JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Most websites use it to create more dynamic experiences for visitors. Critical features like contact forms and site analytics are just a couple of ways JavaScript is put into practice on a daily basis. Unfortunately, while it’s highly useful, all of this code has the potential to slow down your site. 

Deferring parsing of JavaScript (also just called, “deferring JavaScript”) means telling your site to load your non-essential JavaScript code last. This simple tweak can improve your page loading times and overall performance, depending on the number of scripts your website uses.

In this article, we’ll break down exactly what parsing is and what deferring involves. We’ll also discuss how deferring JavaScript can benefit your site and show you how to do it. Finally, we’ll wrap up with some frequently asked questions (FAQs) to address any remaining doubts. 

What does “defer parsing of JavaScript” mean?

When you visit a website, your browser requests files from a server. These files contain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the browser to parse (interpret) in order to create a visual and interactive web page.

Websites often require your browser to load dozens (or even hundreds) of elements and files for just a single page. Here’s a quick example from one of Google’s pages, so you can see how many files it uses:

When your browser parses HTML files, it stops to render any CSS that it finds and to execute JavaScript code. Until the browser has finished executing that code, it won’t continue to load the rest of the page.

In practice, you might not notice this delay if your website is very well optimized (if it loads really quickly). But the delay is there, and the more JavaScript your site uses, the longer it can be. If your website isn’t optimized for performance, parsing of JavaScript can significantly slow down its loading times.

Deferring the parsing of JavaScript means telling your browser, “Hey, if you run into this JavaScript code, don’t parse it until you’re done with the rest of the page.” From the visitor’s perspective, this means the visible elements of the page will load faster. Then, the JavaScript will finish executing in the background, and no one will be any the wiser (except you and the browser).

What are the benefits of deferring JavaScript?

The primary benefit of deferring JavaScript is that pages will load faster for visitors. Scripts will still need to load in the background, but deferring them should improve your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score, which is one of three Core Web Vital metrics.

It’s important to remember that page loading time is one of the most important aspects of a great user experience. If a website takes too long to load, you’ll typically lose a percentage of visitors. Moreover, slow loading times can give the impression that there’s something wrong with your site.

How to defer parsing of JavaScript in WordPress

WordPress offers more than one way to optimize your website. When it comes to deferring JavaScript, there are two methods you can use. 

The first method is the easiest because it involves using a plugin.

1. Defer JavaScript parsing with a free plugin

If you’re not comfortable editing your website’s files and adding code to them, your best bet is to use a plugin. One of the best tools you can use to defer non-essential JavaScript in WordPress is Jetpack Boost.

Jetpack Boost is a free plugin you can use to optimize your WordPress site’s performance. It’s incredibly straightforward to configure, making it an excellent choice for beginners. 

Once you activate the plugin, you’ll need to connect to a WordPress.com account (you can use a free account for this). 

When you’re ready, go to Jetpack → Boost in your WordPress dashboard, and you’ll get a quick overview of how your website is doing in terms of performance.

If you look at the options below, you’ll see a setting that says Defer Non-Essential JavaScript. You can toggle this setting, and it will automatically defer parsing of JavaScript throughout your website.

The plugin specifies non-essential JavaScript because it only impacts scripts that aren’t critical to the website.

Once this setting is enabled, be sure to look through your website to ensure that everything is working well. If you notice anything unexpected, simply disable the feature.

Note that Jetpack Boost can also enable lazy loading and optimize your site’s CSS. This means that the plugin will move critical CSS to the start of each HTML document so that the browser parses it first. This setting is particularly important for improving your First Input Delay (FID) score.

2. Defer parsing of JavaScript using the functions.php file

The second method involves editing your theme’s functions.php file. The process is not overly complicated, but adding code to WordPress can sometimes result in unexpected side effects.

This method is for experienced users, as a lot can happen by deleting just one file or even accidentally adding a space in the wrong place. Remember, you’ll want to only defer non-essential JavaScript to avoid hurting the user experience.

To be safe, we recommend backing up your website fully before editing any WordPress files. Even if you have a recent backup, create another one so that you have a restore point before making any changes. If you have Jetpack VaultPress Backup, the most recent version of your site will already be saved for you. 

There are two ways to edit the functions.php file. You can use the WordPress Theme File Editor, which you can access from the Appearance menu. Keep in mind that this option is only available if you’re not using a block theme that supports Full Site Editing (FSE).

Once you access the editor, select your active theme from the dropdown menu to the right and look for the functions.php file in the list.

