WordPress is a widely accepted and extremely preferred content management system which offers a simplified and user-friendly operations and a lot more to look upon. Any software or application, when used in the latest version, offers the best of services and functions so possible and so does WordPress. The procedure of updating can be carried out in two ways namely Automatic and Manual.

• Automatic Updates: You might often get infuriated with the update notifications of various kinds. WordPress relieves you with the automatic update option. For the version 3.7+, the user needs not to imply an even bit of efforts. If the site is designed to install updates without the use of FTP credentials, the updates will itself run in the background allowing the version to update from 3.7 to 3.7.1, 3.7.2 etc. This is facilitated for minor and security updates however even for the purpose of major updates, the user just needs to click ‘Update Now’.

WordPress provides the users with minor bug fixes with the minor latest versions as available. Therefore, a user is suggested to adopt minor fixes as and when available. Automatic updates are thus very useful and valuable. Nevertheless, if one wants to disable the option serving automatic updates, he can do it too.

If the notification conveys ‘failed updates’, the way out is to delete the file named .maintenance which is present in the WordPress directory. This will eliminate the message. If all the efforts of automatic updates go in vain, the user can turn up to Manual Updates.

• Manual Updates: Manual Updates can be time-consuming and tiring, however, the sense of accomplishment is satisfactory. The Manual Updates option can be exercised if the blog’s URL is in the form [http://example.com/wordpress/].

The procedure involves few steps that are mentioned below.

1. The User needs to download the latest available version of WordPress.

2. All the plugins are to be deactivated which can be done by using the deactivate button in the drop-down list after selecting all the plugins.

3. Replace the previously annexed WP-includes and WP-admin directories with the latest installed ones. This can be done using the FTP or Shell Access)

4. The users without deleting any WP-content folder or directory are required to overwrite the existing WP-content folder’s individual files with the new files. This can be done using FTP, file manager or shell SSH.

5. The same process needs to be followed by the rest of the files. All new files available in the root directory of the new version must overtake the old files in the existing directory.

6. The default files so customized must not be overwritten or else you will lose access to the preset ones.

7. Try the WP-config-sample.php as it might have certain new settings that could attract you and fascinate you to imply to your own WP-config.php.

8. Just in case, you hired the manual procedure after the auto-upgrade failure, a file named .maintenance will hamper you. This needs to be deleted from the directory through the FTP.

9. Log in to your database and further follow the database update instructions which are offered with an update link to assure compatibility. Also, reactivate the plugins and at this note, the task is accomplished.

One of the most popular features of WordPress is plugins. WordPress plugins allow users and developers to extend the functionality of WordPress beyond its core features. WordPress has over 26,000 plugins. These plugins provide custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs.

It has been stated that WordPress plugins are the most liked and the most hated component of WordPress. Don’t you think that is strange? So why do you think people say this? It is because WordPress plugins greatly extend the functionality of WordPress but they can also get you into a lot of trouble. That is usually the case with software that is very powerful; therefore, you need to use caution when using plugins.

So what types of trouble can plugins cause? Some of them have security vulnerabilities that can allow someone to inject malware into your site or actually take your site down. Some plugins can cause performance issues if they load unnecessary libraries, make unneeded HTTP requests or make a lot of database queries. You also need to make sure that your plugins are compatible with the latest version of WordPress and are being actively supported.

There are some cases where you really do want plugins to extend the WordPress functionality. Below are examples of functionality that you need in order to have a successful site for business.

1. Security – In order to be proactive, you need to be able to scan your site to ensure that is does not have malware. You also need to check for vulnerabilities.
2. Spam Management – If you allow comments on your WordPress site then you need an automated way to mark comments as spam. Without it, you will potentially have to wade through thousands of spam comments in your pending comment queue.
3. Analytics – In order to determine if what you are doing is working, you need to analyze your traffic patterns, most popular posts and your source of traffic. This can be accomplished with a plugin.
4. Search Engine Optimization – When you write a blog post, you need an easy way to determine if it has been optimized. There are plugins that ensure that your blog posts are optimized.
5. Performance Improvements – If you have a lot of videos and pictures on your site, then you need to use caching to improve the speed of your site. You also need to optimize the sizes of images in your media library. There are also plugins that improve page load time for videos.

