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Building an online business like most challenges has a lot to do with your tools and software.

Few Ways To Optimize Images Without Using Plugin

We all prefer to use images inside our articles. Images are beneficial to describe what the author is trying to manifest inside an article. Displaying some images keeps your readers more involved in the topic.

During content creation, when it comes to image optimization people usually suggest using proper alt text. However, optimizing an image is much more than just naming it and using suitable alt text.

While optimizing an image for SEO is necessary, optimizing that for page loading speed is a significant part. As a result of optimization, you will achieve better page speed and SEO results.

Optimizations You Can do Before Publishing an Image

It’s always better to optimize your images before uploading them to the media gallery. You can take advantage of powerful tools like Photoshop or your favorite image editor. Prepare the image nicely by cutting, resizing, compressing, and saving in a proper format (PNG/JPEG/GIF) before uploading. Don’t forget to give a descriptive filename to it.

Hint: If your website needs high-quality images (Example: Stock Photo Website, Photography Website, Travel Blog, etc) then optimization of images will not help you because it will reduce the quality as well.

1. Find Unoptimized Images

After assigning the images to the published post, the post-publishing image optimization part will start. First of all, we have to scan and identify the problems with the uploaded images. There are tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom which can help you detect the problem with an image. GTmetrix shows the problem in detail so I would recommend you test a particular page with GTmetrix.

Run your website through GTmetrix. As soon as the analysis is complete GTmetrix will display all the results regarding that page into two different tabs “Page Speed” and “Yslow”.

There are 7 types of image-related problems that can occur on a page. We will first try to solve the most important ones before heading towards the least cause problems.

Serve Scaled Image: Resize a large image into a correct dimension that your themes HTML & CSS specify.
Optimize Images: Compress the images losslessly.
Specify Image Dimension: Define the width and height of images in HTML or CSS
Make Favicon Small and Scalable: The preferred size of a favicon is 16x 16x.
Use a content delivery network (CDN): Serve images from a CDN URL.
Leverage browser caching: Cache image files using a caching plugin.
Minimize Redirect: Serve images with proper HTTPS.
Combine Images Using CSS Sprite: Combine images into as few files as possible using CSS sprites.

GTmetrix will present image related test results like this:

2. Serve Scaled Images

If you get a warning to serve scaled images by GTmetrix, this means that the page includes some oversized images. GTmetrix recommends you resize them into the correct dimension (will be provided by GTmetrix) which matches your theme design.

As soon as you resize the images into the recommended dimension the warning of serving scaled images will disappear. It will help you decrease the page size as well.

Resize The Images Manually:

In this case, you should be resizing the images manually. Using a plugin will not be helpful because every image is recommended to be set in a different dimension.

You can use an online image editor to resize the images which are required. Open the editor iloveimg and upload the image file from your computer or you can download the original image from the GTmetrix link shown in the warning.

Caution: Do not change the image title.

Set the recommended dimensions inside the editor and resize the image and download the resized version.

Check the original file location in GTmetrix and now upload the resized image to that location using a hosting file manager or any FTP client. You should see the overwrite confirmation popup while uploading the image and select confirm.

Resize and upload back all the images which required proper scaling. As soon as you finish the process, recheck the page with GTmetrix and the warnings will disappear.

3. Optimize Images

This warning usually appears when a page contains losslessly uncompressed images. Losslessly compressing an image will help to reduce the size of the image, resize image files themselves instead of via CSS, and most importantly decrease page loading time.

To fix this issue open the optimized image in a new tab which is recommended by GTmetrix and download it. Copy the file name from GTmetrix (Image URL) and rename the downloaded file by pasting the copied name.

Now open your website file manager or use any FTP plugin and upload back the optimized images into the correct location (wp-content/uploads/date/….). Repeat the same procedure for all the unoptimized images. When finished, re-test the page with GTmetrix and optimize the images warning will be solved.

4. Specify Image Dimension:

Specifying the width and height for the images (In HTML and CSS) enables faster rendering by rejecting the need for unnecessary repaints.

This warning appears when GTmetrix detects any image on your website that doesn’t have the width/height mentioned inside the HTML or CSS code. Some themes automatically attach the image dimension while some others don’t.

Visual editors and live page builders like Divi, and Elementor allow you to specify image dimensions so they can assist you to fix this problem.

If you don’t use visual editors then adding width/height in HTML code will end this warning. A great example of using dimensions in the WordPress widget area is:

5. Make Favicon Small and Scalable:

A favicon is an icon connected with a web page. This little image remains in the “favicon.ico” file in the server’s root. During page load since the browser requests this .ico file, hence it needs to be present there.

Every time a browser requests this favicon file, the cookies for the server’s root are sent. So making the favicon small will help to reduce the cookie size for the server and improve the performance of the website as well.

You need to make sure that the favicon size is 16x16px, the file is in favicon.ico format, and is cached using the cache plugin.

Optimization after publishing an image

Post publishing optimizations include managing image loading hierarchy, caching, and extra push with a faster asset delivery network. Here’s what you can do to optimize your images after publishing without using a plugin.

1. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

CDN is a set of web servers distributed over multiple locations around the globe to deliver your content more efficiently to users. The advantage of having a CDN, it can provide an equally fast website performance to your users across the globe.

While using a CDN you need to serve the images from a different URL, which is your CDN URL.

For example:

Image URL without CDN: https://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/an-image.png

Image URL with CDN: https://static-ea7a.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/an-image.png

There are various CDN providers available, but I use KeyCDN and Cloudflare. Cloudflare serves the contents with 150+ data centers while KeyCDN has 34 data centers. Cloudflare is easy to combine with other CDN providers increasing the data centers for faster content delivery.

Since Cloudflare doesn’t set CDN URL for the images, hence we will serve images from KeyCDN.

