Just from this one benefit alone, it’s no surprise that people are looking everywhere for high-quality guest posters. Whether you want to write guest posts, or you’re looking for more guest posts on your site, we are going to give you some tips to steer you in the right direction.

1. Develop Guidelines

If you’re looking to get more people guest posting on your blog you should expect to get some suggestions that are far out in left field. You own a business, run a website, and likely handle a ton of tasks at breakneck speed every day. Saving time is necessary and developing strict guidelines helps speed up the guest posting process as you’ll have fewer edits.

Your guidelines should run parallel with what you would expect from yourself when you publish content on your blog. Try to include specific directions in the middle of your guidelines that include a specific way to create the subject line when submitting a post suggestion.

For example, every set of guidelines should make it clear that there are to be no grammar or spelling errors in the submission. You can compound on that rule by stating specifically how you want your post to be structured with H1, H2 headings, bullet points, and overall formatting.

It’s also important that you are a firm believer in the guest post. It should make sense in the space of your niche and it should support an idea that you believe, or introduce your audience to a new idea that fits in the context of your blog and brand.

You’re going to throw out a ton of guest post submissions because they don’t make sense or the writer submitting the article didn’t follow your guidelines. Don’t get discouraged, there are valuable posts buried within your inbox. Establishing your guidelines early and remaining true to your mission is a pivotal part of bringing guest posts to your blog.

2. Create a Blog Post Submission Form

The great thing about WordPress is it comes with a truckload of plugins to make your site one of a kind. You can use plugins to streamline your guest posting option on your blog.

Use a plugin to help you build a custom submission for potential guest posters. One plugin we recommend is WPForms due to its ease of use and drag and drop builder. With WPForms you can create a highly customizable blog post submission form without touching a line of code.

When you are setting up your submission form there is a slew of important questions you’re going to want to ask the potential posters. Some important questions that should come up include:

• Pen name (if applicable)
• Experience getting content published (ask them to include links to published work)
• Ask for an author bio (tell them to keep their links down to 1-2 per bio)

We also like asking the author to write a short paragraph explaining why the topic is so important to them. They should have the same passion, interest, and energy that you expect from your full-time writers.

3. Link Out to Other Blogs

Linking back to other blogs is a great way to draw some extra attention to your blog and make some valuable connections in the process. When you’re writing your posts, link out to blogs that have earned your respect due to their knowledge, have personally assisted your brand with a helpful tool, or a brand that you admire in the industry.

How does this help you?

When you link out to other companies, it offers the other brands exposure and this is something they will be able to manually track if they are looking at their insights regularly. As a result of the additional exposure, there is a good chance that these blogs may link back to you in one of their posts.

It’s usually a good idea to link to high-authority domains because they are known for being reputable and having a constant reader base. If you’re thinking about looking for high-authority sites in your niche, there are tools that can help you find blogs that rank high based on the niche and keywords.  

4. Pitch Relevant Topic Ideas

Let’s face it, being a successful blogger takes a ton of work and getting a guest post accepted is basically impossible if you don’t pitch ideas that are relevant to the blog. Before you even think about submitting your pitch, do some extensive research on the site.

Start by looking through their previous blog posts for content ideas. You should try to go back at least a month and look at their content that’s published by both their full-time writing staff and guest posters. Pitch them 3-5 headline topic ideas that you think they would like. For example, if you’re pitching a gardening blog, some good topic ideas would be:

• How to Grow Organic Tomatoes (Step by Step)
• Beginner’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening
• 7 Tips for Growing Tulips

Finally, before you submit your pitch, you need to make sure that the topic you’re submitting hasn’t already been published to their site. A simple search on their blog search bar will reveal articles with the keywords you’ve provided.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that you put your reputation on the line when you decide to guest post, or have guest post content on your blog. You must always be careful and ensure that you’re only picking and delivering high-quality content that readers will absorb like a sponge.

The more interesting and entertaining your take, the more views and shares you’ll get. The key to success is building your brand, and guest posting helps business owners around the world accomplish this task.

Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, WPForms, and SeedProd.

wpbeginner.com

The post 4 Guest Posting Tips for your WordPress Blog first appeared on ThemeTrust.

The 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner found that 32 percent of marketers consider images the most important type of content for their business, with blogging at 27 percent. They provide endless value and ROI for blogs and businesses and they’re utilized excessively because of the interest they attract.

Buffer found that tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets than without. People scrolling through endless content on their social networks favor when images pop up, breaking up the monotony of text. Images are important because they encourage a whopping amount of shares and catch people’s attention, which are main goals when you have a blog.

Here are three tips for creating blog images that get you a whole lot of shares.

1. Implement SEO

You can’t expect your blog images to gain any traction if you don’t optimize them for search just like you do everything else in your content marketing. This is often something that’s looked over because a lot of people don’t realize how much value there is in optimizing images for SEO.

There are a few things you need to optimize:

• File name: What you name your image file matters. Label all your images appropriately.
• Alt text: This is text that will show up if the image doesn’t and should include the target keyword of your blog post. Search engines crawl this text so it’s important to be descriptive.
• Caption: This is so users can scan the page with ease.
• Format: The most common are JPG, PNG, and GIF. For photos, use JPG. For graphics or images that need a higher resolution, use PNG, and for smaller image sizes, use GIF.

2. Optimize big files

You need to make sure your image size doesn’t negatively impact how your web pages load. Visitors expect a seamless user experience (UX) when browsing your website and want to view your blog posts with as few problems as possible.

Google research shows that 53 percent of users abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Page speed is also an important factor in how Google’s algorithm ranks your site’s content. If you can’t deliver customer expectations, you’ll have a difficult time keeping them on your site.

Use Google PageSpeed Insights to ensure your site speed won’t frustrate visitors and send them to a site that give them the UX they want.

Use image optimizers like JPEGMini or TinyJPG to significantly decrease file size and quicken loading time.

You’ll higher your chances of being able to feature your blog images efficiently and get them shared to different platforms and social media by taking this one simple step. Try not to crowd your blog posts with images as it’ll appear cluttered and be tedious to skim through.

3. Enable social sharing

Imagine how much more traffic you could drive to your blog if you made it super simple for visitors to share your images. If all it takes is a simple click of a button to share images to their social media, users will be encouraged to take action because it doesn’t require a lot of effort.

Add social sharing buttons to your images and blog posts. Make them easy to notice and not drowned in the text on the page. Social Warfare and WP Social Sharing are both popular, free plugins that allow direct sharing of images that are simple and responsive. They’re lightweight so they won’t make your pages or images lag. Both tools support various social networks and placement options so you can pick and choose how they’re displayed.

Utilize A/B split tests in which you test different variations of your social sharing buttons against each other to see which brings in higher conversions and positive results. One set of visitors will see type A’s variation of social sharing buttons and the other will see type B’s. The results are based on which buttons get more clicks. Analyze the colors, copy, and positioning of the buttons to figure out what brings in more traffic.

Over to you

Creating shareable blog images means implementing SEO, inserting social sharing buttons to make it easy for visitors to engage, and streamlining your image optimization process. It’s not easy to gain traction when the internet is overflowing with ambitious bloggers and business owners trying to make it on top. But if you rethink how to make your content — especially images — shareable, you open up a new door to driving traffic and boosting engagement for your blog.

Syed Balkhi

Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, WPForms, and SeedProd.

wpbeginner.com

The post 3 Tips for Creating Highly Shareable Blog Images first appeared on ThemeTrust.

Remember that one? It wasn’t fun, and there was always stress involved when it appeared.

However, the “white screen of death” in WordPress is even worse.

Why? When Windows crashed, all you needed to do, most of the time, was to just reboot your machine and you were good to go.

When WordPress crashes, you have no way of rebooting anything. You need to find another solution.