You can use the editor to add or remove code from any theme files. Still, we recommend against modifying any existing code unless you understand its purpose.

Adding code to functions.php should be safe as long as it’s from a trusted source. The following code snippet will configure your website to defer parsing of JavaScript:

function defer_js( $url ) {

    if ( is_user_logged_in() ) return $url; 

    if ( FALSE === strpos( $url, '.js' ) ) return $url;

    if ( strpos( $url, 'jquery.js' ) ) return $url;

    return str_replace( ' src', ' defer src', $url );

}

add_filter( 'script_loader_tag', 'defer_js', 11 );

This code will automatically defer all JavaScript on your site, but it won’t touch jQuery scripts. However, it won’t work if you’re logged in to avoid issues with the dashboard not loading properly.

Add that script at the end of the functions.php file so that it doesn’t interfere with any of the other code inside. Click Update File at the bottom of the page, and that’s it!

If you don’t have access to the WordPress theme file editor but are comfortable working with code on a server, you can edit functions.php by connecting to your website via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). You’ll need to use an FTP client like FileZilla to do this. Remember, be sure you take a full site backup before doing anything.

Once you connect to your website’s server, you’ll need to find the WordPress root folder. This is the folder that contains all of your site’s files. It’s usually named www, public_html, or your site’s name.

Open that folder and go to wp-content/themes. There should be several folders, one for each theme installed on your site. Identify your active theme’s folder and open it. The functions.php file should be right inside.

Right-click on that file and look for an option that says something like Edit (this will vary depending on the FTP client you use). That option will open the file using your default text editor. From here, you can add the code snippet we shared earlier and then save the changes to the file.

The same rules apply when editing WordPress files via FTP. Don’t edit any code if you’re unsure what it does, and be wary about adding code snippets unless you trust their source.

You can always restore your WordPress site using the recent backup if you run into errors after editing the functions.php file. Jetpack VaultPress Backup is a fantastic option in these cases because it offers one-click restore functionality even if your site is completely down.

Frequently asked questions about deferring JavaScript

If you still have any questions about how deferring JavaScript works, this section will answer them. Let’s start by talking about the potential side effects of deferring scripts.

Can deferring JavaScript break your site?

Yes, depending on the plugins and theme you’re using, it’s possible that deferring JavaScript could break certain elements of your site. And, if you’re using the manual method, an error in your code could bring your site down entirely.  

That’s why it’s safest to use a tool like Jetpack Boost to take care of this task. While it’s still possible that deferring JavaScript could cause an issue, you can easily deactivate the feature or plugin entirely. 

Is deferring parsing of JavaScript the same as “removing render-blocking JavaScript”?

If you use website performance measurement services like PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix, you might notice they also recommend eliminating render-blocking JavaScript from your website. Due to the language, it can be easy to confuse this optimization suggestion with deferring parsing of JavaScript.

Render-blocking JavaScript refers to any code that blocks your site from rendering. In many cases, the best solution is to eliminate this code if it doesn’t fulfill a specific purpose. If it has a function, you can defer it instead.

Determining which scripts are needed and which aren’t will depend on your judgment. But services like GTMetrix can help you identify unused JavaScript on your website.

Any scripts that fall under this category should be safe to remove. For other scripts, you can use either plugins (like Jetpack Boost) or modify the functions.php file manually to defer them.

Can I safely remove JavaScript instead of deferring it?

This depends on which scripts you’re referring to. It’s not uncommon for WordPress websites to accumulate unused code as they grow. This happens as you install and deactivate plugins, try out third-party services, and stop using them.

Leaving that “orphaned” JavaScript on your website can sometimes create a security risk. Moreover, it can impact your website’s performance because browsers might still need to parse it. 

If you check out the previous question, we show you how to use GTMetrix to identify JavaScript on your website that you can remove safely.

Does deferring JavaScript improve page performance?

Deferring JavaScript should make your website’s pages load faster. How much faster will depend on the number of scripts you’re deferring and how well optimized your website is.

If you already have a fast website, and you’ve taken steps to optimize it, like removing unused scripts, deferring JavaScript might not have a significant impact. Still, every bit of optimization counts when it comes to page performance.

What else can I do to improve my page loading speeds?

There are a lot of ways to improve page loading speeds for a website. For the greatest impact, here are the optimizations we suggest implementing:

1. Consider using a managed WordPress hosting provider.
2. Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
3. Improve Core Web Vitals in WordPress.
4. Minify CSS.
5. Enable lazy loading in WordPress.

Optimizing your website for performance can take a while, but WordPress plugins like Jetpack and Jetpack Boost make the process much easier and faster.

