Faisal Sarker - WP Hive

The Ultimate Guide to Content Repurposing in 2021

Content is the king, unless they are ordinary.

It’s not every day that you can create content that stands out among the rest. One single content like that can outperform a hundred ordinary ones.

So rather than creating more and more ordinary new content every day, isn’t it better to recreate contents that are already proved to be share-worthy? We think you already know the answer to that question.

Today we will let you know the ways to utilize your best content to a hundred percent by recreating them, in a lot of different ways. This is the ultimate guide to content repurposing and how it can help get the best out of your content.

We also have a bonus for you in the end – 5 Great examples of content repurposing that will inspire you to start doing it from today!

Why Should you Repurpose your Content?

What if you know that one of your content has a greater chance to perform well even before you publish it? This may happen when you decide to start repurposing content, as those content are already proven to perform well.

So there’s two major reasons for repurposing content.

Content Repurposing saves time: Repurposing old content means that you will save a considerable amount of time that would go into researching.
Greater chance of success: As you will mostly choose your popular contents for repurposing, there’ll be a better chance for that content to perform well in the new format as well.

Content repurposing is a great way to utilize your popular content.

If you’re still unsure about the benefits of content repurposing, let us tell you a story.

Internet Business Mastery was a popular podcast, ran by Jeremy and Jason. They also had their individual blogs. On their podcast, they ran an experiment where they read and recorded their most popular blogs. Those podcasts (or audio blogs) saw 60-100% more downloads than their regularly featured podcasts.

Yes, that is what you can achieve through content repurposing.

Now, if the term “content repurposing” is something new to you, let’s take a jump back to the definition before showing you the most effective ways to repurpose your content.

So, What is Content Repurposing?

Ultimate Guide to Content Repurposing in 2021

If you are someone new, it’s easy to get confused between content repurposing and content republishing. However, they are not actually the same.

Content repurposing means the process of making different versions or formats of a content by using the same or some elements of the existing content.

For example, you can take a popular blog post from your site and make a video using the same information. In that case, you don’t have to do any extra research while making the video, as all the information you need is already scouted.

How to Find Contents that You Should Repurpose?

Every content that we develop has a specific goal. When you decide to repurpose content, we will once again have to find the goal of the campaign. If you know what product you are trying to sell, or what you are trying to achieve, then choosing the right content for repurposing becomes very easy.

However, there is a set of ways to find repurpose-worthy content. Let’s have a loot at those.

Find Your Timeless Content
Analyze and Find Your Most Popular Contents

Find Your Evergreen Content

There are some contents that never become old. They are always relevant and thus we call them evergreen or timeless content. Evergreen contents are perfect for repurposing. Why you ask?

It is because evergreen contents are always popular, so your effort will be duly appreciated even after a long time.

Another reason to choose evergreen content is that they require less modification or update, to it takes little to no further research before you can start converting them into another format. It’s always nice to get a head start, right?

Analyze and Find Your Most Popular Contents

It is the easiest way to find contents that you should repurpose. Your most popular contents are your asset that needs to be in front of more people, and there is no better way to do that other than repurposing them.

Depending on the type of content, there are many tools that will help you find your most popular content. Google Analytics and YouTube Analytics are two of the most used tool to find the most popular blog and YouTube video content.

Here’s a sample landing page report from Google Analytics showing the top pages of a website. From here, you can easily handpick the blogs that are most popular and relevant to your campaign goal.

You can find an almost similar interface for YouTube analytics as you can see below.

For other types of content, there are respective metrics and tools to check and find the most popular ones.

Once you know the exact content that you want to republish, then it’s time to decide in which formats you want to turn them into and how.

How to Repurpose your Content- The Most Effective Strategies

Repurposing content needs clear thinking and you need to pick the right strategies to make them successful.

Below we have listed out some of the best ways and strategies to repurpose content. It’s better to choose the one that fits your content most.

Republish Your Existing Content to Get New Readers
Repurpose Content For Guest Posts
Split Your Content into Pieces
Turn your Articles into Videos
Make Podcasts from your Text Contents
Turn Group of Contents into an eBook or Online Course
Make Infographics, Quotation Image Using Your Articles

1. Republish Your Existing Content to Get New Readers

Let’s start with the easiest and most used content repurposing strategy. Republishing is publishing your existing content in the same format with additional information or targeting a new group of audiences.

For example, let’s say you have a popular blog that you want to republish. You can add new information to the blog, update it to cater to a larger audience.

2. Repurpose Content For Guest Posts

Guest post is another way of content repurposing method that can help you reach more people with your existing content. Just by republishing with some minor changes on your popular content, you can reach a whole new array of audiences, if you do guest posts with them. Alex Turnbull from GrooveHQ reached more than 1 million people by guest blogging. Imagine how many you can reach with your contents that are already proven to be crowd-pleaser?

Moreover, guest posts are a great source of generating backlinks. And repurposing your old content is by far the easiest way to make some guest post up and ready in no time.

3. Split Your Content into Pieces

Another great way of repurposing a content is by simply splitting them into smaller bits. For example, long content like a blog might work great on your website but can fail miserably on platforms like Facebook. So what you can do is take a popular blog from your website and post only a small and highly engaging part on Facebook and couple it with an image, and you got the perfect mixture for success!

The same can be told about videos, as longer ones are often the most favored by YouTube audiences and get more YouTube views but they are not much popular by the Twitter or LinkedIn audiences. So splitting down your popular videos into some engaging pieces and posting them on social platforms can help you reach more people.

4. Turn your Articles into Videos

Not everyone likes to get their information in the same way. Some people like to read while some prefer videos. The more formats you can convert your content into, the better. However, turning your popular articles into videos surely yield greater result than most of them.

Making a script from a blog is fairly easy, once you start on it. As blogs cover information in a descriptive way, what you can do is break them down into small bullet points and give a summary to all the points taking your info from the blog. Next up, shoot the video and upload it on video and social media.

How do you like the double reach with the same content?

P.S. Same can be done in the opposite direction as well. Yes, you can also turn a blog version of your popular video and get similar result.

5. Make Podcasts from your Text Contents

Another way you can use your existing article or text content is by making a podcast. If you haven’t noticed, the popularity of podcasts, be it business podcasts or general, is rising all over the world. So making a podcast from a topic your blog readers liked can also bring you a similar response if you make a podcast discussing the same topic.

So what’s stopping you from making yours?

6. Turn Group of Contents into an eBook or Online Course

When you are done creating a lot of contents in a certain genre, it is a great way to utilize them by turning them into an eBook or Online Course. Making eBooks from your text contents is particularly a lucrative way to repurpose your content. As not only that your content will reach more people, you will also have the chance to earn some extra bucks selling it.

The same goes for online courses as well. People like taking online courses and you have the resources, perfect reason to start repurposing your contents into an online course, don’t you think?

7. Make Infographics, Quotation Image Using Your Articles

Let us tell you a fact. Did you know, our brains can process a visual content 60,000 times faster than text? Well, apparently it does.

So it’s not really that hard to suggest you to make images from the most notable part of your text contents. Two of the most popular way to represent your blog into images are infographics and quotations from your blog.

Once you are done, share the image on social media and experience the magic.

5 Great Examples of Content Repurposing

Many people have seen tremendous results from content repurposing. So we thought of sharing some of the most prominent handpicked examples of content repurposing.

Aladdin Happy’s Amazon eBook Masterclass

Aladdin Happy, one of the most famous Growth Hackers, used to publish growth hacking ideas on GrowthHackingIdea.com. For his first amazon book, he decided to republish his existing popular contents and filter out 101 of them to feature on the eBook called “Top 101 Growth Hacks”.

The book was highly popular. So much so, that people who subscribed to his invite-only service from Amazon become paying customers at a 2000% greater rate than subscribers from any other channel.

Backlinko’s Story of Social Reach from Case Study

Brian Dean of Backlinko received a great case study from a user. Promoting the case study on its own didn’t seem to be an effective plan, so he decided to add it to an old post and promoted that updated content instead. The updated content with the case study saw a 111.37% increase in organic traffic.

Copyblogger – Why Not Turn it to a Presentation?

Copyblogger’s innovative writers are renowned to write some of the most engaging contents on many topics related to marketing. They also follow the strategy of repurposing content very seriously. One such example is the blog, The 3-Step Journey of a Remarkable Piece of Content, which they transformed into a presentation and uploaded to SlideShare.

The presentation now has 95k+views.

SEMrush’s Success with Blog to Infographics

One of the blog posts from SEMrush, “Your Ultimate Social Media Checklist” was getting popular to their audience. To further utilize the traction they were getting, they designed an infographic based on the article and published it on Pinterest and a couple of other platforms as guest posts. The action performed great and boosted their brand awareness as well as brand expertise.

Buffer’s Bold Attempt at Repurposing Contents

This is perhaps one of the boldest content repurposing campaigns that you can come across. In 2015, Buffer announced the “No New Content” challenge. They announced, for one month they will not publish new content but repurpose the old ones by updating and converting them into different formats.

It still remains one of the best success stories of content repurposing, as, during the experiment, they were able to grow their organic search traffic by more than 4%. Moreover, their repurposed SlideShare presentations generated more than 100,000 views, while one particular post reached the Top 20 posts on Medium.

Get the Best Out of Your Content by Repurposing Them

As Neil Patel says, “Write Less, Promote More”. This should be the motto of every writer and marketer.

Create resourceful content and make as many versions as you can. Get your content to as many people as you can. Because ultimately, it’s not about how much content you can produce in a month or year, but how many people you can reach and help.

With repurposing, you can reach more people with the same amount of research. Repurposed content also has more chances to be successful than your regular ones. And if you have trouble finding content to repurpose, you can just pick your most popular and evergreen content.

We have covered the most effective ways to repurpose your content and some examples of successful content repurposing. So now, all you got to do is just start with one content and see the result by yourself.

