But when it comes to the world wide web (aka w.w.w., the almighty internet), changes are ordinary things, due to human activity. I’m not going to start a discussion about how amazing we are, us as people, but I can tell you for sure that we need to be aware of and be able to adjust to change, whether we like it or not.

We can develop an attitude of flowing with the internet’s changes rather than constantly resisting or trying to control everything.

“Everything changes and nothing remains still.”

Plato, Cratylus 

Oops! I let myself drown by psychology and that’s ironic. Let’s get back on track, shall we?

Today’s lesson is about what changes can occur on your website (based on the theme you chose to work with), as developers work 24/7 to bring to you, the public, their best services/products. And yes, we are going to see how to update a theme without losing any customization.

One more thing, because I’m about to use the words “child theme” and “parent theme”, let’s find out what’s the deal with each one, but keep in mind that the main subject is how to update a theme in WordPress, as we are going to see later in this article. So please bear with me, I have some precious info to share.

Parent Theme | Child Theme

What’s a Parent Theme?

It is fundamentally any theme that’s been either free or paid, from WordPress repository or from any marketplace out there.

In one hand, theme frameworks are parent themes, but in the other hand not all parent themes are theme frameworks. People often confuse one with another.

To be a parent theme requires first to be declared by another theme, child theme.

What’s a Child Theme?

A child theme obtains the look and functionality from the original theme (also known as the parent theme), allowing you to make custom modifications to your website, and preserving them when the parent theme updates.

How do you update a theme in WordPress?

WordPress developers always recommend to website owners to update their theme to the latest version. In my point of view, this is a piece of good advice to take. It ensures your theme possesses all the latest features.

Ignoring updates only make your website susceptible to security threats or performance issues. And to what’s worth, you should know that the word “update” and the word “back-up” are BFF. Each time you hear “update”, it should trigger in your mind its BFF, “back-up”.

Where can I see the updates available?

Your WordPress website regularly checks for updates and displays them under Dashboard – Updates page. But it can be seen also as a notification on the Appearance – Themes.

Aside from security and bug fixes, developers can introduce new features with these updates, which is good and great. Saves your precious time.

What to do before making any updates?

In the next paragraphs, I’ll need your attention for a while, cause there are some important things to do before you update your theme. Here’s a list with must-do things before making any updates:

• Get prepared – as a quick reminder, any CSS changes that you have added to your theme’s stylesheet (style.css) and functionality.php files will be wiped off, so back-up your theme before anything happens.
• Download the new version of your theme – In case you have added any code, you need to transfer customizations from the old theme files to the updated ones. To do that, simply visit your theme’s website and download the files or if you use a theme from WordPress repository, you will see a notification on your Dashboard.
  If you have a brilliant memory and you remember what customizations you have done, just copy & paste those. If not, you’ve reached a point where you will need to compare your theme’s files (software like WinMerge should do the trick to help you out).
• Upload the new version – using your FTP client, you need to connect to your website. Go to /wp-content/themes/folder, select the new theme folder (the one that is updated and have your customizations) and with right-click, select Upload. You’ll get a warning from your FTP client about the files with the same name. Go ahead and choose Overwrite, to be sure that the old files are replaced by the new ones.

And you’re done. Was it so hard? I didn’t think so. But, to prevent doing all the things listed above, I strongly recommend to you, as the best solution, to create a child theme, and all modifications can be done in this child theme, without affecting the parent theme.

It is necessary to update?

From my point of view, a big and empathic “YES”! Why you say?! Because updates come with the following:

• Increase security;
• Fix bugs;
• Add features and functionality.

Updates to WordPress themes, and not just WordPress themes, often increase security by patching vulnerabilities and strengthening against hackers attack, fix bugs that were discovered in previous versions, and not the last, add new features and functionality.

The WordPress development team regularly provide updates, so neglecting to update means not only taking a risk of being hacked, but you may also be missing out on new improvements.

Will WordPress update affect my website?

If you created a child theme, all modifications can be done in this one, without affecting the parent theme. But, if you don’t have a child theme, and you want to create one, you can learn how to create a child theme, it’s not that hard.

The sad reality is, that it never guaranteed a smooth and “painless” update without the risk of things gone wrong, so keep in mind always make a back-up before.

Should you update your theme or plugins first?

My tip is, evermore update your plugins first, then update your theme and not the last your WordPress Core.

It makes sense to update the plugins first because their developers always release new updates based on the latest versions of themes and WordPress itself. Theme developers have to base their updates on new WordPress versions so if you update WordPress before anything else, your plugins and theme aren’t prepared to handle the latest version of WordPress’s core files.

Wrapping up

Updates can be a pain in the a*s, but done correctly should be a piece of cake. Don’t be afraid to update, as you have seen what can happen if you are neglecting to update.

We hope that this article helped you to update your WordPress theme without troubles, cause we don’t need them.

The post How to update a theme in WordPress first appeared on WOWLayers: Free WP Templates, Branding & Design Tips to Grow Your Online Business.

So, we’re back in business, and because, everybody knows that “the backlink” is the word, actually Peter Griffin reminds us that “the bird” is the word :)) , but what Peter knows, in fact. Right?!