As you can see WordPress plugins are very powerful and are an essential part of your successful business.

Web Hosting and Attention-Grabbing Facebook Marketing

What works with social media for business owners?

Facebook Mobile for Business

To begin with, the majority of websites and blogs are created using WordPress. So, the security of your Word Press website or blog is crucial.

Two very cool security plug-ins for bloggers who use WordPress are available. Imagine this scenario. One day you wake up and your blog has been hacked and every single article had disappeared. Thank God for backups. It could be absolutely disastrous if someone were able to hack into your WordPress site. SecureWP and WSDSecurity are two plug-ins that can be used collaboratively and they give you increased security for your WordPress blog.

1. Password generator generates super secure passwords that no one can guess. If you have an administrator that has full access to your account, you need to be sure to generate extremely secure passwords.
2. A lot of hackers use systems that are smart. They go to a WordPress blog and look at the source code so that they can tell which version of WordPress your blog is running. These plug-ins eliminate the version of WordPress from your source code. Hackers try to exploit challenges of your version of WordPress, so by eliminating the version of WordPress from your code, it is extremely difficult for automated attacks to target your blog.
3. When you try and login to WordPress with the incorrect password, it generates a response. These automated systems look for those responses in an attempt to hack your blog. These plug-ins remove that response completely. Instead they jingle or blink the login screen so you, as the user, know you have the wrong password, but a machine or a software tool would not know that, therefore, automated hacking attempts are reduced.

Facebook Marketing on a Mobile Platform

Four hundred and eighty-eight million people are using Facebook mobile every month. That is bigger than the entire population of the United States. Additionally, three hundred million pictures are uploaded to Facebook every single day. Close to a billion members take pictures and upload them to Facebook using their smart phone. People have Facebook on their smart phone and check Facebook when they are in a line waiting for a coffee, stuck in traffic, and doing it almost everywhere, this makes mobile users very important to Facebook. Half of the nearly billion Facebook users use Facebook through their mobile device and they are actually twice as active than non-mobile users.

People have a tendency to never leave their house without their mobile device. This is wonderful news for business owners! The more you as a business owner can get your message in front of those users who are in constant contact with their circle of friends, the better. Marketing has shifted from trying to get your message in front of people during certain times to becoming an intricate part of their social experience. Ads are coming in through their news feed and users don’t even know that what they are looking at are ads. Facebook’s mobile ad click-through rate is an astounding four times higher than Twitter!

Facebook, Instagram and Cameras

In the past, Facebook’s weak spot was mobile. They were behind the eight ball for developing a robust app so with the purchase of Instagram, Facebook took the lead in this market. It shows the marketplace that Facebook is serious about mobile. Instagram is solely a mobile app. You have to view photos through a Instagram partner, but Facebook might be rolling out an Instagram.com profile where users can share their photos through the web. It could be a whole new social network like Pinterest.

Steve Jobs was a mentor for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is rumored to come out with their own smart phone. They could be taking a leaf out of Apple’s book and be working on a whole new market in the smart phone industry. It would be a whole new developer marketplace that is perfectly feasible. At some point, there will be more mobile phone subscriptions than there are people on the planet. The whole world is in your hand with a smart phone. You can check your e-mail, check in with friends, view the news, use apps to do just about anything. It is only going to grow and it is a wonderful thing for connecting people among the world. The Facebook mobile app is still relatively limited. For example, you can’t share with the app. So, many people are using Safari to view Facebook on their smart phone and accessing the social media network that way. Facebook might very well venture into the hardware market in the near future to further capture market share within the prominently growing mobile marketplace.

Facebook Page Manager App

Facebook page manager is a great way to manage multiple pages. You can have access to your page on the fly, post content and quickly reply to comments and moderate them. Its very helpful for business owners and entrepreneurs. The latest update to the Facebook iOS and Android apps will now let you tag your friends in status posts and comments. The feature, which has long been available on the Facebook website, can be activated by typing “@” followed by the name of the friend you want to tag in your comment or status update. You can use this feature on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad or any Android device running the latest version of the Facebook app. The biggest feature that is still missing, however, in the Facebook mobile app is share. This means half a billion people per day are not able to share something on their mobile device.