When are you planning to start repurposing your content? Cause you know what they say, “The sooner the better!”

learn How to create a content marketing plan

The White House Uses WordPress to Relaunch Their Website (With a Stunning Dark Mode)

2021 is a fresh start on many perspectives. One of the biggest of them is a new administration on the White House. However, with this came a piece of good news for WordPress. The White House has relaunched their website with a new design and for the second time in a row, the White House administration chose WordPress to build their website.

So many talented people worked their tails off to get the new https://t.co/9wqlgOK5bi brand & website launched last Wednesday. Our express goal was to give the new Biden-Harris Administration a seamless, fresh start (and do our best to make it all look easy). 1/? https://t.co/k40mnTazX5
— Ben Ostrower (@benostrower) January 25, 2021

The website relaunched on the same day that the new administration took over. The new slick and clean design immediately caught the eyes of many and became a talking point for the tech enthusiasts.

Here at WP Hive, our team loved the all-new look. If you are a WordPress lover, join us, as we talk about the new design, what changed from the previous one, and what this relaunch means for the WordPress community.

When Did the White House Start Using WordPress?

The White House website www.whitehouse.gov has been powered by CMS for a long time. It was Drupal, which was the choice of successive administrations from 2009 to 2017. However in 2017, the new administration closed the door for Drupal, and it was time for WordPress to power the prestigious White House website.

It was December 15, 2017, that the White House first launched their website with WordPress, which was an auspicious occasion for the WordPress community. The move was welcomed by many as WordPress is arguably the most stable CMS out there.

Why White House Uses WordPress – What We Think

Why WordPress is preferred by the White House is a question that can be asked in the opposite way, as well. Why wouldn’t WordPress be the choice for the White House?

By 2017, WordPress was already the engine that powered by more than 30% of the website out there. It was and still is the developer’s choice, as you can see from more than 50,000 plugins available on the WordPress repository (higher than any other CMS) and countless free and premium themes. Add to that the world-class security plugins, and you are all set for a powerful and stable website.

Andrew Nacin, one of the WordPress lead developers, joining White House’s U.S. Digital Service was thought to be one of the prime reasons behind the White House’s move to WordPress, although he later said that he didn’t have any part to play in the transformation.

I wasn't involved in this. I work on public-facing digital services like veterans applying for health benefits or immigrants applying for citizenship.
— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) December 20, 2017

However, even if Nacin did not have many roles in the process, it was not a hard decision to make. Because of the advancement that WordPress made on all fronts, starting from Functionality, SEO, Speed Optimization, Security, to Stability, it was in fact an easy choice to make.

What’s New – White House Website Relaunch with WordPress

The recently depreciated White House website, as seen in the image below, was already a simple one.

However, the new website is even cleaner looking. With all new navigation bar, and the option to translate the whole website into Spanish make it more meaningful. The website is as follows:

If you look closely, you will see that there are two little buttons on the left side of the screen. What are those? We have solved the puzzle for you. Those two buttons are there to let you toggle between “Large & Small Font Size” and “High & Low Contrast Mode“.

Wait a minute, what does High Contrast Mode mean? Well, yes you have guessed it right, the White House now has Dark Mode support.

However, as you know we like a bit of Sherlock Holmes here at WP Hive, naturally, we sneaked under the page source and found this for you. See the green texts?

Yes, inside the source code, there’s a recruitment message by the United States Digital Service. Don’t look at us like that, we were equally surprised seeing the Easter Eggs!

Apart from the dark mode support, new design, they also did quite brilliant work optimizing the website. As you can see from the tweet from @webos, the new website is rocking on all fronts. Hats off to the White House development team!

https://t.co/hoaioTVqE3 scoring super well on lighthouse, has dark mode and font size selector

h8ers gonna be mad that it's wordpress and jQuery tho pic.twitter.com/tyMNjdmnTH
— Wes Bos (@wesbos) January 20, 2021

How Does This Affect Us All

If you search on Google, you will find countless articles on why you should not use WordPress to build your website, terming it as slow, insecure, or even outdated. Yet, WordPress is being used more than ever, and now powering more than one and a half quarter of all the websites.

What’s more, WordPress is now in the middle of a multiple-year-long modernization project that will make it even more appealing to build websites using WordPress in the near future.

As more and more important sites like the White House uses WordPress, it is becoming even more apparent that WordPress is becoming a more reliable way of building and managing all sorts of websites.

So if you are a WordPress lover, this means that all your love is not going in vain. If you are not quite fond of WordPress as of yet, it is perhaps the time to acknowledge the big stride WordPress is making. And if you are interested to build your next website with WordPress, we have a comprehensive guide to do just that!

How to create a blog using WordPress

Best WordPress Chrome Extensions that you Must Have in 2021

In 2008, there was no Chrome. In 2021, Chrome now has a market share of more than 7o%. Chrome has always been one of the most feature-packed browsers that helped users to choose it more than just browsing websites. One of the ways Chrome achieved this feat is through the Extensions.

There are more than 190000 extensions in the Chrome Web Store

Therefore you can now get all sorts of features right in your browser. WordPress being one of the most used website builders, there are now many extensions built solely targeting this user base.

Today our article is about the best WordPress Chrome extensions that you must have in 2021. This is an always-updated list, so make sure to check it out from time to time, if you are a WordPress user and interested in finding some nifty extensions for everyday use.

Quick Navigation

Why You Need WordPress Chrome Extensions

Chrome extensions can do literally everything. And we mean it!

Whether you want to check your grammar right when you are typing something on your browser window, or need to take the screenshot of a portion of the page, or even when you need to secure yourself by using a VPN, all of them have something in common.

Yes, all of them can be done using chrome extensions!

Here is a pie chart with chrome extensions per category. A huge list, to be honest. But a big chunk of them, specifically 24.9% is categorized to improve productivity, while 7.2% is categorized as developer tools.

If it weren’t for the chrome extensions, you would have to use individual app for all the features that we have pointed out here. This is how Chrome extensions helps us out with useful functionalities.

Even when it comes to WordPress, it has some exciting extensions to offer, and that is what we will cover in this article. Ready for it? Let’s start with the list then!

13 WordPress Chrome Extension that You Should Have as a Marketer

Finally, we are at the point of sharing the selected extensions. But you do have the chance to share any extensions that you like in the comment section, and if we think they are a must-have, we will add them to our blog.

So without wasting any further time, let’s get to the list.

1. WP Hive

Yes, we now have a chrome extension for WP Hive, and we have featured this extension on top of our list. Before you start raising your eyebrows, hear me out!

We are a team of WordPress enthusiasts and the reason behind building WP Hive was to help you find the plugins from tons of options and get crucial insights, which we were tired of doing.

Well, WP Hive chrome extension will help you do that even more easily.

Best WordPress Chrome Extensions that you Must Have in 2021 2

Once you install this extension, whenever you visit any plugin page in the official WordPress repository you will see the key insights of that plugin in the sidebar, just like the image above.

And if you need more detailed insight about the plugin, you can click on More Insights button or Compare Plugin button, if you want to compare the plugins with any other.

This chrome extension is available for free, just like all our features. And there’s no reason for not downloading this extension today.

GET WP HIVE CHROME EXTENSION

2. BuiltWith Technology Profiler

If you are a WordPress enthusiast, or even someone who is remotely interested in what web technology is used to build a website, BuiltWith is an extension that you will surely love.

Using this extension, you can get to know the technology used to build a website. This includes whether the website is built with a CMS (i.e. WordPress) or not. If yes, which are the themes and plugins powering the website. All this information is presented in a very simple and intuitive way.

As you can see from the image, by clicking on the bw icon from the menu bar, you can get to know the technology behind the website you are currently in.

This is also a free extension, available in the chrome web store.

3. Grammarly

This is an extension that everyone should have, and if you are someone who uses WordPress as a medium to publish blogs, Grammarly is even more important.

Grammarly will help you with grammar, spelling, and even your spelling tone. It also helps you avoid errors in writing and suggest better words in a sentence. What’s more, you’ll get real-time feedback. Grammarly is available on Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and of course on WordPress!

GET Grammarly CHROME EXTENSION

4. FATRANK

For a marketer, FATRANK is the kind of tool that you need every day. It helps you track the SERP ranking of a webpage or blog for a certain keyword. To get such kinds of functionalities in the browser is almost unbelievable, but thanks to this chrome extension, you can do that with ease.

Have a look at this image, where we checked the ranking of one of our blogs for a certain keyword, and it gives back the result in a flash.

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5. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a popular web traffic analysis tool. With this tool, you can get all in one website analytics & compare website traffic and performance. Which can help you with your future strategies.

And with the extensions of SimilarWeb, you can literally do it all without even leaving the website you are in.

6. WPADMIN : WordPress Site Manager

WPADMIN, known more by the name WordPress Site Manager is another chrome extension that you must need in 2021. If you own multiple WordPress sites, it can come in super handy.

This WordPress Site Manager lets you add multiple WordPress site credentials so that you don’t have to input the credentials every time. If you’re like us, you know the hassle of remembering and inserting the credentials every time, so this extension will surely come as a relief.

7. WP Sniffer

Ever visited a WordPress site and liked the design so much that you wanted to know the theme being used to design the website? Well, you’re not alone. We found ourselves in the same situation quite often.

This sniffer has a nose like a bear and can tell you the theme being used to build the website if it is built with WordPress. If it is available in the WordPress theme repository, you’ll also get the link to that. If not, the button will redirect to the Google search page with the term “Theme name + WordPress theme”.

(N.B: Some website owners disable the option to display the theme name, WP Sniffer will be unable to sniff the theme in that case, even if the site is running WordPress.)

8. WhatFont

Sniffing theme isn’t enough for you? Fancy another website’s font as well? Well, we hate to disappoint you, so here’s an extension to that!