Today’s point of interest is 2 words that can easily create confusion, “follow” links and “no-follow” links. Without any further ado, let’s clear up this confusion.

What are “follow” links?

Follow links are links that count as points, forcing SEO link “juice” and increasing the page rank of the linked-to sites, helping them to go higher in the SERP’s as a result.

Now, to understand what the heck I just told you, we need to talk first about how most links work in the field of SEO. When a website gets an inbound link (or a hyperlink pointing to that page – that’s why links are counted as points), the page gets a small SEO boost. The more well-known the site, the bigger the boost of link juice the linked-to site gets.

Google sees these points, and to calculate them, it created a metric called “PageRank” (one of the variables used by Google to determine how high your site will be placed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)).

What is “link juice”?

“Link juice” is a term referring to how powerful a link could be. It’s a fact that a link from a popular website, that is trusted by the search engines, will pass more “juice” than one on a pointless directory.

Getting a link from Neil Patel is Gold, with capital “G”!

A “do-follow link” tells a search engine that the link is good and that you don’t mind if the links help them rank higher. Or do you?

What are “no-follow” links?

“No-follow” is a value that can be assigned to the “rel” attribute of an HTML element to notify some search engines that the hyperlink should not have any kind of influence towards the ranking of the destination URL.

Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across them. Anchor text? Or clickable words used to link one web page to another.

Does Google crawl “no-follow” links?

First, what does Google say about no-follow links?

“In general, we don’t follow them.”

Google doesn’t even crawl “no-follow” links. The “no-follow” tag was always a way to say to Google: “Don’t pass link authority through this link”.

“Follow” links vs “No-follow” links

Besides the fact that the “do-follow” tag helps your search engine ranking, the “no-follow” tag doesn’t, the only difference, my friends, between these two, is only visible if we dig into the HTML code.

Let’s have a look at some examples of follow link and no-follow.

Followed:

<a href:"https://wowlayers.com"> follow link </a>

No-followed:

<a href:"https://wowlayers.com" rel="nofollow"> no-follow </a>

“Google announced in early 2005 that hyperlink with “rel=”nofollow”” would not influence the link target’s PageRank. In addition, The Yahoo and Bing also respect this attribute value.”

Wikipedia

When to use “no-follow” links?

I can tell you a lot of reasons to use the “no-follow” tag, but they may all be in different places, though. In this case, I invite you to break down together some of the most common places:

1. Paid Links

If you don’t want to get penalized by Google, I suggest you use “no-follow” links, even if it’s through ads.

2. Embeds

If you add widgets or infographics on your website from other sites, it means that you’re not completely behind the content, that’s why we use the “no-follow” tag.

3. Comments

Using “no-follow” links you protect your website from any bad sites, from appearing to get credit from you. Anything that has user-generated content is more likely to be a source of spam. And to be honest, it’s not even that hard to stay home and get paid just to spam others (rolling eyes).

4. Others

“No-follow” can be used anytime you don’t want your website to be seen as endorsing a link to another site. Even these popular website are using the “rel=”no-follow”” on all of their outbound links:

• Quora;
• YouTube;
• Wikipedia;
• Reddit;
• Medium

How do I create a “no-follow” link?

Everybody knows that Google has “robots” that once landed on a page on your website it crawls through and reads the content on that page. Once it knows what your page is about, it takes the next step and indexes your page.

As the bot crawls through your page and finds a link, maybe a “do-follow” link, that link is like a door for the bot, you basically telling the search engine “You can pass this door”. Nothing can stop the bot from entering except you. How?

At this point, your salvation is the “no-follow” tag, because remember, that a “do-follow” tag is also referred to as “passing the PageRank”. We certainly don’t want that.

How to add a “no-follow” tag to a link?

Step 1: You can start by creating your awesome content (don’t forget to use images, videos, as a boost for more engagement).

Off topic: Would you like to see how images and videos make your WordPress website more Engaging?

Go on, take a look.

Step 2: Add a link to your text, highlight the text you want to be the link and click the link icon (the chain symbol).

Step 3: To be able to add the tag to your link, you will need to switch to Code Editor (click on the three dots on the top right corner or simply use the cmd CTRL+Shift+Alt+M. Now add the tag rel=”nofollow” within the <a> tag, just like this:

<a href:"https://wowlayers.com" rel="nofollow"> no-follow </a>

And you’re done. Good job!

Do “no-follow” links help or hurt your SEO?

In 2013, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cuts said that links that are “no-followed” can’t hurt your rankings in Google, whatsoever. Unless you are a spammer, you are spamming at a high level, in this case, Google will take manual action on these links to discourage all spammers.

What are the benefits of “no-follow” links?

First of all, “no-follow” links can help you with your SEO, in a direct way, and not the last, “no-follow” links can bring you the traffic that you need, and much desire.

Long story short, hopefully, this article gave you the knowledge on what are the main differences between “follow” and “no-follow” links.

Do you still have questions? Hit me up Scotty in the comments below.

Howdy!

The post Follow Links or No-follow Links? first appeared on WOWLayers: Free WP Templates, Branding & Design Tips to Grow Your Online Business.

