The two of the most popular buzzwords, UI and UX have been in circulation for quite some time already and they continue to play an important role in designing a WordPress website. In general conversation they are often used interchangeably but although compatible, these are two completely different terms. The following sheds some light on the UI and UX difference.

UI is an abbreviation for User Interface. It refers to the tools people use in their interaction with machines. User interfaces come in many varieties – buttons, physical switches, selection switches fields etc. It basically denotes the way in which users interact with operating systems, applications and websites. A good user interface has to be clear, clean, aesthetically pleasing, familiar, efficient, intuitive, forgiving and consistent.

The term UX, on the other hand, stands for User Experience. It mainly focuses on how the user feels when using a product. It concerns all the aspects of the interaction between a user and a computer system. Apart from the physical interaction, it includes what people think about the user interface, the graphics they observe and their emotions and attitudes when operating the system. UX usually includes things like the look and feel of a button and the action necessary to reach a button, the user’s emotional responsive to having to click to button and how he felt afterwards, whether these actions worked the way he expected, etc.

There have been a lot of great design improvement in the UI and UX of WordPress-based websites during the years, not only for the end users but also for the site admins. The goal of these improvements was to build an effective and efficient UI, which at the same time ensuring great UX.

It is also interesting what the future holds for the role of UI and UX in a WordPress design. I believe that while some things will continue the way they are heading currently, other will improve and become more prominent.

Scrolling, for example, will be more widely-used and dominant in designing WordPress themes because of the high number of people using mobile devices. Users find it easier to scroll than click. Apart from improving the load time of a site (a key SEO element), scrolling is also more intuitive than clicking.

User interfaces will be flat. 3D buttons and shadows will become a thing of the past. Flat designs are simpler and more intuitive. They also work better for mobile devices.

Navigation will be faster and more efficient. Accessibility will become an increasingly important issue and there will be support for both standard gesture and mouse-free navigation. This means more focus on the needs of the end user. Navigation will use larger fonts with higher contract and specific colours to provide clues.

The minimalistic approach to design will take firmer roots. The screen will no longer be clutters by flashy things. Future layouts and designs will adopt minimalism.

Mobile devices will rule the market. The OS of Google also came from mobile devices.

There will be a wide use of dynamic backgrounds as background video is much faster in conveying a message. It also does it in greater detail than text. This is the reason why high-quality background visuals will be used often.

Tiles and cards have functional layout and an uncluttered look that quickly becomes standard for WordPress design. Ever since Pinterest made cards popular, they have transformed into a web design trend.

There will also be a greater need for typography customization in WordPress themes. Fonts will be chosen based on image, style preferences, mood, etc.

UX will have to be more personalized. On many retail sites, content is already personalized to the tastes and behaviour of customers. Analytics provides information on how visitors consume content. This kind of information is useful for websites to offer information the way the user intends to use it. One such example is Amazon and …

There is a good chance you will need to clean up your WordPress installation if you have been using the CMS for some time. WordPress website speed optimization allows you to significantly reduce the size of your database, resulting in a substantial speed improvement and allowing for smaller backups. Below we outline the ways in which you can achieve this.

Using WordPress over long periods of time piles up a lot of data like data from no longer used plugins, trashed comments, spam comments, post revisions, etc, which begs for WordPress database cleanup. By disposing of this type of no longer needed data, you can bring down the size of your database significantly, which will speed up your WordPress website.

Don’t let the phrase “database cleanup” frighten you. The procedure is not as complicated as it sounds.

Backup everything before you begin

Ensure you have a complete backup of your WordPress website before you begin. The changes you make using a cleanup plugin are irreversible, which requires from you to stay on the safe side of things.

Use a plugin such as WP-Sweep to clean up your WordPress database and speed up your website

After installing the plugin from the WP dashboard, just go to Tools -> Sweep to start the cleaning process. The plugin runs an analysis on the content of your database and provides a report on how much clutter you can clean. The Sweep report is nicely divided into sections, providing an easy way for you to determine what you wish to dispose of. The procedure itself takes some time and depends on the size of your database but the plugin updates you on the progress.

The nice thing about relying on this particular plugin, instead of using any other plugin that does a similar job, is that WP-Sweep uses the correct WP-specific function for deleting data from the database instead of relying on MySql queries directly. For example, the plugin WP-Optimize leaves data behind. This is the reason why I use WP-Sweep for WordPress website speed optimization.