WhatFont is an excellent extension for marketers and developers alike. This extension can find out which font is being used on a website. It will also help you get information about font size, weight, style, and even a link to the font.

Still not using the extension? Now’s the time to install it.

GET WHATFONT CHROME EXTENSION

9. WPintel – WordPress Vulnerability Scanner

Ever visited a website and thought to yourself, whoa! I need some intel on that. Well, neither did we.

But as WordPress enthusiasts, we did felt the need to know the WordPress version in use for the site, if it has any vulnerabilities, which plugins & themes are being used, and who are the users using this website.

However, this free extension often fails to acquire the information, if the site owner block anyone from accessing these data.

10. Keyword Surfer

Remember Keyword Everywhere? Doesn’t matter if you didn’t know about it, Keyword Surfer is as good of Keywords Everywhere alternative as there can be.

With Keyword Surfer installed, every time you search something on Google, you will see the search volume of that term. Moreover, you will also get the related search keyword volumes.

As you can see from the image above, Keyword Surfer also presents some nice keyword ideas from time to time. Besides, article length and estimated monthly traffic for the domain is also something that can help any marketer.

GET Keyword surfer CHROME EXTENSION

11. Check My Links

Whether you are a content editor, marketer, or SEO specialist, you need this extension on your browser. Because of all the things, broken links are a kind of thing that you don’t want on your webpage.

And if you ever manually checked broken links on your website, you know how much of a hassle it is. Check My Links is your instant solution to this time-consuming problem.

Check My Links checks all your links and finds those that are going nowhere, which eventually hamper your ranking. Broken links are not something that you want on your site and if you are as tired of searching for broken links as we are, add this to your browser today.

12. Post to WordPress

Post to WordPress is a relatively lesser-known chrome extension, but we don’t mind that as long as it brings convenience for you.

With this extension, you can connect your blog and publish articles to it without even accessing your site. Once you are logged in to your WordPress site with adequate permission, all you have to do is insert a title, content, select categories (right from your blog) and tags and then publish your blog. You can also save the post to draft.

Beside that you can source images for the blog you are publishing from the page you are currently in. Pretty nifty, right?

13. Eye Dropper

We sniffed themes and font, so why not sniff the colors as well? Eye Dropper is an excellent plugin that helps pick out colors from a web page.

After adding the extension, all you need to do is hovering your mouse over a part of your page and you will get to know the color with codes at the bottom of the page. The plugin is absolutely free, so you can install this extension without thinking of spending a penny.

GET EYE Dropper CHROME EXTENSION

Finishing Up

Behind the ever-growing popularity of Google Chrome, usage of extension is termed as of the main reasons. There are a lot of extensions that are available in the chrome web store right now, and with huge demand, the number of WordPress chrome extensions also increased. So we picked out the chrome extensions that we think are a must if you are a WordPress enthusiast, marketer, or even a web developer.

Got any plugins that you think deserves a shoutout here? Let us know in the comment below!

WordPress Full Site Editing: What it is & How It Can Shape the Future of WordPress

Are you a WordPress Enthusiast? Then you might already know about the 10 years long WordPress Roadmap, that will change the way we see WordPress. Phase 1 of this project is already finished, where we saw the release of Block Editor. Phase 2 is not too far away, and it is one of the things that we all were looking for, for a long time now.

Yes, we are talking about WordPress Full Site Editing, or simply FSE. And our wait is almost over.

According to Matt Mullenweg’s speech on State of the Word 2020, we will be seeing this long-awaited feature in 2021.

Phase 1 and Phase 2 is also very related to each other, as Gutenberg blocks will be in the core of WordPress Full Site Editing. If you’re not used to Gutenberg yet, now would be the time to do so. Because, Gutenberg is not just the block editor that helps you edit your blog, it is meant to be the forerunner of the modernization process of WordPress. So the importance of Gutenberg can not be ignored.

However, for most people, WordPress Full Site Editing is one of the most important parts of the process that we are talking about. Now that it is almost here, it is natural to worry about the impact of FSE on your existing site, whether you are using a third-party theme or a page builder. So bear with us, as we tell you all about WordPress Full Site Editing, why is it so important and what are the impacts of this particular feature that we are rating so highly.

Why is WordPress Working on the Full Site Editing?

WordPress Full Site Editing What it Is & How It Can Shape The Future of WordPress

WordPress started out as a platform for bloggers looking for a free way to publish their texts online. But over the years, its true potential slowly revealed, as people started to build all kinds of sites using WordPress. In fact, WordPress is used by so many people that it powers over 39% of the web that we see today.

But the truth is, WordPress with its proven technologies was getting outdated. Just at the right time, it was decided that WordPress would get a step-up by using modern technology and offer a more customer-friendly way of developing. Thus, the inception of the Gutenberg project.

In total, 4 major phases of the Gutenberg project were planned. It is a project that is supposed to change the publishing of content on the web. In the first phase of the project, the block editor was released in late 2018, with the second one supposed to be launched in the latter part of 2021. Full Site Editing, the second phase is likely to change how we design the whole outlook of a WordPress website.

With the page builder plugins like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi becoming more and more popular, the default way of designing a WordPress website was becoming kind of obsolete. So the WordPress Full Site Editing will come as a blessing and offer the developers and site owners a more modern and dynamic site-building experience. The full site editing will rely on WordPress REST API, React, GraphQL on its core, so there’s no doubt about the availability of cutting-edge web developing experience.

These are the prime reason for WordPress to opt for offering the full site editing feature.

A Sneak Peek into the WordPress Full Site Editing

WordPress Full Site Editing will unlock new potential for a new era of web development. It will be easy to use and highly customizable. We have already crossed the era of the classic editor, where we could only publish some text on our blogs and add some media that doesn’t align with how you wanted it to be. Gutenberg block editor gave us the chance to add blocks to our blogs. Whereas each block like text, image, button, video, column, table, and others are independent components that unite together to complete a beautiful blog post. Now this will not be just for the blog but for the entire site.

So how will the interface look? We have tried a beta theme that supports WordPress full site editing (FSE) and tried to know exactly that.

Here is a image of how a homepage editing can look like. If you have prior experience with Gutenberg block editor, you won’t have the slightest problem using this.

Home Page Editing

Reusable Blocks & Templates

You can save a specific block as a custom template, making them reusable later on. Below is an example of that. But does this also indicates that the block editor will now impact the theme file? We’ll get to that later!

WordPress Full Site Editing: What it is & How It Can Shape the Future of WordPress 3

New Blocks

As full site editing has a lot of scopes, it will also come with a whole lot of new blocks to handle them.

There are a lot of new blocks like Site Logo, Site Tagline, Query, and many more that we are noticing. We can only expect a lot more new blocks to come when WordPress Full Site Editing finally launches later this year.

Something that we wanted to mention specifically is that we also noticed some dynamic blocks which will be exciting to try out once fully released.

Global Styles

Global styles will be another crucial part of WordPress Full Site Editing. This will handle the global typography, font size, font color, page color, and background color, helping you create a brand identity for your website with ease.

Setting up a global color palette and style is super easy and intuitive, at least as much as we used till now.

However, it is left to be seen exactly how much improvement we will get on the global style. Anything on top of the existing one will be more than welcome, and I’m eagerly waiting for that.

There are many more features that are rolling out and will be rolled out in the days to come. For now, it does look like exciting prospects from what we have seen using the beta version.

WordPress Full Site Editing: What it is & How It Can Shape the Future of WordPress 4

Will WordPress Full Site Editing Affect the Existing Plugins & Themes?

This is a question that might be hovering over many developer’s and site owner’s minds. Will the WordPress Full Site Editing have a bad impact on the plugins and themes?

We can not yet tell you that it will have a disastrous impact or not. But while using the FSE (Beta) using the Q Theme, we did have to reactive a few plugins before we were able to use it.

But this can be a glitch they will solve, or a new guideline might be coming towards us, so that the developers and site owners can be prepared for a possible change that they have to make to make their plugins and sites compatible with the WordPress full site editing.

As for the themes, I talked above about the new reusable custom templates and their impacts on the themes. But what we noticed is that templates are not being stored in the theme itself, rather it is saved globally. So even if you use a different theme, later on, you can use that templates again.

But for making the themes compatible with the block-based editor, theme developers will have a lot of tasks ahead, that is for sure.

Is it a Big Threat for the Page Builders?

Page builders are the direct competitors of the WordPress full site editing feature, no doubt about that. But the most popular drag & drop page builders like Elementor, Divi, or Beaver has a lot of features and pre-made templates that are popular with millions of people.

We are not expecting them to vanish overnight, rather their ease of use will make them a good contender along with the WordPress full site editing. And they will surely get the fast mover advantage. But as Gutenberg improves and provides as much function as the likes of Elementor, while being a core part of WordPress, we are not yet sure if the page builder will stay relevant in the far future.

What Does The Future Hold for WordPress?

WordPress was lacking behind in terms of customization, offering modern design, and using modern technologies. But this revamp plan is surely getting me and many other WordPress enthusiasts hopeful and excited.

The Gutenberg project was not well received by the users initially, but it is something that we have seen over and over again, that it is not easy for people to accept change in the big platforms. The new Facebook design is another good example of that. But as we’re seeing more and more of Gutenberg, we now know that it is not just a block editor for editing the blog posts but a part of a big future that will change how we see and use WordPress to build websites.

Like the Gutenberg printing press technology that changed the printing industry, the WordPress Gutenberg project will transform how we publish content online and transform it for better.

While WordPress now powering more than 39% of websites worldwide, to keep up with the stiff competition with the uprise of drag and drop CMS’s like Wix.

The future looks bright and promising, and I’m waiting eagerly with my finger crossed, just like you all are.

Top WordPress Plugins for your Site in 2021 (Freemium)

There are important plugins and there are must-have plugins. In this blog, we have created a list of some of the top WordPress plugins that will be highly useful in 2021.

