Blogger vs WordPress Blog

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

You know you need a fast website. Your visitors don't want to wait, Google rewards speed, and you just want to create the best site you can.

We previously talked about some strategies for speeding your site in our article How to Optimize Your WordPress Site's Performance. One key strategy we covered in that article is caching.

Once you start googling the topic, you find that it becomes quite complex, and there are a lot of caching solutions out there. Which one should you choose?

In this article we'll explain the options and help you make a decision.

How Does Caching Speed Up My Site?

There are a lot of benefits to using WordPress for your website. It's easy to add new posts, tweak the way your site looks, and add new functionality. It's definitely the way to go, and why it's the most popular CMS in the world, powering almost 75 million sites, or over 25% of the web.

But all of that convenience comes at a price. Your web site has more work to do when someone visits your site, making it slower. Scripts need to be run, your database accessed, your theme displayed, your plugins run.

Caching changes all that.

A cache is a place to store temporary data. It takes your dynamic, easy-to-change website, and stores it as static HTML files, which are much faster to read. Each time your site is modified, the cache needs to be cleared and regenerated, which is normally triggered by a WordPress plugin.

What Are the Benefits of Caching?

There are three major benefits to using a WordPress cache:

Caching enhances the speed and performance of your website, particularly page load times. Your visitors will spend less time waiting, and more time reading.

Caching reduces the load on your web server. Your database doesn't need to be accessed as often, and less system memory is used. This can make a big difference on a limited shared hosting plan.

You will rank better on search engines. All other things being equal, Google punishes slow sites by ranking them lower in search results. Your site will become more discoverable, which may lead to an increase in traffic.

So, should you be using a WordPress caching solution? For most people the answer is a resounding "Yes!" It's the one thing you can do that give a huge performance boost to your site, especially when you have high traffic.

When shouldn't you use a cache? When you want your site to display differently to each visitor. One example is an ecommerce site, where the shopping cart will be updated differently for each user.

But these are special cases. For most WordPress sites a cache is a great idea.

So where do you get one? There are two options: pre-packaged, or roll your own.

Option 1: Use Your Hosting Provider's Custom Caching Solution

Some hosting providers have their own custom caching solution, which may involve server-side software plus custom WordPress plugins. These are carefully tweaked to maximize the speed improvement.

If your provider offers such a solution, strongly consider using it. Not only will it save you time and effort, but you're unlikely to match their results in tuning the cache for maximum speed.

Some examples:

SiteGround's caching solution is SuperCacher, which is based on NGINX ("Engine X"). It supports HTTPS and is claimed to make your pages load four times faster:

The SuperCacher is developed by SiteGround exclusively for our customers. It increases the number of hits a site can handle and boosts the website loading speed. The SuperCacher includes 4 different caching options for maximum optimization of your websites.

It's a suite of four different caching solutions (well, actually three for shared hosting):

Static Cache, a caching solution for your static resources which is enabled by default.

Dynamic Cache, which is effective for dynamic sites powered by WordPress and similar.

Memcached, which caches the results from the database queries .

For best results on your WordPress site, enable all three.

WP Engine call their caching solution Evercache, which is set up and ready to go out of the box. They describe it as their "secret sauce", and claim will load pages 4-6 times faster. They recommend you don't use your own caching solution. In fact, they explicitly block the use of many caching plugins.

Because of WP Engine's EverCache, there is no need for site owners or developers to manage caching plugins. WP Engine takes care of that for you.

Varnish is a caching solution used by many hosting providers including Bluehost and DreamHost, and it may be part of WP Engine's secret sauce. It's fast, but has a major limitation: it doesn't support HTTPS. Some hosting providers run it in conjunction with NGINX or other software to get around this limitation.

Does your hosting provider offer a caching solution out of the box? Check it out before deciding to install your own cache—it can make your job a lot easier. In fact, one good reason to choose a hosting provider is because they offer a fast and easy-to-use caching solution.

Option 2: Use a WordPress Caching Plugin

If your hosting provider doesn't provide a caching solution, or you prefer a more DIY approach, you can install a WordPress caching plugin. As a bonus, many of these have features beyond just caching, using techniques we described in our article How to Optimize Your WordPress Site's Performance.

Which plugin should you use? Firstly, one that will give you a significant speed boost. Secondly, one that will meet your preference of configurability or ease-of-use. Thirdly, consider cost.

Two independent benchmark tests done earlier this year (by Design Bombs and Dev Shed) agree on the fastest three WordPress caching plugins out there. They rank the plugins differently, and debates about the best or fastest plugin are fierce and never-ending. But these three perform well, and one of them should do the trick for you.

