SPRING SALE! ENJOY 15% OFF

ON ALL WEB DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT SERVICES

USE coupon

#spring15

in the contact page

Learn more
Request a quote
Home Blog Page 13

Cloud Infrastructure: Cloudways Hosting Review

Alina G.
-
5
Cloud Infrastructure: Cloudways Hosting Review

Founded in 2011, Cloudways is a European-based managed cloud hosting platform for entrepreneurs, digital agencies, small and midsize businesses. As part of their infrastructure platform, Cloudways partners with Digital Ocean, Google Compute Engine, AWS, Linode, StackPath, and Vultr.

Know the basics of Cloudways

The Webhosting analysis reveals that over 300K web hosting companies are out there competing for your attention in the most important aspects: high speed, extremely secure, and affordable pricing. This makes it so hard to know which one is the best for you. If you haven’t got the opportunity to try the Cloudways hosting yet, you’re in the right place, because today we are taking a closer look at it, to help you decide.

Cloudways is a Platform as a Service (PAAS) and their vision is to keep up a minimal platform and accessible for anyone. It offers hosting solutions for several open-source products, such as WordPress, Magento, PHP, Joomla, PrestaShop, and others. Furthermore, on behalf of third parties, Cloudways is a reseller for several hosting providers such as Digital Ocean, AWS, Vultr, and others. What’s best on this type of hosting, is that you only need a Cloudways account and select the wanted provider.

Cloudways Hosting Cloud Providers

If you’re wondering how secure this hosting is, the Cloudways servers have platform-level firewalls protection. You can also get automated or on-demand server and application data backups.

“We live and breathe WordPress” is the statement that introduces users to discover more information on Cloudways web hosting experience. Let’s take a closer look at the main performance and security features that can make your experience a steady one:

  • Cloudways is an SSD-Based Hosting: this feature helps reducing page loading times and enhances performance.
  • Includes Cloudways Breeze, a free WordPress caching plugin you can use to reduce size and response time on databases.
  • Automatic GIT deployment and unlimited staging areas.
  • Auto-healing managed cloud servers – when a server gets some issues, it automatically restarts.
  • HTTP/2 supported Servers – fast communication between servers and browsers.
  • Dedicated firewalls protected by OS-level firewalls which help to stop hacking attempts at server-level.
  • Free SSL Certificate installation.
  • Perform regular OS patches and firmware upgrades that ensure a secure managed cloud server.
  • Real-time monitoring.
  • 24/7 Live Chat, and also a ticket system.

Cloudways Platform for Managing your Website

Do you have some history with hosting companies and you’re used with an intuitive management panel like Plesk or cPanel? If that’s the case, it might be a little bit uncomfortable to accustom Cloudways Platform. It’s not a traditional one but gives you some flexible tools to get started and monitor your website’s server performance.

Cloudways Hosting - management

With any Cloudways plan, you’ll get free hourly backups. Their admin panel is easy to learn by the new users. When it comes to a management panel, beginners who are not that tech savvy, need to have easy access to their domains/subdomains, WordPress install, make or restore backups. That’s why, some people may say that managed hosting dashboards are better than using the popular cPanel.

Managed Hosting for WordPress websites

The Cloudways team included a full plan for managed WordPress hosting services. It means you get features such as scaling and cloning to backups, restores, and many more. Furthermore, during your site’s deployment, ThunderStack optimization recipe will impress you. It combines the Varnish, Memcached, Apache, and Nginx features to ensure a better speed and increase the website’s performance.

Cloudways Hosting - Pricing

It frequently happens that users don’t consume all their hosting resources but still paying for it. Since Cloudways offers a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) pricing model, it means users only pay for the hosting they use. With this company, you can host unlimited websites on the same server.

For those of you who want to change their host, the Cloudways team offers the Free WordPress Migrator, which is a plugin that automatically migrates your site on their managed WordPress hosting server. In case you need assistance, Cloudways team provides one free managed migration.

Global Locations for Your Cloud Server

Managed WordPress hosting has 60+ data centers all over the world. You can choose the server’s location based on 15 countries, and even pick a city from a list of 33 major ones around the globe.

Cloudways - Global Locations

To show beautiful posts and images with the speed of light, you need more than a powerful host. You also need to study the market and find the right theme fit. It’s better to choose a template, well-known in the industry, and you’ll avoid bouncing between themes to find a complete solution to your needs.

Cloud Hosting for Developers & Web Agencies

If you are a developer, after you’ve selected the server, you also get to choose the CMS you need to build your website on such as WordPress, Magento, PHP, Joomla, PrestaShop, and others. Take your site up and running using the CloudwaysBot, a tool that assists you with tips and recommendations to optimize servers and applications in real-time. As a developer, you can use the popular MySQL or MariaDB for the database management systems.

If you are part of a web agency and design WordPress sites for different clients, Cloudways has a package, called “Cloud Hosting for Web Agencies ” which offers unlimited websites on the chosen server, SMTP add-ons, security patching, and managed migrations. All these happen on a dedicated server, which you don’t share with anyone else.

Cloudways Hosting – User Experience Oriented

What we found the most useful at Cloudways services is the user’s ability to select by himself the server’s locations, cloud hosting provider & applications. Avoid slowing down your website or getting it completely offline due to high spikes of traffic, by making some quick tweaks.