Almost 37% of the total websites in the world are built using WordPress. It is also the largest CMS in the world, with more than 60% share of the CMS market.

So without any surprise, it is also bolstered with the largest array of plugins than any other CMS in the world. But this array of choices might also confuse you, especially if you are not an advanced user. With the number of plugins keeps on increasing year by year, it is getting even harder to filter out the most useful plugins out of many less capable ones.

In this list, we will talk about some of the top WordPress plugins that will surely prove to be useful in 2021.

How WPHive Selected the Most Useful WordPress Plugins

WPHive has a team of expert who eats and sleeps WordPress. We use tons of plugins, the new ones and the old, in order to test them out. We thrive to find the most amazing plugins and themes, that can help you.

The list of most useful plugins that we choose are sorted based on two major factors.

Their essentiality.
The ease of use.

We sorted the list for two different genres, blog, and eCommerce websites. For that, we have explored hundreds of plugins and selected the ones that we think are the most useful. You might know most of the plugins already, as the best plugins are also the most well-known.

List of Top WordPress Plugins

We have divided our list of top WordPress plugins into two sections. The top plugins for eCommerce and top plugins for blogs. So without wasting any more time, let’s get to it!

Plugins for Blog

plugins for eCommerce

Top WordPress Plugins for Blog Sites

WordPress was primarily built for creating blog sites. So generally, there are some awesome plugins for blogs that are available for WordPress. So we had a hard time choosing the most useful ones among so many plugins.

Rank Math SEO

Regarded as one of the best SEO plugins, Rank Math has surely become a force to reckon with. Despite not being the SEO plugin with the most active installation, it proved to be very useful and on par with the best SEO plugins like Yoast SEO.

With options to add unlimited focus keywords that can be very helpful for blogs, a 3x lighter UI than Yoast SEO, and an above-par free version, Rank Math is surely killing the SEO game.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes. Starts at $59/year.

jetPack

Jetpack is the ultimate allrounder for WordPress.org sites. Its large array of modules can help you do a wide range of things like blogging enhancement (related post, social share button, subscription), security enhancement, performance enhancement, theme enhancement, antispam, loads of widgets, and many more.

It is truly a one stop plugin for WordPress sites. And it will not be any less useful in 2021.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes. Individual pricing for modules.

WP Super Cache

There are loads of caching plugins out there, but WP Super Cache is different in many ways. While being one of the best caching plugins available for WordPress, it is one of the few plugins to offer so many features for free. Speed is one of the major issues for a blog, so generally, this becomes an easy suggestion for its utter effectiveness.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: No.

Akismet

Akismet stops spam. And they do it better than anyone else. If you’re a blogger, there’s a good chance you have experienced comment spam very often. If you are seeking a plugin that can help you save your site from these comment spamming, Akismet is your go-to plugin.

Have a blog? You need it.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes. Starts at $8.33/month.

Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a useful link-shortener plugin. Do you want to shorten that ugly big URL into a nice little link that is sharable on social media or email? Or maybe you want to hide the affiliate URL into disguise. But you can’t really use bit.ly or similar services, as they don’t let you use your own domain for that. Well, Pretty Links can help you do that with ease.

Instead of bit.ly/abcde, you get to have shortened links like wphive.com/abcde

What’s more, the plugin is absolutely free to use on unlimited sites while also having a premium version that offers even more advanced features.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes. Starts at $9/month for 10,000 subscribers.

MonsterInsights

If you’re like us, you constantly want to know how your blog is performing. If users are liking it or not. What’s the average reading time, where are the visitors are coming from, and many more. And there’s no better place to get these statistics than Google Analytics. And Monster Insights make this insight more accessible by getting them right on your WordPress Admin Dashboard.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes. Starts at $99.50/year.

weMail

Without email marketing, even the best of your blogs wouldn’t get read by most people. Who wants that? Nowadays, every blogger collects and manages a subscriber list and mail them whenever new or interesting blogs are published.

weMail is a plugin that makes this process rather easier. It is an email sending API is a killer combination to send awesome emails, grow subscriber lists & promote products all within the WordPress dashboard.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes. Starts at $9/month for 10,000 subscribers.

Top WordPress Plugins for eCommerce Sites

Although WordPress started out as a platform that helps create blog sites without coding. But over the years it became capable of letting people build much more than that. Now there’s not a single type of website that you can not build with WordPress. That reflects in the stats of the eCommerce sites globally, as more than 30% of them are built using WordPress.

So generally there are loads of eCommerce plugins that are now available on the WordPress plugin repository. However, most of the plugins that we covered in the blogs section, are also important for blog sites.

WooCommerce

WordPress was intended to develop mostly blog sites, so there’s no default option to turn your WordPress website into an eCommerce. However, there are a lot of plugins to help you do that. The best of them is surely WooCommerce. Developed by Automattic, the mother company of WordPress, WooCommerce currently powers more than 93% of eCommerce websites built using WordPress!

This is because of the sheer number of features this plugin offers. More than 27% of all eCommerce sites worldwide are built using this plugin. The dominance of WooCommerce is likely to be increased in 2020.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: No. Some of the modules offered by WooCommerce are premium.

Elementor

Elementor is a page builder plugin and arguably the most popular one for WordPress. With it, designing an eCommerce becomes very easy. You can design your website, any way you like, with its impressive feature set. Add to that a lot of third-party addons like Happy Addons, which makes it even more powerful.

If you want to create a catchy, customized design for your eCommerce site, there’s no better option than Elementor.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes. Starting from $49/year.

Dokan Multivendor Plugin

While WooCommerce may be the best eCommerce tool for WordPress, Dokan is surely the best multi-vendor plugin to turn your WooCommerce-based eCommerce site into a multi-vendor one. It can save you from hundreds of hours of coding. With more than 50,000+ active installations and this is a plugin can offer you almost every multivendor feature that you can imagine.

Building an eCommerce site like Amazon, eBay is now just a matter of minutes with Dokan.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes. Starting from $149/year.

UpdraftPLUS

Updraft is a backup plugin that offers arguably the most number of features. Its pretty impressive range of features is used by more than 3+ million sites. By number, this is the most number of active installations for any backup plugin.

If you care about your eCommerce site, installing UpDraft Plus would be a nice little step towards protecting it.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes. Starting from $70/year.

LiveChat

If you believe customer support is the base of your business, then you should definitely use this plugin on your website. With the help of LiveChat, you can chat with your customers in real-time, effortlessly. Moreover, it works well with any popular page builder.

Free Version: Yes.
Pro Version: Yes, starting from $16/month.

Don’t Miss Out on the Best Plugins in 2021

202o was an eventful year. We experienced the inception of WordPress 5.5, the biggest update of the WordPress community for the year. Along with it, countless new plugins have emerged, while the old ones upgraded their armory.

2021 will not be any different.

If you want to take your website to the next level in 2021, consider installing the top WordPress plugins that we have talked about here. You can also compare the plugins with similar ones or get insights on any plugin from WP Hive.

GET EXCLUSIVE INSIGHTS OF PLUGINS FROM WP HIVE

Understanding 14 Types of Backlinks: Here’s How You Can Beat Your Competitor in SEO

All backlinks are not good for your website SEO. In pursuit of ranking don’t follow the shortcut to rank your site, rather understand the types of backlinks to use on your website.

Backlinks are one of the most essential parts of any SEO plan. Establishing backlinks with authority sites can surely put your site on good terms with the search engines. The more quality backlinks you have, the more the search engine will acknowledge your site as an important site for that particular topic.

Backlinks are considered a crucial authority and ranking factor for top search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.

However, not all types of backlinks can yield the same type of result. If you want to get the best outcome from your hard work, you should understand the good backlinks techniques and the bad backlinks techniques.

This article will cover 14 major backlink techniques and not all of them are healthy ways to rank your site. Read on to know the good and the bad types of backlinks in detail.

What is Backlink and Why Does It Matter?

In the world of the internet, a link is used to describe the way to connect to a particular webpage. In general, when a website links to another website, it is called backlinks. Usually, a website to link back to another website to prove the source of information or give it some credibility.

So when a website links back to another, search engines consider the latter website as an authority site. So the more website links to a particular website, the more powerful it gets.

This makes backlink a necessary part of SEO. Many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists consider backlinking as the most important ranking factor for search engines. This is why it’s important to know the difference between types of backlinks and only use the good ones!

14 Types of Backlinks Explained

There are many types of backlinks that SEO specialists use, all of which are broken down version of “14 Types of Backlinks”, that we will talk about today. So without further ado, let’s get to it!

The Best Types of Backlinks To Boosts Your SEO

1. Editorial backlinks

Editorial backlinks are one of the finest types of backlinks for your site. These backlinks are placed when you are well-known as the source of information or statistics and a website is trying to make their article look credible.

When you can create top-notch content that makes you an established authority site in your arena, getting editorial backlinks is actually very easy. In order to become an authority site and a thought leader, you need to create well-researched and high-quality content continuously.

2. Guest Blogging Backlinks

Guest blogging is not as popular as it was in the 2010s, but it is certainly one of the easiest ways to get backlinks from a top site. In order to get these types of backlinks, you have to write high-quality content for a top site for free and they’ll offer you to include a backlink to your site. This type of backlinks allows you to get backlinks on your desired keyword.

3. Business Profile Backlinks

When you have a well-established organization, you will try to branch out. The same goes for websites, only here you try to branch out by creating profiles on different authoritative directories, social media, review websites. Doing these things not only makes you look like an established website to search engine but also get you more than one backlinks each

4. Webinar Backlinks

Webinars are also a kind of editorial backlinks, but for videos. Making quality and informational webinars and letting others embed that on their site will give you the chance to get not only more views but also genuine backlinks.

The important thing to remember here is to provide such kinds of information that not only prove to be useful but also sharable.