WP Rocket "Simplicity & Speed" at a price

Active installs: used by 233,995 sites

Cost: $39 for a single site, 3 sites $99, unlimited sites $199 (includes one year of updates and support)

All plans come with a 30 day money-back guarantee

The fastest caching solution according to some benchmark tests

Don't waste your time struggling with complex plugin settings. WP Rocket launches upon activation – minimal configuration, immediate results.

Features:

Page caching: fast loading for web pages

Cache preloading: improves indexing by search engines

Images on request: images are loaded only when they come into view, improving the initial page load time

Static files compression: HTML, Javascript and CSS files are minified so they can be downloaded quicker

Developer friendly: designed to be easily customized.

WP Super Cache by Automattic, creators of WordPress

Active installs: 1+ million

Cost: free

A "Top 3" caching solution according to benchmark tests

One of the fastest free caching solutions

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

The plugin serves cached files in three ways, and is fast and easy to set up. It's recommended that most users should enable the following settings:

PHP caching

Compress pages

Don't cache pages for known users

Cache rebuild

CDN support

Extra homepage checks.

W3 Total Cache "Web Performance Optimization for WordPress"

Active installs: 1+ million

Cost: free

A "Top 3" caching solution according to benchmark tests

Another of the fastest free caching solutions

W3 Total Cache improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing download times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration.

This plugin does more than just caching—it has a feature set similar to WP Rocket. According to the website, those features provide the following benefits:

Improved search engine page rankings, especially for mobile-friendly websites and sites that use SSL

At least 10x improvement in overall site performance

Improved conversion rates and "site performance" which affect your site's rank on Google.com

"Instant" repeat page views: browser caching

Optimized progressive render: pages start rendering quickly and can be interacted with more quickly

Reduced page load time, increasing visitor time on site

Improved web server performance, and the ability to sustain high traffic periods

Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds.

Time to Make a Choice

Which caching option is best for you? The one that gives you the best balance of:

Speed and functionality

Configurability vs. ease-of-use

Cost.

Here are our recommendation.

If your web host provides a caching solution, strongly consider using it, especially if you value ease of use. SiteGround, our preferred hosting provider, packages an excellent caching solution into their affordable hosting plans, and would be an excellent choice.

WP Rocket is fast and easy to use—you can be set up in 3-4 minutes. If you don't mind the $39 price point, it might be perfect for you.

On the other hand, if you prefer a user-friendly solution that's free, choose WP Super Cache. It was written by the team that know WordPress best, and because it has less options, is easier to set up.

Or if you prefer a free solution that's more configurable, choose W3 Total Cache. It has features beyond caching that may save you from installing additional plugins.

Which caching solution do you prefer? Why? Did we leave out your favorite? Let us know in the comment section below.

Source: How to Choose a WordPress Caching Solution

Provided you are selling only what you yourself make or a providing service that you personally provide on a wordpress.COM site, or you are asking for donations you have two options.

(1) PayPal - Know that the only instructions that will work for posting a PayPal donation button on a WordPress.com blog are found here http://en.support.wordpress.com/paypal/Note that the PayPal email link is not supported and PayPal customization options are not supported either https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/paypal-button-41?replies=12#post-2517229 This is not likely to be changed any time soon, if at all.

Some bloggers create a contact form https://en.support.wordpress.com/contact-form/ on a page and after the people have made a PayPal donation they provide the link to a private page for downloading files. Maybe that will work for you.http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/page-visibility/

(2) If you set up an eCommerce site somewhere else online you can create a custom menu http://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/ and include a custom link to that site in it. http://en.support.wordpress.com/menus/#adding-custom-links

If what I provided above at (1) and (2) do not suit you, then you can purchase a Business Plan upgrade for full e-commerce capability.

We have 4 different plans: free, personal, premium and business. All hosting is free regardless of which plan you choose. You can view all wordpress.com plan features here https://wordpress.com/pricing/ Add a plan for each of your sites here: http://store.wordpress.com/plans/.

The Business upgrade includes:• Google analytics• Footer Credit Options https://en.support.wordpress.com/footer-credits/• SEO Tools https://en.support.wordpress.com/seo-tools/• The ability to install most plugins including woocommerce and the ability to install third party themes.