After sending a newsletter, social media posts, or viral videos through different channels, your website might receive huge amounts of traffic. It’s the moment when you should start paying attention to bandwidth and server capacity to host your site. Fortunately, by using the vertical scaling, Cloudways allows you to add more power such as CPU or RAM resources to your servers, making them faster and perform better.

Have you tried Cloudways? Share your experience below.

Updating the Core of the tagDiv Themes for Envato WordPress Requirements

Alina S.
-
212
Updating the Core of the tagDiv Themes for Envato WordPress Requirements

Notice: You need to Manually Activate the tagDiv Composer Page Builder after Updating to Newspaper Theme v. 9.7.3 and Newsmag Theme v. 4.9 – Scroll down for instructions

This is it! The change we’re working on for months is ready. The tagDiv themes are updated to meet the new Envato WP Requirements. It’s an exciting moment as we dove into the core of themes and redesign them to open new possibilities for future implementations. Read below to see the tagDiv themes changes and how they affect you.

They say “it’s only after you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone that you begin to change, grow, and transform.” Well, the new quality standards of the Envato Market forced us to stop what we were doing and rethink the way Newspaper and Newsmag Theme work.

Why we are updating the core of the themes

In summary, the Envato market required us – the theme and plugin authors – to restructure the products to provide only WordPress basic functionality by May 31, 2019. Just like the other authors that have products created a few years ago, we faced two significant challenges.

First, we had to make the themes compliant and still provide our customers with all the tools they need to build amazing websites. Our products have hundreds of features, blocks, sorting options, custom widgets, and a myriad of custom settings.

Secondly, we have over 90,000 clients that love our products. All the changes had to be implemented without disrupting the customer experience and their websites.

So, what’s going to change?

As the first step to a lighter template, we’ve decided the best course of action for a smooth transition is to move all the functionality previously part of the theme into the tagDiv Composer page builder. What happens when you are updating your Newspaper Theme to version 9.7.3 and Newsmag Theme to version 4.9? The entire code that brings you the features that you love, other than basic WordPress functionality, will be moved in the page builder.

The tagDiv Composer page builder now includes all the functionality. As a result, your website maintains its design and flexibility you are used to. The change will be a different code structure.

! The new code structure may interfere with your child theme customizations. If you’ve made changes only in the functions.php and style.css files, your modifications are safe. In case you’ve altered other files, before updating your theme, please create a test environment and check out the changes there, not on your live website.

If you don’t use a Child Theme, read the update instructions below:

What do you need to do?

To get all the benefits of your theme, you first need to update it. We’ve included a new section in the Welcome screen to facilitate the plugins’ install and/or upgrade.

Step 1. Backup your website
Step 2. Update your theme – How to update the Newspaper Theme and Newsmag Theme.
Step 3. Activate the theme
Step 4. We’ve identified three possible situations for you, and below you’ll find instructions for each case:

4.1 Customer previously using the tagDiv Composer Page Builder

[Action required] Manually Activate/Update tagDiv Composer page builder

Did you use the tagDiv Composer page builder plugin to create your website? Up until now, in the Newspaper Theme and Newsmag Theme, the plugins were automatically updated. According to the new Envato WordPress requirements, starting with this version, you need to activate the tagDiv Composer page builder manually. If you do not enable the page builder, your website will be affected by the missing code (now moved into the plugin).

Update the page builder plugin as seen below:

Go to your WordPress admin area > Newspaper/Newsmag > Welcome. Click the “Install/Activate Plugins” button. All the plugins in the list will be activated, and you are ready to create amazing content.

You can also update the plugins manually from the WordPress admin area > Newspaper/Newsmag > Plugins tab. However, for this update, we highly recommend you use the previously described method.

4.2 Existing customer previously using the WPBakery Page Builder

This update will bring a small change in the way you work with Newspaper Theme and Newsmag Theme as you will need to activate the tagDiv Composer plugin and keep it enabled.

Go to your WordPress admin area > Newspaper/Newsmag> Plugins and click the tagDiv Composer “Install/Activate” button.

4.3 I’m a new client

Install the Newspaper Theme or Newsmag Theme, and go to your WordPress admin area > Newspaper/Newsmag > Welcome. Click the “Install/Activate Plugins” button just as described above. All the plugins in the list will be installed and activated. Once this process is completed, you are ready to use your Newspaper theme or Newsmag Theme.

Wrapping up

We’ve tested these changes over and over to make sure everything works smoothly for you when updating. Still, if you are facing issues while updating, don’t worry. We are here to help you. Open a new topic on the Customer Support forum and we’ll be happy to assist you. We’re doing our best to reply with a solution within 24 hours, however, in the period with a high volume of requests, it may take up to 48 hours to address your issue.

Design Trends: Duotone Web Design with Newspaper Theme

Alex I.
-
2
Design Trends: Duotone Web Design with Newspaper Theme

Are you looking to redesign, bring color, and spice up an already-existing page? One design trend you could use is to give the images on the page a duotone aspect. Combine two colors to create a contrasting effect and give the page the attitude it needs. Make it radiant, delicate, subtle, or bold – using the versatility of duotone web design to create a lasting effect in the readers’ mind.