2. Server WebP images

WebP is an excellent replacement for JPEG, PNG, and GIF images. Like other regular formats, WebP supports both lossless and lossy compression. Lossless compression prevents any kind of data loss. Lossy compression reduces file size, but at the expense of possibly reducing image quality. Usually, you will require a plugin to convert your website’s images to webp and serve them across your site and I would suggest so because this is the safest way to serve WebP unless you know what you are doing.

WebP images are 25 to 35% smaller than their JPEG and PNGs. This helps in reducing page sizes and improves performance.

Typically WordPress shows you an error message of not supported file type whenever you upload a WebP image. To overcome this you must check whether your web host support serving webp files. You can ask them to let your site serve webp image files.

Next, follow the steps below to upload WebP images in WordPress.

First, log into your WordPress admin panel.
Go to the Appearance section.
Then go to Theme Editor for editing the theme.
You will have to select the Theme Functions from there [functions.php]
Then append the code mentioned below in the function.php file. (do not override any available code)
Now, all you need is to update the function.php file.

Code to add in function.php file:

function webp_upload_mimes( $existing_mimes ) {
	// add webp to the list of mime types
	$existing_mimes['webp'] = 'image/webp';
	// return the array back to the function with our added mime type
	return $existing_mimes;
}
add_filter( 'mime_types', 'webp_upload_mimes' );
//** * Enable preview / thumbnail for webp image files.*/
function webp_is_displayable($result, $path) {
    if ($result === false) {
        $displayable_image_types = array( IMAGETYPE_WEBP );
        $info = @getimagesize( $path );
        if (empty($info)) {
            $result = false;
        } elseif (!in_array($info[2], $displayable_image_types)) {
            $result = false;
        } else {
            $result = true;
        }
    }
    return $result;
}
add_filter('file_is_displayable_image', 'webp_is_displayable', 10, 2);

3. Preload Responsive Image files

Preloading critical images can boost your site performance. By preloading, an image file you are telling the browser about critical images that you want to load as soon as possible before they are discovered in HTML. This is especially useful for images such as site logos, background images, cover images, etc.

To preload an image you can use this code at your site header (you can use a header and footer plugin for that)

<link rel="preload" as="image" href="important.png">

For responsive images:

<link rel="preload" as="image" href="wolf.jpg" imagesrcset="wolf_400px.jpg 400w, wolf_800px.jpg 800w, wolf_1600px.jpg 1600w" imagesizes="50vw">

4. Lazyload Image Files

Lazy Loading Images is a technique that defers the loading of images on a page to a later point in time – when those images are actually needed, instead of loading them up front. It helps in improving page performance, better utilization of the device’s resources, and reducing associated costs.

Again, lazyloading images with a plugin is a handier process than configuring it manually. Although check this guide on how you can lazyload image loading on your site, manually.

Conclusion:

Images are heavy assets for a page and need to be optimized to avoid performance drops. This guide will help you keep your page size smaller with the proper image optimizations. This is very much focused on image optimization without using plugins but I can tell you with optimization with plugins make this process much easier and provide a great boost to your page performance.

Rupam May 10, 2022 0 Comments

TutorialsWordpress

How to avoid unnecessary CSS in WP and its impact on the performance

When you try to optimize your WP site speed, you need to remove unnecessary CSS. It delivers a faster page loading experience to the users and improves your site ranking in the Google page speed test.

We focus on using reliable and fast web hosts, enabling caching, optimizing images, and removing unused plugins to reduce server load, compressing javascript & CSS, using a content delivery network, etc.

But sometimes we can improve our page performance even more by avoiding those components which load as bloats. So, next in the list you can remove these CSS and JS files from WordPress to make your page feel smooth and fast. In this article, we will particularly focus on avoiding CSS that is not required.

Of course, there are great plugins to unload specific CSS from a page, such as WP Asset Clean Up, PurifyCSS, or Perfmatters to name a few. In this article, we will see how to do it with and without installing plugins on your WordPress site.

Before that, let’s go through…

What is unused CSS?

Unused CSS is the CSS code that loads regardless of its importance on a particular page. Some of these codes do their work to design page elements, however, the rest(most) of them are not required because a single page does not demand all the CSS codes written for the entire website.

Most of the time almost 80% of the CSS files probably do not do anything on a single page. You can test it on your personal site’s homepage and observe how many CSS files are being used on the page against what is the total number of CSS files being served.

Why does the plugin load all CSS?

During development, the theme developers need to write the theme in such a way that it will support all kinds of websites whether it’s a blog, forum, woocommerce site, and so on. It has a decent level of complexity because individual sites require various HTML elements along with their own adjustments.

These include our daily used elements:

Search bar
Navigation bar
Widgets
Icons
Typography
Comment box
Social media section
Author bio section
Buttons
Tables

and the list goes on…

For example, when a plugin is including the style.css file, it would be something like this

<style>
    @import url("style.css");
    p {
           color: blue;
           font-size: 16px;
        }
</style>

99% of the time developers put all the CSS codes in this style.css file. What it does is load all the codes from the style.css file regardless of the certain elements you are using on a certain page, and all the CSS will be served to your visitor’s browser. And for this, you have no right to blame the developers either.

What if we don’t serve these elements?

In your blog, you don’t need Woocommerce if you are not running an additional store, you don’t need a comment box either if you are using a third-party commenting system (Disqus for example). So these elements can certainly be avoided while loading the page.

Again some elements are needed in certain pages although are not necessary for all pages on your site. A good example is the author box, it is a part of your blog posts however on pages such as the homepage, privacy-policy an author box is worthless.

Avoiding this CSS will only improve your page performance because they are unused CSS and simply are not doing anything good.

Note: It’s not just the elements of your theme, plugins do inject additional CSS into your pages. This another good reason for keeping the installed plugin count low on your site.

So, does it say you can remove all the unnecessary CSS from a WordPress page!

Why is removing CSS not an easy task?

Filtering out the unnecessary CSS is not an easy job to deal with, mainly because of dynamic classes. It’s a technology to load the function of a class at runtime. It allows loading CSS functions that are uncertain or not known before a web page starts loading.