Blogger initiated third party advertising is not allowed here. Please read: Monetize Your Site https://en.support.wordpress.com/monetize-your-site/No upgrade is required to post affiliate links. Affiliate links are allowed on WordPress.com as long as the primary purpose of your blog is to create original content. Please read: https://en.support.wordpress.com/monetize-your-site/#affiliate-linking

The only advertising program at WordPress.com is called WordAds and it's for blogs on their own domains that have enough traffic to qualify for acceptance into the plan.http://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/http://en.wordpress.com/apply-for-wordads/https://wordads.co/faq/

For the ability to add third party advertising to a site you'd need a self-hosted WordPress.ORG software install running on a paid web hosting service.http://en.support.wordpress.com/ftp-access/http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/

WordPress.COM and WordPress.ORG are completely separate and have different username accounts, logins, features, run different versions of some themes with the same names, and have separate support documentation and separate support forums. Read the differences here http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

See: Moving to Self-Hosted WordPresshttps://move.wordpress.com/

If you don't have a username account at WordPress.ORG account, then click http://wordpress.org/support/ and register one on the top right-hand corner of the page that opens, https://wordpress.org/support/register.php so you can post to the support forums there.Resetting your WordPress.ORG password http://codex.wordpress.org/Resetting_Your_PasswordWordPress.org support docs are at https://codex.wordpress.org/Main_PageSee also https://apps.wordpress.org/support/

Source: Blog payment

Agricom is a colorful WordPress theme perfectly suitable for agricultural business, agrotourism, healthy food blog, organic food shop, organic farm, farming, agriculture, cultivation, bakery – anything you want!

GENERAL FEATURES

Visual Composer

Revolution Slider

Woocommerce ready

Contact Form 7

WPML supported

Price Table Type

Metabox supported

Total Cache file for quick theme cache and speed options

Google Web Fonts

Blog ready

.POT for all languages – Multi language

7/24 fast support

Oneclick demodata installer and XML

Oneclick theme update

Onepage and Multipage theme layouts supported

Custom menus for per page via metaboxes

Parallax background image and video supported

Unlimited sidebar

Unlimited background

Unlimited color

Add your custom preloaders

Bootstrap

700+ vector icons

Upload and use your custom font families

Well Documentation

Well commented HTML, CSS and JS files

Social icons

W3C Valid HTML

HTML5 and CSS3

Multi-Browser Support

Mobile Friendly

And many more options

WONDERING ABOUT THEME DETAILS

Sections

Parallax background image and video supported

…

 

Source: Agricom – Agriculture & Organic Food WordPress Theme Pack

The City of Abbotsford is being publicly shamed for trying to flush away a four-year-old parody logo – which was altered to include a picture of feces – from the annals of the Internet.

The Abbotsford News first reported about the city's failed request to pull the poop logo image from a website, which is detailed on WordPress's Hall of Shame. The blog promotes transparency across its publishing platform and highlights copyright and trademark holders who "abuse their rights by issuing improper takedown notices."

"For our latest Hall of Shame entry, we turn our gaze towards the City of Abbotsford in Canada," starts the post, which was originally posted May 2 by WordPress staffer Stephen McLeod Blythe.

"To demonstrate just how… dirty a move the blogger thought this was, he illustrated his post with a doctored image of the city's logo, which had been modified to include a large … well, see for yourself."

The logo was inspired by a 2013 incident in which Abbotsford city staff spread chicken manure on a homeless camp in what's believed to be an attempt to get the homeless individuals to move. The city and the mayor later apologized but not before controversy erupted.

The Hall of Shame post goes on to share the text of the takedown notice, which was filed January 12 by marketing firm October 17 Media on behalf of the City of Abbotsford. The notice alleges the parody logo infringed on Abbotsford's original logo and cited copyright law.

Blythe goes on to wonder why the city would take four years to file the request, when the graphic was first posted back in 2013.

"What is clear, however, is that this stinks. Pardon the pun," he wrote. "It was glaringly obvious that the addition of the hilariously large feces was for the purposes of parody, and tied directly to the criticisms laid out in the post."

Blythe notes that it seems pretty obvious the logo falls under fair use considerations, and said the request was rejected.

sip@postmedia.comtwitter.com/stephanie_ip

Source: Abbotsford shamed by WordPress for trying to remove parody city logo

Dear Word Press dot Com,I own the domain name:lorieannj and I have a paid site: lorieannj.com I also have a free WordPress.com site called:lorieannjblog.wordpress.com It has been Illegally copied before and I suspect Sherry Gillam of befirstinc.com She has not left me alone and alters my content and there is also very slow loading or no loading at all of my pages. What do I do? Is there a way that this can be stopped or prevented? I again, am a writer of original work and Sherry Gillam from befirstinc.com is not only claiming my domain name ownerships; lorieannj.com and lorieannjermoune.com but she is stealing and illegally monetizing herself, at my expense and she harasses me and wiretaps my telephones and has been blocking me for almost 7 years now. Every few months I have to report another income stream where she is using my name and my Intellectual Property. Homemagz.com before it went offline was using my website verbiage and my website banner that bears my name. I have conta cted Bark.com where she was using my full name and opened up a writing services account using my name and my identity. She uses my name to promote her porn sites and her viagra sites where she promotes sexual enhancement products. Again, I have contacted Google and everyone that I can think of. If is one site after another that she uses my name and my words and my Intellectual Property and poses herself and her writers using my name, banner and likeness. Please help me save lorieannjblog.wordpress.com I am tired and I do not know what else to do. She has ruined my lorieannj.com website by selling an illegal copy of my site that she has using a way to tap into lorieannj.com to send forwards for her nasty products and clients. I need help please!Lorie Ann Jermoune

The blog I need help with is lorieannjblog.wordpress.com.