What is the Duotone Web Design?

Photography used to lay one color halftone over another to bring out the middle tones and highlights of any photo. Traditionally one halftone was black while the other was a different color such as blue, or yellow; however, there are many varieties of color combinations. A photo created with this method was known as a duotone image.

Hero Duotone Web Design Newspaper Theme

Since then, it has evolved into a web design technique. One of the most popular sites to ever use Duotone Web Design is Spotify. From its homepage, login, and even artists’ pages, you can see images in two-tone colors. Pantone also used a pair of colors for its “Color of the Year” which made the blending of the colors reflect the minimalism of its time.

With a duotone image as the background for a page or section, you can make the content pop out. Just use a different color for the text, and it becomes readable no matter its location on the page. With this method, the website can be equally engaging visually for both your designers and audience.

How to create a Duotone Web Design with Newspaper Theme

First, decide on the picture you want to turn duotone. Select a high-quality photo as blurry images tend not to work well. Then, choose two colors for the pair. Think about complementary colors: red – green, blue – orange, purple – yellow, and so forth. However, don’t let that prevent you from picking colors you enjoy or that depicts your branding.

Duotone Web Design Background Image

Using an image editing program such as Photoshop, you can add a gradient map with the selected colors on top to achieve the effect. If you don’t have such a program installed, use an online website that does the job for you. Now, imagine the place you want to set the photo in: do you want it as a background or as an element in a box? Crop and resize the image accordingly.

Get Creative

Open the tagDiv Composer on a page or Template. If you want the image to be set as the background, select a row and go to the “CSS” tab. Then upload your photo in the Background section. Adjust the padding to the row and add the elements:

Choose the typefaces to fit with the overall mood of your message and image. Then pick a color to contrast well with the background. Whenever you design a duotone page, template, or even website, work with a palette of colors and maintain it on each element.

Duotone Web Design Trends Newspaper Theme 2 Columns

You could also insert the photo through the “Single Image” element and change the background color of the row so that it blends perfectly. Divide the row into 2 columns, and write your author’s name, description, and social links on the second column.

Another easy way to get a perfect design is to add a “hero” element at the beginning of your page. Select the image from the “General Settings,” create the text and page name, a stylish button, and you’re done!

Duotone Web Design & You

Don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone when it comes to working with Duotone Web Design! Your content pops against a high contrast image and makes text easily readable. The end goal is to create an exciting and appealing visual that demands attention from your readers.

Have you created a Duotone Page or Template with Newspaper Theme, yet? Show us your results in the comment box below!

HostPapa: Your New WordPress Hosting Service?

Alina G.
-
2
HostPapa: Your New WordPress Hosting Service?

Founded in 2006 by Jamie Opalchuk, HostPapa is known as a popular Canadian web hosting company. It offers multiple hosting services, suitable for any online business. Divided into five categories, the HostPapa services are a great solution for your forum, eCommerce or WordPress website. HostPapa offers Shared, WordPress, VPS, Reseller, and Online Store Hosting.

What’s the meaning of the HostPapa’s name?

I am not sure if you feel the same as I do. I find hosting services’ names interesting. They are all different yet most give you the idea of parental care or fulfilling dreams. For example, HostPapa is a combination of two words: “host” and “papa.” The last one means “father,” a model who takes care of you and your needs. Other examples are GoDaddy, HostGator, and DreamHost. So, is HostPapa a hassle-free solution for your website?

Amazing Support HostPapa Hosting

A word about safety

Nowadays it’s essential to get your website secure. And the most important thing is to get an authorized document to certify it. If it’s for free, the better for you. All the three WordPress hosting plans by HostPapa include a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for your website. The ISRG team says that through this certificate authority they “give people the digital certificates they need in order to enable HTTPS (SSL/TLS) for websites, for free, in the most user-friendly way we can. We do this because we want to create a more secure and privacy-respecting Web.”

What this means is that visitors will definitely want to check out the content you’ve published, as they feel secure while accessing your site. If your audience sees a red warning box telling them the connection is not private, they’re probably not going further to navigate through your great content. Not only does HostPapa provide you with a free SSL certificate, but also with an encryption method up to 256-bit. Your website’s data can travel over a network in a secure environment.

Recommended domains for you

Choose a domain extension that fits your website’s name. HostPapa recommends you these five domains: .com, .net, .xys, .website, .online. If you’ve registered a domain name, you can have multiple Top-Level Domains attached. Furthermore, with an extra email solution from HostPapa, you can match your brand identity with your name. The hosting company offers free domain transfer or free website migrations and promises to support you in these procedures.

WordPress Hosting by HostPapa

With HostPapa you can select between three pricing plans for WordPress: WP Starter, Business, or Business Pro. While WP Starter is advertised as a useful tool for WordPress newbies or starting blogs, the other two options can be a great acquisition for any small or large online business, with improved security, high performance, and fast loading speed.