Remember that any effort you make to improve your page loading speeds will more than pay off over time. If you can keep your website running in top shape, your visitors will have a much better experience.

Improve your website’s performance today

There are a lot of changes you can make to your website to improve its performance. If you use multiple third-party scripts and plugins on your site, there’s probably a lot of JavaScript code running in the background. That code is important, but it may prevent the rest of your website from loading as fast as possible.

Deferring parsing of JavaScript in WordPress is easier than you might think and can significantly impact your website’s performance. Here are the ways you can defer JavaScript parsing:

1. Use a plugin like Jetpack Boost.
2. Defer JavaScript using the functions.php file.

Jetpack offers several plugins to improve your WordPress website’s performance. Jetpack Boost is only one of them. If you use the Jetpack plugin, you also get access to a free CDN that can drastically improve your site’s loading speeds. Consider starting with Jetpack today!

Things don’t always go perfectly, and they seem to go wrong at the worst possible time. If you have a website, you may be familiar with this conundrum. Right when you’re about to publish a post you’ve been working on for hours, your power goes out, your browser crashes, or your cat walks across your keyboard.

But all is not lost! The WordPress autosave feature makes it possible to get that work back quickly and easily. Let’s find out how. 

What is WordPress autosave?

Autosave is enabled on WordPress sites by default to help site owners protect their content. It automatically saves posts and pages while you’re using the Editor so that, if your site goes offline or something else goes wrong, you haven’t lost all of your hard work.

If something happens, simply try reloading your browser. With autosave enabled, WordPress should have a recent backup of the post that you can restore with a single click.

We say “recent” backup because a copy of your page or post is saved based on a time interval, not after every single keystroke. 

What is the default autosave interval on WordPress?

Autosave intervals tend to be relatively low to offer the highest level of protection. By default, the WordPress autosave interval is 60 seconds, but that may vary depending on your web host’s configuration.

Some hosts with limited resources will increase autosave intervals to avoid performance issues. That’s unlikely to be a problem if you’re using a quality provider.

In most cases, it’s not possible to check the default autosave interval on WordPress. But you can change that interval manually, which we’ll cover in the tutorial portion of this article.

Can you change your autosave settings?

WordPress lets you change the default autosave settings, but to do so, you’ll need to edit core files manually. That means accessing your site’s server via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or your web hosting control panel.

You can change autosave settings by editing the wp-config.php file in the WordPress root directory. This allows you to do any of the following:

• Enable autosave (if it was disabled previously)
• Disable autosave (by increasing its interval to a high number)
• Modify the autosave interval in WordPress

Another way to modify the autosave settings in WordPress is to edit the functions.php file for the theme you’re using. Adding custom code to functions.php will disable autosave for specific post types or turn off the feature altogether if needed.

What’s the difference between autosaves and revisions in WordPress?

The goal of autosaves is to save work in progress in case something goes wrong while editing a page or a post. Autosaves take place in the background, even without you hitting the Save Draft button.

Revisions are drafts of posts or pages that you’ve manually saved. When you save a new draft, WordPress stores previous versions as revisions in case you want to revert back. Autosaves are not listed as revisions, as they’re a separate system.

With WordPress, you can only have one autosave at a time. But the revisions system lets you store multiple drafts of a post or page, then easily view changes and toggle between them.

How to use and manage WordPress autosaves

How can you manage autosaves and edit their settings? Making certain changes requires editing WordPress core files and dealing with code — we’ll guide you through those processes step by step. But first, let’s talk about restoring autosaves.

1. How to restore WordPress autosaves

Restoring a WordPress autosave is simple. If you exit the Editor without saving changes to the page or post, WordPress will warn you that you might lose those changes.

After opening the Editor again, WordPress will let you know if it has an autosave available. Then, you can click on the Restore the backup button to load the autosave.

WordPress will load the autosaved version of the post you’re working on. From this point on, you can continue editing the post, but probably want to save drafts periodically to avoid further problems.

2. How to delete a WordPress autosave

WordPress stores autosaves in the database. If you want to delete an autosave, there are three ways to go about it. You can access the database using a tool like phpMyAdmin and find the corresponding entry, wait for new autosaves to overwrite old ones, or use a plugin to do the job for you.

From a practical perspective, there’s little reason to delete one single autosave from the database. But some users report seeing moderate increases in site performance after removing unnecessary entries, like revisions and autosaves.