Source: My blog: lorieannjblog.wordpress.com is being illegally altered and manipulated

Each and every day a number of innovative WordPress themes are launched. These themes provide a makeover for your website. As the number of WordPress themes increase, website owners tend to choose different themes for their site. Availability of too many themes can lead to a complex selection process, and this is ending up with the selection of the wrong choice for your site. While choosing the themes for a website, one should consider many things in mind.

A special checklist is there for choosing the right WordPress themes. Website owners should check this list and then look into the themes. Through this, one can filter the available themes, and it is very useful in the task of choosing the WordPress themes. Finding such a list and using the list makes this process much more manageable and helps you to select a satisfactory theme to your site.

Themes are the important aspects of a website. So, one must be careful and intellectual in choosing the correct themes for the site.

First clear about the type of your website

With a number of wonderful WordPress themes, one can easily seduce by a stunning theme without considering whether the theme suits for his/her site or not. Even though most of the WordPress themes are versatile, sometimes it cannot shoehorn your site design. So, one must have to be clear about what type of website he/she is going to build. This is much important for selecting the correct theme for the site.

A theme should be in the manner that it should match the content of your site. An irrelevant theme can make a bad impression among the users.

Make a list of your required features

Themes should be selected by considering the additional features and functionalities of the site. A theme should provide the features via plug-ins rather than included into the theme directly. So, before going to select a theme for your site, make a list of your site requirements. Then choose your site theme by keeping this checklist and search those features in your theme.

Compatibility and third party plug-in support

Although most of the WordPress themes work well with plug-ins, you can search the one that supports all your third party plug-ins. A website should have a theme that lists compatibility with it. This will include the necessary page templates that are needed to get the site online as fast as possible. The details of plug-in support and compatibilities are not mentioned for all themes you look at; it is worth to check the theme compatibilities while choosing the WordPress themes.

Pricing

There are plenty of free WordPress themes available for the users. One can get their desired beautiful themes from these free available themes. But, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't choose a premium theme for your site. Website owners can get low-cost themes for their website design. If you choose to go for a premium WordPress theme, you should consider one thing in mind.

Purchasing a WordPress theme not only gives access to template files, but also support ongoing updates. The WordPress software is designed to update itself on a regular basis. So it is important to select a theme that will be updated and compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

Look for a reputed theme supplier

While purchasing themes you should consider from whom you purchase your theme. Getting themes from a reputed theme supplier will help you to get the best theme for your site. Also, buying a theme from a marketplace can provide you a better level of protection to your site.  This is because selecting an in-house theme shop can be a little trickier as it can be difficult to know how reputed the provider is.

You can go for online searching for this purpose. Searching online will provide you the necessary information about the theme store and the quality of the themes they provide to their customers.

Pre and post sales support

Once you have done with your shortlist and finished choosing the source for your theme, you have to spend some time for verifying the pre and post sales support provided by the store. Some of the theme shops provide open access to their forums and customer communication areas. Through this, you will be able to know how they deal with customer queries and provide support for requests.

Make sure with your theme store the type of supports they provide after your purchase and find out how you can contact the support team. That checks out the ways for contacting the supporting team like email, forums, telephone or any other method of communication.

Usability, SEO, and Speed

These things are important to consider while choosing the themes for your website design. Look how your theme customization supports SEO and how the usability of your theme enhances your site performance. Also, the theme should not down the running speed of the site.

So, consider all these checklist points while choosing a WordPress theme for your site.

This article is written by Mary Scott. She is a WordPress developer for Wordsuccor Ltd. She enjoys digging into latest WordPress design and development trends to improve her website and help people to do the same. Besides that, Mary provides WordPress theme customization services for startup and established businesses to help them make a difference. You can contact her through Facebook or Twitter.

Disclosure: Some of our articles may contain affiliate links; this means each time you make a purchase, we get a small commission. However, the input we produce is reliable; we always handpick and review all information before publishing it on our website. We can ensure you will always get genuine as well as valuable knowledge and resources.