5. Free Tool Backlinks

As we already said, in order to get organic backlinks, you need to create useful content. But what if you go one step ahead and create free tools for your respective industry to use? Won’t that help you get more backlink? The answer is, yes, It will. And we call these types of backlinks, “The Free Tool Backlinks”.

More Backlinks That Helps SEO

6. Acknowledgment Backlinks

Acknowledgement backlinks are special type backlinks that are generated because of donation or relationship. There are three major ways to get an acknowledgement backlink that, and we’ve mentioned those below to give you a clear understanding of what acknowledgement backlink actually is. Ways to get acknowledgement backlinks are –

Donating for a cause.
Speaking to an event.
Sponsoring an event.

Usually, these types of backlinks don’t come with any keywords or content but a plain mention on the host website.

7. Guest Post Bio Backlinks

Some websites have a regulation of not accepting backlinks inside a content when you do a guest post. However, most of them usually allow having a link inside the author’s bio. Though these types of backlinks will not be as impactful as a guest blogging backlink, it will still have a somewhat positive impact.

8. Badge Backlinks

Badge backlinks are a way to empower both the site that is giving out the links and the site that is being linked to. Creating a listing blog that includes the top 10 or top 20 websites is a great way to get backlinks. You can also give out awards to sites and offer them a badge.

Later, the site that is being motioned or received the badge will link back to your website. This way you can get some invaluable backlinks without much work. But keep in mind that in order to get people to recognize your award or listing, you have to be a somewhat known or established site in your arena.

Understanding 14 Types of Backlinks: Here’s How You Can Beat Your Competitor in SEO 5

9. Newsworthy Press Release Backlinks

The press release is an important way to let people know about you while also get backlinks. This two-way promotion makes it one of the best marketing tactics. So whenever you have something worth sharing with a broader audience, a press release always a good option.

10. Comment Backlinks

Comment backlink is another old technique to get backlinks. This way of getting backlinks is, however, often misused by spammers. Whenever you comment on a website or a blog post, you are generally permitted to add a link to your website. If the search engines suspect that you are posting spammy links, you can even get penalized for this type of backlink.

However, proper use of comment backlinks is still a great way to generate backlinks.

Backlinks That You Need to Avoid

11. Paid Links

Backlinks are an integral part of SEO strategy. This influences many people to even adopt blackhat types of backlinks like buying backlinks from other websites or publishers. But keep in mind that, Google or any other search engine can most of the time asses if your link is relevant or not. If a search engine determines that one of your backlinks is a commercially formed link, it will negatively impact the ranking of your website.

12. Non-Newsworthy Press Release

We have talked about press releases being a great way to get backlinks while also giving your website exposure. However, we also suggested using press releases as a way to share something big happening to your organization. If you publish a press release just for getting another backlink, it will be considered as a bad practice for SEO and can also result in a drop in SERP ranking.

13. Directory Links

Once a popular way of gaining backlink is now not that useful anymore. With thousands of directories growing up over the years, stick with only the most trusted and authoritative directory site if you want to get something good out of it.

14. Low Quality Forum Backlink

If you don’t want to get lesser-known directory backlinks, then you should also avoid trying to get backlinks from low-quality forums as well. Joining a lot of forums and post irrelevant backlinks is not a great way of getting backlinks anymore. In fact, this is one of the worst types of backlinks you can get for your website.

Wrapping Up

No one can ignore the importance of backlinks for an effective SEO strategy. However, it’s important to ensure you are getting more quality than quantity. Getting a single backlink from a top-tier, high authority site can have a more impact on ranking than many backlinks from weak websites.

However, Different types of backlinks techniques result in different levels of ranking boost, while some can even make your site get penalized for wrongdoing!

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets

If you’re an aspiring data analyst, Excel is still the most essential tool out there. It’s very important to learn different functions if you want to do data analytics in excel. But, it’s not always as easy as it may seem. There are more than 500 functions in excel. This big collection of functions help you work with big data set and do analytics. Moreover learning these functions will also help you do similar tasks using Google Sheets, which is quite similar to Excel in terms of features and formulas.

However, learning all these functions is not an easy task to do, especially if you are someone who is new in data analytics. So we filtered out some of the most important functions that will help you do data analytics in Excel.

Importance of Data Analytics

Today data is the most important asset for any business. The more data you have, the more actionable insight you can get.

In today’s world data analysis has many applications for all sorts of business. Be it an offline business or an online business, data analysis shows you how you can make intelligent data-drive n decisions reducing the margin of error. Data analytics can also help stay ahead of your competition data analysis by giving you an edge over others, in terms of customer insights.

Apart from these data analysis can also help you with –

Determining the target customers.
Bring innovation.
Reducing business costs.
Help make effective business plans.

Excel & Data Analytics – Why & How Can You Do it?

Excel or spreadsheet is one of the most influential tools ever developed by Microsoft. It has varied applications and data analysis is one of the most important ones from those.

Excel has a huge collection of formulas that make it very easy to analyze, filter, sort, or make reports from a large quantity of data. Moreover, it is very easy to learn and start working with. You don’t even need to learn all the formulas that excel offers, in order to start with data analytics in excel. Starting with only a few most used formulas can get you through the initial learning stage and give you the most sought after information.

So it’s quite obvious why you should start data analytics in excel. It is quick to learn, easy to understand, and very affordable as well.

Excel vs Google Sheets: Things to Consider

When writing an article about Excel and its importance in data analysis, it is almost impossible to do it without mentioning Google Sheets. Though Excel was built long before Google Sheets, these two are now almost comparable in terms of features and popularity. So what are the major difference between Excel and Google sheets? Let’s get to know.

Functions: Excel has an edge over Google Sheets in terms of the number of functions it has. Large number of formulas make Excel the popular choice till now, but it can change in the recent future as Google is adding new functions aggressively over the last years.
Price: Microsoft Office 365 costs $8.25 per month. While you can use Google Sheets for free. However, there is a business subscription that costs $5 per month.
Data Analysis & Visualization: If you are planning to mostly perform data analytics, Excel is surely a superior option given its large array of functions as well as built-in charts and visualization options. Google Sheets, on the other hand, has fewer number of formulas and only manual visualization capability.
Ease of Use: Ease of use is where Google Sheets dominate Excel. It offers simultaneous edit from multiple people, while Excel doesn’t have that luxury. This is because Excel is an offline software where Google Sheets is a cloud-based one.

Now that you know the differences between this two spreadsheet software, it is clear that as of now Excel is only a slight bit ahead. But in because of the complete package and ease of use, more and more people are choosing Google Sheets as their primary software.

Most Important Excel Functions for Data Analysis

Now that we know the way we should use excel for data analysis, let’s learn the most important functions that are a must for data analysts. If you are a beginner, these are the formulas that you will be working with the most.

1. CONCATENATE

We’re starting with one of the most important functions, CONCATENATE. This handy function lets you combine the data of multiple cells into one single cell. Once you start your journey as a professional data analyst, you’ll realize the tur importance of this function.

Also, below is an example of how it works.

Formula: =CONCATENATE(cell1, cell2)

2. LEN

LEN is another function that is highly used in data analysis. We often need to calculate the number of characters on a cell. For example, if you analysis a product dataset for an eCommerce business, you’ll find lots of different SKUs. If you can display the number of characters, you can easily get to know it. Apart from that, you might need to set a word limit for a cell, which is quite easy with this function.

Formula: =LEN(cell)

3. SORT

SORT is one of the self-explanatory features that say it all through its name. This is not only a necessary feature but also a lifesaver. Imagine finding a certain value from thousands of disordered data? It could’ve been a nightmare for a data analyst had there not been this function.

With SORT, you can just arrange your data by highest or lowest value, and easily find out the one you need. An ordered list also makes life easy for a data analyst in many ways.

Here’s how you can use this feature.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 6

As you can see, there is a dedicated feature for sorting a list of data. Here we have selected the Length data and sorted them starting from the smallest.

The good thing is when you sort a single column of data, it also sorts the corresponding row with it.

4. FILTER

FILTER is another super handy feature from excel. It is used when you need to show that contains one or more specific terms. When you have thousands of data to analyze, this is another feature that will help immensely.

Have a look at how you can work with one of the most used functions to do data analytics in excel. Click on the Filter option from the Sort & Filter button. You can see a downward arrow with every collum as soon as you click on the Filter.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 7

Now you can filter out the result that matches your desired data.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 8

And as you can see, the sheet is now showing only the rows that includes 1995.

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5. VLOOKUP

Ah, the VLOOKUP! Even if you haven’t worked as a data analyst, you must know this function if you did even some small task-completion with excel. It is considered as one of the most recognized excel function.

Using VLOOKUP, you can easily find data associated with a value that the user chooses. This feature has multiple impressive applications. You can search within a single table or multiple tables.

For example, you have Name and Employee ID in one table and Name and Salary in another, you can easily add them together using VLOOKUP.

Let’s see how VLOOKUP works.

VLOOKUP formula consists of 4 different parameters, LOOKUP_VALUE, TABLE_ARRAY, COL_INDEX_NUM, [RANGE_LOOKUP

LOOKUP VALUE is the value you want to look for.
TABLE ARRAY is the table where you want the function to look.
INDEX NUM is the column number of the information you need.
RANGE LOOKUP is used to specify the type of lookup.

Here’s how we started the VLOOKUP. We specified the value we want to look at, which is Johnny in our case. Then we selected the cell where the value Johnny is.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 10

After that, we selected the data which has the birth year related to all the name here. We put in sheet 2.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 11

Then we also selected the column where our desired information is. Which is in B or Column 2 in our case.

Here is the end result. Efficient, right?

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 12

Formula: LOOKUP_VALUE, TABLE_ARRAY, COL_INDEX_NUM, [RANGE_LOOKUP

6. LEFT / RIGHT

Remember what CONCATENATE does? Well, the LEFT/RIGHT function does the opposite. With these two functions, you can extract data extract specific text/number from a cell. While the LEFT formula extracts these data from the beginning part, the RIGHT formula does it from the end.

