The creators of WordPress, Automattic, really are a fantastic group who not only made the greatest CMS currently available, they also take time to have a little fun. This is evident by this WordPress Easter Egg.

What’s an Easter Egg? Well, aside from those plastic eggs filled with delicous chocolate, an Easter Egg is an inside joke by developers. Sometimes they’re un-intrusive and only funny if you know the backstory, some are more obvious, if you can find them, like this WordPress Easter Egg.

WordPress Easter Egg

Here is a fun WordPress Easter Egg that occurs whenever you compare WordPress post revisions. You’ll see an animated series of events that calls you out by your author name or WordPress username and then proceeds to re-create events from the classic movie – The Matrix. Give it a try yourself or watch the video.

How to Remove the WordPress Easter Egg

If you have a non-technical client who would freak out and be rather upset about this WordPress Easter Egg (it’s happened), then the following code snippet will hide the WordPress Easter Egg. Simply paste it in your WordPress theme’s functions.php file.

function prevent_matrix_easter_egg() {
    $left = empty( $_POST['left'] ) ? ( empty( $_GET['left'] ) ? '' : $_GET['left'] ) : $_POST['left'];
    $right = empty( $_POST['right'] ) ? ( empty( $_GET['right'] ) ? '' : $_GET['right'] ) : $_POST['right'];
 
    if($left == $right) {
        $redirect = get_edit_post_link( $left );
        wp_die("Error: Cannot compare a revision to itself.<br /><a href=\"" . $redirect . "\">Go Back</a>");
    }
}
add_action('admin_action_diff', 'prevent_matrix_easter_egg');

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How to Disable WordPress Theme Switching

Paste the following code in your WordPress Theme’s functions.php to completely disable WordPress theme switching and save clients from themselves.

// disable theme switching
add_action( 'admin_init', 'wplg_lock_theme' );
function wplg_lock_theme() {
	global $submenu;
	unset( $submenu['themes.php'][5] );
	unset( $submenu['themes.php'][15] );
}

How to Disable WordPress Theme Switching – Except for Whoever Setup the Site

Paste the following code in your WordPress Theme’s functions.php to only let the user with the ID #1 change themes – and the user with the ID #1 is the person who setup the site, which is usually the developer. If you have a different user ID, simply change the number to your user ID so you’re the only one who can change the theme.

// disable theme switching
add_action( 'admin_init', 'wplg_lock_theme' );  
function wplg_lock_theme() {
	global $submenu, $userdata;
	get_currentuserinfo();
	if ( $userdata->ID != 1 ) {
		unset( $submenu['themes.php'][5] );
		unset( $submenu['themes.php'][15] );
	}
}

It’s also worth noting that only users with the “Administrator” level can change the theme. So it’s also perfectly valid to give clients the “Editor” capability. More info on WordPress’ user levels.

Code Snippet via Steve Taylor

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• Theme Review: Tweet Archive Theme
• How to Use WordPress to Display Content Depending on a User’s Level

How to Stop Users from Deactivating WordPress Plugins

Place the following code snippet in your WordPress Theme’s functions.php to disable WordPress plugin deactivation and save clients from themselves.

// how to disable plugin deactivation
add_filter( 'plugin_action_links', 'wplg_lock_plugins', 10, 4 );
function wplg_lock_plugins( $actions, $plugin_file, $plugin_data, $context ) {
	// Remove edit link for all
	if ( array_key_exists( 'edit', $actions ) )
		unset( $actions['edit'] );
	// Remove deactivate link for crucial plugins
	if ( array_key_exists( 'deactivate', $actions ) && in_array( $plugin_file, array(
		'slt-custom-fields/slt-custom-fields.php',
		'slt-file-select/slt-file-select.php',
		'slt-simple-events/slt-simple-events.php',
		'slt-widgets/slt-widgets.php'
	)))
		unset( $actions['deactivate'] );
	return $actions;
}

Just like with WordPress themes, it’s worth noting that only users with the “Administrator” level can disable WordPress plugins. So it’s also perfectly valid to give clients the “Editor” capability. More info on WordPress’ user levels.