Marketing Tips for Businesses

Mobile users should be engaged and treated differently. It is all about content. Mobile users default to the news feed so the more you can be an effective producer of content the better.

• Shorter posts are better – 160 characters or less
• Be entertaining
• Make use of photos
• Ask questions that are short and sweet
• Include a call to action such as “like” or “add your comment” or “click here”.

Local Businesses and Facebook Mobile Marketing

For the longest time, people could setup a check-in deal. Offers are only available if you have a place page. But if you do not have a place page and can’t setup an offer, you can instead periodically post a status update, for example, “Are you reading this on your mobile phone, come in for a free latte.” Every single member of your staff should know all the ins-and-outs of what your company is doing on social media. Offer a coupon on-the-spot if people check-in. Encourage visitors to take a photograph of themselves in your store and post it on Facebook. It can go a long way and get people excited if they see their friends at the store.

Facebook and the Future of Marketing

There have been a lot of changes with Facebook since it went public. Some of the changes include “promoted posts” and it is more difficult to get into the news feed. Edgerank is the algorithm that all content passes through on Facebook. Content passes through the Edgerank filter, and that is how it is determined what content will show in the news feed. Ultimately, Facebook is saying that they are only going to display your content on average to sixteen percent of your fans. There are, however, some tools that can increase your visibility on Facebook.

• Ads
• Friends Lists
• Interest Lists
• Sponsored Stories
• Promoted Posts
• Reach Generator guarantees up to seventy-five percent of your content

As a marketer, you can do some split testing and allocate a budget to see which will work well for you:

• Either a sponsored story which is a post made on your fan page that is turned into an ad
• Promoted posts which will be visible to mobile users and is given more visibility in the news feed, which is what people look at on their mobile device.

There are some creative ways around this. Fan pages like George Takei (an actor) is a page that has a phenomenal following and has a very high engagement rate. Study fan pages that are successful and watch their page to see how these brands are achieving fan engagement. People on Facebook want to know that there is a real human being behind the brand.

Business owners have put an enormous investment into creating a fan base. People have expressed concern and frustration resulting from Facebook now requesting more investment to get your content visible to more than sixteen percent. Next to every single post on Facebook, you are given the option to pay for your post to be more visible. The large denominator problem is when companies have a huge fan base, so if that person is not regularly interacting with the fan page, they will not see the content. It can get very pricey to promote a post, sometimes from three hundred to five hundred dollars per post.

Why would you use a Promoted Post on Facebook?

If you have a webinar or special event coming up a promoted post could be a good option. Some companies have been able to double their reach, increase engagement with promoted posts. If a page has a low number of fans or has plated or a low engagement rate such as less than two percent, you might want to play with promoted posts to see if it is a worthy advantage. You can better reach the mobile users with a promoted post.

Web Hosting Tips for Facebook Visibility

If you are like the majority of business owners, you have a website or blog that serves as your ultimate destination for visitors. Some people call it their “money site”. A Facebook fan page for your business can funnel visitors to your website or blog, where hopefully that visitor will perform the MDA (most desired action) such as joining your e-mail list or purchasing a product. So, as a business owner, it is imperative to keep a professional looking website or blog online. This can be done with a web hosting account through a reputable hosting firm that offers tools such as WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal content management systems for creating an engaging web presence.

Since there is a multitude of WordPress themes that you can choose from, you can easily feel overwhelmed and turn to deciding on a poor-quality theme. When you have a wide range of options, it is good to know what you exactly need.

Free vs. Premium

In the past, the price of a theme said a lot about its quality. Usually, the free ones were poorly coded, and at the same time, used to acquire sensitive user data. However, there have been many changes lately, and WordPress community developers have come up with thousands of free themes that look great.