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Source: 2017 Checklist to Ensure You Choose the Right WordPress Theme

Home > Class, Education, Podcast, Seminar, Speaking, Video > Get The Word Out! Start A Blog from Using the Career Compass To Find Your Work And Career [Video] (1:09) Get The Word Out! Start A Blog from Using the Career Compass To Find Your Work And Career [Video] (1:09) May 23rd, 2017 Douglas E. Welch Leave a comment Go to comments

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Using the Career Compass to Find Your Work and Career with Douglas E. Welch 

 

Read the book

Douglas E. Welch (http://douglasewelch.com) presents to the class Career Development – Theories and Techniques at Pepperdine Graduate School of Education & Psychology taught by fellow CareerCamp Co-Chair, Danielle Gruen

The two biggest challenges are deciding what you want to do as a career and then building the career you deserve once you decide.

I discuss the Career Compass method of discovering your career wants, needs and desires and then using various social media tools to show people "What you do and how well you do it"

Transcript:

But since the invention of the Internet, we now have a series of tools that make it easy .cheap — if not free — in most cases — and provide you a way of reaching out to a world of opportunity that wasn't ever possible before. The best way of telling people what you do and how well you do it is to tell somebody about it and one of the first things I tell most people to do is start a blog. A blog can be anything. Free services all over the place to set up a blog. WordPress. Blogger. Tumblr. Twitter can be considered a microblog if you will. The reason I start with a blog is when I talk with people I say "Well, what do you want to do?What are your skills? What are you interested in? What neat things  have you done?" They'll start off saying "Oh I don't have anything interesting to say. Everybody has something interesting to say. Everybody has some unique that they do, but they don't have a place to tell people about it.

Links for items mentioned in this talk:

Video: Career Compass: Finding Your Career North from CareerCampSCV 2012

Audio: Career Compass: Finding Your Career North from CareerCampSCV 2012

Career Compass Kindle Book

Video Archives: Career Prescriptions at Tuesdays with Transitioners

Video: CareerCamp: New Unconference Methods for Helping People Build the Career They Deserve with Douglas E. Welch

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Read more on this topic:

Your Domain Name Home and Creating Your Blog from Two Challenges in Building Your Career [Video Clip] (1:05) A Clip from Two Challenges in Building the Career You Deserve...

Your Domain Name Home and Creating Your Blog from Two Challenges in Building Your Career [Audio Clip] (1:05) A Clip from Two Challenges in Building the Career You Deserve...

Where To Start With Social Media from Two Challenges in Building Your Career [Video Clip] (1:11) A Clip from Two Challenges in Building the Career You Deserve...

Why Have A Blog? A Place For Your Best Ideas from Two Challenges in Building Your Career [Audio Clip] (0:50) A Clip from Two Challenges in Building the Career You Deserve...

A Deeper Interest in Your Work from Using the Career Compass to Find Your Work and Career [Video] (0:46) Using the Career Compass to Find Your Work and Career...

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Source: Get The Word Out! Start A Blog from Using the Career Compass To Find Your Work And Career [Video] (1:09)

WordPress blog theme is the core of every good WordPress powered website. It all begins with storytelling. Brixton brings a unique style, loved by hundreds of happy customers!

Brixton Responsive WordPress Blog Theme. Discover the power of blogging.

BRIXTON V4.0 IS THE BIGGEST UPDATE YET

Brixton has been one of the best-selling WordPress Blog Themes on Themeforest for over a year now. That's why we decided it's time to take it to another level and bring some great new features.

Don't worry, all new features can be turned on and off. Everyone who likes Brixton just the way it is, your design will be intact. We believe that the original design must stay the same so that people who love the vanilla design won't be disappointed with version 4.

FREE PSD BLOG TEMPLATE

We decided to share the PSD TEMPLATE of the Theme for free. You can check it out on our website or click on the image below:

BRIXTON WORDPRESS BLOG THEME V4 NEW FEATURES

Let's see what some of the most exciting new features are:

Revolution Slider (extra $19 value)

Several new Sidebar options

Brand new Widgets

Improved speed

Minor CSS fixes

Background image for the header

Video Widget

Magazine Style

Amazing Revolution Slider

With the inclusion of Revolution Slider, we wanted to…

 

Source: Brixton Blog – A Responsive WordPress Blog Theme

Hi I made this blog wanted to get the domain for it after I created it. I then went through Bluehost and signed up with a new account there, and when I transferred it to what my username is on WordPress (through Bluehost) I think it transferred to someone with the same username, but signed up through WordPress...because when I try to log into WordPress with that username I created FOR WordPress (after I installed it through Bluehost) it won't sign me in.

I really need this to be undone, and want to know how I can transfer this blog, over to the account I made via Bluehost?