Code Snippet via Steve Taylor

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• How to Remove, Move, or Style the WordPress Admin Bar
• Learn More About Your Visitors with the Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin
• LifeGuard Assistant Plugin

Displaying certain information depending on a visitor’s user level can be a very nifty trick to display relevant content to each individual who visits your WordPress site. This way contributors or subscribers can see something different than a new visitor. Another nifty trick is to use this code to only show something to administrators while a new section of the WordPress site is under development.

How to Check if a WordPress User is an Administrator

<?php if (current_user_can(‘administrator’)) { ?>
[html here]
<?php } ?>

This code snippet can be modified to display content based on any WordPress user level. (More info on WordPress’ user levels)

How to Check if a WordPress User is an Editor

<?php if (current_user_can(‘editor’)) { ?>
[html here]
<?php } ?>

How to Check if a WordPress User is a Contributor

<?php if (current_user_can(‘contributor’)) { ?>
[html here]
<?php } ?>

How to Check if a WordPress User is a Subscriber

<?php if (current_user_can(‘subscriber’)) { ?>
[html here]
<?php } ?>

It really is that simple to display content depending on a WordPress user’s level.

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Selling WordPress themes is all about producing a large amount of quality WordPress themes and selling large quantities of them. Since most WordPress themes across the popular marketplaces cost between $30 and $40, and theme authors only see 50% to 70% of each sale, resulting in between $15 and $28 per sale, theme authors have to sell a lot of WordPress themes to make a living. This requires a lot of investment, time, skill, and a bit of luck. As marketplaces mature, it becomes harder for new and less popular theme authors to get a break.

At wpLifeGuard, we want to help WordPress theme authors make money, which is why we have our Affiliate program.

You Can Make an Extra $8.70 from Each Theme

Our affiliate program grants a 30% referral bonus, that’s $8.70 per referral, paid every month – no minimum balance required. All you need to do is add the our wpLifeGuard Plugin for developers to your WordPress Theme – that’ll add wpLifeGuard video tutorials and your affiliate link to your customer’s WordPress dashboard.

Install our Plugin – That’s It – It’s Free!

Our plugin adds a “Help” link to the user’s WordPress Dashboard navigation along with wpLifeGuard’s free videos and your affilate link. Your customers go to the Help link when they’re in need of it, watch a few videos, and visit wpLifeGuard through your affiliate link. This way there isn’t any intrusive, annoying, unsolicited sales pitches – let them find out about wpLifeGuard on their own and you still get credit for the referral.

Get a 58% Increase in Profit from Each Theme

Let’s say you’re among the top WordPress theme authors on Theme Forest – so you’re selling your WordPress themes for $40 each and making 70% per sale – that’s $28 a sale. Adding $8.70 to a sale is a 30% increase in profit for no extra work. That is a good deal.

Now let’s say you’re just starting out as a WordPress theme author on Theme Forest. You’re likely selling themes for $30 each and making 50% a sale – that’s $15 a sale. Adding $8.70 to a sale is a 58% increase in profit for no extra work. That is a very good deal.

Giving away your WordPress theme for free? Well, this would be an extra $8.70 that you’d get while keeping your WordPress theme free!

Become an Affiliate Today – It’s Free!

Get the Free Plugin

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• LifeGuard Assistant Plugin
• WPMU – Quality WordPress Themes & WordPress Plugins

We’ve had the LifeGuard Assistant for Developers available as a way for WordPress developers and WordPress theme authors to make some extra money on their work. This tool is especially handy for WordPress theme developers – an extra $8.70 off each theme would be a welcome income increase for any theme author.

In an effort to make it even easier for theme developers to make money and even easier for anyone to learn how to use WordPress, our LifeGuard Assistant is now available as a prepackaged WordPress plugin.

The LifeGuard Assistant is now available on WordPress.org.