Essentially, there is no definite winner. Free and premium themes, alike, come with pros and cons, as detailed below:

Premium Themes

Pros

More updates

The best reason to opt for a premium product is because these themes are updated from time to time. Considering the fast evolution of the WordPress CMS, it is crucial to have a theme that is updated more often in order to manage the latest security issues.

Less common design

Since free WordPress themes are very popular, it is common for thousands of websites to use the same design. On the other hand, these themes are not too common, making them stand out.

Better documentation

Many premium products come with a detailed PDF that explains how to maximize them. This documentation is not common with free themes.

Continuous support

Premium theme developers give the best support by means of combined live chat, public forum, plus an email ticketing system. Usually, free themes only offer public forum as support.

Does not require attribution links

Most free themes require websites to include a link in the footer to credit the theme’s author. Though this is starting to become less common among free themes, you can rest assured that links are not required in premium themes.

Cons:

Price

When you choose a premium theme, you have to spend from $50 to $200.

More configurations

Many premium themes include a custom administration panel with different customization settings that take time to understand and set up.

Non-essential features

Premium themes come with features you don’t really need, like a portfolio manager, multiple slider plugins, plus extra skins. Though they make a theme more versatile, these unwanted features tend to bloat the theme.

As a whole, the most important feature that a theme should have, whether it is free or premium, is the quality in making it. The code’s quality will influence all the things discussed in this article, including security and page speed.

The best way to assess the quality of a theme is to listen to what customers have to say. When a theme comes with a public support forum, read about the problems people are experiencing and the way developers respond to resolving them.

WordPress gets attacked again… is it worth using? Is it safe?

It’s true, no open-source content management system seems to get attacked quite like WordPress, but there is something fundemental to mention: no other open-source content management system is as big as WordPress. In fact, if you added all the other guys together, WordPress would still be bigger.

So if I’m a hacker sitting at home looking to target a weakness, do I invest in the smaller guys, or the big guy? WordPress gets attacked because it is the big guy, and any vulnerabilities that might be out there get found as a result. So that’s the good news.

But what vulnerabilities are generally found on WordPress?

Despite WordPress being open-source, one of the biggest afflictions is poor password choice. While username can be an issue, it’s also not something that can be hidden from public eye, so if you think you’ve mastered the process by making a tricky admin name, think again. Your true admin name can be found without any hacking.

Most times, a poor password is the biggest problem. But more can be done. There are so many plugin that protect against security threats. How much do they cost, you ask? You can get top-notch protection for: FREE! Make sure you get something that scans your site as well as protects your htaccess file in your root folder. Bulletproof Security does this nicely. Wordfence is another great free plugin that protects your system.

The key is security, and it is essential for having a site that you don’t have to worry about. I cannot tell you how many horror stories I have heard from an unsecure site not being tended to properly. Outdated plugins/themes, etc… well, that is just a breeding ground for potential malware.

If you manage a WordPress site there is another thing to take into consideration, having multiple sites on the same server can be dangerous if they’re not all well tended to. Think of it this way, if one site gets an infection and they’re all sitting next to each other, what do you think will happen to the rest? Be careful how you manage multiple sites.

WordPress might get attacked, but their response and service is fantastic… especially since, as we said before… they’re open-source and free. As far as CMS platforms go, WordPress is the standard, and I will take it over the rest any day!

Having a WordPress website is one thing. And managing it is a whole another. You need to perform some daily actions to ensure that your website runs smoothly. After all, it helps you to grow your business and boost sales. Ask the experts offering WordPress web development services about the important aspects of managing a WordPress website and they will tell you about the 3 S’s. They are; speed, security, and SEO. However, we believe that there is much more to effectively manage your WordPress website than the above-mentioned aspects.

If you want to have a smoothly running website, you need to know about some of the best business management methods and how to apply them. Through this article, we intend to provide you with a step-by-step procedure to manage your WordPress website like a pro.

Know What You Want

It is quite easy to build a website in WordPress as compared to other platforms. True that. But, there are chances that you might not know WordPress development to the fullest. In such cases, it is advisable to hire a company that provides WordPress development services according to your requirements. For any website based on WordPress, the major goals are to have a mobile responsive website that works flawlessly and does not stop working due to security issues.