Pricing for HostPapa Hosting

If you have one or two websites, would you rather rely on limited disk space or go beyond the restrictions and opt for never-ending facilities? All the WordPress Hosting kits come packed with the latest WP version installed, the cPanel admin interface, Free SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt, Cloudflare CDN, and unlimited bandwidth for your data transfer. HostPapa powers its data centers with renewable energy and hosts over 500K sites, starting at the low price of $3.95/month. The HostPapa offers technical support in multiple languages, such as English, French, Spanish, and German.

Strong Features you’ll get with any of the pricing plans:

  1. Unlimited bandwidth usage
  2. Free WordPress installation or migration
  3. With WP Super Cache and Varnish plugins, your site loads faster
  4. Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate
  5. WPForms plugin included
  6. Brute force attack protection
  7. Downtime monitoring
  8. 24/7 FTP access, and FTPS (SSL/TLS)
  9. Access to cPanel control panel through HostPapa Dashboard
  10. Server firewall, monitoring, and intrusion detection
  11. DDoS attack prevention and responses
  12. Network monitoring
  13. Account statistics
  14. 99.9% uptime

If you opt for the WP Business Pro package, you get premium features such as daily automated backups, automatic security fixes, spam filtering, and malware scanning. Moreover, this plan comes with Google Analytics integration and SEO preview tools.

If you’re in a hurry and want to design a site for your business, HostPapa has other services you might be interested in. For example, they can build the website for you, as part of the managed Do-It-For-Me web design service.

HostPapa users call upon for help

A reliable product or service is one that’s well supported. The HostPapa provides you with technical assistance through different channels. Whether you choose to get advice over the phone, chat, or by changing emails, HostPapa team supports you. Furthermore, if you want to check out the network status, there’s a dedicated landing page with real-time reports here.

Customer Care Hostpapa Hosting

Get a jump on website design

While HostPapa has its own drag and drop Website Builder, it’s easier to focus on a WordPress website. All you need to do is to find the theme for your project. Quite often, people choose free themes for their initial sites. With time passing, they create content and want to highlight it within a beautiful layout. So, they search for a premium theme to help them make their dreams come true. Whether it’s a website about travel, sports, home design, or a gossip magazine, with flexible tools and an intuitive interface, you’ll nail it. There are powerful templates out there, though you need not look any further than Newspaper or Newsmag. While Newspaper theme is an entirely front-end WordPress Theme and offers tons of easy customizations, Newsmag comes with a minimal layout.

Is it worth your attention?

Definitely. Since the World Wide Web is full of attractive hosting packages, do you feel confident with your choice? If you find yourself in an impasse and need more arguments to take a decision, you might want to pay attention to a few details. Some brand strategies focus on keywords and trustworthy facts about their company. HostPapa team says that they’re totally committed to meet customer’s satisfaction, and have a reliable web hosting that users can count on. Have you tried any of the HostPapa WordPress hosting services? If you did so, please share your experience with tagDiv’s community, in the comments below?.

Monetize your website with the new Ad Box Element

Alex I.
-
36
Monetize your website with the new Ad Box Element

Running ads on a website is the first step anyone takes to monetize their content. Whether you’re earning money through Google AdSense or by hosting local businesses’ ads, there’s an easier way of creating ads with Newspaper Theme. The new “Ad Box” element added into the tagDiv Composer makes it easy for you to copy-paste the ad codes straight on the front end. What’s more, you can even use this shortcode to display local business ads. Monetizing a website is done with just a few clicks now!

Two Ad Spots on two sidebars using the Ad Box Element

Create perfect ads with the new “Ad Box” element

Open any page or template with the tagDiv Composer, our front-end page builder, and add the “Ad Box” element in any spot you want. Click on it to access the settings. In the General panel, you can write a title for the image and choose the color of the text and its font. If you’ve been running ads before the addition of this shortcode, you can choose which “ad spot” to use from the General Settings tab, too.

In the “Image Ad” tab, you have the option to upload images for various devices such as tablet landscape, tablet portrait, and phone. So, if you have specific images that vary in sizes on each device, set them from this tab. If the same photo needs to be set for all screens, then upload it in the “All Devices” section.

An Ad Box Element used in the Header with the Header Manager and Builder

Explore it further

Next up is the “Ad URL” field, where you should write the business or affiliate website link to send your users to when they click on the “Ad Box.” You can check the box below this setting to have the URL open in a new window. Choose the type of link from the “Spot URL rel”:

  • None
  • Nofollow
  • Noreferrer
  • Noopener

By default, the link type is set to “none.” The next 4 boxes can be checked to hide the ad on various devices. The next setting changes how your ad is displayed: you can choose the maximum width of the image and then change the value in the box for each device through tagDiv Composer’s device tabs. Find out more about the device tabs here.

If you have a code for the ad, navigate to the “Custom Ad” tab. Paste the text into the box you find there. From the “CSS” tab, you can make further adjustments to the Ad Box by giving it padding, margins, or even a border. Explore each setting to get the desired look!

Ad Box Element with Newspaper Theme with the tagDiv Composer Shortcode

Why you should use the new “Ad Box” element

With the new Ad Box, you upload an image and type a link. Monetization with affiliate marketing for different organizations and businesses can now easily be implemented. Your custom ads from Theme Panel can also be chosen, too! Just drag and drop the element onto the desired spot and select your custom ad.