Thank you SO much!

The blog I need help with is tutorgurublog.wordpress.com.

Source: I JUST made a wrong blog transfer (I think?)

My blog seems fine when I am logged in and on it, but when I liked another of my blogs on this account, then signed out and signed into the other account, and went to the notifications list and went to this blog from there, this blog does not show up. It shows some unbuilt blog called 'Title.' This is a problem. If I follow other people, I want them to be able to come to my blog. Everything looks fine while I am signed in to this blog. And I transferred this blog over from the other blog to this account. Maybe that's why there's something wrong with it?

The blog I need help with is lorrainestorybookart.wordpress.com.

Source: My Blog is Not Showing Up When Visited From Other Accounts

Different WordPress News Designs and Themes

WordPress News is one of the great idea in the wordpress to have in the website that brings information's or new issues among blogger. They can directly click the news item to have reading articles or news in a certain event in the internet or some popular people in the world. You can also submit press releases and other writing materials here that will publicly post in wordpress.

If you run a WodPress News it should be well-oriented website or blog, the best service you can provide to your readers is to display your content on the homepage in a content management system style, that will allow readers to easily find the news that most interest them. However, for wordpress users you will be happy to learn because there are now in a large number of premium news themes available on the market. Below you will find the collection of all the top news themes currently available on the market and displayed whenever possible that in cluded screen shots, feature information, and pricing information as well a links that are directly where you can acquire the theme.

The Newsady News Theme- a completely widgetized sidebar with special widgets with six different styles to choose, built in theme options panel, available through wordpress admin for the detailed set of you're theme you can see screen shot, image re-sizer that is automatically creating thumbnails for the blogs posts, custom page templates for archive's and site map, built-in gravitate support for comments, comfortable and simple managing of banners and Ad sense in the blog using special.

The Celebrity Press Theme- two colors available black and white, two background samples, ad you're your ad sense or image link code, turn all or individual banners on/off, quick post no need to put an image, image auto re-sizer, random video rotators, flicker integration, build your own menu from the theme options, photo gallery, drop down menu, custom ized error page with site map, ad your own logo and styles easily, unique post randomize, gravitate support, main news section, widget ready, customized archives and search pages, style sheet switcher, feed-burner integration, extensive help and tutorial included, IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari and open compatible, XTHML and CPS validity.

The Newspaper WordPress Theme-auto image re-sizer, theme support, free updates, Ajax tabs,SEO, built in photo gallery, multi-widget support for sidebars, ad optimized, W3C compliant, custom 404 error page and drop-down navigation support for subcategories.

The i-News theme- four column home page layout, front page feature box, you can highlight any content you want on your home page, including older content that gets buried, post quick notes and links with the center asides section that you can post quick links, quotes or notes, upload a new graphic, the custom image up-loader feature that allows you to personalize your site with your own lo go, drop down navigation menu, i-News is optimized for SEO like Google. Other themes available: Magazine News Theme, No Good News Theme, Gab-fire News Pro Theme, Fresh News Theme, News Gazette Edition, and Flash News Theme.

Source: Different WordPress News Designs and Themes

We all love WordPress, but one frustrating thing with the platform out of the box is having to deal with large volumes of comment spam. No matter what type of blog your business runs, you will have to figure out or come up with a strategy on how to stop WordPress comment spam at some point. Thankfully there are a lot of great plugins, tricks, and settings you can easily enable and or install to literally reduce your spam by 99%. Yes, you can really reduce it that much! Stop wasting time managing spam comments and focus on growing your blog and business.

There are different strategies you can take to stop WordPress comment spam, and they might differ based on your current WordPress site's setup and goals. We recommend trying one of the following and see which one works best for you:

Disable Comments Altogether

The first option you have to simply disable comments altogether. Perhaps your business doesn't use or want comments, so to protect yourself from getting any spam comments you can just disable them. One of the easiest ways to do this is to simply uncheck the "Allow people to post comments on new articles" option, which is located under "Settings > Discussion."

Disable comments in WordPress

Another quick and easy way to do this is to use a free plugin like Disable Comments. The plugin allows administrators to both globally disable comments, as well as disable them by post type, all with a single click. This also disables trackbacks and pingbacks.

Disable Comments WordPress plugin

Don't want to use a plugin? You can also disable comments with code. Check out our in-depth post on how to disable WordPress comments.

Turn Off Anonymous Comments

Another option you have is to turn off anonymous comments. WordPress native comments by default asks the visitor for four pieces of information: comment, name, email, and website. If anonymous comments is enabled, they won't be required to input their name or email. This instantly opens up your site to a lot of spam bots that constantly crawl comment forms on websites. To disable anonymous comments simply check the "Comment author must fill out name and email" option under "Settings > Discussion."

