Basics

how to securely remember your online account passwords

As soon as you own your own website you will quickly amass a large number of online accounts – your web hosting account, FTP access, WordPress access, Google, Twitter, Facebook etc etc. This leads to 2 main problems for bloggers. Firstly most people end up losing track of their information, forgetting passwords, always having to reset their info, and generally being disorganized and frustrated. This results in problem #2 which is security. For many people, keeping track of all these usernames and passwords is a real challenge and most  resort to very insecure methods such as using “weak” passwords over and over again because it’s easy to remember.

We really can’t afford to be so cavalier with our account info. I always liken such pieces of info to the keys to your house or car. Most people guard those things pretty closely,but when it comes to online info, they take more risks. For consultants and developers like myself it’s extra important that we have ways to keep info securely because we are privy to the accounts of all our clients.

Whatever your situation, here are some free and cheap tools that will help you. You only need to pick one of them and I highly recommend you don’t put this off any longer!! For some background reading on the importance of secure passwords and more, check out this post from web security expert Tony Perez of Sucuri.

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