You can copy the Google AdSense codes straight onto the front-end editing section and make modifications to the ad’s placement with ease:

  • Keep the ad in its own separate row.
  • Drag it onto the sidebar of your page or template.
  • Adjust the paddings and margins of the element to fit into your layout.

However, do remember that the Google AdSense policy restricts the use of ads on “sticky” or “floating” blocks. So don’t put your Ad Box on a sticky sidebar if you want to use Google AdSense.

Conclusions

With each update to the Newspaper Theme, you get brand new features that aim to make any design job effortless. Explore the options and settings to the “Ad Box” element and create picture-perfect ads to drive clicks and traffic. Monetizing your website has never been so easy!

Use the comment box below to show us your inventive ways of using the new Ad Box!

Which WP Host is Faster: Kinsta Hosting Review

Alina G.
-
5
Which WP Host is Faster: Kinsta Hosting Review

Kinsta is a specialized hosting company founded in 2013 by a team of professional WordPress developers and it’s powered by Google Cloud Platform. No matter if you’re a beginner or an advanced developer, Kinsta could be a good solution for you. They say they have a 100% rate for solving clients’ issues, with a support service available 24/7, 365 days a year.

Is it worth taking a look?

Kinsta hosting comes with an intuitive admin interface, daily backups, and provides site’s migrations. Also, you can take your work up on staging environments and publish when you’re ready.

Kinsta Features

When people approach hosting services for their websites, they first look into speed, security, and backups. Few of them take this further and think of running their businesses from anywhere without inconsistent delivery. Kinsta offers all these, and it also lets you manage your resources and focus on site content.
There must be a reason some of the Fortune 500 clients like GE, Intuit, Drift, Buffer, and MariaDB, Tripadvisor, Asos, Ubisoft use Kinsta services.
TL;DR – Definitely!

Downtime? No worries

Powered by the Google Cloud Platform and its Premium Tier network, Kinsta’s aim was to optimize its performance and become a strong, reliable, and secure WordPress hosting service for its customers. The Google team of experts wrote a comprehensive study case about the Kinsta hosting, and mention that “On the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure, with live migration and data redundancy features, Kinsta and its clients don’t have to worry about extended, unexpected downtime.” Google is a trusty global company, and it’s constantly improving the optic network speed, reaching over 10,000TB per second. Just think about how fast loads something you type in Google Search, your Gmail conversations or the videos you play on YouTube. These Google services and others are using the Premium Tier Network that performs requests within high-quality speed. And that’s just one reason to take your website for a driving test on a managed Kinsta host.

What is the page loading speed?

On their documentation about the Cloud locations, Google says that their platform “meets rigorous privacy and compliance standards that test for data safety, privacy, and security.” So, as a Kinsta customer and WordPress user, you can select from over 18 global data center locations to match your sites closer to your visitors. If your audience is mainly from Belgium, Frankfurt, to Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and anything in between, positioning your WordPress installs closer, will ensure lower latency and a faster page loading speed.
From small websites to large ones, Kinsta can host any WordPress blog. To get outstanding results, besides a great host, your WordPress theme must be well coded and optimized for speed. For example, Newspaper and Newsmag themes are built from ground up with a clean code structure and with a host like Kinsta, your website will load fast. You can always check out the servers’ status and see in real time how’s the uptime going.

Kinsta Page Speed

MyKinsta – Your Control Center

For better user experience, Kinsta uses the LXD and LXC systems to create container management. Each WordPress website has its private container that includes the required software resources to run properly such as Linux, Nginx, PHP or MySQL.

Kinsta Dashboard

From the panel called “MyKinsta”, you can manage all your websites that use their WordPress hosting services. This interface lets you create SSL certificates, track visitors, bandwidth usage, response times, and many more. Also, you can give access to more people in your team.

While other companies might offer shared hosting, Kinsta doesn’t. Neither of the unique containers shares information between others, or even your own WordPress websites (if you have multiple ones). Kinsta offers support for complex framework installations, such as Bedrock, reverse proxy configurations, while giving access to SSH and WP-CLI features on all their pricing plans.

Depending on your monthly site’s visits, Kinsta offers four attractive pricing offers:

  • Starter – 1 WordPress install
  • Pro – 2 WordPress installs
  • Business – from 5 up to 40 WordPress installs
  • Enterprise – from 60 up to 80 WordPress installs

Kinsta Pricing

What’s inside the Kinsta hosting pack:

  1. Intuitive admin panel called “MyKinsta”
  2. Three types of hosting solutions for any pocket: Business, Enterprise, Custom Hosting
  3. 24 / 7 Quality support: pro-active WordPress experts
  4. Speed: Nginx, PHP 7, LXD containers, and MariaDB
  5. Near real-time access to data – High-performance routing and a low level of latency
  6. Supports premium optional add-ons, such as Cloudflare Railgun, Elasticsearch or Redis
  7. Designed for beginners, also packed with advanced features
  8. Automatic backups
  9. DDoS detection
  10. Hardware firewalls
  11. Uptime monitoring
  12. Free SSL support
  13. Comprehensive Knowledge Base
  14. All pricing plans include SSH, WP-CLI, and Git developer tools

To conclude

Kinsta is the first managed WordPress host to exclusively use the Google Cloud Platform and could be a great hosting service for your website. Also, Kinsta it’s recommended as a WordPress valuable resource by Google Cloud team. Furthermore, the Review Signal is making tests on various hosting companies, and for the fourth year in a row, along with LightninBase, CloudWays, and Pantheon, Kinsta is on Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance in 2018 as one of the fastest WordPress hosts on the market. If you’re using this hosting company services, please comment below and tell us all about your experience!