Before we get into the How To, you can make restoring your WordPress site a very simple process by using a backup plugin like UpDraft Plus. It’s a plugin that provides you with an easy-to-use interface for scheduling full site backups. And the best part is that you can restore a crashed site with the click of a button.

UpDraft Plus

So this is where this guide comes into play. Here are the 5 steps to restore your WordPress site after a crash:

1. Take out pen and paper

The first thing to do when your site has crashed is to go back and try to recall the most recent actions you took on the site. For instance:

• maybe you installed a new plugin,
• or updated a plugin,
• or updated your theme,
• or installed a new theme even,
• or edited some PHP file by hand, and etc.

Whatever it was, jot it all down on paper. Usually, it’s going to be just one action, or a handful at most. If possible, revert those actions and see if it fixes the problem.

Granted, not everything can be reverted just like that, but even if the issue is not that straightforward, you at least get a good idea of what to tackle first in order to get rid of the problem.

2. Force deactivate / remove plugins

If the list you’ve prepared above includes any actions involving some of your plugins, this is what you should do:

Connect to your hosting account via FTP (if you’re not quite sure how to do that – contact support and ask for instructions; they’ll help you out) – you can use FileZilla as your FTP tool (free).

Go to the plugins directory, which is wp-content/plugins, and delete the whole directory of the plugin you fiddled with. Example:

This will cause the plugin to stop being executed by WordPress, and thus, possibly, un-crashing your site.

For a more extreme approach, rename the whole plugins directory to something else. This will force WordPress to unload all of the plugins and attempt to run clean. If it works, start enabling plugins one by one and see when the site re-crashes – that’s how you find your trouble-maker.

3. Go back to the default theme

If getting rid of the plugins didn’t help, revert back to the default theme. To do that, just delete your current theme’s directory from wp-content/themes.

When the theme goes missing, WordPress will use the default one instead.

At this stage, take your theme, revert the changes you made recently, re-upload and reactivate it.

4. Reinstall default WordPress

If the problem is neither in your plugins nor in the theme, some core WordPress files have perhaps been affected.

To restore WordPress to the default version, download a clean install from wordpress.org, extract the archive, and then copy and replace everything (via FTP) except the wp-content directory. Don’t worry, your site content won’t get affected.

5. Restore the database

If you’re still seeing the “white screen of death,” this may be a database problem.

Unfortunately, the database is hard to fix if you don’t have a backup of the last working version of your site.

This is why plugins such as UpdraftPlus are really handy. This particular one allows you to schedule your backups to take place every day on autopilot. Should any problems arise, you can restore the site from one of those backups.

If you didn’t use any backup plugin, you can try reaching out to the support team at your web host, and ask them if there are any database backups stored on their end. Some web hosts offer this as part of their plans. If they have such thing, either ask them to restore the database from that backup, or get the SQL file from them and restore it via phpMyAdmin by hand.

At this stage, your WordPress site should be all fine and dandy!

Conclusion

This may sound weird, but I really hope that you’ll never find yourself in a situation where you have to use any of the advice here. Here’s to you and your WordPress blog not crashing! Ever!

The post How to Restore a WordPress Site After a Crash first appeared on ThemeTrust.

We love WordPress. If it wasn’t for WordPress, there would be no ThemeTrust. It really is that simple. That being said, though, WordPress has its flaws – flaws that every site owner should address. Some of them are crucial for site security, others are more cosmetic in nature but can be equally frustrating.

Let’s find out what those problems are and how to fix them:

1. WordPress isn’t always secure

We start with security because it’s one of the most serious problems on many WordPress sites.

Every year, we witness more and more sites falling victim to hackers and malicious scripts. For instance, just in 2014, two major vulnerabilities were reported:

• the first one affected 50,000+ sites,
• and the other one around 100,000 sites.