Here’s how you can perform the operation with these functions. Staring with the LEFT function.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 13

And the RIGHT.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 14

Here is the end result.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 15

Formula: =LEFT(cell, length of data to extract from left)

=RIGHT(cell, length of data to extract from right)

7. FIND & REPLACE

FIND & REPLACE! Does it need any extra introduction? With this feature, you can find a specific text or number within a table. Then it replaces all the data that matches your provided term with a new term that you provide.

It can be used to replace large numbers of mistaken data at once. You can also use it to slightly modify a large number of data. No wonder it is used heavily to do data analytics in excel.

Using Find & Replace is quite easy.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 16

But it does give back some good results. You can see that the word Johnny is now replaced with Adam everywhere in the sheet.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 17

8. IF

IF function helps automate decision making. This makes it a very important function for data analysis.

With the IF function, you can make excel do a specific task or show a result based on the outcome of another operation. Let’s see an example of what IF does and how we can automate a decision using this function.

We want to if the birth year is 1996 or not, so we selected ==1996 in the first parameter, and then set the formula to show True if the value is true and False if the value is false.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 18

Here is the result.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 19

Formula: =IF(logical test, value if true, value if false)

9. SUMIF

SUMIF is another excel function that you must learn to start doing data analytics in excel.SUMIF sums up all the number that matches specific criteria.

Let’s say you have many different numbers, but you want to get the sum of a specific number (i.e. 50) of that table. This function will find how many times the number is present on that table and do a sum.

Here’s how it works.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 20

Now we can find the sum of the values that are exactly 1995. Here is the result.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 21

Formula: =SUMIFS(sum range, criteria)

10. COUNTIF

COUNTIF function is almost like the SUMIF. But unlike SUMIF, it does not actually sum-up all the number that matches your criteria. COUNTIF calculates and shows you how many times your desired data is present on the sheet.

The operation of COUNTIF is very straightforward and goes like below.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 22

And now you can exactly how many times 1995 is present in the sheet.

How to Use Important Functions of Data Analytics in Excel and Google Sheets 23

Formula: =COUNTIFS range, criteria)

Wrapping Up

The growing demand for data analysis is not a miracle. The application of data analysis is diverse. Despite the emergence of many new data analytics software, excel is still one of the most powerful tools for data analysis.

Learning excel functions is a must for any aspiring data analyst. But you can’t just learn all the functions at once and start data analytics in excel over night.

The right way to learn them is to just start data analysis with some important functions and learn all other functions from time to time when you need them. So, make sure to learn the use of the most important excel functions and get started with your journey of being a data analyst.

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WordPress 5.5 Breaks Plugins & Sites: Here is the Fix

The recent WordPress 5.5 update caused many plugins and sites to crash and behave oddly. But you can fix the WordPress update problems with jQuery Migrate helper.

WordPress 5.5 was recently released to the public. WordPress branded it with the nickname “Eckstine“. Apart from the new branding, a lot of new features and updates were also announced.

However, for some people, these new updates are actually doing the opposite of improving their site performance. A lot of site owners reported that WordPress 5.5 breaks plugins and sites.

If you are a site owner, who’s affected by the recent changes from WordPress, don’t worry. Let’s go through the solution and fix the issues for your website.

When Did the Problem Start

WordPress released version 5.5 aka “Eckstine” on August 11, 2020. Immediately after that, some developers and site owners started to notice and then reported different types of problems.

Many of the sites started showing problems as pop-ups and pull-down stopped working. But the major problem was that plugins like Yoast SEO, Classic Editor stopped working properly. Many site owners were in a fix with the breaking of Yoast SEO, which is one of the most used plugins for WordPress sites. Some of them are even trying to get back to version 5.4.2 to fix this.

Why WordPress 5.5 Breaks Plugins & Sites

The problem that triggered plugins and sites to break after WordPress 5.5 update was that WordPress removed jQuery Migrate. Although many people noticed it after WordPress 5.5 release, it’s removal was announced 2 months prior to that. Developers were also told to update plugins and themes accordingly.

With the removal of this tool, plugins, and themes with outdated core stopped working properly. This resulted in a disastrous situation for some site owners, who found their site behaving oddly.

WordPress 5.5 Breaks Plugins & Sites: Here is the Fix 25

What is jQuery Migrate and Why did WordPress Remove It?

jQuery Migrate is a javascript library. It helped plugins and themes that are outdated to run smoothly on the newer version of jQuery. With the help of jQuery migrate, plugins that were compatible with the older version of jQuery and not updated according to the new jQuery version was able to run. However, as WordPress is updating to the latest supported version of jQuery, the older version of plugins needed to be updated along with it.

WordPress announced it before the WordPress 5.5 release that removing the jQuery migrate is necessary to make this transition happen smoothly.

How to fix WordPress 5.5 Issues with jQuery Migrate Helper?

Although WordPress removed the tool jQuery Migrate, you can bypass the problem for now. In order to do this, you need to install a plugin developed by the official WordPress team, the jQuery Migrate Helper.

WordPress 5.5 Breaks Plugins & Sites: Here is the Fix 26

What this plugin does is help you enable the jQuery Migrate tool again, so that your outdated plugins can still work. However, WordPress developed it only as a temporary solution, not a permanent one.

Meanwhile, all plugin and theme need to be updated and have to be compatible with the newer version of jQuery in order to run smoothly in the future.

WordPress 5.5 Breaks Plugins & Sites: Here is the Fix 27

GET JQUERY MIGRATE HELPER FROM WPHIVE

What to Do If You’re a Developer

If you’re a developer, it is time to update your plugin or theme in order to provide the customer with a smooth experience. WordPress has released a plugin called Test jQuery Updates, in order to help you check your plugin against the new jQuery version before updating them on the WordPress repository.

Beware of the fact that while activating this plugin will not replace the current jQuery but it will disable jQuery Migrate.

Update Your Plugins & Themes

As a site owner, whenever your plugin developer drops a new update, try to update it as soon as possible. New updates minimize a lot of security updates and compatibility issues. With the new “Auto Update Plugin” option from WordPress, it is now even easier to keep your website updated and safe.

GET THE TEST JQUERY UPDATES FROM WPHIVE

How to Delete WordPress Site or Unpublish Temporarily

Whether you want to start a new venture or just want to take a break from your website. There could be many reasons one might want to unpublish or even permanently delete a WordPress site. We also got several messages from our readers seeking ways on how to delete WordPress site.

Whatever the reason for you to remove or unpublish your WordPress website, there are several ways to do that. You can also put up a page stating that you’re on maintenance or on a break if you’re planning to come back.

In this article, we will take you through the process of how to delete WordPress website or unpublish it temporarily. So without further ado, let’s get to it!

WordPress Site Permanently Delete vs Temporarily Unpublish

How to Delete WordPress Site or Unpublish Temporarily

Once you create your WordPress website, depending on your necessity, there are two ways to hide that from the visitors.

You can either unpublish your website or delete it. The difference between these two ways is that if you unpublish your website, you can republish it anytime you want. But if you delete your WordPress website, you’ll never get it back.

If you want to hide your website for a while because you’re planning to upgrade some functionalities of your website, we suggest that you unpublish your website. However, if you’re sure that you don’t want anything to do with your website anymore, we will also let you know how to do that.

When to Permanently Delete WordPress Site

Let’s talk about when exactly you should permanently delete your WordPress site. There are a couple of occasions when one might need to permanently delete the WordPress website.

If you are planning to start a new project that makes the current project obsolete, then you might think of deleting the older one.
You might also want to delete a website that hasn’t lived up to the potential and became unable to reach the goal you set.
There might also have personal reasons for you to delete your website.

Now that you’re sure that you want to delete the website permanently, let’s roll towards that.

How to Delete a WordPress Site Permanently

Permanently deleting your website and removing its existence from the web takes some time. Just deleting your website from your server won’t do the trick. Google might still have your website on SERP thinking that it might be down for some time.

So in this part of our blog, we’ll let you know how to how to delete WordPress site permanently and remove all its traces from the internet.

1. Backup your Data

Although you seem to be pretty much settled about deleting your website forever, it is still a good idea to backup your website data.

At some point, you might want to get your website back. Or you might also lose some important data along with the website. Backing up your website data can help get back your website or specific content if needed in the future.

You can either back up your website data into cloud storage or your hosting server. You can also download all the data to your pc.

2. Delete All Data from Server

Now that you are done with the back up of website data. Let’s head on to delete all the WordPress files from your hosting server. Bear in mind that, this will delete all the plugins, themes, posts, and media from your WordPress website.

To do this, first, log in to your hosting server. Depending on the hosting provider, you will find something like files or file manager. Open the file manager and delete all the website data from the root directory.

All your data may still be in the trash option, so be sure to delete them from the trash as well.

3. Remove Your Website from Search Engine

Even after deleting the website, it will still be visible to Google and other search engines. Search engines keep your website indexed for a while even after you delete all your data. This is because your website might become down temporarily or get hacked and search engines hope that you might revive your website after a while.

Step 1

In order to fully remove your website from the search engines, as soon as you delete all your data, create a robots.txt file on your root directory. As you might already know, robots.txt deals with the search engine crawlers and inform them about different pages. You can also use this file to tell the crawlers not to index your site.

Now, to do that, create the robots.txt file and simply paste the following lines of code into it.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This two-line tells the search engine crawlers to avoid indexing your website and show them on SERP’s.

Step 2

However, some search engines may keep showing your website ignoring the robots.txt file.

So, to permanently remove your website from SERP’s, create a new file on your root directory and name it .htaccess. Now open the file and paste the following lines of code into it –

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L,G]

Don’t forget to replace the example.com with your website domain name. After this, your website will be out of search engines within days.

How to Restart Your Website with Backup Data?