Using a plugin to “clear out” the database may not be necessary if you have a hosting plan that offers great performance and you’ve taken steps to optimize your website. Still, plugins like Advanced Database Cleaner make the process very straightforward and can also help you clear orphaned tables from the database.

To use Advanced Database Cleaner to delete WordPress autosaves, install and activate the plugin, then go to the WP DB Cleaner tab in WordPress. This page includes a list of the database tables you can clean, including one that says Auto drafts.

Select the Auto drafts element, choose Clean from the Bulk actions menu, and click on Apply. The plugin will ask you to confirm the decision and, afterwards, it will delete all available autosaves for your website.

3. How to change the WordPress autosave interval

If you want to change your website’s autosave interval, you’ll need to edit the wp-config.php file. To access that file, connect to your site via FTP using a tool like FileZilla.

Once you establish an FTP connection, navigate to your WordPress website’s root folder. That folder can have several different names, including www, public_html, or your site’s name. 

If you can’t identify it, these are some of the files and folders you should see inside the root directory, including the wp-content and wp-admin folders:

This folder also contains the wp-config.php file. Right-click it and select the Edit option. This will open wp-config.php using your default text editor.

To change the autosave interval, you’ll need to add the following line of code:

define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 60 );

The crucial part of that code is the number. In the example above, it’s set to 60 seconds. You can change it to any value you want, but we recommend against exceeding one minute. Autosave has a negligible impact on your site’s performance, so it’s better to run it often to keep your work safe.

When you’re done, save the changes to wp-config.php and close the text editor. Your FTP client might ask if you want to save the new version of the file to the server. Confirm the changes, and you’re good to go.

4. How to disable WordPress autosave

Autosave is enabled by default in WordPress, but you can disable it manually for posts, pages, or both. Unfortunately, these settings aren’t available via the WordPress admin dashboard. So, you’ll need to connect to your website via FTP. 

Navigate to your root folder and find the functions.php file. Open the file and add the following line of code:

add_action( 'admin_init', 'disable_autosave' );

function disable_autosave() {

wp_deregister_script( 'autosave' );

}

Don’t forget to save your work!

An alternative method of disabling the autosave feature is to follow the same steps for changing the autosave interval as above but set the interval to be an entire day. While this doesn’t turn off autosave entirely, it would only kick in after 24 hours. To do this, follow the instructions above, but add this line of code to your wp-config.php file:

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 86400); 

5. How to enable WordPress autosave

Autosave is enabled in WordPress by default. You don’t need to turn on the feature manually unless it was disabled at some point.

If the autosave feature isn’t working on your site, it might be due to a change in the autosave settings or code inside of the wp-config.php or functions.php files. In these cases, we recommend opening both files to see if there’s custom code that modifies the autosave functionality.

You can find examples of what this code looks like in the previous sections of this tutorial, where we show you how to disable autosave and modify its interval settings.

If you find similar code in either or both files, you can delete it to re-enable autosave in WordPress. Before you do this, though, we recommend backing up your site fully in case you run into any errors while editing your files.

Frequently asked questions about WordPress autosave

If you have any questions about how autosave works in WordPress, this section will answer them.

Can I preview an autosave in WordPress?

In the past, WordPress let you preview autosaves before restoring them. That feature is no longer available. Now, the Editor simply asks if you want to restore the autosave if one is available. 

Which types of content does WordPress autosave?

WordPress only autosaves posts and pages. You can configure the Content Management System (CMS) to autosave custom post types, which requires adding some code to their respective settings files.

Does WordPress automatically save drafts?

WordPress requires you to save drafts manually to store them as revisions. If you don’t save a draft and the editor closes, you might be able to access an autosave when you reopen it. But the availability of an autosave will depend on the interval that you configure.

WordPress autosave isn’t working, what can I do?

If autosave isn’t working, someone might have disabled it for your posts and pages. You can check out the earlier instructions for disabling autosave for posts and pages. You may want to reach out to your hosting provider and ask if this was done on your plan.

Can I autosave my whole site in real-time?

WordPress autosave only works for posts and pages. If you want to save every aspect of your website, including its media library, settings, plugins, themes, and other elements, you’ll need to use a WordPress backup plugin.

For most websites, having full backups is a much better solution than relying solely on autosaves. With frequent backups, you can restore your website to a previous state if you delete content, run into a technical error, or need to undo changes to the site.

Although you can back up your website manually, the process can take a while, and we recommend making full copies frequently. With Jetpack Backup, you get automatic real-time backups of your entire website. That means the plugin creates and saves new copies of your site as you make changes to it.