Get a beautiful Overlay Header with Newspaper Theme

Alex I.
-
0
Get a beautiful Overlay Header with Newspaper Theme

For artistic websites that have a ton of beautiful images on various pages, a minimalistic Header is the perfect support for your content. Newspaper Theme’s Header Builder can help you strike a great balance between bold visuals and minimal fonts with an Overlay Header. What’s more, fashion, beauty, creative magazines can employ this type of look for a multitude of pages.

what an Overlay Header looks like

Welcome the Overlay Header

Do you have a page or template with a beautiful color added to the background or an image that stretches across the screen? A Single Post Template that has a Background Featured Image, a page with a wide Flexible Big Grid or Block, and even one with a Hero element on it can be the perfect start.

Important: Don’t use an Overlay Header on a blank page or template as your content gets pushed underneath each element contained within your header: the Live Search, Logo, and even Navigational Menu.

If you’re new to creating a Header then read this blog post first to find out how to use the Header Builder.

Ready to start? Then open the tagDiv Composer and go to the Header Menu Zone settings. At the bottom, from the “Display” drop-down menu, choose the “Overlay” option. As long as you don’t have a set background to your header, it becomes transparent. Does it look exactly as you imagined it, too? Make any further adjustments to the text colors and fonts and you’re done! This Header gets applied to the page you opened up as soon as you hit save.

Overlay Header with a Flex Grid

Layout and Style of an Overlay Header

For a great user experience, especially when you apply an Overlay Header on a Single Post Template, add an overlay gradient on top of the image that is under the header. This way, when your visitors navigate to a different article with another featured image so that the menu’s text can be easily read.

You can get a clean look for the page by using a sans-serif font in the header. After you’ve chosen the font, you can move on to your Mobile Header. Add the Logo, Mobile Menu, and Mobile Live Search elements to the header. For more information, check out this blog post here.

Hit Save and you can easily import the header on other pages of your website. However, we advise you not to set it as your site-wide template. An archive page or even a 404 Template will have the text overlapping the menu. For stunning results, make it unique and use it sparingly.

Overlay Header on a Single Post Template

Conclusions

Get the Overlay Header on your page with one click using the Newspaper Theme. Customize and style it to match the rest of your website and obtain a clean layout. Assign it on any template you want to impress the audience. Are you ready to step into the limelight?

Show off your beautiful results in the comment box below! ?

Give Your WordPress Site A Boost With A2 Hosting

Alina G.
-
0
Give Your WordPress Site A Boost With A2 Hosting

When you’re new to WordPress and want to start a business, there are a lot of things to consider, like finding a suitable WordPress hosting provider. This is not an easy choice you have to make, as it depends on various facts — a fast and secure host, with site-staging, free migrations, and so on. In today’s article, we’ll take a look at the A2 Hosting services.

A little bit of history

Did you know that A2 Hosting previous name was “Iniquinet”? Later, in 2003, this company was renamed as A2 Hosting, to be easily recognized by everyone. Where’s the A coming? You’re probably asking. Well, the business is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan – USA so, A is from the Ann Arbor.

A2 Hosting Geo Location

It is an independent hosting company with four data centers so you can choose the location as Michigan – USA, Arizona – USA, Amsterdam-Europe, or Singapore – Asia. You can choose the server’s location. This is important because the closer your content is to your visitors, the faster your content will be delivered. It improves the site’s loading speed by shortening the physical distance.

A2 provides several hosting services, like Shared Hosting, Managed WordPress, Reseller Hosting, VPS hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting.

WordPress Hosting or Managed WordPress Hosting?

We’re tackling the classical question and try to give you a comprehensive answer. All the A2 Hosting plans use the SwiftServer infrastructure. Based on the chosen server location, SwiftServer is a speed optimized platform where servers use free Solid-State Drives – SSD, CloudFlare Servershield CDN, or LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress.

A2 Hosting Pricing Plan

A2 comes with several options for hosting services such as Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, VPS hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting. The pricing ranges from €3.44 to €87.49/month.

A2 Hosting ServicesYou can choose between a shared or managed WordPress Hosting plan. But now it gets complicated as each of these plans has multiple pricing offers. You should select the one that gives you the best solution to your needs.

A2 Shared WordPress Hosting

The Shared WordPress Hosting solution comes with three pricing plans. They have a few similarities you might take into consideration while reflecting which one is the best for you. All the three pricing plans give you access to unlimited Raid-10 Storage, Transfer, and Solid State Drive Speed boost within the Complete SSD solution to your files, OS & Database. They also offer a Free SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt.

The Swift and Turbo plans offer an unlimited number of websites, domains, and subdomains. The Turbo package includes some plugins that increase the site’s speed such as WordPress LiteSpeed Cache.