LifeGuard Assistant WordPress Plugin featuring our free WordPress video tutorials.

The LifeGuard Assistant settings page for your Affiliate ID

Don’t know how to install WordPress plugins? Check out our WordPress video tutorial showing how to use WordPress plugins.

Download the LifeGuard Assistant

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• Google+ Add to Circles WordPress Plugin
• Day 16: The Grandmaster WordPress SEO Plugin

Google+ Add to Circles lets you easily add the Google+ Badge to your website through a WordPress plugin with just a widget.

Google+ Add to Circles also adds Google+ Direct Connect to your WordPress site, allowing Google+ users to add you to their circles from within Google Search Results.

Disclaimer: This Google+ Badge only works with Google+ Pages, *not* Google+ Profiles. Google+ Add to Circles has a validator to check if your Google+ ID is a valid page.

Installation

1. Download Google+ Add to Circles WordPress Plugin
2. Upload ‘add-to-circles’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
3. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
4. Visit the “Add to Circles Settings” under the settings menu and add your Google+ IDPlace the widget in the desired widget area.

Don’t know how to install WordPress plugins? Check out our WordPress video tutorial showing how to use WordPress plugins.

Don’t know how to use WordPress Widgets? Check out our video tutorial showing how to use WordPress widgets.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is this plugin for Google+ Pages only?

Currently Google only allows Google+ Pages to use this Add to Circles Badge.

What is the difference between a Google+ Page and a Google+ Profile?

Google+ Profiles are for humans – Google+ Pages are for corporations, websites, products, etc. The plugin settings page has a way to verify if your Google+ Page really is a page.

Screenshots

The Google+ Add to Circles settings page

The Google+ Add to Circles Badge

Related Post: How to Add Google Authorship to WordPress Posts

Download on WordPress.org

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WPMU is a fantastic WordPress focused website with a WordPress blog, WordPress forum, WordPress themes, and WordPress plugins. While WPMU offers a lot for WordPress users, we’re gonna focus on their WordPress plugins. WPMU’s WordPress plugins can greatly improve any WordPress website. It doesn’t matter if you want to make minor improvements to your WordPress website or a complete overhaul turning it into a Community blog, Wiki, or online store. In fact, at wpLifeGuard we use several WordPress plugins – WPMU’s plugins give wpLifeGuard its core functionality.

WPMU has 30+ free WordPress plugins and WordPress themes and over 300+ premium WordPress plugins and WordPress themes. Here’s a few of their WordPress plugins.

Floating Social

Floating Social WordPress Plugin

Floating Social adds social network icons to the left of your content area. It’ll add Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon.

Post Voting Plugin

The Post Voting Plugin allows visitors to give posts a thumbs up or thumbs down – you don’t even have to display the results of the voting. This can provide great insight into what kinds of posts your visitors like.

Google Maps

Google Maps WordPress Plugin

For websites that have corresponding a brick and mortar location, the Google Maps WordPress plugin is a quick and easy way to ad a map to your website via a widget or button.

Don’t know how to use WordPress Widgets? Check out our video tutorial showing how to use WordPress widgets.

A/B Theme Testing Plugin

A/B Testing is a very helpful process that can help improve your website. The A/B Theme Testing Plugin lets you quickly and easily A/B test content to increase the conversion of your website. It even integrates with Google Analytics!

MarketPress

MarketPress – WordPress eCommerce Plugin

WPMU’s MarketPress eCommerce WordPress plugin is a great way to start your own online store. With features like a fully functioning Shopping Cart, product categories, popular products, shortcodes, advanced API, and much more. Check out the MarketPress demo to see it in action!

Wiki

Interested in starting your own Wiki? Look no further, the Wiki WordPress plugin has ya covered. With features like full revision history, public or members only editing, breadcrumbs, notification system, and much more this thing WordPress plugin is all you need.

Q&A

The Q&A Forum WordPress plugin

If you’ve ever spent time searching Google for anything code related, then you’ve probably seen Stack Overflow. With the Q&A plugin you can create your own Q&A site – to see it in action, check out the Q&A demo.

