Social Logins to Your WordPress Site

I’m going to assume you already know why you should add social login capabilities to your site. If not, the short version is that many visitors won’t want to take the time to sign up for a specific account just to comment on your page.

Having their comments tied to their social accounts – especially ones with pictures and locations visible – will increase the amount of genuine feedback you get, and encourage people who otherwise might not have wanted to sign up for an account to leave a single comment to do so. And having had a taste of your site, they’ll be more likely to come back for more. Plus, for your viewers’ convenience, it’s always nice to have the ability to login with one click and without having to remember a password.

As always, there are no shortage of plugins that can do this, and as I’ve already mentioned the free Social Login plugin plenty of times, I won’t rehash that again. There are tons of other social plugins to choose from, free and premium, so let’s cover some of those.

Janrain Social Login

 

Janrain’s Social Login features many of the same functions as most social login plugins, but one thing that sets it apart is the ability to post to multiple networks at the same time, which dedicated social media users are sure to appreciate, especially the ones sharing your content to a legion of followers across platforms – which is exactly what you want, right?

One hitch – I wouldn’t call it a downside, but it’s a hitch – is that in order to use it, you need to sign up for an account with them. This is reasonable, though, since your site will be accepting emails and making complex API calls. You’ll also need your own social account of some kind to sign up, but that only seems fair.

There’s also another series of steps you have to go through in order to connect Janrain to a specific social network. Basically, you have to make an app for each one you want to connect to. But it’s not as intimidating as it seems. They walk you through the entire process.

Social Connect

 

Social Connect, another free option, is the simplest and most minimal plugin featured here. And possibly the simplest and most minimal social login plugin available, period. This is the option to pick if you just want a no-frills social media connection that you can set up with a minimum of time and effort, and are willing to sacrifice customization and fine-tuning in the name of user-friendliness.

It does basically everything you need – adds the buttons, register and comment forms and places them on your website, and according to reviewer “chillmen,” “the configuration is very simple and short.” The only issue with it is that it doesn’t support manual linking of social accounts with existing accounts.

UserPro – User Profiles With Social Login

 

As top selling user profile plugin, you know that UserPro would come packaged with some great features. One just happens to be an easy social login integration, so your readers can create their own user profiles on your site (for exclusive content, your comments section, a forum or even a store). The plugin is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram and Bkontakt – so anyone with a social account on one of these sites can instantly register for your site in a few clicks. Plus you can enable auto-tweet and auto-posts, to make it easier for your readers to share your articles with their friends.

LoginRadius Unified Social API

 

I couldn’t not mention this one. Like Janrian, LoginRadius offers a free and a paid version. The free version is competent as free versions go, with all the paid version’s sharing functions intact, nine available languages, and a few different options for interface designs.

The full list of features is far too long for me to list here, but you can see it on the plugin’s page. It also offers detailed analytics that are automatically collected when someone uses it to log into your site with one-click. Both versions are turnkey and installation is said to be easy. It also features an active and frequently-update support forum.

AccessPress Social Login

 

Want to add an easy social login for your users? One that has 9 social login options (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, VK, Foursquare, Buffer and WordPress)? CheckoutAccessPress. The plugin comes with 15 social login button and icon styles, as well as easy shortcodes and widgets that you can use to add login forms anywhere on your site.

Want more? With AccessPress your can easily enable or disable social accounts you want to allow, reorder the social login buttons, and enable social logins for BuddyPress and WooCommerce. The plugin is also fully customizable and includes tons of options for all of the registration and login text, links, avatars and more.

Social

 

This simply-named plugin from MailChimp, in their own words, “handles a lot of the heavy lifting of making your blog seamlessly integrate with social networking sites.”

Social’s most unique feature is that it republishes the comments made via these social media sites, even Twitter retweets and Facebook mentions. This has the effect of multiplying the number of comments on your site as well as blending social media comments in with ones left via WordPress, in contrast with the way many other plugins stick Facebook comments in a separate window from the other ones, resulting in two different discussions. The reader’s comment will also be displayed on their chosen social network, meaning every comment is also, essentially, a share.