But after you build the website, you need to ask yourself questions like, “How many conversions would I need to reach the targeted sales goal?” “When should I enhance the scalability of my website?” Once you find answers to these questions, it will get easier for you to maintain it.

Keep a Watch on Costs

While running a business, we often overlook certain financial aspects. But, it is important to remember that if you do not gain profits from your business, all your work is sure to go in vain. Hence, you need to keep supervising the finances you spend on web hosting plans, WordPress themes, plugins, design, and development tools etc.

When you create a budget for yourself, you can get better returns. Also, when you have ample amount of insights about your spending, you can predict the ROI for your business. After all, if you do not value your business, nobody else will!

Utilize the Right Plugins

Plugins and themes are imperative if you want to have a flawless WordPress website. However, it is even more important to make use of the right tools. If you do not have the knowledge required to choose the necessary plugin, you can also get in touch with a WordPress Plugin Development Company that can help you with your issues and suggest you with the right plugin to address your problem.

These plugins usually help the business owners to streamline different processes on their website and enhance their results. Search on the online market and you will find several WordPress plugins available in the market. However, you must choose the reliable and superior quality ones.

Over and above these steps, there are many other actions you can undertake to handle your WordPress Website. Just like we mentioned above, you need to go beyond the 3 S’s and have a perfect system in place so that you can keep maintaining it at regular intervals. You can also get in touch with a CMS website development company and know about their insights on maintaining a website based on WordPress. All the best with your WordPress ventures!

There is no denying the fact that WordPress provides a ton of features and flexibility. However, it still cannot do “everything” you want it to do. This is where WordPress plugins come to the rescue. There are around 40,000 plugins in the WordPress directory. These are meant to make up for the discrepancies in the core software. So, here is a list of plugins that will help you turn your ordinary website into a baroque masterpiece.

Have a look at the top 7 WordPress plugins that every website developer must know.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Looking for a comprehensive SEO solution for your website? If yes, this is the plugin developed for you. Yoast helps you with your website’s optimization. With this, you can optimize title, descriptions, content, XML sitemaps, and a lot more things easily. It helps streamline the website and boosts organic search traffic along with enhanced brand awareness.

W3 Total Cache

Nobody likes a slow website. That’s why, W3 Total Cache is here to increase the page load speed of website. It will reduce page load times, so that you can improve user’s overall experience and get top rank in Google. It is really easy to install and set up. It supports minification, GZIP compression and content deliver networks.

Canada Post Woocommerce Shipping Plugin

Canada Post Woocommerce Shipping Plugin allows you to provide live shipping rates to your customers in their shopping cart and during checkout. This multilingual is compatible with WPML and ideal if you ship within Canada or worldwide. Your customers can track their order and get an email notification time to time about the package.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is the best contact form plugin for WordPress websites. It allows you to create custom registration forms. This powerful add-on can be used for online survey, user submitted posts or almost anything where you want your users to give their input. Choose your own fields, configure options and build powerful contact forms within a few minutes.

Uber Menu

Uber Menu helps you catch your customer’s attention. It makes it easier for the owner to control menu layout. You can add any HTML, shortcode or widget to your website menu. Apart from this, you can also insert pages, categories, terms or custom taxonomy terms as per requirements. It offers tons of options to make your website menu look beautiful and professional.

Sucuri

Are you worried about the security of your WordPress website? Simply use Sucuri plugin. Any website on the internet may fall victim to hackers or get attacked by malicious codes. So, it is better for the owner to be prepared rather than sorry. Sucuri is a security plugin that keeps your website secure from attacks. It offers malware removal service and acts as a security scanner. It is a must have security plugin for every WordPress powered website.

Envira Gallery

Do you have a photography site? Do you post a lot of images? Then, you would surely love Envira Gallery plugin. This is a responsive gallery plugin that helps you create eye-catching image galleries. This insanely quick plugin showcases all your content quickly. You can also add password, choose cover photos and do a lot more things with Envira Gallery.

Choosing the best plugin for your website is really important to deliver an amazing experience for your users. Don’t just pick any plugin, first think about why you need a plugin. Focus on your needs and then integrate a plugin to your WordPress website. The right plugin will surely take your website to the next level.