Disable anonymous comments in WordPress Enable Comment Moderation

Your next option to stop WordPress comment spam is to use some of the built-in moderation features. The first is the ability to manually approve each comment. While this won't reduce spam, it can be an effective way to ensure visitors to your site only see high-quality comments that you have approved.

The second is the comment moderation queue. For example, you can automatically hold a comment in moderation if it contains a certain number of links or more. You can also build up a list of words, names, URLs, IPs, etc. that are held for moderation as well.

The third is the comment blacklist. Here, you can also build up a list of words, names, URLs, IPs, etc. But instead of being held more moderation, they will automatically go straight to trash so you don't have to worry about them. All of the above options can be found in your dashboard under "Settings > Discussion."

Utilize a WordPress Comment Spam Plugin

Another popular option, that is very easy to implement, is to use a WordPress comment spam plugin. There are a lot of great ones out there, and most of them are completely free.

Akismet Plugin

The Akismet plugin is included by default with every WordPress installation, and is developed by the team at Automattic. It analyzes data from millions of sites and communities in real time and protects your WordPress site from spam. It's completely free for personal use, and starts at $5/month for commercial sites.

Akismet WordPress comment spam plugin

We highly recommend trying this plugin first as it is very lightweight and does one thing well, and that is protecting you from spam. Other features include:

Automatically checking all comments and filters out the bad ones

Status history to see which ones were blocked

Discard feature to save on disk space

It currently has over 3 million active installs with a 5 out of 5-star rating. You can download Akismet from the WordPress repository or by searching for it within your WordPress dashboard under "Add New" plugins (although it should be on your site already unless it was removed). This plugin has a long history of building up spam rules and filters which do a great job at ensuring you see the good comments and not the bad. As you can see on the site below, it blocked over 3,800 comments from even needing moderation.

Akismet protecting from spam

Here are some additional popular comment spam plugins you might want to check out. However, it is important to note that some of these might hurt your performance due to the fact that a few of them are trying to provide all in one security features, not just spam protection.

Enable a Captcha

Another popular option is to use a CAPTCHA, which is some type of form or question to challenge a bot and or rather prove that the visitor is a human. There are a lot of great plugins out there that allow you to implement this strategy into your WordPress site, and most of them are completely free.

Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) by BestWebSoft

We are big fans of Google's take on the CAPTCHA, or rather what they call the reCAPTCHA. Google's is probably one of the cleanest and easiest ones to use without hurting the user experience by asking puzzling questions or showing hard to read letters. You definitely don't want someone leaving your site simply because they were frustrated by the CAPTCHA. The Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) by BestWebSoft plugin works great for implementing this on your WordPress site.

Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) WordPress plugin

It currently has over 90,000 active installs with a 4.5 out of 5-star rating. You can download Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) by BestWebSoft plugin from the WordPress repository or by searching for it within your WordPress dashboard under "Add New" plugins. Other features include:

Also works on registration forms, login forms, reset password forms, etc.

Hiding CAPTCHA for whitelisted IPs

Different themes

Multilingual and RTL ready

Here is an example below of what the comment section on your WordPress site would look like with Google's reCAPTCHA enabled. A visitor simply has to click once to prove they are not a robot and then submit their comment.

Google reCAPTCHA on WordPress comments

Here are some additional popular captcha plugins you might want to check out:

Use a 3rd Party Comment System

And last but not least, another easy way to stop WordPress comment spam is to forego the default native comments and use a 3rd party comment system. We actually use the Disqus platform on our blog here at Kinsta and we can honestly say that it cuts out 99% of spam.We never have to spend time cleaning up spam comments.

According to Disqus, it uses its own anti-spam software to smartly combat comment spam. It was designed to learn over time and becomes increasingly accurate with moderation activity. They also partnered up with Akismet. This is probably why it is so powerful, because you have two different systems all combating spam. They do additional things such as:

Multiple checks on the same comments to improve the accuracy of classifications over time.

Commenting requires email verification. This stops many fake accounts with throwaway email addresses.

Commenters mistakenly marked as spam can request to be reviewed by moderators. This keeps the system healthy when our detection is occasionally too aggressive.

Disqus also has some great comment moderation tools. One we personally like is any comments with links must be manually approved.

Disqus comment moderation

However, that is not to say Disqus doesn't have some issues. You can read our blog post about Disqus ad changes. And if you want to use Disqus on your blog, we highly recommend using the free Disqus Conditional Load plugin. This was developed by Joel James as a way to lazy load comments so that it won't hurt the performance of your WordPress site.