Unfortunately, it’s worth noting that MailChimp doesn’t support the plugin, so if you end up having problems with it, you might just have to go with another option. If it does work though, you’ll get an excellent social integration plugin with some very unique features.

Ultimate Facebook

 

As the name suggests, Ultimate Facebook is for Facebook users only. Ultimate Facebook is a premium plugin that gives you the functions of over 12 separate plugins in one. In addition to letting your users login via Facebook, it also gives them the option of creating new profiles using the information from their social media as a basis, instead of making the profile directly from it. It too includes like and send buttons, as well as a ton of widgets, like a Like Box, Facepile, and a Recommendations Feed, with the option for complete customization of all of them.

Nextend Facebook/Twitter/Google Connect

 

While we’re on the subject of one-network plugins, our last entry will be a three-for-one.  Nextend offers three separate plugins for the big three social networks: Facebook, Twitter and Google. All three are completely free, and come with multiple designs, support using profile pictures as comment avatars, and fast, helpful support.

Ease-of-use is also a touted feature, both by the description and the reviewers. This is true for developers and users. For the former, the configuration options are simple and fast, letting you get up and running with a minimum of time and hassle. And the latter, we’re sure, will appreciate the ability to both register and log in with a single click.

One interesting bonus feature this plugin comes with is a Social Connect Button Generator, which makes it easier to generate a variety of professional-looking buttons for multiple social networks.

Conclusion

There are plenty of ways to accomplish any task with WordPress, and integrating social logins is no exception. There are even more plugins than this. Do you know any others that work particularly well? Or do you have any differences of opinion on the ones I’ve covered here? Let me know in the comments!

Secrets Unraveled: Managing a High Traffic WordPress Site

A couple of days ago, we looked into how you can drive more web traffic to your WordPress website, so this isn’t it. We also ventured into starting your own freelance business with WordPress, so this isn’t that as well. In today’s post, we will not show you how to start a WordPress business or drive more traffic. Instead, we will take you through a step by step guide on setting up your WordPress site for when you finally hit the pot of gold as far as traffic goes. This we do in a bid to ascertain that your site doesn’t break when you start getting more and more visitors. Enjoy and don’t leave without sharing your thoughts in the comment section at the end.

 

 Here’s a quick breakdown of this serving:

1. Case study of high traffic WordPress sites and… What do they do to make good of the high numbers?

2. Essential plugins and tools for high traffic WordPress Sites (Juicy)

3. Acquiring WordPress traffic (uh-oh, we just said we won’t be going into traffic generation but just had to, because, well, we’re talking traffic) 

How to Prepare Your WordPress Site for High Traffic

Out of the box, WordPress is built scalable, allowing it to adapt to any task, hard or simple, and/or any amount of traffic you throw at it. But there are a couple of considerations you have to keep in mind when scaling for more traffic to ensure your site is performing at its best. What are these considerations? 

Processor & Memory Limitations

To have your WordPress site online, you need a capable web server. You need sufficient server resources to run your site without hassles. Two server resources you absolutely need are adequate processor power and memory. Now, high levels of traffic can be incredibly taxing to your web server, which in turn causes your site to slow down or break.

Which is exactly what we don’t want happening, especially when you’re receiving tens of millions of visits and page views. What to do? Firstly, ensure your web host has the server resources required to provide sufficient memory and processor power. And since WordPress runs on MySQL and PHP, make sure your host provides the latest stable versions of these platforms to create a favorable environment in which to run your WordPress site. 

 

Speaking of MySQL, did you know you can rig your MySQL settings to permit many simultaneous database connections? Oh yeah you can. It’s called replication, which – among other things – ensures users won’t encounter the “connection timed out” error when accessing your busy site. On top of that, you can improve MySQL performance by proper indexing, and using query caching. Further, you can create a read-only slave of your master database in order to separate read requests from insert/update queries, which results in a faster and sturdier environment for your high traffic WordPress site.