Manual WordPress database cleanup

If you don’t want to go on with installing yet another plugin on your website, you can optimize the WordPress database yourself. This is usually done via phpMyAdmin. Many companies providing webhosting services use this software to administer all kinds of database-related tasks.

phpMyAdmin allows for easy database optimization. Just check all the boxes on the left side of your tables, choose “Optimize table” from the dropdown menu and press “Go”. Once the process completes, you will see a confirmation message.

Dealing with website bloat

The next thing you may want to consider is to reduce the so-called “dead weight” of your website.

– Post revisions – While it is great to have as many post revisions as you can have with your WP website, they contribute to the size of your database significantly. The first thing you can do about it is to limit the number of revisions the CMS stores at any given time. WordPress keeps an unlimited number of revisions by default and in order to reduce their number, you can place the following line of code into your wp-config.php file:

define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 2 );

The number “2” here represents the number of revisions WordPress allows. By replacing it with the string “false”, you can disable post revisions completely and save the most space occupied by post revisions in your database.

A word of caution – limiting the number of allowed revisions doesn’t affect the number of revisions you currently have in the database.

– Spam comments – the plague of the Internet, the spam comments, also add to the bloat of your database.

Although WordPress deletes spam automatically after 30 days have passed, if you have a lot of traffic on your website, it may significantly affect its speed. You can easily speed up your site in the meantime by going …

Have a WordPress theme and need some customization work done? Do not worry, you have come to the right place. We have done a lot of WordPress theme customizations to help customers like you.
Whether you have stumbled upon us thorough one of our partners, or you have discovered us on your own, we are willing to assist you with customizing your theme.

Just contact us via the contact form and let us know exactly what you need done and customized on your WordPress theme so that we can make it happen. Whether you need design customizations for your theme or to customize your code, we will work with you to make the necessary updates to suit your project or business.…

WordPress isn’t the most insecure CMS there is although many people claim it to be so. It is the popularity and the wide use of the CMS that attracts most attention from hackers. The number of brute force attacks WordPress users are subjected to have been on the rise in recent years. We often see websites with more than 10,000 login attempts in just one weekend. Therefore, the need to automatically blacklist IP Addresses in WordPress is obvious.

Because we have to be very vigilant when WordPress security is concerned and for the reason that we are after an automatic blacklisting of IP addresses, we need to consider a plugin adding such functionality.

Although my favourite plugin for WP security is the AIO WP Security & Firewall Plugin and it allows for blacklisting of IP addresses, it doesn’t do this automatically yet. The good news is that there is another, much lighter plugin that does just that. It is the IP Blacklist Cloud plugin and it is available for free download from the WordPress repository at WordPress.org.

Blocking IP addresses automatically in WordPress is necessary because it saves you a lot of unnecessary work of doing it manually and be constantly on the alert for brute force attacks. It is sometimes very hard to block even one intruder as hackers are smart and often use proxy servers with different IP addresses

to try to gain access to your site by hammering it with a combination of usernames and passwords.

Because you may be getting hundreds of failed unauthorized access attempts per site per day, you want to be blocking IP addresses automatically. Blacklisting a lot of IP addresses across a lot of websites each day is a hard and unpleasant task. My way of doing this is by using the IP Blacklist Cloud plugin. It allows you to block certain intruders by IP, instead of blocking a particular user when the failed login attempts exceed a certain number.

Another handy feature of the plugin is the ability to see a number of details for all those who have attempted a brute force attack against your website. If you have questions on how to block IP addresses with this useful tool, just visit the aforementioned plugin page, read its description, go through its documentation and when in doubt, open a support question.

Be careful not to blacklist yourself. Sometimes you also make the mistake of typing the wrong password. It is usually a good idea to whitelist your username. The plugin allows it.

Although there are a lot of WordPress security plugins and IP Blacklist Cloud is neither the plugin that offers the most options and the most comprehensive security nor it is the best WP security-related plugin there is, it is my plugin of choice when automatic blacklisting of IP addresses is concerned.

As it is with all of your websites, you want to prevent hackers from accessing your admin panel and making your life miserable. Be cautious of brute force attacks and if you can’t find a better plugin that does the task of blocking IP addresses in WordPress, give this one a try. It is free, easy to use, and only takes a few moments of your time to set up properly.…