The Javascript function of your site can load CSS classes as needed and it does not have to keep track of the name of classes before any one of these classes is loaded and run. This behavior makes it difficult to identify which part of the CSS will you unload and whether it is safe given missing CSS can break your page.

Also, extraction of used CSS is not easy like critical CSS because there might be js files that call a certain CSS class following a particular event of a button click. These CSS classes might be required for animation such as the “go-to top” button on your page. Being dynamically inside javascript these CSS classes are extremely difficult to find for removal.

Note: Critical path CSS which is an important style/CSS required to render above the fold contents. The rest of the required CSS is loaded in the footer section of the page to avoid render blocking.

How to find unused CSS and JS files on your pages

To remove or avoid using unnecessary CSS files we need to analyze those files first. The most comfortable way to do this is the coverage tab in the Chrome dev tool. To initiate it;

First, open the page you want to debug.
Press Ctrl + Shift + I to open the chrome dev tool.
Click on settings icon > select more tools > select coverage.

Then click on the reload button that appears below.

analyze-unused-css-using-developer-panel

Chrome will analyze your webpage and it will prepare a report where you can see the element’s URL, their types, total bytes, unused bytes, and Usage virtualization.

You need to focus on the Usage virtualization tab, mainly the correlation between used and unused bytes of page elements. Red color represents the number of unused bytes whereas blue color means the number of used bytes.

Then you can select the URL to dig a little more to find out what exactly is being used and what are unused codes. You can see the unused and used code section in the same red-blue color representation.

See this example below;

(As we aim to look for unused CSS make sure you have selected the URL of a CSS file. In this example, I did select a JS file only for tutorial purposes)

How do we remove unnecessary CSS

There are multiple approaches to avoiding or reducing unnecessary CSS on your webpage. I will try to keep the hierarchy in reverse order of difficulty.

1. You can avoid inline CSS styling in the WP editor

While creating a post we usually type in the default Gutenberg editor which is good because it allows you to create a beautiful looking well-organized page. But the block adds additional inline CSS to your page.

Typically, if you keep your posts simple and do not use advanced Gutenberg styles then you can avoid the inline CSS by using the code editor. You can use HTML elements such as <p> for paragraphs, <H1>, <H2>, etc for headings, <li> for list, and so on.

For example;

You will be able to use the classic editor too once you paste the final copy of HTML into your WordPress code editor.

2. Generate critical CSS

Critical CSS can be beneficial to improve FCP (First Contentful Paint) where it only renders above the fold contents in the header and delays the loading of other styles to last. Ultimately this improves your page speed and resolves the render-blocking warning in the page performance testing tool.

More than removing the CSS from a page, delaying is the key mechanism here that avoids the loading of CSS during page load.

Various WordPress plugins can generate critical CSS for example Autoptimize, WProcket, etc. Alternatively, you can use Criticalcss.com to generate critical CSS in a couple of simple steps.

3. Use a CDN to deliver CSS files

CDN can drastically improve the content delivery speed because of its widely distributed network which reduces the distance between users and servers. Thus it can reduce server latency and download of CSS (not only just CSS though). Even if you have a lot of unused CSS files on your page CDN can deliver them in less than 50 ms.

So the use of CDN won’t necessarily remove unnecessary CSS from your page instead it will quickly deliver the complete CSS along with other contents in so much less time. You can use good CDNs such as MaxCDN, Sucuri, Cloudflare, etc.

4. Use the Asset Cleanup plugin to remove CSS files (plugin)

The asset Cleanup plugin marks it very easy for the users to unload CSS from your site. It has a free version available in the WordPress repository. All you need to install and activate it to find and unload CSS files in CSS/JS manager.

I would recommend this plugin because you will find tips for each CSS file to choose whether you would want to unload or keep it. Also debugging your site becomes easy because it provides a simple enable/disable option and you will know which action is breaking the site and which one is improving the performance.

You can also open any published page and you will see a list of loaded CSS and JS files. These files are classified so it’s easy to go through them. Then you can see which are stylesheets not getting used on your page and then unload them sitewide or for individual pages.

Remember, sometimes CSS that seems unused on a particular page may still have work to do so removing them can break the page. The good news is you can immediately revert the change if unloading any CSS breaks a page.

5. Use the Perfmatters plugin to remove CSS (plugin)

Perfmatter is a premium plugin which is another great option when it comes to unloading js and CSS files from a page. It comes with a script manager that is super simple to use. You will have the ability to unload an entire plugin or individual js/CSS files from a page.

There is nothing to configure on your part. All you need to install the plugin, activate it and you can see the script manager on the WordPress toolbar for each page of your site.

6. Create a plugin manually to remove CSS (and JS) files

This is a manual approach to removing unused CSS files and you will create a plugin that will keep the record of removed CSS. In WordPress, when you want to remove unnecessary CSS/JS there are four main functions you will require.

wp_deregister_script($handle): Remove the registered scripts.
wp_dequeue_script($handle): Remove the scripts enqueued before.
wp_deregister_style($handle): Remove the registered stylesheet.
wp_dequeue_style($handle): Remove the stylesheet that you enqueued before.

And other required functions to create the plugin are,

__return_false()
__return_empty_array()

You may also need conditional WordPress tags to remove unused CSS/JS files on a certain page. Now to create the plugin go to wp-content > plugins, create a new folder named “remove-resources” followed by the .php extension.

Add the following content to the file:

Now for example if you want to remove styles and scripts of the Jetpack plugin you need to add the following code into the remove-resources.php file.

Finally, go to the WordPress plugin manager and activate the remove resources plugin. It will remove the CSS you have mentioned in your newly created plugin.

Final words:

It’s not easy to remove every single bit of unused CSS from your site, and it’s almost impossible for us as a user of WordPress! But with the mentioned steps you will be able to reduce unnecessary CSS from a page and improve page speed + user experience.

After reading the article share your thoughts with us in the comment section and don’t forget to share it.