WordPress is becoming a very popular content management system (CMS), not only for blogs but also for websites. This is mainly due to its ease of use, flexible customization and with robust security. Largely, WordPress is used for blogs, although there have been intensive development of templates that are fit for regular websites. The application is more of a content management system backed by a database, and with a wide variety of web application extensions called plugins. Consequently, hosting a WordPress site needs more than what static page sites requires. Here are things to consider when choosing a WordPress hosting plan.

Disk space and Bandwidth

WordPress comes with its already designed template, of which takes a sizable amount of space in a web server. More importantly, the system has to be fed with content in form of text, images, videos and sometimes audio depending on the kind of site the owner is putting up. Therefore, WordPress requires sufficient disk space as well as bandwidth.

Server platform

WordPress is backed up by a MYSQL database, style sheets and numerous PHP scripts. Therefore, for a WordPress-based blog or site to work, the server needs to at least support MYSQL databases and PHP. WordPress systems run well in Linux based server platforms as opposed to Windows-based. These are some of the things you need to consider before paying for a WordPress hosting. Other things you may ask include emails and ftp accounts.

Online Backup Facility,

WordPress requires regular updating. At times things may go awry during updating of the content system or even upgrading of the server. This can result to lose of website files. To avoid such situations, your WordPress hosting should provide online backup facility so that you can constantly back up your website or blog when updating the system or the server applications.

Server Uptime

Another aspect which is quite important when it comes to choosing a good WordPress hosting plan is server uptime. Server uptime is a way of showing how effective the server is in terms of speed and availability. Apparently, this is one of the things web hosting companies or resellers will lie about. While server uptime should at least be 99%, many companies claim to offer 99.9% but actually very few of them do so. You don’t want your WordPress blog or site to be offline at any time, and so, you need to be quite adamant of this.

24 / 7 customer support

You also need to ensure that the hosting company is offering a customer support all times. This is to help you in case you land in trouble during installation, maintenance or upgrading of your WordPress site. This is something commonly forgotten by people looking for a web hosting provider. With WordPress, you can easily get stuck with technicalities that may be out of your knowledge leading to discontinuation of your website or blog online. Therefore, you should be able to reach for customer support at any time to get your woes solved.

Knowing how to upgrade WordPress is an important skill that you will need to have if you want to keep your WordPress blog up to date.

There are many reasons you want to keep your WordPress blog up to date. Most importantly are security issues. Keeping your WordPress installation up to date will ensure that you have plugged up the latest security holes in your blog.

Of course there are always new features, templates and plugins that come along with each new WordPress upgrade. Being able to take advantage of new WordPress plugins, features and themes will ensure your blog is always on the cutting edge of technology.

*Important! Before upgrading WordPress either automatically or manually you must:

1. Check the requirements to make sure your host is running the required versions of PHP and MySQL.
2. Make a backup of your database so you are sure that you don’t lose any of your posts and pages.
3. Make sure your plugins and theme will work with the upgraded WordPress installation.
4. Disable your plugins for the upgrade process by using the Bulk Action to deactivate all your plugins at once.
5. If your plugins or theme will not work with the new WordPress installation you will either have to wait to upgrade until the plugins and theme are upgraded also to work with the new WordPress version, or you will have to forgo using the plugins and/or theme.
6. There have been times where I have used a plugin or theme that was not upgraded to work with the latest WordPress version. Sometimes I was successful and sometimes I wasn’t. I do not recommend using plugins or themes that have not been approved with the upgraded WordPress theme if you want to have a stable WordPress installation.

Manually upgrade WordPress

First I will go over how to upgrade WordPress manually.