Now you know how to delete WordPress site and might’ve already deleted your site following our guide. But you might also want to restore your data and get back to running your website again in the future. So, how can you do that?

Depending on which way you backed up your website you may have to follow different methods. For example, if you used a WordPress backup plugin to back up your website data, follow their manual to restore your website.

You might also backup your data manually, in that case uploading that to your website data manually through FTP will do the trick.

How to Delete WordPress Site or Unpublish Temporarily 28

When to Temporarily Unpublish WordPress Site

So when exactly should you unpublish your WordPress site temporarily?

There can be two major reasons to unpublish your website on a short-time basis.

When you want to take a temporary break from your website, but you will come back after that period. For this, you don’t need to delete your website, only unpublishing it will achieve your goal.
The second one is when you want to upgrade or run maintenance on your website. While doing this, you can also choose to put up a page informing everyone about your upgradation and when you’ll be back.

How to Temporarily Unpublish WordPress Site

We already covered how to delete WordPress site permanently, now it’s time to let you know how you can unpublish a WordPress site temporarily.

Unpublish a Post from the Website

You may not need to unpublish the whole website if you just need a single post to be hidden from the visitor. You can easily unpublish a post from WordPress.

To do this, first enter the blog post you want to hide, from WP Admin Dashboard > Posts > Your Post

You’ll find a page like the one below. On the right side, you can see the visibility option. Change the visibility from Public to Private.

Once you change the visibility, the post will not be visible to the public anymore. However, site admin and editors will still be able to see the post.

Unpublish Entire Website

If you want to unpublish your whole website entirely, you can do that as well.

One way to hide your website from the world is by discouraging search engines from indexing your site. You can do that from WP Admin Dashboard > Settings > Reading

However, as it has a negative impact on your website’s SEO, many people tend to avoid this method. Just like many webmasters, we also suggest not use this option to unpublish your website.

If you decide to not follow this method, let’s head towards the second one. This method requires you to use a free plugin, WordPress Password Protect Page. Which you can install from the WordPress plugin repository. Once you’re done with the installation, find Password Protect WordPress from the admin dashboard. Now you have to turn on Password Protect Entire Site from the Entire Site tab. This will password protect your entire site, and make it private from the visitors.

GET PASS PROTECT WORDPRESS FROM WPHIVE

Putting up Maintenance Mode

We already learned how to password protect a WordPress website. But this is not always what you might need. If you’re just running routine maintenance on your website, putting up a page for “Maintenance Mode” would be a far better solution. This way, your visitors will get to know what is going on with your website and will check back later.

Now, many themes have an option for turning on “Under Construction” or “Maintenance Mode”. But a majority of them do not. However, you can use free plugins to do that, if your theme doesn’t have that option built-in. One great free plugin that does this well, is “Under Construction“. With this, you can easily hide your site and put up a “Maintenance Mode” page. Once you install this plugin from the WordPress plugin repository, it can be found under WP Admin Dashboard > Theme Panel > Under Construction.

From that page, just check Enable Under Construction and select a page that you want to put up.

GET UNDER CONSTRUCTION FROM WPHIVE

How to Republish Your Website with Ease

Republishing your website is easier than unpublishing it. The unpublished posts can be published by just changing the visibility option from Private to Public.

Republishing the entire website is also easy like that. If you have password-protected your site using WordPress Password Protect Page, disabling the Password Protect Entire Site from the Entire Site tab will set it back to normal.

If you have used the plugin “Under Construction”, uncheck the Enable Under Construction option from WP Admin Dashboard > Theme Panel > Under Construction and you’re good to go again.

Wrapping Up

If it’s time to say goodbye to your WordPress website forever or for a while, this guide should help you. After reading the blog we hope you understand that it’s not that complicated to delete or unpublish a WordPress website. We wanted to write in detail on how to delete WordPress site. But if you still have any confusion, don’t forget to let us know.

10 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared

Backup plugins are one of the things that we miss the most. Worry not, we have prepared a list of top Backup Plugins just for you.

Imagine putting all your efforts into establishing a website and then losing all that overnight; It’s nothing short of a nightmare, right?

You can lose your website data for several reasons. Your server can crash, or the website might get hacked, or a faulty plugin can mess up your WordPress site.

However you might lose your data, you can always recover it, if you back up your data beforehand.

Often our hosting providers offer an automatic backup feature. But that is not always the best way to back up your data. If your website is based on WordPress, it’s better that you use a backup plugin to back up your data.

10 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared

However, among the countless backup plugins available for WordPress, it is not always easy to find out the best one. So, here we have compiled the list of 10 best backup plugins, from where you can choose the one that suits you.

Quick Navigation

Why do you need a WordPress Backup Plugin?
What to Look for While Choosing a Backup Plugin?
Our Top 10 Backup Plugins – Tried & Tested
Performance Test using WP Hive
Expert Opinion – Which is The Best?
Wrapping things Up

Why Do You Need A WordPress Backup Plugin?

We get asked a lot, “my web host provided me a free automatic backup policy, why do I still need to back up my website data with a WordPress Backup Plugin?”

Yes, it’s true that many hosting providers offer free backup policy. But they don’t really tell you the whole story. First of all restoring data from your host is a complicated process. It takes a certain level of technical knowledge to do so.

However, we cannot just discourage you to use that because it is a complicated process. The truth is, that is not the only thing that is wrong about the automatic backup features offered by your hosting provider. Even if your hosting provider offers you an automatic data backup feature, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever take any responsibility in case something goes wrong.

Don’t believe us? Let’s check out some of the hidden terms you unknowingly accept from renowned hosting providers.

HostGator is not responsible for files and/or data residing on your account. You agree to take full responsibility for all files and data transferred and to maintain all appropriate backup of files and data stored on HostGator’s servers.
– UNIVERSAL TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT (HostGator)

You agree to back-up all of your User Content so that you can access and use it when needed. GoDaddy does not warrant that it backs-up any Account or User Content, and you agree to accept as a risk the loss of any and all of your User Content.
– UNIVERSAL TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT (GoDaddy)

You will be solely responsible for backing-up all Subscriber Content, including any Subscriber Websites off of Bluehost’s servers. This is an affirmative duty. Bluehost is not responsible for the loss of any Subscriber Content.

IT IS SOLELY SUBSCRIBER’S DUTY AND RESPONSIBILITY TO BACKUP SUBSCRIBER’S FILES AND DATA ON BLUEHOST SERVERS, AND under no circumstance will Bluehost be liable to anyone FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND under any legal theory for loss of Subscriber files and/or data on any Bluehost server.
– User Agreement (Bluehost)

As we can see from the terms above, even if your hosting provider promises you an auto backup policy it is not always guaranteed. So, unless you want to face a sudden loss of data, we recommend you to use a proper backup plugin for WordPress.

Features You Should Look For While Choosing A Backup Plugin

Modern backup solutions have loads of features at your disposal. It’s often hard for a newbie to tell what are the key features that one should look for while choosing a backup plugin for WordPress.So, let’s get to know what are those features that distinguish a good backup plugin from bad ones.

Scheduled Backup Policy: It is without any doubt, one of the most crucial features that you must seek while choosing a backup plugin. A scheduled backup policy ensures automatic website backup on a fixed time, even when you’re not around.

Full Website Backup: Some backup plugins only backs up your database. It’s better to choose plugins that can back up the whole website. A full website backup includes all your media, themes, files, and of course the database.

Backup to External Storage: Your backup plugin should be able to back up your data to external resources such as Dropbox, G Drive, Amazon S3, OneDrive. Apart from your hosting, it’s better to keep your data saved on different storage. However, This feature is now included with almost all the modern backup plugins.

Our Top 10 List – Tried & Tested

So, we know why we need a backup plugin, and we know what are the essential features that we should look for. But there are a lot of plugins that match our criteria. So, we narrowed down the list for you by testing a lot of them, and here is the list of top 10 backup plugins from our test.

BlogVault

BlogVault is one of the most popular backup plugins on WordPress. It is a feature-rich plugin that not just works as a backup plugin but can also migrate your website to another host.

It does incremental backup, so only the changes you make to your website will update on the cloud storage, where your backup is. It takes off a significant amount of pressure from your server. It also backs up your data to an off-site BlogVault server. And with 90 days archive, so you can be assured that whatever happens to your website, you can always recover.

Apart from that, it also has a real-time data backup feature for WooCommerce stores with 365 days archive facility.

Annual charge for this plugin starts from $89 for a single website.

Pros

Super-fast backup and restore.
Simple and intuitive setup process.
Works for any web hosts.
Always backs up on scheduled time.

CONS

Price is higher than most of its competitors.
Doesn’t back up to popular cloud servers, rather backs up on its own servers.

Our Verdict

Though it is a bit pricier, it is surely one of the rare plugins that have almost all the features that you would expect from an ideal backup plugin.

download blogvault

UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus offers one-click backup and restore with ease. It’s a reliable backup plugin that is loved by many.

It can back up directly into the cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email. The paid supports even some more. It offers advanced data encryption methods, yet a fast and smooth back up experience that works both by scheduling and manually. With this many features, no wonder it has over 2 million activate installations on WordPress.

UpDraftPlus is free to use. However, if you want to get access to features like incremental backups, more database option, there is also a premium version that starts from $70/year.

Pros

The free version works great.
Supports multiple cloud platforms for backing up data.
Both scheduled and on-demand backup facility.

CONS

The premium version doesn’t offer significant updates over their free version compared to the price.
Advanced configurations are somewhat confusing.

Our Verdict

We liked using UpDraft plus a lot. The features it has does justice to it’s 2 million-plus installation for sure.

download UPDRAFTPLUS

VaultPress

VaultPress is from automattic, the mother company of WordPress. Apart from doing backup, it also has security scanning services.

It is powered by Jetpack and it’s able to back up every post, comment, media file, revision, and dashboard setting on your site. While the protection against any intruders or malware is a bonus you’re getting.