Cheers…

Rupam April 19, 2022 0 Comments

ToolsWordpress

How To Track Links And Buttons In Google Analytics

There is a general trend on the internet to track what the website users are doing on the page. In order to track activity such as clicks or how the users are moving one page to another on the website, the webmaster normally uses two types of methods called UTM and GTM tracking.

Another scenario is button click tracking which is very popular and recommended to use if you have a WooCommerce website. However, button click tracking can be used in general websites to track conversions such as buttons containing affiliate links or any specific landing page.

Now, if you are using a WordPress site you can set up the link and button tracking using plugins. Since configuring Google tag manager or UTM code in Google analytics event is a manual process, so to avoid any mistakes you can take advantage of two great plugins for WordPress.

Generally, there are multiple plugins available to track links and you are free to choose any of them. Though, the two most recommended plugins with the best features are MonsterInsights and OptinMonster. That being said let’s dive in and see how to track links and buttons with these two plugins.

Track Links And Button With MosnterInsight

MonstarInsight is a powerful analytics tool that offers an in-depth report of user activity on your website. It will let you discover exactly how people came to the website, what are keywords bring them in, which site actually referred the visitors, and most importantly what the visitors are clicking on the website. These reports help the plugin to guide you to improve website performance as well.

MonsterInsights makes it so simple to connect your WordPress site with Google Analytics properly. Simply get your tracking ID from Google analytics and place it inside the settings of MonstarInsight to get the stats inside your WordPress admin. This procedure is much easier than manually adding analytics codes and configuring event tracking etc.

Let’s find out how it works:

#1. Install The Plugin From WordPress Repository

Install MonsterInsights (Google Analytics for WordPress) either via the WordPress.org plugin repository or by uploading the files to your server. Activate the plugin and it will take you to the setup wizard.

#2. Configure Plugin With Setup Wizard

Proceed by describing your website category and click on continue. Remember these steps are highly recommended if you are using this tool for the first time and help you properly configure the plugin. Additionally, it allows you to avoid any misconfiguration.

In the next step, MonsterInsights will ask you to connect your Google Analytics account so that all the links and button clicking events can be tracked by analytics.

After successfully connecting to your Analytics account it’s time to configure your plugins settings so that links & button tracking work well. If you have affiliate links on your website you can set the path for those links to get tracked. Also, you can mention the users who can see tracking reports.

After saving the settings MonsterInsights will be ready to use and it will deploy tracking and start collecting data which you can either view in Analytics events or the WordPress dashboard. Depending on your website size it will take 30 minutes to 24 hours to display data in Google Analytics.

#3. Advance Settings Of MonsterInsight

After finishing with the setup wizard you can take some advanced steps to make your report more appropriate like enabling the demographic and interest report of the links.

Go to the insights on your WordPress dashboard menu and click on settings. Swap to the “engagement” tab to configure link attribution.

To track eCommerce links and buttons activity you need to look for the eCommerce tab inside the settings window. Enabling this feature requires a premium plan so that you can see click and conversion rate, and purchase button action with revenues.

With MonstarInsights you can bring your website tracking to a whole new level. After setting up this plugin you can go to Google Analytics and check the link & button clicking events under the real-time tab or behavior tab.

… or you can use the MonsterInsight report inside the WordPress dashboard too. You can detect audience type, device, link categories, and clicks from the countries.

Moreover, most clicked outbound links, incoming referral links can be found inside the plugin report.

Moving to the next plugin OptinMonster, let’s find out how we can track links and buttons with this plugin.

Track Buttons And Links With OptinMonster

This is another great option for tracking links, increasing leads, increase subscriptions from an all-in-one plugin. More than tracking and it provides you dynamic ability to make personalized engagement campaigns with the help of popup messages, floating bars, lightboxes, and other interactive elements.

In terms of link and button tracking, all you need to do is add the desired links and buttons into the optinmonster elements and let it track everything automatically. Most of the engaging part of this plugin is not only the interactive elements it has, instead the ability to track and predict visitor behavior makes this plugin a perfect choice for many professionals.

So let’s dive in and see how you can configure this plugin for link tracking.

#1. Install The Plugin From WordPress.org Repository

First of all search for the plugin OptinMonster – Best WordPress Pop-up Plugin and install/upload it to the website server. Activate the plugin.

#2. Configure The Plugin With OptinMonster Account

Now a new window will appear which will ask you to either create a new account or connect to your OptinMonster account using an API key.

Remember that OptinMonster is a premium plugin and you should have a plan before connecting your WordPress website. There are four plans which offer different types of features are called basic, plus, pro and growth.

The UTM link tracking features are available only in Pro and Growth plans which costs around $29 and $49 per month accordingly.

After creating your account go to the Optinmonster account and create a new API key inside the API dashboard.

In the next step copy your API key and paste it inside the API credentials settings of the WordPress plugin and click on connect.

When your website is successfully connected with the OptinMonster account you will see a new tab called Optin above the “API credentials”. Go there and click on refresh to appear all your Optins in the WordPress plugin.

#3. Creating Optin And Track It With Analytics

With conversion elements like lightbox subscription, floating bar, and closing popups OptinMonster does a great job to get more returning traffic and convert them to leads & customers. At the same time, it allows you to track all the activity on these elements with Google analytics or optinmonster report.

Setting up the conversion analytics with optinmonster is pretty easy. Craft your elements, publish them, connect to Google analytics then track all your growth.

Create any pop-up or buttons in the OptinMonster account and then go to the analytics. To configure your Google Analytics account click on add new account and generate the authorization code. This process is simple and should not give you any headache while setting it up.

You can also set an account label to quickly identify it inside your Analytics account.

In the Optin monster site report you can track the highest conversion pages with their URL, Leads, and click conversion percentage. The graphical presentation makes it easier to determine where you need to improve and where everything is going very well.

Moreover, you can track email subscription buttons click by integrating your account with popular email marketing tools like Aweber, MailChimp, Getresponse, and much more. So optinmonster is a great tool if you really want to scale your business depending on live and practical stats.