Taking care of your site security really is no joke, but unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t offer any rock-solid protection right off the gate. That’s why you should take matters into your own hands and look for some solutions:

• Always use secure passwords. If you’re using any of the most common passwords, you’re doing it wrong. Pick something more complex.
• Update the WordPress core and the plugins you use as soon as the notification pops up. WordPress updates and plugin updates always fix a number of bugs and patch common vulnerabilities.

• Don’t download plugins or themes from unknown sources. Either get them from the official repositories at WordPress.org, or other trusted sources, such as here at ThemeTrust.
• Use a dedicated security plugin. A solution like Sucuri Security or Wordfence will protect you from various common attacks.

I really can’t emphasize this enough. WordPress security is no joke. You could lose your whole site due to a single vulnerability if you neglect this.

2. There’s no backup functionality built-in

WordPress does a lot of things out of the box, but backups aren’t one of them.

So if you want to save yourself from any unfortunate crashes, you need to take the necessary steps yourself. There’s a handful of ways to enable backup functionality in WordPress:

• if you want a top-quality premium tool, consider VaultPress (it’s a complete backup-and-restore solution; starts at $99 per year),
• if you’d prefer to keep things free, try the plugin called WordPress Backup to Dropbox (it takes your whole site and backs it up in your Dropbox profile).

3. WordPress tends to load slowly

It’s been reported that just one second delay in your site’s load time can result in a 11% drop in page views.

People just don’t have the time to wait, or the patience to wait, or can’t be bothered. Either way, it’s clear that load time matters a lot for your site’s potential growth.

There are a lot of things that can make your site sluggish:

• Slow plugins. Your plugins contribute to the majority of the loading time. Check which of your plugins are slow (do this with the P3 analyzer plugin), and replace them with faster alternatives.
• Slow web host. If your web host is sub-par then there’s unfortunately nothing else you can do other than ditch it for a faster one. In general, cheap hosting plans aren’t very effective. The quality stuff starts at more than $10 / month.
• No caching. Caching is a fairly complicated concept, and equally as boring. What’s important, though, is that you can make your site faster by getting a caching plugin that works on autopilot (like W3 Total Cache).
• No gzip compression. In short, zip compression reduces the size of your website files. You can enable it by adding these lines to your .htaccess file:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

4. Your theme could be unsafe

WordPress themes often have various vulnerabilities in them, and it’s basically impossible to find them on your own while performing some standard administrative tasks.

To improve your chances, you can test your current theme with the Theme Check plugin. It will look through the theme’s source code and make sure that there’s nothing malicious lurking in the dark.

5. There’s negative social proof

Social media is huge these days. It’s literally impossible to imagine a successful WordPress site that has no social media integration at all.

One of the most popular ways to make your site social media friendly is to simply display share buttons alongside your posts and pages.

That’s where negative social proof comes into the picture.

Basically, if you use social media buttons that display how many shares the post has garnered, but those numbers are all zeros (or there’s just 1 or 2 shares), then you’re just making things worse. Buttons like that tell your visitors one thing: this content is unpopular.

Fixing this is quite simple. For instance, you could use SumoMe to handle your social media buttons. In the Share module’s settings, just select the option not to display the numbers until they reach a given threshold:

6. The JPEG compression isn’t always helpful

WordPress has an interesting setting when it comes to the image compression it uses.

By default, every JPEG is set to render at 90% quality. For some scenarios this is perfectly fine, but if your site relies on its visuals more heavily, then you should consider resetting the compression level back to 100% – using the original versions of images.

Add this to your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'jpeg_quality', 'reset_jpeg_quality' );
function reset_jpeg_quality() {
return 100;
}

7. The image thumbnails aren’t always optimized

WordPress uses thumbnails in various places around your website. For instance, next to your post listings, in the footer, and so on.

Here’s the thing, though, if you ever change your theme, the thumbnail settings will change along with it. What doesn’t change, however, are the thumbnails that were generated previously. This you need to do on your own.

A plugin like Regenerate Thumbnails will help you out. It takes your images and generates new thumbnails according to the current settings.

8. Your site has broken links

Why am I so sure?