 

But as a beginner, this might sound all too alien to you, which is why the Core WordPress team built the HyperDB plugin to help you out. If you’re one bit curious, HyperDB, “…is an advanced database class that supports replication, failover, load balancing and partitioning.” It’s the kind of solution you need when your traffic numbers start racking up. Moving on… 

Burst Data

 

Some web hosts will allow you to exceed a pre-set transfer speed limit – something known as bursting data – when demand for yout content is high. Some servers are automatically configured to allow this service. Other web hosts will charge you for the service, while others don’t have the service at all. It’s your duty to check with your service provider.

 

Limit Graphics and WordPress Plugins

 

Let’s assume your WordPress site calls upon five graphics and four WordPress template files to create the design of your site. For 1,000 web visitors, these files will be loaded 9,000 times resulting in a huge demand on your site. WordPress plugins are called by your theme as well, and to function, they make queries to your database. This just means the more plugins you have, the more the database queries, and the heavier the activity on your server. What to do? 

• Reduce the number of graphics needed to create the design of your WordPress site. You can do this by eliminating unnecessary graphics, and editing your style.css and template files.

• Turn off WordPress plugins that you can live without even if it’s for the few days you have a spike in traffic. Look into hard-coding some of the features you need directly into your theme.

   

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

 

To avoid traffic overages (exceeding your allotted bandwidth) and maximize the performance of your WordPress site, you should consider using a content delivery network aka CDN. This way, your site’s files are served from a data center closest to the web visitor. This reduces load on your server significantly since copies of your files are stored on multiple data centers around the globe.

 

When there is a huge demand for your content, your server won’t be the absolute receiving end of the spike in traffic – CDN servers will act a shield. There are many pay-as-you-go CDN solutions out there, so you ought to set up in no time. If you have no idea where to start, we recommend CloudFlare (a personal favorite) and MaxCDN.

 

 Upgrade to Better Web Hosting

 

Sure enough, shared web hosting is great for new blogs with low levels of traffic. This, however, will become a problem when your traffic increases to tens of thousands of views per day. If you’re currently on a shared hosting plan and you notice poor performance when you have traffic spikes, consider migrating to VPS. If you’re facing traffic problems with your VPS plan, migrate to a dedicated server and so on and so forth.

 

There are a couple of managed WordPress hosting companies out there that offer you great managed WordPress hosting packages. They include WPEngine, Flywheel and Media Temple among others. These companies provide a whole range of features from automatic updates and backups, CDN, caching layers, top-of-the-drawer security, dedicated infrastructure and great support among others. The prices may not be beginner-friendly, but for the peace of mind and the assortment of awesome features you get, they are worthy every single penny. 

 

Use a Caching Plugin

 

A caching plugin could be the tool that saves your site from collapse when the number of visitors go up, up and up. How so? Glad you asked. A caching plugin usually creates HTML versions of your pages, which reduces the number of times WordPress needs to invoke PHP to serve pages. With a great caching plugin, you can increase the speed of your WordPress site, while shielding yourself from the negative effects of a downtime.

 

You want to go for a caching plugin that supports features such as page caching, database caching, CDN and minification just to mention a few. Great examples of awesome caching plugins include W3 Total Cache, Varnish Cache, and WP Super Cache among others. 

 

Take Advantage of Service-Oriented Architecture

 

Most basic hosting plans will host your WordPress site and MySQL database on a single machine. Unfortunately, this kind of configuration favors not resiliency or site speed when your traffic spikes. What to do?

 

You can split your WordPress into multiple parts, and serve each separately. What does that even mean? (So sticky) By taking advantage of a service-oriented setup, you will take more load, run faster, and easily identify stress-points that need ironing out. Here’s an example of service-oriented architecture: 

• MySQL database to host your master/slave WordPress database

• Nginx/Varnish proxy layer to handle all initial request from users

• Nginx/Apache2 web server to handle page rendering and site administration

• Image server or CDN to serve media files

Note, the above set up is just an illustration, yours may be different depending on your needs. With a great architecture in place, you can scale in/out any layer independently depending on your traffic levels. All the same, don’t sweat the details, if you don’t understand service-oriented architecture, please consult your web service provider for instructions on how to set up your design. 