Final Words:

Though there are a number of great WordPress plugins for creating and tracking your website activities OptinMonster and MonsterInsight have done the best job which really improves your site performance. While this post just scratches the exterior of these two plugins, it’s got the decision point you need to take for advancing towards a perfect tracking campaigning and taking your initial strategy to the next level.

With the link and button tracking, you see your site internally and visualize your next decision perfectly which would not be possible without tracking and getting the reports. And in my sight, Optinmonster and MonsterInsigt have done everything right for a WordPress site owner to save lots of time understanding the things of Google analytics so that they can focus more on the outcome.

Jon April 5, 2022 0 Comments

MindsetToolsWordpress

What to do When a WordPress Website is Hacked!

A hacked WordPress site causes panic. It’s one of the most frustrating experiences a site owner can face. In this post, I will help you with how to detect whether a WordPress site is hacked or not along with steps to clean your site.

There will be a few tips, in the end, to prevent your WordPress site from being hacked in the future.

How to identify if your WordPress site is hacked?

When your site is hacked it will start behaving as it should not. Generally, a WordPress site can behave strangely without getting hacked. These issues are mainly related to internal settings and plugins causing errors.

For example, your caching plugin can break your site’s layout, misconfiguration of the SEO plugin can result in 403 errors, a white screen because of code conflicts, and many more. But these are not necessarily the signs that a site got hacked.

Let’s take a look at some signs you should be careful with that could be indicating your site is hacked.

First and foremost, you can’t log in to your site.
You haven’t done anything to your site recently but you can identify some changes. (It can be your homepage is replaced by a new page or added new content)
The browser gives you a warning when you try to visit your site.
Google gives a warning that this site might be hacked.
Your site is redirecting visitors to other sites.
Your hosting provider has informed you about unusual activity.
If you are using a security plugin then you might receive a warning from it as well.

Now let’s look at these events in brief:

1. You can’t log in

Sometimes you can’t log in to your WordPress admin dashboard because of a wrong password or because you have changed your login URL previously. While this is a potential warning of your site is hacked you should not be too quick to consider it. Rather try to reset the password and see if that will resolve your login problem.

If you can’t reset your password that can be a warning sign. Although, being able to reset the admin password doesn’t prove that your site is safe or not hacked. You will have to examine more to identify such potential threats.

The reason why you may not be able to log in once your site is hacked is the hacker either changed your password or removed the user from WordPress. Sometimes they can replace the default login address i.e /wp-admin with something else. If so the site will give a 404 error when you try to visit this address.

2. Your site is changed

If you notice that your site looks different whether it’s the homepage or your website theme without your acknowledgment then it can be a huge sign that someone has accessed your site without permission.

These kinds of changes don’t have to be something that can be spotted easily. Little changes like adding suspicious content, links to spammy or bad sites, and hidden links mean your site could have been hacked.

However, changes like theme or frontpage layout can be caused accidentally when you are updating your theme, activating a pre-built design for your site. I would rather recommend using themes from trustworthy & reputable sources.

3. Browser warns the visitors the site may not be secure

Check your site on visitor’s mode and if you get a warning that the site is not safe it could be a likely warning that your site has been hacked. This can also happen due to a plugin or themes issue with SSL.

In this case, try removing/deactivating the plugins to check whether that resolves the issue as well as check your domain SSL status. If that doesn’t help you should be careful and follow the advice given with the browser warning to diagnose the issue.

4. Search engine’s site hacked warning

Another way to know your site is hacked is through the warning on Google’s search result. Google will display a warning message “the site may be hacked” on SERP under your site or page URL. If you are getting this kind of result lately, then there is a possibility that your sitemap is hacked.

A hacked sitemap or 403 error can prevent Google from crawling the website or at least it will affect the way Google crawled a site. It can be more than just a sitemap hack. You will need to diagnose and find out the origin of this problem.

5. The site is redirecting to external pages

If your site is redirecting to pages or sites that are not related to your contents, contain spammy or adult ads that could be a sign your site has been hacked.

Hackers will probably add scripts or redirect rules which will take the visitors to other sites as soon as they visit yours. This can raise a serious caution in visitors’ minds while they are being taken to the pages they are not keen to visit.

Such behavior not only harms your site reputation but also you will notice a significant downfall in every positive thing on your site, whether that be your daily visits, user engagement, revenue, etc.

6. Warning from your security plugin

Security plugins like Wordfence constantly track the activity on your site. You should have a robust security plugin that protects your site and keeps you informed of all kinds of suspicious activities so that you know what is going on in the backend.

If you have a security plugin then it should notify you about recent unusual activities or if someone is trying to access your site. Once you get informed about such threats regardless if the site is hacked or someone is trying to do so, you can take necessary precautions to protect your site.

Nevertheless, a warning email from your security plugin means bad activities are going on behind and might be a crucial sign of your site being hacked.

7. Warning on your hosting panel

A reputed hosting service has inbuilt tools to monitor your website activities and report if illegal actions are recorded. You will also find a virus scanner to scan your website files for infected files providing backdoor access to the hackers.

Make sure you use a reputed hosting service and keep a close eye on the hosting’s site activity log. If you find any warning in there it could be a sign that someone is hiddenly working on your site.

Now you know the behaviors that warn about a site that has been potentially hacked, let’s find out what you need to do to fix your hacked site and get it back to the ideal state.

WordPress site hacked: What should I do next?

Once you confirm your site is hacked, you will need to take the following steps to clean your site and get it back to its ideal state. You might not have to follow all the steps mentioned below as you might be able to fix your site at any stage of the following.

Step 1: Don’t panic

As I mentioned above a hacked site is the worst thing a webmaster can face, but the first key to progressing towards a solution is to stay calm. You do not need to be frightened in such a situation, instead maintain a clear mind to help yourself to proceed into the diagnosis part.