The starter pack starts at $3.50/month, which may seem cheap, but there’s a catch. The cheapest plan offers just 30 days archive, and if you want to update the plan, the price shots up at $20/month. Plus, it’s Jetpack dependency means you’ll also have to buy Jetpack to use it!

PROS

Developed by WordPress mother company Automattic, meaning you can rely on them with a sense of assurance.
The starting price is cheaper than most plugins.
Offers security features as well.

CONS

The starter plan offers only 30 days archive of your backup. Need to spend $600/year if you need real-time backup and unlimited archive.
Jetpack dependency.

Our Verdict

VaultPress is one of the most reliable backup plugins out there. Feature-wise it is fine, but for most of the people, the pricing may seem sky-high compared to its features.

download vaultpress

BackupBuddy

10 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared 29

BackupBuddy is a backup plugin from iThemes. It has an active installation of half a million according to its website.

It can back up your entire website to BackupBuddy Stash, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox & more cloud storage. There’s a real-time backup, but it’s only available if you use BackupBuddy Stash to store your data. After every backup completion, you can download the whole website as a zip file, which is pretty cool!

Once you buy their premium plan, which is priced at $80/year for one website, you’ll get access to their support forum, 1GB BackupBuddy Stash storage, and some more premium features.

PROS

BackupBuddy is pretty straightforward to use.
Free 1GB BackupBuddy Stash storage.
Backup to offline storage.

CONS

Limited functionalities.
No free trial version.

Our Verdict

BackupBuddy is a kind of plugin that offers just what you need and not a thing more. We appreciate the simple plugin but would love to have some more features.

DOWNLOAD BACKUPBuDDY

BackWPup

BackWPup is probably the most feature-packed free backup plugin. It has over 10 million downloads and an active installation of more than 6,00,00, making it one of the most popular backup plugin for WordPress.

It can backup your whole website to Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace, even when you use their free version. You can also set a recurring backup schedule.

Its premium version offers backup to Google Drive and Amazon Glacier. Also, the premium version allows you to encrypt your backup and restore the encrypted backups.

While the free version is up to the mark, its pro version offers even more exciting features, which starts at $69/ year.

PROS

Extensive features even on the free version.
Basic & Advanced features that will suit both beginner and pro users.
Multiple cloud storage support
The Premium version is reasonably priced compared to the features.

CONS

No on-demand backup option. Only scheduled backup is available.

OUR VERDICT

BackWPup is an excellent option for any kind of user. While its free version is not as good as UpdraftPlus, two plugins have almost similar feature-set.

DOWNLOAD BACKWPUP

Duplicator

Duplicator is mainly a website migration plugin that works pretty well as a backup plugin. It’s 1 million-plus active installation is mainly due to its efficiency for site migration. You can move, migrate, or clone a website to the same or another host with this plugin. And in the same way, back up a website or a certain part of it.

Duplicator Pro has decent features, such as scheduling your back up and storing your data to cloud storage. Unfortunately, those features are not available for the free version.

If you wish to use Duplicator, it’s better to use the pro version, not just because the free version lacks a lot of key features but also because of the excellent value for money the Duplicator Pro offers.

The pro version starts at $59/year for three sites, which is significantly lower than its competitors.

PROS

Excellent value for money.
Offers remote backup storage to Amazon S3, Google Drive & Dropbox.
30 days money-back guarantee.

CONS

Requires at least a primary level of technical knowledge to use.
No on-demand or scheduled backup option for the free version.
No restore backup option.

Our Verdict

Being mainly a site duplicator, as the name suggests, Duplicator also offers fairly good site backup features. We liked using it, but as it is a little less intuitive, your opinion about it may vary depending on your level of technical expertise.

DOWNLOAD DUPLICATOR

WP Database Backup

10 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared 30

What’s more satisfying than to be able to protect your website data? Obviously the way to do it for free! WP Database Backup is a hundred percent free plugin that can back up your database (yes only the database, not your files) to cloud storages like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 or even to your FTP and Email,

With this free tool, you can do an on-demand backup anytime or schedule automatic back up for a repeating time. It also has an easy one-click restore option.

As we already told you this tool is completely free to use and has a more 60,000+ active installations with a 4.6 star review on WordPress plugin repository to prove that it gets the job done!

PROS

Completely free, not a single penny needed.
Easy to set up and use.
Supports scheduling and multiple storage options.

CONS

It only backs up the database, not the whole website. Meaning your media and files will not be protected.
Doesn’t support incremental backup, meaning your website will likely to act slow during the backup process.

OUR VERDICT

How much can you expect from a free plugin? Not much, right? Even if you are used to getting premium support, give this plugin a try. Because, in the end, how much can it cost at max? That’s right, nothing! Yet we think you will like the simplicity of this plugin.

download wp database backup

WPvivid

10 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared 31

WPvivid is yet another free backup plugin to protect your website. Albeit, this one has a premium version, the free version doesn’t lack many.

This free plugin can back up your entire website to Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, SFTP, FTP. This all in one backup plugin can take care of your back, restore, and even site migration needs.

You can schedule an automatic backup or do a manual one anytime you like. The site migration works like a charm and takes just one click! You can also download all your data to your computer.

This plugin is free to use. The only notable feature that might attract you to opt for the pro version is the incremental backup option. The pro version starts from $99/year for 3 websites.

PROS

Free to use unless you want the incremental backup feature.
No limit of backup size.
Works with almost all common hosts.

CONS

The paid version is not a significant update over the free one.
The migration feature is still new and causes problems sometimes.

Our Verdict

If you are not willing to spend any money on your backup plugin, yet don’t want to compromise on data protection, this is the plugin is for you.

DOWNLOAD WPVIVID PLUGIN

Backup Guard

10 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared 32

Backup Guard is a nifty plugin to deal with all your backup solutions. It has a 4.5-star rating on the WordPress repository and often praised for extraordinary after-sale customer support.

Backup Guard is a conventional backup plugin whose free version has left many things to be desired. The free version of the plugin can backup your whole website either on dropbox or on your computer. However, if you want to backup your data to more cloud storage like Google Drive, Amazon S3, OneDrive & SFTP/FTP you have to buy the pro version. You can easily restore the backup from both the free or pro version. The plugin also offers a site migration option, which requires the pro version.

The pro version starts at as low as $25 for lifetime usage with customer support and unlimited updates for 1 year.

PROS

Excellent value for money for the pro version.
Backup to all popular cloud storage.

CONS

No incremental backup feature, even for the pro version.
The free version doesn’t offer any storage option other than Dropbox.

OUR VERDICT

The plugin lacks advanced features but you can do the basic backup and restore very easily and without costing a fortune.

download backup guard

WP Time Capsule

10 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared 33

WP Time Capsule is a cool choice for a backup plugin for WordPress. It’s fast, lightweight, and easy to use. There is however no free version, if you want to use it after 30 days trial, you have to pay for it.

WP Time Capsules’ key features are incremental backup, lots of cloud storage support, and restore a backup from a specific date (perks of having a realtime incremental backup?).

This plugin has no free version, a bummer! The premium version, however, starts from $49/year for two sites.

PROS

Incremental backup support.
Restore backup from any specific date.
Reasonable price.

CONS

No free version, only a 30 days trial.
No on-demand backup feature.

Our Verdict

We found WP Time Capsule to be pretty good while using. If you have a tight budget but you also want to premium support, this can be your go-to plugin. But if you are looking for a free backup plugin, this is not the one, mate!

DOWNLOAD WP Time Capsule

Performance Test using WP Hive

Utilize-WPHive-to-Make-Data-Driven-decision

Now, lets see the how the plugins perform when put through the test using the new WordPress repository WP Hive .

Plugin	Memory Usage (On average)	Page Speed	Latest PHP Compatibility	Latest WordPress Compatibility	Frequently Updated
BlogVault	65.12 KB	+0.03s	Yes	Yes	No
Updraft Plus	363.81 KB	+0.01s	Yes	Yes	Yes
VaultPress	106.94 KB	+0.01s	Yes	Yes	No
BackupBuddy*	–	–	–	–	–
BackWPUp	263.8 KB	+0.07s	No	No	Yes
Duplicator	338.8 KB	+0.01s	Yes	Yes	Yes
WP Database Backup	89.62 KB	+0.03s	No	No	Yes
WPVivid	840.56 KB	+0.06s	Yes	Yes	Yes
BackupGuard	249.22 KB	+0.06s	Yes	Yes	Yes
WP Time Capsule	1067.07 KB	+0.05s	Yes	Yes	No

*Backup Buddy is not available on WordPress repository, therefore can’t be tested with WP Hive.

That was the performance test for WP Hive, not a single plugin has a negative effect on page speed, but some of them have are memory hungry, and some are not compatible with the update PHP and WordPress version.

If you want to check any plugin specifically for a more detailed performance test, click below.

Compare PLUGINs WITH WP HIVE

Expert Opinion – Which is The Best?

It has been a long read, and now finally it’s time to let you know our favorites among these excellent plugins.

Best Free Offering: UpdraftPlus

We think UpdraftPlus offers both the basic and advanced features of their free version. It’s offering as a free plugin has exceeded our expectations.

Best Premium Offering: BlogVault

BlogVault has been one of the most instrumental plugins to back up a website. Whether you need it for personal use, or you’re from an agency looking for a multi-site deal, it offers something for everyone. It is by far the best backup plugin for WordPress from our point of view.

Wrapping things Up

Your data is precious, and you want to protect it. But choosing the right backup plugin is not easy. Especially when there is an ocean of backup plugins out there. We wanted to help out and make it easy for you to choose from the best. Losing your data is hard, losing control of your website is even harder. That is why we also have an extensive security guide for you to keep it safe from intruder and unwanted malware.

If you enjoyed the article and found it helpful, do appreciate with a comment. If you have a question, ask away!