 

Note, the above set up is just an illustration, yours may be different depending on your needs. With a great architecture in place, you can scale in/out any layer independently depending on your traffic levels. All the same, don’t sweat the details, if you don’t understand service-oriented architecture, please consult your web service provider for instructions on how to set up your design.

 

Case Study: High Traffic WordPress Sites

 

 

In this section, we will quickly look at some high traffic WordPress sites, and how they cope with high volumes of traffic. First, here’s the list of the candidates that made it to our case study today. Oh by the way, they pull the kind of stats that we only dream of:

 

• HotAir – 45+ million page views per month

• Digital Trends – 33+ million pages views each month

• Slashgear – 10+ million page views per month

• The Next Web – 8+ million page views a month

• iCulture.nl – 5.4+ million page views per month

   

Now, let’s see how they cope with huge amounts of traffic. 

Hot Air

 

After only 48 hours of launching, Mark Jaquith – the developer behind HotAir – had to migrate the site to a new server. Guess he didn’t anticipate so much growth in such a short period. And in order to keep up with the growing traffic, Mark invested in a CDN to deliver static content, a proactive caching solution, and a load balancer with multiple web backends. HotAir uses VaultPress for backups (and so do we – it’s pretty awesome), Google Analytics for the dets, News beat, chart beat and WordPress stats (for more dets).

 

Digital Trends

 

Digital Trends is no longer the baby it was at launch. With over 33 million pages views each month, it’s one of the fastest growing WP-powered site considering it started with about 1 million uniques per month. Here’s what Tom Willmot, the guy who brought us Digital Trends, has to say:

 

When I started work on the website, there were some pretty big performance sinks in the code base that needed ironing out…Coding well plus some persistent object caching are enough to begin with.

That’s right, clean your code kids. Moving on.

 

Slashgear

 

Unlike the other companies we are reviewing in this section, Slashgear had a scalability plan in place when they launched. Their plan was to grow their traffic by 30% each year. The only problem? Their plan did not account for sudden traffic spikes. You’re reading this part because their threshold was exceeded every time Apple made a huge announcement. The result? The site would struggle to keep up with the demand.

 

So how did Slashgear handle the upsurges? Firstly, they added Amazon EC2 to their infrastructure. They hosted the website over at SoftLayer, a dedicated cloud web host . Then they adopted the Disqus comment system, which took the comment load off their servers. They have powerful caching in place, and advises you to use a trial-and-error method to set up your WordPress site.

 

The Next Web

 

The Next Web was launched when there were few large WordPress sites. As such, they weren’t really prepared for the sharp spike in traffic. All the same, they adapted and learned along the way. When the traffic shot up, Arjen Schat and Pablo Roman had to work fast. Went to work and found Memcached for heavy queries, Munin for monitoring and Varnish as a reverse proxy. They use W3 Total Cache and WPVarnish as well. (zing) 

iCulture.nl

 

iCulture.nl started as iPhoneclub.nl on shared hosting but they were immediately kicked out because – high traffic. They moved to VPS hosting but were kicked out once again. So they moved to dedicated server and incorporated a CDN but that wouldn’t cut it. Finally, they settled on load-balanced servers and threw CDN to the mix.

 

With a service-oriented architecture, iCulture.nl has survived high traffic levels since November 2011 with zero hassles. They use tools such as W3 Total Cache, WP Widget Cache, Plugin Output Cache, Recent Posts, Recent Comments and Similar Posts, Clean Options and WordPress Sphinx search plugin. They’ve adopted a responsive design to cater to mobile visitors.

 

Essential Plugins + Tools for High Traffic WordPress Sites

 

We have sprinkled this post with quite a number of plugins, tools and solutions meant for high traffic WordPress sites. As such, this section will just summarize the resources you might want to utilize: 

 

1.     High traffic compatible hosting solution (such as WPEngine, Cloudways, etc.)

2.     Improved website caching (with W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Varnish Cache, Memcached and WP Widget Cache)

3.     Better comment management (Disqus

4.     CDN for improved performance (CloudFlare CDN & MaxCDN are both great)

5.     Frequent & reliable website backups (VaultPress, BackWPup, BackupBuddy etc.)

6.     Analytics & tracking tools (like Munin, WordPress Stats, and Google Analytics)
 

Obviously you don’t have to use any of these, but they are helpful tools and resources that can make managing a high traffic website much more, well, manageable.