Since the site is still visible to the audience, to reduce the damage and bad impact consider putting the site into maintenance mode and relax a little bit. You can simply use a WordPress maintenance mode plugin to do that, or if you use Cloudflare then activate the under attack/development mode.

Steps to active maintenance mode in WordPress:

Log in to your WordPress dashboard (if the site is accessible)
Go to plugins > add a new plugin.
Install a maintenance mode plugin.
Activate the plugin and set the maintenance mode to at least 24 hours.

Once the visitors can’t see what’s going on behind your site, you can take your steps one by one carefully. If you can’t access your site then browse it as a visitor mode to see whether the contents such as posts and images are appearing properly or not. If yes, you need to do a backup job from your cPanel or hosting dashboard. We will go to this step later in this article.

Step 2: Reset the password

Again this step requires the ability to access your site after being hacked. If you can access then it’s important to change the password of all user accounts since you don’t know which account is being used to access your site. If you have multiple users working on your site ask all of them to reset their passwords.

Once the user passwords are modified, next change your hosting password, database password as well as SFTP password.

Step 3: Remove users

If you find any user account on your WordPress site that you do not acknowledge it’s important to remove such accounts. Such accounts could be used by hackers to access your site and perform illegal activities.

You can either remove them right away or confirm with your co-administrators whether they have recently changed their account details or not before finally deleting suspicious accounts.

To remove a user from your WordPress site:

On the WordPress dashboard expand users.
Then click on all users.
Check if you can find any user account under admin access that is out of your acknowledgment.
To remove a user hover on the user row and click on the delete option.

Step 4: Update plugins and themes

After removing suspicious users next you need to make sure that all the themes and plugins are up to date. Themes and plugins updates are frequently released by the developers to fix security issues and improve protection.

If you are using any plugin that is outdated or not compatible with your WordPress version try to get rid of such plugins if alternative and updated plugins are available.

This step is really important because in case your site is misbehaving because of an outdated plugin or theme then you will be able to resolve your issue by installing the latest updates or an alternative.

Updating a plugin in WordPress is pretty simple. All you have to open the installed plugins page and update the plugins in bulk or one by one. As for themes, go to Appearance > themes and update your currently installed themes.

Another recommendation, do not to keep hold of unnecessary themes unless you are planning to use them in the future. Although, the necessity of doing so is low in priority and entirely depends on your consideration.

Step 5: Reinstall plugins and themes

Apart from updating the plugins & themes, you can check your site status by uninstalling the active plugins and themes. Updating a theme or plugin still can hold bad codes into it that didn’t catch the developer’s attention.

If you are unsure about whether a plugin & theme is causing this problem or being the backdoor access provider then you should debug them at this point. Make sure to uninstall the plugins first and then see the site’s status. If deactivating/uninstalling the plugins bring your site back to an idle state then activate or reinstall the plugins one by one. Check your site’s status after every plugin activation. This way you can find out which plugin might act as a threat to your site. The same procedure applies to the theme diagnosis too.

Step 6: Remove unwanted files

To find out if there’s any file in your WordPress installation that shouldn’t be present install a security plugin like WordFence or use your hosting site scanner. This kind of tool will scan all the files in your hosting directory and inform you about any potentially infected files.

Run a scan and if you notice any such files in the scan result remove that file from your directory. It makes more sense to have a backup of your site before removing the file as well as analyze the file which you are about to remove to replace it with a fresher copy later.

Step 7: Clean out the database

Doesn’t necessarily a way for the hacker to access the site but consider cleaning the database to remove unwanted or bloat entries. This will not only make your database take lesser space but also remove unnecessary rows and related data making your site load faster.

Step 8: Reinstall WordPress

This step is necessary when you can’t access your site to make the changes we have discussed earlier. Make sure your site has the contents and no prior damage has been made to the structure of the site before processing these steps.

First, you need to take a backup of your database and wp-content folder using your cPanel or FTP client. Once you do that, go ahead and reinstall WordPress using the inbuilt installer.

When WordPress installation is complete, now upload the backup contents into your new WordPress installation and configure or import the database backup into the new WP installation.

After that load your site and try accessing your site. In case the issue occurred because of a damaged WordPress installation then it should be solved now. Instead, use the database editor tool to find and fix your user account access. Once you do that you should be able to access your site in the usual way.

Wrapping it up:

Having your website hacked means your site is losing user attraction as well as control over it. This could bring a severe impact on your business. So getting it fixed as soon as possible is important.

I believe the above steps will help you to head in the right direction during such a bad situation. Let us know if you find this article helpful and do not forget to mention any steps you think should be mentioned so that it becomes more resourceful for the readers.

Looking forward to the next… cheers.

Rupam April 5, 2022 0 Comments

Wordpress

WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache – Which One is Better?

WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache are arguably the two best caching plugins available for WordPress. But when you are unsure which caching plugin will do the best caching job for you that’s where a head-to-head comparison article fits properly.

So, if you are looking for the WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache comparison and test case, then you are on the right page.

Before diving into the plugin details and comparison part, let’s talk about caching and how it helps to improve your site performance.

What is caching and how does a caching plugin help?

Caching can be a hardware or software component that stores data for future requests to be served faster than the initial response. Technically, a website cache is a temporary location for copies of website files such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images.

Later these files will be served from the browser cache location (typically a cache subdirectory under the directory of your browser) to improve the page loading experience.

This image explains the caching mechanism thoroughly.

Fortunately, as a WordPress user, you have access to a wide range of caching plugins that can significantly improve your site performance. Nowadays, caching plugins are more than capable of caching website resources. They provide a complete site optimization package starting from code minification, control javascript, CSS execution time, media control, etc.

It’s up to you, how you can analyze the current website performance, find out the bloats, and configure caching plugin settings to improve those areas. Regardless of your preferred plugin, here are the key benefits of using a caching plugin for WordPress.

Provide faster experience to users and search engine crawlers.
Help you to increase the performance and speed of your site.
Reduce caching load on your server.
Saves bandwidth.