It currently has over 9,000 active installs with a 5 out of 5-star rating. You can download Disqus Conditional Load from the WordPress repository or by searching for it within your WordPress dashboard under "Add New" plugins.

Here are some additional WordPress comment systems and plugins you might want to check out that have their own spam rules:

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Source: How to Stop WordPress Comment Spam

Teletype is a minimalist, portfolio ready WordPress blog theme based on Bootstrap, offering advanced customization options, Google Fonts support and a neat post layout masonry grid. Geared with a practical drag and drop feature that allows you to reorder and customize the sections to better suit your needs, it also comes localization ready fresh off the box, with .po/.mo translation files included in the languages folder.

Source: Minimalist Blogger WordPress Theme

I'm planning to move my blog content from blogger to a self hosted wordpress blog. I am starting out by playing with my blog design on a local server on my computer. Is it possible for me to move my blogger content over to my wordpress blog on a local server BEFORE I go live with my wordpress blog online? (If this is possible, I would like to try it and make sure that my content fits well into the way I have formatted my theme, before I make anything live online or go ahead and purchase hosting).

I have a LOT of posts to transfer (around 1500) and if it is possible to bring them over on a local server and make sure comments transfer and that I can do some redirects BEFORE putting the whole thing online, hosted, that would be great! (but I am a little new to all of this and trying to find out if that's even do-able)

Source: Move from Blogger to WordPress on Local Server?

With TravelPod closing, some TravelPod members may wish to move their blogs to an active blogging platform to continue writing or to keep their travel blogs on the web for others to read. While there are many great services out there, the most popular is WordPress.

First, you'll want to download your TravelPod archive by visiting your TravelPod Dashboard. (See our post about the archive and download process here.) In your archive, you'll find XML files that can be used to import your blog content into a new blogging platform. These files have been optimized for WordPress.

WordPress offers both a hosted option (which runs on the wordpress.com domain) as well as an easy installer that allows you to run the WordPress software on any Internet Service Provider that supports PHP. On their hosted version, WordPress has both free and paid products, one of which should suit your needs.

The importing of TravelPod blogs to WordPress will be relatively straightforward for someone with medium experience with blogging tools. On WordPress, as with TravelPod, each of your TravelPod trips would become its own separate blog. You can import as many of your trips as you like, by creating a new blog and importing the content to it.

The following instructions should help you get started with your TravelPod content on WordPress.com:

WordPress Import Instructions

First, if you haven't already, create an account on WordPress.com. You'll be asked for basic login information and asked to pick a name for your blog and a template. Pick any template you like, you can always change it later.

Next, you'll see an admin screen similar to this one:

The "First blog post" is a placeholder post that you can leave alone for the time being. Later, you'll want to delete it.

For importing, go to Settings (lower-left menu option).

If you click on Import at the top, you'll see this page, where you can choose which type of import file to use. We have optimized the import file for WordPress, so choose that option by clicking Start Import.

Now you can either drag the appropriate XML file from your TravelPod archive to the big empty rectangular target area, or just click there to navigate to the file on your hard drive.

WordPress will recognize your XML file as an import file, and let you know that all content in the blog will be assigned to you. (Since TravelPod blogs only have one author, this should make no difference to you.) Click Start Import again to begin the import process.

The next step is the longest part of the process, where WordPress imports the file and turns your entries into WordPress posts. It may seem like nothing is happening, but in fact, WordPress is processing your file in the background. When you see the message Finishing up the import, you can go do something else as it processes. WordPress will email you when the import is complete.

Once you get the confirmation that the import is done, click over to your new blog and check it out. You'll see that we have included both published entries (now called "posts" in WordPress lingo) as well as drafts, which have been marked as draft in WordPress.

Next, import your images. For technical reasons, we are not able to import images to your WordPress blog from the XML file in the archive. You will need to insert them in your WordPress blog from the Images folder that is part of the archive.

There are many ways to do this, but the fastest way to get started is to upload all of the photos at once to your WordPress Media Library. Go to your blog and click on Media in the left hand column.

The photos from your blog are stored within the blog folder in your archive. You can simply drag and drop all of the photos into the Media Library page, and they will automatically start uploading to WordPress. Once there, you can use the WordPress blog post editor to place photos into your blog entries from the Media Library.

A word about videos:

TravelPod saves your videos as flv files, and this format is unfortunately not supported by WordPress.

You can use a third-party tool like Handbrake or Adobe Media Encoder to convert your flv files into a format accepted by WordPress, such as mp4.Please note that you must pay for a Premium account on WordPress to upload videos to the Media Library. Video uploads are not supported in the Free or Personal plans. You can, however, embed videos from other sites such as YouTube.

Source: WordPress Import Intructions