Membership and Affiliate

The two core plugins that powers wpLifeGuard is Membership and Affiliates. These two plugins are great for providing an online service to your visitors. They allow visitors to sign up and pay to get certain levels of access to your site and limit content/pages of your site to users with the correct level of access. The affiliate plugin is a great plugin that provides users with an affiliate account, and excellent stats on the clicks and signups they refer.

Pricing

Monthly: $79.00
Every 3 Months: $159.00 – about $53 a month
Yearly: $419.00 – about $35 a month

Don’t know how to install WordPress plugins? Check out our video tutorial showing how to use WordPress plugins.

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A stale blog is a dead blog. Google likes fresh content, and so do your users. If they somehow find an old article with incorrect information due to its age, they won’t be happy and won’t likely stay.

There is always room for improvement. Have a good page? You can make it great. Taking time to improve popular pages increases your chances of turning a visitor into a subscriber/buyer/etc.

Re-Evaluate the pages on your site

Take time to improve old pages, popular or unpopular, good or bad, and you can attract and convert more users than ever before. But before you start improving pages, you need to figure out what pages would benefit from improving and what improvements would be most beneficial.

What makes your popular pages popular?

Before you can improve a popular page, you need to figure out what makes it popular. Is it because it’s in the primary navigation? Because is has a link from a popular site? Ranked highly in the search engines? Lots of social sharing?

Why aren’t people visiting your unpopular pages?

Take a look at your unpopular pages, particularly the ones you want to be popular. In contrast to the popular pages, what are the unpopular pages missing? What can you add or change to make them popular? Give them higher visibility? Publicize them? Redesign?

Why do people leave your high bounce rate pages?

Sometimes pages with a high bounce rate can be the most popular pages on your blog. While high bounce rate pages are bringing in visitors, they do you little good aside from total number of visitors to your site. It’s critical to get visitors to visit more pages on your site. To do this you have to figure out what kind of visitor is ending up on that page and where they came from. Are they looking for a laugh, or a free download? Did they find you through Google, or a friend sharing on Facebook? The more you know about who is visiting the page and why, the better you can custom tailor that page to get them to visit more pages.

Ways to improve your pages

Examine the popular pages or posts on your blog, what can you do to make them better? What about the high bounce pages, how can you encourage visitors to visit another page? Based on what you know about the popular pages, what can you do to make the unpopular pages more popular?

Redesign Pages

Giving a page a major or minor redesign can do wonders to help conversion. It can be as simple as adding a header image or a sidebar widget, or as complex as a complete page redesign. Depending on what page it is and why it needs to be improved, either one could be equally effective. Something as simple as a header image could make the page more visually interesting to get a visitor to start reading. Or a new popular posts sidebar widget to get visitors to check out other pages. There are infinite possibilities here – figure out what a page’s greatest shortcoming is and add something to counteract it.

Add or Update Content

Have a popular page with incorrect content due to its age? Fix it! Write a new article and add a prominent link saying “this page is dated, go here for the correct technique/stats/whatever.” Or if only part of the content is incorrect, strikethrough the incorrect info and provide the correct info.

Even if the article is 100% correct, adding content can be great for relevancy or search engine rankings. Something as simple as a sentence, a paragraph, or several paragraphs can make a huge difference. Maybe add or update headers or bold some text to increase the scannability of the page.

Interlink Pages

Out of all the ways to improve your pages mentioned in this article, this is probably the simplest and best improvement you cane make. Having pages and posts reference other pages and posts on your website is a simple and great way to increase the click through rate and search engine rankings of your website. If a topic on a post you’re writing references something you’ve already written about, simply link to the old post. Or, if you write a new article talking about something you have mentioned previously, find the old article and link it to the new one. Doing so takes little time and will help out your site a lot.