As mentioned earlier, there are a ton of caching plugins available. WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache stand out among the others and are widely preferred by WordPress users. 1+ million active installations to date speak a lot about the popularity of these two caching plugins.

So, in this post, we will find out which caching plugin is better with the help of head-to-head feature comparison and based on test results.

#1. Introduction to WP Rocket

WP Rocket is arguably the #1 premium caching plugin for WordPress sites. It is one of the widely used caching plugins and used by over 1,494,000 WordPress sites on the globe. You might be using your favorite caching plugin for now, but you should at least consider testing WP Rocket to realize the ability of this plugin.

We internally use WP Rocket on clients’ sites and that helped us drastically improve their site performance.

#2. Introduction to W3 Total Cache

If you are looking for an easy to configure, user-friendly, and free caching plugin then W3 Total Cache is the right choice for you. This plugin has over 1 million WordPress installations to date. W3 Total Cache comes with a lot of features such as managing high web server performance, CDN configuration, Minification, Inline Js & CSS, and a lot more.

As we proceed through this article, you will know about the features of W3 Total Cache and the impact on optimizing your site performance.

WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache: Which Plugin Does Better Caching Job?

In this section, we are comparing each feature of both plugins based on availability, user-friendliness, and efficiency. This way, you will know what you can achieve with both of these plugins and pick your preferred one.

Features of WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache:

#1. Browser Caching: It will enable the storing of frequently accessed resources into the local memory of the user’s device. By enabling browser caching you are asking the browsers to store commonly used but rarely updated files into their local cache directory.

You don’t have much to do to active browser caching in WP Rocket. Activating the plugin will automatically enable it and then you can set the cache lifespan under the basic cache option.

W3 Total Cache on the other hand gives you extended control over how you want to configure browser caching for your website. You can set general caching controls, caching for CSS & JavaScript files, HTML and XML files as well as media files.

The caching interface of W3 Total Cache looks like this.

#2. Minification and Concatenation: With minification, you aim to remove unnecessary characters from the source code to lower page size. On WP Rocket, the minification configuration is simple. All you have to enable the minification and the plugin will do the rest of the job for you.

On WP Rocket the minification configuration is easier because you don’t have to find the best combination that works for your site.

W3 Total Cache gives you separate minification control for HTML & XML, CSS and JavaScript files. Enabling and disabling of minification for each of these modules are independent. You can set minification methods, set the minification engine’s location, enable HTTP/2 push, etc.

#3. Database Optimization: Reducing database response time is important for improving site performance. Fast database response means your server is getting the required address of page resources quickly and that helps in improving overall page loading time.

WP Rocket has an inbuilt database optimization module. You can configure post-cleanup settings, comments cleanup, transients cleanup, and one-click database cleanup to reduce the overhead of the database table.

W3 Total Cache however only provides database object caching, you won’t be able to control database optimization. Additionally, you can install a plugin like WP-Optimize from the WordPress repository. With this plugin, you will be able to do all the jobs you can do with WP Rocket plus delete rows from the database table with safety.

#4. Image Optimization & Lazy Loading: To improve page performance you need to reduce image size as much as possible without sacrificing the quality of the image. Another important mechanism you can use to improve the page testing tool’s grade is by delaying the loading of an image only when visible.

WP Rocket has an inbuilt feature to enable lazy loading for images. You don’t have to do anything manually, activating lazy loading will assign loading as “Lazy” tags in the site images. In case you want any image to be excluded then you can provide an image URL to exclude it from lazy loading.

As for image optimization, WP Rocket doesn’t have an integrated module; instead, you need to subscribe to imagify which is developed by the same company who created WP Rocket. Imagify will optimize all the images on your site, automatically. You can control the quality of the image delivery when it makes more sense.

W3 Total Cache has the option to defer image loading as well but it doesn’t come with a module to compress the images of your site. You will have to use another plugin for image optimization. You will have a couple of good plugins like Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer, etc.

#5. Google Font Optimization: Google fonts are easy to implement, look beautiful on screen but they have a huge impact on page performance. Google fonts are already optimized for delivery, but when you get the configuration wrong, your visitor might need to wait a bit to see them appearing, doesn’t look like a good idea for user impression.

With WP Rocket installed, you can improve performance by helping browsers discover fonts in CSS files. You will need to find those fonts which need to be downloaded by the browser as the connection starts and thus the font displaying process will be smoother.

All you need to mention is the Google font (any font) URLs that you want to preload as a browser initiates a connection with your web server.

W3 Total Cache doesn’t have the option to remove or optimize Google fonts. Other plugins such as Asset clean up might do the job for you once you decide to integrate this plugin with W3 Total Cache.

#6. Defer Javascript Loading: It means trying to defer javascript execution until the page loads to help other parts of the page load faster. It is applied by changing the type and src attributes of <script > elements on the HTML page.

With WP Rocket deferring javascript loading is as simple as checking to defer javascript options and you are all set. Doing so if anything breaks or behaves abnormally on your site you can find those specific javascript and exclude them from applying the defer attribute.

In W3 Total Cache you get more control over how you intend to load the JavaScript files on your site. You can apply four different strategies to load minified JavaScript into your <head> and <body> section;

Default (Blocking)
Non-blocking (using JS)
Non-blocking (using defer)
Non-blocking (using asynchronous delivery)

This module of W3 Total Cache can be really useful when a lot of javascript gets executed once your page is being loaded. You can delay or asynchronously load javascript to improve site loading time as well as get the green light on the best practices.

#7. CDN Support: CDN doesn’t only improve the delivery speed of website resources, it prevents site crashes in the event of sudden traffic spikes. Applying CDN is a great idea because it reduces the server workload by distributing the bandwidth across multiple servers. Not only that, the nearest server station makes the browsing experience significantly smoother.

Both WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache come with the CDN configuration module and that only takes you to add the CNAME record from your preferred CDN service. On WP Rocket you serve specific files using CDN and exclude individual files whenever necessary.