A2 Managed WordPress Hosting

The Managed WordPress hosting also comes with three packages for you: 1-website, 3-sites, and an unlimited number of websites.

So, is shared or Managed WordPress WordPress hosting service right for you?
Shared hosting is for those of you who are ready to go for a lower cost host solution. This could be a choice if your website is new-entry, with not so much traffic. The Shared hosting package comes with the cPanel control panel, and you can see when some of the resources meet the limit (such as CPU and MEM usage).

A managed hosting has everything already configured for your WordPress website. It frees you from the maintenance of your sites like the setup, plugins or theme updates. Though it’s a more expensive service, the Managed WordPress hosting has automatic, optimized tools and increased performance. It settles for a low number of sites on the same server and uses a custom designed admin panel, which is better for the user. Also, with this kind of plan you don’t have to worry about updates, caching, HTML, CSS or JS file minification.

What’s an A2 Turbo Server?

A2 Hosting is well-known for its statement of having a Turbo Server option that allows pages to load everything up to 20x faster. This kind of server uses a speed boost Apache alternative. The users get more resources while fewer users (websites) share the same server. The main benefits are that they can host unlimited websites, sub-domains, add-ons or parked domains, RAID-10 Storage, Server Rewind Backups, and more.

These Turbo Servers include more caching solutions than the others and can be customized with the A2 Optimized WP plugin which integrates options with the functionality given by third-party plugins to increase your site’s speed and security.

To improve the pages’ performance, the caching solutions store in memory key pieces of the website, instead of loading every page portion each time the site is accessed. This option could be a good choice if your website gets a lot of traffic.

Who Manages the WordPress Setup in A2?

By choosing the Managed WordPress Hosting, the A2 team assures they take care of the whole WordPress setup, while your access to the Plesk control panel is granted. Furthermore, as A2 has the WP CLI installed by default, you can manage your WordPress sites using the command-line tool. This means you can update plugins and configure multiple websites installs, without using a web browser.

A2 Hosting - control panels

One more step: Finding the right WP theme

By now, I’m sure you already have a powerful theme in your mind to help you make a great online presence. You can choose from a free theme WordPress repository, or you can take it to another level with a premium theme form a market like ThemeForest. If you’re looking for a news, blog, or magazine oriented template, your choice should be the best-selling Newspaper theme which offers you entirely front-end customization possibilities for posts and pages. With a boxed layout, another popular theme to fit your sport, medical, traveling or tech website might be Newsmag.

Wrapping up

Featuring some new technologies to speed up your website, the A2 Hosting gives you multiple options you can choose from. If you got much traffic on your site, you should check out the managed hosting services. Is this the right hosting service provider for you? Do you have experience with this provider? Share it with us in the comments below and help us improve the web.

How to Design Faster with the new Typography Presets

Alex I.
-
5
How to Design Faster with the new Typography Presets

While working on a page’s design, you may want a faster way of getting the same fonts on each element. How do you do that? Easily transfer the type from an item to another one through the new Typography Presets with the Newspaper Theme. Find out how to do that and speed up your workflow when making a new page!

Typography Presets Obtain your Style

What you can do with the Typography Presets

For starters, what are the two primary fonts you use? If you’re just creating a website and need help deciding, head on over to Typography Guide 101. To obtain a consistent look and feel, the typefaces from the homepage should repeat on each page of your site.

So, similar elements need to have a common appearance. Let’s say that you have two Flex Blocks on a page, each one can use the same type as the other, however, styled differently. Maybe one of the Flex Blocks has inner padding to its Meta Info whereas the other one doesn’t. There could be a multitude of differences. However, if they have an identical rank on the layout’s hierarchy, they should have matching font settings.

There’s an easy solution to that: Newspaper Theme’s new Typography Presets. Customize a block and resize the font for specific devices with the tagDiv Composer device tabs. Now you can keep the same look when you import it through the Typography Presets.

How to use the Typography Presets

Open a page with the tagDiv Composer page-builder. Click on an element, then navigate to the Style tab, and customize the font settings. Change the font by adjusting the:

  • Weight
  • Size
  • Tracking
  • Line Height
  • Style (make it bold, italic, and more)

Responsive Layout for each Device through the tagDiv Composer and Typography Presets

Then go through the options for each device and resize it, so it doesn’t take as much space on smaller screens. To do this, click on each respective device’s icon at the top of the settings window.

Use the Typography Presets to Stylize your WebsiteOnce you’re happy with it, you can transfer the font to another block and maintain a uniform appearance throughout the page. To use the Typography Presets just go to the font you have customized and click on the three black dots next to the typeface name. A box opens up with three possible actions: Save, Reset, and Load Font Settings. Click on ‘Save’ and give the new preset a name to remember it by.

Select the element that you wish to transfer the font settings to. From the same three-dots box, pick the “Load” option. Choose the name you came up with for the preset. Your block now has the same typeface, weight, size, tracking, style, and line height. Quickly obtain a beautiful, organized layout and design for your audience to enjoy reading through!