1. To upgrade WordPress manually you will need to download the updated WordPress version.
2. You will also need to unzip WordPress to a folder on your hard drive (try not to forget where you put it).
3. Now you will need to open up your FTP program and log into your site.
4. You will want to note where you WordPress is installed. Whether it is in your root folder or whether you have installed it in another folder such as /blog.
5. Once you have located your WordPress installation folder on your web site, you will want to navigate to the updated WordPress files you unzipped on your hard drive (you did remember where you put it, didn’t you?).
6. You will then need to upload the upgraded WordPress files on your hard drive (folders and all) to the corresponding folders on your web site. Important! The wp-content folder is the only exception to overwriting the files. If you have any special WordPress themes or plugins you are using you will not want to overwrite this folder or you will lose your WordPress theme and have to re-upload them.
7. After you have uploaded all your WordPress files, you will want to go back to your browser and log into your WordPress blog on your site.
8. If your database needs to be updated also then WordPress will display a link to update your database that you can click on and follow directions.
9. At this point you will want to make sure everything is working properly as well as check the WordPress version to make sure you uploaded everything correctly and your WordPress upgrade took effect.

Automatically install WordPress theme

If you like to take the safe and easy route like me then you will want to let WordPress do all the work for you and upgrade WordPress automtically.

1. To put WordPress to work you will need to first log into your blog.
2. Once you are logged in you should see a message at the top of the screen stating you need to update WordPress if you have an out of date installation. If you don’t see a message you will want to go to your dashboard and click the updates option.
3. You will see your version of WordPress displayed with a message as to whether or not you need to upgrade WordPress.
4. WordPress will ask you for your connection information and proceed to update once you have entered this information.
5. Note: If you customized the default or classic theme then you will need to back up these files to re-upload one the WordPress upgrade is completed or you will need to manually upgrade WordPress.
6. Once you are sure everything is working correctly you can go in and enable your plugins.

You obviously want to engage the services of the best WordPress hosting provider for your website. You already know that not all hosting companies are the same and there are lots to choose from, it is only safe to be careful and selective when choosing the best WordPress hosting provider that meets your present requirements now and in the future as your business grows.

We have put together a checklist of vital factors to consider before you make your decision.

Specialists: You need a web hosting provider which specialises in WordPress and also has a good reputation for their service and their technical support.

Up-Time Reliability: The last thing you need is a host provider that goes down all the time! When web visitors cannot access your website, they move on – to your competition and they may never try to return to your site again. This will cost you money in lost sales and a negative reputation. The best WordPress Hosting Providers have 99.9% reliability.

Fast Loading Servers: You need your website to load up quickly for your visitors. Most people will not wait any longer than 4 seconds for a site to upload – any longer and they just hit the back button and move on to your competition.

Only the best WordPress hosting companies provide non-crowed servers which allow your website to load up fast for your visitors.

Linux Servers: WordPress was written for Linux Servers and that’s why there is less chance of running into technical problems.

Database Backup: This is an absolute must, should your database or website become corrupted or even hacked. The best WordPress hosting companies provide automatic back-ups of your website and will re-install a version of your website to a date prior to when the corruption or hack took place.

Secure Servers: Closely related to this fact is the security monitoring of the servers. The best WordPress Hosting companies monitor their servers from external attacks 24/7/365! They carry out regular software updates to ensure the stability and continuance of service.

Technical Support: Should your website be down for any reason, it’s vital that you can contact your web provider no matter what time of the day or night. The best WordPress Hosting Providers offer technical support 24/7/365 usually via a support ticket system and will have you up and running in no time. Technical support should be inclusive of your plan (no matter how modest) and be unlimited. You just never know!

Installation: WordPress is easy to install, especially if you have chosen a dedicated WordPress hosting company. A good host will enable you to install your website via your control panel using ‘Installatron’ which is similar to Fantastico, but only better! Installatron allows you to easily install software that might otherwise be problematical to install.

Whilst Linux based hosting packages will run WordPress not all hosts make it easy to set-up and not all provide support if you have problems.

Cost of Hosting: The cost of hosting your website will be influenced by your requirements and ultimately the plan that you choose. However, no matter which plan you decide upon, it’s important to have the option to pay monthly or annually and be covered by the 30 Day Money Back Guarantee.

Guarantees: The best WordPress Hosting providers offer a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee to ensure that you are completely satisfied with their service. This is an ideal risk free way of trying out their services, as if it’s not what you expected you can always get your money back.