W3 Total Cache provides greater control over the CDN settings. You can choose what kind of resources to be hosted with CDN which is something similar to WP Rocket, but the ability to custom resources such as minified javascript and CSS files is a great advantage. You will be able to add canonical HTTP headers to the asset files as well.

You can exclude all kinds of file types from being served through CDN, you can also exclude users’ roles, disable CDN on SSL active pages, and set cookieless domain with a single click.

Additional Features Comparison:

Apart from the features mentioned above, there are a couple more areas where we can compare these two caching plugins. You will find them below in the table.

Feature	WP Rocket	W3 Total Cache
Gzip Compression	Yes	Yes
Cache Preloading	Yes	Yes
Cloudflare compatibility	Yes	Yes (No quick configuration)
Page Caching	Yes	Yes
Disable Emojis	Yes	Yes
Sitemap Preloading	Yes	No
DNS Prefetching	Yes	No
HTML & XML Minification	No	Yes
Database Caching	No	Yes
Object Caching	No	Yes
Lazy Load Google Map	No	Yes (Extension Required)
Remove Query String	Yes	Yes
Cache Group Control	No	Yes
E-commerce Friendly	Yes	Yes
Multisite Friendly	Yes	No
Multilingual Compatibility	Yes	No
AMP Support	Yes	Yes
SSL Support	No	Yes
Render Blocking Optimization	Yes	Yes
Server Performance Upgrade	No	Yes

Now you can see in terms of features there are ups and downs for both plugins, but thanks to WordPress extension capability you can get the job done with other specific task plugins and bring a better version of your website performance with combined power.

That being said, let’s move on to the use case experience of these two plugins and try to figure out who gives you more flexibility but less stress while optimizing site performance.

User Experience – WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache

In terms of user experience, W3 Total Cache is populated with lots of options to configure however they are organized under specific sections. If you are a beginner, it can be the best plugin given it’s available for free but it asks for an understanding of what’s going on behind the site’s background when you are applying those settings.

WP Rocket however is simple, has a clean interface, and easy to apply and test the settings because the modules are packed into single-click control. For example, when you enable the JavaScript minification, all you have to do is check the js minification checkbox, save the setting and that’s it. However, that reduces the flexibility of WP Rocket. You can enable minification but you can’t control where & how you want to serve those minified files.

Risk Factor – WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache

Apparently, there is a low percentage of risk when using these caching plugins because even if you have broken something in your site (mostly layout), uninstalling the plugin should get your site back to its normal state, unless the plugin has added irrelevant codes into you .htaccess files or any other core files.

Apart from that, we still consider there might be a risk while configuring a caching plugin. If something is misconfigured and forces you to uninstall the plugin, well then where’s the benefit of having a caching plugin. In the end, for better performance, you will end up installing the same plugin once again.

In W3 Total Cache, I didn’t find any option to revert the settings automatically to their idle state rather you have to do it manually. WP Rocket has an inbuilt safe mode utility which you can find during the uninstall note. It’s a great module to fix your broken site’s layout and restart your configuration with more care.

Pricing Comparison – WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache

WP Rocket is a premium plugin. That’s not good news if you are looking for a great caching plugin free of cost, but I must admit this plugin proves to provide value to the users and worth the money you pay for it.

On the other hand, W3 Total Cache is a freemium plugin where you will get most of the important features in the free version. For extended features such as CSS Render blocking, Full site delivery via CDN you need to go for the premium version.

Find the pricing plans for both plugin below:

WP Rocket is currently offering these 3 pricing plans:

Single ($49, One year support for 1 website)
Plus ($99, One year support for 3 websites)
Infinite ($249, One year support for unlimited websites)

W3 Total Cache is generally free but has 1 plan to add extended features:

Total Cache Pro ($99/year for a single site)

Support – WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache

WP Rocket provides you all the documentation and video guides along with the plugin so that you can learn how to get the best out of this plugin and improve your site performance to the max level. Apart from that their support team is super active and ready to help you whenever you ask for any kind of help whether it be the plugin settings or anything related to it.

Support of W3 Total Cache is not as efficient as WP Rocket. You might have to look for configuration guides elsewhere or purchase their premium support for stuff like plugin configuration, CDN configuration, Hosting environment troubleshooting, etc. I have added a screenshot of their services below.

Performance Comparison – WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache

Performance is not something predictable and we can’t declare which plugin performs better. From our internal experience, we can say it depends on the website structure and the resources it has to serve per request. WP Rocket brings out an immediate performance improvement with the sites that are built with optimized themes such as Astra, Generatepress, etc.

However, for sites built using page builders such as Elementor, WP Bakery, W3 Total Cache seems to have a better output than WP Rocket, which I believe is because of more control we have on the W3 Total Cache plugin. Again, this is only according to our internal tests and can vary on your side. The key is to find the best combination of settings on each site because there are no idle settings that work on every site.

Below you will find test outputs of a site hosted on Siteground and using the Generatepress theme. To increase the payload I had a long-form of content, media, and advertisement on the page and tested with both WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache to find out which works better.

The test was performed on a page of gamespec.tech and I get the following output for both plugins.

Test result with WP Rocket:

Page Speed Insight Score:
1. 99 for desktop
2. 94 for mobile

Test result with W3 Total Cache:

Page Speed Insight Score
1. 91 for desktop
2. 83 for mobile

Final thoughts:

As we discussed in the article, if you’re a WordPress user, installing a cache plugin improves your site performance and load time. That being said, choosing one caching plugin between WP Rocket Vs W3 total cache is again, a tough decision.

The test case and feature explanation should help you find the right one for you. Whichever you choose, I can guarantee your site will significantly do better in terms of performance. If your budget doesn’t help to get WP Rocket, go for the W3 total cache, and if you’re someone who’s looking for quick setup and industry level support then choose WP Rocket instead.

So which one are you going for? Do you have experience with any other plugin that can match these two? Let us know your experience so far in the comment section below.

Jon April 13, 2021 0 Comments