Well, broken links don’t appear on your site in some magical way. This is more of a natural process. For instance, if you linked to a third-party site, say, two months ago, but then that site went offline, then you now have a broken link.

Of course, finding all broken links by hand would be impossible. Instead, use a plugin called Broken Link Checker to get the job done.

9. Pingbacks can cause a real mess

Pingbacks are one of those ancient WordPress features that have been with us for years.

In theory, pingbacks are a cool thing. They allow your site to communicate with other WordPress sites and notify them of new links.

However, they can also be used as a DDoS attack tool, as pointed out by Sucuri. At this point in time, you’re better off disabling pingbacks altogether.

You can do it in Settings > Discussion (leave the box unchecked):

Your turn

Is there anything else that’s surprisingly frustrating to you about WordPress and the way it works (or the way it’s set up)? Feel free to share in the comments.

The post 9 Problems With WordPress You Didn’t Know About (And How to Fix Them) first appeared on ThemeTrust.

Create is our brand new multipurpose WordPress theme. It’s our most powerful and flexible theme yet. Built around the awesome open source Page Builder from SiteOrigin, it gives you maximum control over page layout and content creation. It also comes bundled with the #1 slider plugin, Slider Revolution, a $19 value!

Another awesome feature is the One Click Demo Importer, which allows you to make your site look just like the Create demo with the click of a button. Then you can easily swap out the demo images and text with your own.

See All Features and Explore the Demo

Henry Jones

Henry Jones is the founder and owner of ThemeTrust. He has been designing and developing for WordPress since 2007.

The post Introducing Create: Our New Multipurpose WordPress Theme first appeared on ThemeTrust.

The WordPress theme customizer was introduced as part of the Theme Customization API (that was introduced in WordPress version 3.4. If you want to make changes to your theme settings, then you’ll need to make use of custom controls that comes shipped with the theme customizer like a checkbox, text field, radio and a few others. But, what if you would like to add your own custom controls to your WordPress theme?

To help you understand how you can create and add controls tailored to meet your specific needs, we’ll demonstrate creating three custom controls to make a few changes to our theme’s footer. However, to begin with the process, you’ll first need to become familiar with the WP_Customizer_Control class.

Getting to Know About “WP_Customizer_Control” Class

In order to generate a custom control, you need to create a new class and extend it using the WP_Customizer_Control class. This class uses the “$wp_customize->add_control()” method to add your own custom control to your WordPress site theme customization screen. Furthermore, in order to access this method, you need to use the $wp_customize object available in the action hook: customize_register.

Let’s consider an example that illustrates how you can add an existing custom control to your theme section (in the ‘customize_register’ action hook) as follows:

$wp_customize->add_control( new WP_Customize_Header_Image_Control( $wp_customize, 'header_image', array(
'label' => __( 'Header image', 'mynewtheme' ),
'section' => 'header_image_settings',
'settings' => 'header_image_position',
)
) );

In the above example, we’re creating a control that will give users the ability to choose a new header image.

Examples Demonstrating: How to Create More Custom Controls?

This section is divided into three different steps, wherein each step contains code that will generate a custom control for the text area for your theme customizer. We’ll add the code in WordPress theme’s footer.php file, so as to make changes to the footer via the new text area controls.

Step1: Creating a Simple Text Area Control

As we’ve discussed above, in order to create a new custom control, we need to define a class that will be used for extending the WP_Customize_Control class. Essentially, this class is used together with the WordPress Theme Customization API for adding an input control (i.e. custom control) on the theme customization screen. Let’s look at the code to implement this task:

/*Customizer Code HERE*/
add_action('customize_register', 'theme_footer_customizer');
function theme_footer_customizer($wp_customize){
 //adding section in wordpress customizer   
$wp_customize->add_section('footer_settings_section', array(
  'title'          => 'Footer Text Section'
 ));
//adding setting for footer text area
$wp_customize->add_setting('text_setting', array(
 'default'        => 'Default Text For Footer Section',
 ));
$wp_customize->add_control('text_setting', array(
 'label'   => 'Footer Text Here',
  'section' => 'footer_settings_section',
 'type'    => 'textarea',
));

In this code, the customer_register action hook is used to tell WordPress about the custom function, we’ve created with the name: theme_footer_customizer. As you may know, that the WP_Customize_Manager class helps to control WordPress Theme Customizer, and so the custom control will become a part of this class. However, to access your control, you’ll need to use “wp_customize” object that is an instance of the customize_register hook.