People love online interactions. Why not using this aspect in your favor? By adding videos & images, you attract more visitors.

Because we are talking about engagement (user interactions), in this article I will cover the following beginner topics:

• How to embed videos in WordPress?
• How to show images in rows and columns?
• How to make images into links (clickable images links)?
• How to add a contact form?

Videos

What’s an embed code?

It’s nothing more than a piece of HTML code, which when entered into your website page source, creates a video object.

How do you embed videos in WordPress? Embedding videos with 2 methods.

I’m going to show you 2 methods. One is an “old fashioned way”, the other is a “modern way”. “Old fashion way”? “Modern way”? What do you mean? Hold your horses, I’ll explain below:

Option 1 – Using WordPress auto-embed option

WordPress has a great feature called “auto-embed”, that allows you to get the embed code from any popular video services like YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

How? Just copy & paste the video URL directly into WordPress editor. Once you add your video URL, you can change its settings from the block toolbar. That’s why I called it the “modern way”.

Option 2 – Paste the code into WordPress Editor HTML block.

Before you can add an embed video with this method, first you have to go to the video you want to add and click on the Share button.

Once you do that, look for an option called Embed. Now, all you have to do is to copy the embed code to your clipboard. It should look something like this:

<iframe width="560" height="315" 
src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lclLJz5Rd5M" frameborder="0" 
allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; 
picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Then click on the “+” symbol in any WordPress post or page, and select Custom HTML Block. If you can’t find it, search it. Paste the code, save, and you’re done.

What’s the advantage of this method?

You can change the width and height of the video.

Example: If you want the embed video to take the whole horizontal space of the post, instead of 560 pixels which is in this case, you just have to replace “560” with “100%” as seen on the example below:

<iframe width="100%" height="315"
src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lclLJz5Rd5M" frameborder="0" 
allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;
picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

You can also change the height parameter to any value you desire.

Why should I embed a video on my website?

Well, because statistics don’t lie. I believe in statistics and I like to use the numbers in my own favor. Check out the following infographic:

Images

How to show images in row and columns in WordPress?

Why do you need to do this? The answer is very simple. Let me give you an example: if you are adding multiple photos to a blog post, it will not look very professional and will require a lot of scrolling from your users.

Solution? Displaying photos in rows and columns using a grid gallery, which is provided by WordPress editor. This way images will appear in a compact layout and improve user experience on your website.

How do I display images in rows and columns in WordPress?

On the post edit screen, click the “+” symbol and select the “Gallery” block. Upload desired photos, or choose from the ones that are already uploaded, click on “Create Gallery” link from the left column and then click on “Create a new gallery” button.

Now WordPress will insert the gallery in your blog post. From here, you will be able to select how many columns you need.

When you create a Gallery, you have 2 options. You can either select the “Crop images”, shown in the left menu, or you can crop the images by yourself. But remember to keep the same size for all images that you crop.

How to make images into links (clickable images links)

Quite easy! After inserting an image into the editor, click on it, and above you will see a chain icon ( or simply press CTRL+K if you are on Windows ). Click on it, a window will pop up, asking for the URL. Type or paste the URL you want, and hit “Apply“.

If you want the link to be opened in a new window, click on “Link Settings” (the dropdown icon) and make sure the “Open in new tab” option is checked.

Contact form

What’s a contact form?

Contact Form it’s a set of questions that once filled out by users it’s automatically sent to your email. This feature enables visitors to directly contact and engage with you, the owner of the website.

How to add a contact form in WordPress?

To add a contact form, you need a plugin. The one that we suggest is Contact Form 7. Why? Because, first of all, it’s free, and secondly, it provides some great features.

The first step to setting up Contact Form 7 is to install the plugin. To do that, in your WordPress dashboard, select Plugins > Add New from the menu.
Once here, on the right part of the screen, you will find a search box, type the name “Contact form 7” and click Install, then Activate.

After activation, on the left menu, you will see a “Contact” option, from where you can manage and edit contact forms.

By default, there’s a contact form labeled Contact Form 1, which contains all the basic fields you need. This form is ready to use and can be inserted into any page and post of your website.
So far, so good?

What to do next?

You have the plugin up and running. Next, you will need to copy the shortcode and paste it into your post, page, or text widget content.

You can edit with your own information, or you can create a new contact, by pressing the Add New button, from the Contact menu.

Bring your website to life

Effectively used, images can help drive more visitors to your website, promote social sharing and ultimately help drive business goals. Visuals (videos) give us a better understanding of not just the message, but what’s behind the message.

Having all kinds of “tools” (embed videos, images, contact forms) will stimulate your audience to interact with your website.

Creating content consistently is one of the best ways to keep users around longer and get them to view multiple pages. Useful, engaging content will drive traffic to your website. Once that traffic is there, they’ll stick around, keep reading, and eventually become a subscriber or customer if you have a wide array of informative blog posts for them to read.

That being said, keep in mind:

“People will always choose an online video tutorial over reading the manual.”

The post Make your WordPress website more engaging (embed videos, images & contact form) first appeared on WOWLayers: Free WP Templates, Branding & Design Tips to Grow Your Online Business.