Tutorials

We live in a multilingual world and if your website is only available in a single language, you're missing out on being able to reach a huge chunk of the Internet's estimated 4+ billion worldwide users!

In this post, you'll learn how to translate your entire WordPress site in just a few minutes (including your Themify theme), with our step-by-step WordPress multilingual tutorial. But first, let’s go deeper into why exactly going multilingual is so beneficial.

The Benefits of Translating Your WordPress Site

Creating a WordPress multilingual website gives you more chances to connect with people on a worldwide level in an organic search, and then offer them a better and more personalized user experience once they land on your site. How does translating your existing content increase your web traffic, you ask?

What is SSL and why do you need it? On today's tutorial series, we'll focus on getting down to the bottom this small but mighty detail. SSL (Secure Sockets Layers) is a set of encryption protocols used to secure users' information and ensures that the data transmitted to a website remains encrypted. Major search engines (such as Google) recommend all sites to have an SSL certificate and favours sites that do by ranking them higher in searches. Now you can probably imagine just how beneficial having an SSL certificate on your site is. Not only would it increase the security on your site, but it would potentially create more visitors because of your higher Google search listing.

On top of this, providing visitors and customers peace of mind when submitting personal information and buying products on your site allows for more trust, less buyer's remorse, and happier clientele. If you have a website that accepts payments, such as an online store, then having an SSL certificate is an absolute must. Typically, you can purchase an SSL certificate via your host provider or from an SSL authority. Here are a few options that you can use to get you started: Symantec, Comodo, and Let’s Encrypt.

As part of our on-going foundational tutorials, we'll be explaining how to manually get out of WordPress' maintenance mode in the event that your site gets stuck in it. You may be wondering what it is and why it happens. Well anytime you update your themes or plugins, WordPress' maintenance mode kicks in, displaying a message that your site is briefly unavailable. Usually the updates only take a few seconds and are too brief to even notice.

But sometimes the process gets interrupted midway. The hiccup can come from server connection errors, or perhaps a browser or page was accidentally closed during the updating process. Whatever the case, there is usually an easy fix for it, and we have 2 possible solutions for you to get rid of that pesky message fast.

Welcome back to our tutorial series. In this edition, we'll be sharing how to save and recover specific parts or entire layouts of a page. If you've ever spent loads of time working on a page, only for an accident to change it in a way you're not happy with, you'll know that retrieving an old layout can be a huge time saver!

Themify offers a free standalone page builder for use on any third-party WordPress theme, so we'll be using the Themify Builder for this. The Builder relies on its intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, and has a revision feature, allowing you to recover previous versions of a page layout you've been working on.

You have two options of retrieving old layouts: either recover a full layout or only a specific section. Recovering a specific section of a layout is useful if you have created a great design but only want to use a part of it for another page.

In this week's tutorial series, we'll be discussing staging sites. Every time you wish to change your WordPress website, doing it without a staging site is pretty much a gamble. You would never want a visitor to see your site while it's broken, or while you're implenting and testing out a new plugin. That's pretty much the equivalent of being caught with your pants around your ankles! In any case, having a staging site would be great for everyone.

You may be asking, what exactly is a staging site? Well it's an exact duplicate of your live website but it isn't available for the public to see, and any changes you make have no effect on your live site.

The Benefits of a Staging Site

• Test out new features and updates with zero risk
• The developers can work on bug fixes while the live site is operational
• Reduces the downtime your customers may experience
• Test out WordPress, theme and plugin updates before using them on the live website
More

Stock photos add intrigue and interest to your web content and your marketing needs without the added cost of outsourcing photographers. Free stock photos can get a bad rap for being anywhere from cheesy to zany. However, the number of free AND beautiful stock photography sites are growing in number.

So, we’ve done the research and compiled a list of the best and most beautiful free stock photo sites for you all. We’ve crossed out anything that heavily advertised paid stock photos alternatives, and also whittled our choices based on our user experience (handy search features, scrolling, user interface, etc.).

Get one step closer to creating a more professional freelance, business, food, eCommerce, lifestyle, and travel website today.

1. Unsplash

Looking for consistency in photo aesthetic and style? Unsplash boasts beautifully edited images with a stock of over 300,000 high-resolution photos.