 

Acquiring WordPress Traffic

 

Perhaps you are a beginner without much traffic. Perhaps you’re reading this post to prepare for scalability unlike most of the people in our case study. While it’s great to be prepared, best would be to build your WordPress-based business and learn along the way. That’s the best way to learn. After all, experience is the best teacher. For your business to flourish though, you’ll first need to get more traffic to your WordPress site. Here’s a quick word by Mike to keep your motivated:

 

 Creating a high traffic WordPress site is not as complicated as many would have you believe. Sure, it takes a lot of testing, failing and starting all over again, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll regret why you didn’t start earlier. – Mike Wallagher, How to Promote Your Blog and Get More Traffic.

 

At the end of the day…

 

Surviving traffic spikes and/or running a high traffic WordPress site shouldn’t intimidate you. In essence, you should enjoy the high traffic, and work towards growing your business. How do you manage traffic on your WordPress site? Had problems related to high traffic on your WordPress site? Please share your experiences with us in the comment section below. Adios!

Social Media Marketing Basics for Your WordPress Website

Social media is a proven way to get more visitors to your website. This in turn helps you generate more leads, sales, and business from your WordPress site – something we all want from our online presence right?

 

Whether your website is new or established, now has never been a better time to leverage the power of social media to grow your audience. Even if you think you’ve already taken care of social media optimization for your WordPress site, with new platforms popping up all the time, there is always more you can do.

 

Not only does social media gives you more channels to find and interact with your target audience, if you set up your WordPress website correctly, you can build an army of fans who are willing to share your content and spread the message of your brand simply because they love your content and what you have to offer.

 

How to Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Website Audience

 

However, updating your website and blog can be hard enough, let alone building a social media presence. Where do people find the time to be constantly tweeting and posting and pinning high-quality content on social media? This article is going to share some helpful tools and plugins for WordPress users that will help you keep on top of the social media whirlwind.

 

These solutions were designed to save you time, help you interact with your audience more, and to better promote your site, brand and business online. Implementing just one or two of these methods should help you start growing the number of visitors to your website, giving you more opportunities to convert against your goals, whatever they may be.

 

Make Your Content Easily Shareable

 

It is no longer enough to write great content for your site. People are writing great content on sites everywhere, so how can you stand out? To make it easy for your target audience to find your content, read it, and then come back for more you need to be promoting your site on the most appropriate social media networks.

 

Social Sharing Buttons

Having highly visible social sharing buttons on your site can make a massive difference to how often your content gets shared, which in turn affects your site’s traffic levels. By adding these buttons, your visitors can click on them to share your content with their friends and followers in an instant.

 

These buttons can also encourage your visitors to check out your own profiles and decide whether to follow you on social media. This gives you another opportunity to connect with your audience and turn one-time visitors into repeat readers.

 

The Best Social Sharing Buttons Plugins for WordPress

 

 

A great free WordPress plugin that adds social sharing buttons to your site is Social Media Feather. This plugin displays attractive social sharing and follow buttons to each piece of content on your site. This will encourage people to instantly share an article as they finish reading it.

 

Create Tweetable Quotes 

 The WordPress plugin Click to Tweet is another great tool that can increase how often your content gets shared. It allows you to embed quotes in your articles that your readers can tweet to their followers in just one click. If you choose the right quotes from your content to become clickable tweets, when they show up in someone’s timeline they will pique their interest and draw them to your site.

 

Show Off Your Follower Counts

 

 

 If you are looking for a social sharing plugin with a bit of an edge then you want to get Socialbox. This shows your visitors just how popular you are and gives your site extra credibility and social proof. People are also more likely to join you on social media if they can see you already have many followers and are actively engaging with them there. 