In our case, the wp_customize object is used to define a new footer section that will be included in the text area. So, whatever you’ll type in the footer section “text area” will get displayed in your theme’s footer as shown in the screen shot below:

In this screen shot, you can see that a new “Footer Text section” is added to your theme. The text written in this section will get displayed in your theme’s footer.

Step 2: Adding Custom Control to Change Background Color

So, now that we have created a text area control, you can add many different custom controls to it. In this example, we’ll be adding a custom control to our new Footer text section that will help in changing the background color of the footer. To do so, simply add the following code snippet in your theme’s footer.php file:

//adding setting for background
$wp_customize->add_setting('background_color', array(
 'default'        => '#ffffff',
) );
$wp_customize->add_control( new WP_Customize_Color_Control( $wp_customize, 'background_color', array(
'label'   => 'Footer Color Setting',
'section' => 'footer_settings_section',

        'settings'   => 'background_color',

    )));

As you can in the screen shot above, choosing an appropriate color from the “Footer Color Setting”, the background-color of the footer has changed to gray.

Step 3: Adding Custom Control to Add Logo

Another control that we’re adding to the Footer text section is “Footer Logo”. As the name implies, the ‘Footer Logo’ control will help in adding a logo the footer. To add this control, you’ll need to include the below code snippet in the footer.php file:

//adding setting for footer logo
$wp_customize->add_setting('footer_logo');
$wp_customize->add_control(new WP_Customize_Upload_Control($wp_customize,'footer_logo',array(
 'label'      => __('Footer Logo', 'mytheme'),
 'section'    => 'footer_settings_section',
 'settings'   => 'footer_logo',
 )));

}

Let’s Wrap Up!

You may find the process of creating custom controls a bit time-consuming. But, you cannot neglect the fact that the better controls you’ll add to your website theme customization screen, the more time of your users can be saved, thereby leading to enhanced user experience. So, if you plan on building some custom controls on your own to be added to the WordPress theme customizer, then this post will prove a resourceful guide for you.

Sophia Phillips

Sophia Phillips has been working as a professional in WordPress website development company and loves sharing information about leveraging multiple benefits of WordPress CMS in the best possible manner. Currently, she has an impressive count of WordPress development-related articles under her name.

The post How to Create Custom Controls for the WordPress Theme Customizer first appeared on ThemeTrust.

We are a few weeks into Spring. Birds are chirping and flowers are blooming. What a great time of year! To celebrate, we are offering 30% off on WordPress themes at ThemeTrust. Enter the coupon code spring in your shopping cart.

Henry Jones

Henry Jones is the founder and owner of ThemeTrust. He has been designing and developing for WordPress since 2007.

The post ThemeTrust Spring Sale – 30% Off Themes first appeared on ThemeTrust.

Check out all of Gear’s features and view the live demo.

Henry Jones

Henry Jones is the founder and owner of ThemeTrust. He has been designing and developing for WordPress since 2007.

The post Say Hello to Gear: Our New E-commerce Theme first appeared on ThemeTrust.

Check out all of Swell’s features and view the live demo.

The post Swell: A Stunning Video WordPress Theme first appeared on ThemeTrust.

We’ve also done away with our theme options panel, moving all options to the built-in theme customizer. This is a change the just made sense. The customizer is there, so why not use it. And it is just cool seeing your changes take effect in real time.

Check out all of Trail’s features and view the live demo.

The post A New Theme and Some Changes Going Forward first appeared on ThemeTrust.