Improve Keyword Density

Have a page that does well in the search engines? Make it do better! Pay attention to what keywords people are using to find your site and where they’re ending up. If a certain article is doing well for certain keywords, find ways to add more iterations of that keyword or keyphrase to the page. If your home page is doing well for certain keywords, find ways to add that keyword or keyphrase throughout the entire site.

Create a Table of Content

If you keep on writing articles covering one particular topic and they tend to be very popular to visitors and/or the search engines, create a new page and have it be a table of contents of all of the best articles you’ve written on the topic. Have that page link to all of those articles and have all of those articles link to your new table of contents page. A great example of this practice is SEOmoz’s Link Building page. Pages like this do well in the search engines and is a great way for visitors to read a lot of articles on your site. If you have enough content to create one of these, do it.

Conclusion

Any website can always be improved. A great way to improve clickthrough, increase subscribers, buyers, regular visitors, or whatever your website wants, is to improve old pages and articles. There are many ways to do this and there isn’t one set formula that works for every page. But if you can figure out what kind of visitors and what those visitors want for each of your pages, you can drastically improve those pages for their visitors greatly improving every area of your website.

31 Days to a Better WordPress Blog

This post is apart of the 31 Days to a Better WordPress Blog series. Be sure to subscribe via RSS, follow on Twitter, follow on Facebook, or circle us on Google+ to keep up with wpLifeGuard’s latest WordPress and blogging tips and tricks.

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There are untold thousands of free and premium WordPress themes out there. The easy part is finding WordPress themes, the hard part is finding good WordPress themes that aren’t overpriced or won’t steal your WordPress login info (yes, bad WordPress themes can run hidden malicious code). Thankfully there are many excellent trusted WordPress theme marketplaces out there to choose from.

Free vs Premium WordPress Themes

At wpLifeGuard, we strongly believe how well designed a website is will make or break a website. While we believe a full on custom design to be the most effective and will provide the greatest chance of success, not everyone can afford to put a few thousand dollars on a website. For those who can’t, a quality WordPress theme is the next best thing. Which is why we strongly recommend paying a few extra bucks for a good WordPress theme. And by a few extra bucks, I mean anywhere from $10 to $200, give or take — while most will be from $35 to $70.

4 Quality WordPress Theme Marketplaces

Theme Forest is probably currently the most popular premium WordPress theme marketplace. Created by the great team over at Envato, they have over 5,000 WordPress themes that cover a wide variety of styles and features. Here you’ll likely spend $35.

Our favorite WordPress theme author, Orman Clark, can be found on Theme Forest. You can find his WordPress themes on Premium Pixels.

wpBundle offers 12 excellent WordPress themes with an incredible attention to detail. All of wpBundle’s WordPress themes come with free updates and support – a pretty good deal. Here you’ll spend $50 for one, or $200 for all 12.

Mojo Themes puts a little more emphasis on quality than Theme Forest – the average theme at Mojo Themes tends to be better than the average theme at Theme Forest. While Mojo Themes only has about 500 marketplace items, you’d be hard pressed to find something that wouldn’t fit your needs. Here you’ll likely spend $35.

Woo Themes is even more exclusive than Mojo Themes. With a little over a hundred themes on the marketplace, they have a huge emphasis on quality. But with nearly 140,000 users, it’s obvious they should not be overlooked for having less themes than their competitors. Woo Themes WordPress themes are high quality and often include advanced functionality, like Woo Commerce. Here you’ll likely spend $70 or a monthly subscription.

Don’t know how to install WordPress themes? Check out our WordPress video tutorial showing how to use WordPress themes

Conclusion

Having a good looking, easy to use, high converting website relies on the design. For website owners on a budget, premium WordPress themes is a great way to accomplish this. Not drinking 7 Starbucks drinks is well worth it to improve the success of your WordPress website.

31 Days to a Better WordPress Blog

This post is apart of the 31 Days to a Better WordPress Blog series. Be sure to subscribe via RSS, follow on Twitter, follow on Facebook, or circle us on Google+ to keep up with wpLifeGuard’s latest WordPress and blogging tips and tricks.

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