The Importance of Shareable Images

 

Images are a crucial part of a successful social media campaign. People are now more likely to view and read a social media post that contains eye-catching images. This visual content can also increase the chances of your audience sharing your blog posts or social media messages on their own channels. If an image looks good on your site, then there is a good chance they will be happy to leverage it to enhance their own social media feed.

 

Each post that you publish, whether on your blog or your social media channels must include interesting and relevant images. If people enjoy your content and the images are a reflection of that content, they will be more likely to share them. Equally, if someone sees an image on social media that immediately grabs their attention then there is a higher chance of them checking out the accompanying article or re-posting that message to their followers.

 

Make it Easy to Share Your Images

 

 

 If you have an image heavy website then you will want to be sharing these images on Pinterest. To make sharing your images quick and easy for your visitors you need to install the free Pinterest ‘Pin It’ plugin. This free plugin will add a ‘pin it’ button to each image so if somebody wants to pin the picture to their Pinterest wall all they need to do is click. This is a great way to get your images shared on Pinterest and increase traffic to your site. 

 

If you want even more options for making your images shareable then the powerful Monarch from Elegant Themes is a premium social sharing plugin for WordPress you should check out. Monarch offers some excellent options for social sharing as well as a particularly easy and efficient way for people to share your images on a variety of social media platforms.

 

Once Monarch is set up, visitors to your site just need to hover over an image to view a selection of social share buttons. This image can then be shared on social media channels of your audience’s choice in just a few clicks. By getting your images shared in this way, you are again more likely to increase traffic to your site and generate leads.

 

Integrating Social Media on your Site

 

If you have lots of social interactions happening on your social platforms then it is important that you showcase these on your website. If your site visitors see that your social media has lots going on and is very popular then they will want to join the conversation.

 

By displaying your Instagram feed on your site, your Facebook wall, or your latest tweets, your audience will be able to quickly get a sense of what’s happening in your social network and make a decision whether to get involved or not.

 

Embed Feeds into Your WordPress Website

 

 Juicer is a newly released WordPress plugin that makes it easy embed your social media feeds into your site. You can install and use this plugin for free or upgrade to their premium plan for more features.

 

Not only does it promote your social media pages on your site, it also offers analytics on who is using your feed and how they are interacting with it. This helps you to see which social media platforms are most popular with your target audience and what you can do to optimize the promotion of your site.

 

Automating Social Media Sharing

 

Constantly tweeting, pinning and posting on social media channels is essential if you want a strong online presence. However, it is also extremely time-consuming as well as difficult to organise. Thankfully, there are a few tools out there that can help you automate these tasks and save you some time.

 

The Revive Old Post Pro plugin is one such tool that will save you plenty time and effort. This is thanks to its ability to repost old blog content to your social media networks of choice. This means that you no longer have to constantly write new content just to get attention from your followers.

 

Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about your old but still valuable content getting lost and forgotten. This plugin allows you to choose what type of articles you want posted on social media, how often, and where. While there is a free version of this plugin available, if you really want to automate your social media sharing efforts then it’s worth considering paying for the commercial version and seeing how much more traffic it can drive to your website.

 

 

 

An even more feature rich option for organizing your social media publishing is Hootsuite. This is a powerful solution for managing your social media marketing, offering extensive options for social sharing, analytics, and security, amongst many other things. With Hootsuite, you can also auto schedule your posts, enabling different content to be sent to a variety of social media platforms all at different times. This means you don’t have to be physically posting yourself, yet you can still reach your audience on the right social media channels at the right times. 

Final Thoughts

The options above are just a few of the many ways you can leverage social media to increase traffic to your WordPress website and hopefully generate more sales, revenue, or commissions. However, like most things in life, there is no one definitive answer when it comes to how to use social media effectively. Depending on the type you of site you have and your target audience what you need will differ. Take your time, trial different plugins and solutions and just see what works best for you.

 

How are you currently promoting your website on social media? What steps have you taken to automate this process? What sort of results have you seen from your efforts? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.