Design Faster with Newspaper Theme

Each item on the page has to fit in with the rest of your website to create a seamless transition. Therefore, having two typefaces that you can adjust to create hierarchy is important. Knowing how to pair fonts is essential as well. However, Newspaper Theme offers you an easy method of maintaining the website’s style throughout each new page: the Typography Presets. Use this new feature to vastly improve your workflow.

Have you created a perfect layout with font contrasts and sizes? Tell us how you’ve used the new Typography Presets in the comment box below! ?‍♀️

How to Start a Business Blog that People Will Actually Read

Marco Mijatovic
-
6
How to Start a Business Blog that People Will Actually Read

Blog marketing is becoming more popular among modern companies and for a good reason – it’s a win-win solution both for the company and its customers.

Modern customers spend most of their free time on the internet, and there is no reason for businesses to miss out on the opportunity to market their brand to potential clients while they’re having on their favorite social media channels.

How to Start a Business Blog That People Will Actually Read

Now that the advantages of a business blog are clear, we have to add that organizations from various industries list business blogging as one of the best promotional tactics.

However, adding random keywords in your content to improve SEO and publishing posts with catchy titles, but without any depth or accurate information, won’t help you improve your business.

With that in mind, here are a few crucial tactics that will help you produce quality content that people will actually read.

Pick a subject matter that has depth

Before you do anything else, you have to choose the main topics for your blog. You have to pick fresh and unique topics to attract the readers, but the content of your blogs also needs to be deep and meaningful.

A superficial subject limits your ability to do extensive research and provide your customers with high-quality content, and it won’t attract new readers or increase the traffic on your website. Well, you should estimate what subject will be engaging for the specific target group, which leads us to the next step – finding the right audience.

Research your target audience

Nowadays, we can divide internet users into specific target groups by various characteristic, including their age, gender, location, interests, online behavior, lifestyle, their hobbies, and much more.

What you should do is check your current database for such information, and to conduct research that will help you define your target audience based on the subject you’re planning to distribute within your content.

You can introduce various AI driven tools to your business to collect customer data and improve customer experience by producing the most suitable content. Moreover, you’ll increase the traffic, resulting in better service and engagement with clients.

Create content that’s better than what the competition offers

The competition plays an important role when we’re talking about the content of your blogs. We’re not saying that you should mimic your competitions’ online behavior, but you should check the situation from time to time just to check what works well for them.

The point is to learn from their mistakes and create the content that is better and more attractive. Moreover, you’ll stay up-to-date with other trending subjects, which allows you to create content on various hot topics.

How to start a business blog?

Provide real value. When we’re saying provide value, we’re talking about tons of benefits, such as greater online presence. You can do it in many various ways, but some of the best would be to write research-based blogs, to answer questions from social media or blog comments, to engage with readers by sharing your experience and knowledge.

Simply put – stay in front of your audience as often as you can and be open to introducing new strategies.

The content of your blogs must have a purpose, and you’ll find out what works best for you after you try different stuff. Customers’ feedback will often surprise you. If you’re looking for a way to make things smoothly, you shouldn’t make web design mistakes. You can try out these useful web design tips or check out 10Web for outlining ten of the most common WordPress blog mistakes. 

Keep the quality consistent

Quality is more valuable than quantity. Although it’s known that good search engine optimization requires frequency, when we’re talking about business blogs, the quality is more important. If your readers know you for your creative and accurate content, one mistake might result in losing a good chunk of your audience.

So, if your blogs have already attracted lots of readers, keep your content excellent and unique. Stay consistent and don’t publish superficial content only to fulfill the norm.

Keep updating your content

Sometimes, the content you have written years or months ago might become relevant again. If your blog is specific to a certain time period, it’s clear that you can’t just repost it. Actually, you can, but first, you have to update it.

Now you’re surely wondering how reposting can bring you any advantage, but actually, there are tons of benefits that might arise if you simply update your blog – an old blog brings lots of website traffic! Instead of investing efforts in new content, you can keep your work relevant and you’ll get higher click-through rates, and Google will display the date you changed a post rather than the initial date.

Ensure that your blog is technically sound

Based on the subject of your content and your audience, you should select the most suitable voice and tone, as well as the language of your blogs, but one thing is certain – it must be technically sound.

Always read your content before you share it, and check for any mistakes, including links and photos, but the structure too. Misspelled words or mistakes might appear unprofessional.

Promote, promote, promote

Content promotion is the moment when you can actually profit. If you don’t invest lots of time in the promotion, your previous efforts won’t pay off and even if you are selling a product that is in demand in 2019 you’ll end up generating few leads. Simply put, all that you’ve finished, starting from picking the subject matter to checking your content for mistakes is worth nothing without a well-organized promotion.

Since the promotion might be a very complex process, you should use all the available tools such as blog calendars, to facilitate and automate all the processes that can be simplified.

We hope that these tips will help you to boost your productivity and improve your business blog. On the other hand, if you’re still thinking about starting a new business, here are some things that might push you in the right direction.

Are you satisfied with the insights about the traffic on your website? Let us know in the comments!

1...121314...24Page 13 of 24

We are a dynamic team of skilled developers, designers, and support experts dedicated to providing the web solutions you need to achieve success.

About us

Expertise

Services

This website was developed using the ❤ Newspaper theme, a creation of tagDiv.