Jetpack Backup can store backups for up to 30 days or a full year (depending on which plan you use) and lets you restore any of them with only a click. Additionally, you’ll have access to premium technical support in case anything goes wrong with your backups. 

Use autosave to protect your work in WordPress

Autosave is an excellent feature for sites of any kind. After all, having a recent autosave can mean the difference between losing hours of work or picking up right where you left off if something ever goes wrong. While autosaves won’t help you restore deleted content, they can ensure that you don’t lose anything you’re currently working on.

On top of using autosave, creating website backups can ensure that you never lose your work. Jetpack Backup will automatically save your site in real-time and allow you to restore it with a single click. 

Get Jetpack Backup. 

Whether you sell physical products, digital items, services, bookings, or courses, an online store can be an incredible opportunity to reach your target audience. It helps you reach people where they already spend their time, even if they’re always on the go. And it allows you to share the benefits and strengths of your products in the best way possible.

But how do you get started selling online? And what tools do you need to build the best ecommerce store? 

Let’s take a look at WooCommerce, a powerful ecommerce platform. We’ll learn what it is, how businesses use it to run their stores, and the steps you can take to get started.

What is WooCommerce in WordPress?

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that includes all of the functionality you need for an online store — product templates, cart and checkout functionality, coupon codes, payment processor integrations, shipping tools, and more. It’s built and supported by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, so you can trust that it integrates seamlessly with your site and can rely upon excellent support and high-quality code.

While WooCommerce itself includes everything that many stores will need, you can also choose from a vast library of extensions that offer extra functionality. Feature a wide variety of product types like memberships and subscriptions, integrate with marketing or accounting tools, create detailed product configurators, and more!

What is WooCommerce used for?

One of the biggest benefits of WooCommerce is its endless flexibility. You can create any kind of ecommerce store you’d like! Let’s take a look at a few ways you can use WooCommerce and WordPress.

1. An ecommerce store for physical and digital products

Out of the box, WooCommerce includes functionality to sell both physical and digital products. You can list your items, accept payments, design your storefront, host sales and offer discounts, market your products across a variety of platforms, and more. 

If you sell physical products, you can charge for shipping based on factors like weight, size, and product type. If you sell digital products, you can deliver them to customers via email and make them downloadable from an account right on your site.

Orange Amps chose WooCommerce to sell their merchandise — like amp accessories, t-shirts, and gig bags — and ship to customers around the world. Shoppers can select a product, choose from options like size and amp model, then pick from multiple shipping speeds and payment methods when checking out.

TipoType uses the same platform, but sells digital fonts. When someone checks out, they can select the font they’d like, choose a license type, then easily download the fonts after paying.

2. A fully-customizable online marketplace

Want to run a multi-vendor marketplace similar to Etsy? You can, with WooCommerce and the Product Vendors extension. 

Pick a niche or area of focus, then allow artisans to apply for your marketplace. Set commission rates, allow vendors to manage their products, quickly view sales reports, and pay vendors on a schedule of your choosing. The possibilities here are endless!

Dumpster Market is a collection of dumpster rental companies located across the U.S. Site visitors enter their location, choose the size dumpster they want, and can see a list of vendors in their area, along with information about each one.

Jinja Gift is an online gift shop chock full of handmade items from Uganda. Vendors all apply through a registration form on the website, then sell everything from energy bars and stuffed animals to candles and board games. Those products are then shipped to customers around the world.

Learn more about creating a multi-vendor marketplace with WooCommerce.

3. A B2B wholesale platform

If you’re a wholesaler, you can also use WooCommerce to easily sell to your retailers instead of manually managing each and every account. This keeps customers happy, helps you grow, and even saves you time!

Simply add the Wholesale for WooCommerce extension to unlock features like special wholesale pricing, minimum order quantities, wholesale roles, visibility settings, and more. You can either sell just wholesale products, or list your retail products alongside them with different rates.

There are also other extensions you can use to sell wholesale products, like B2B for WooCommerce. This offers similar functionality, like wholesale registration forms, “get a quote” buttons, the ability to hide products based on user role, customer-specific pricing, and more.

Porta Pro Chem, a portable restroom product distributor, uses this extension on their B2B wholesale store. Some of their products can be ordered by anyone, while others are only available to wholesale customers, requiring new visitors to request a quote instead. They also have special pricing and shipping rules for each wholesale client.

Learn more about how to sell wholesale with WooCommerce.

4. A subscription service for recurring payments

Subscriptions are a powerful way to generate recurring revenue. Help loyal customers restock on the products they use over and over, sell themed subscription boxes, or charge monthly for your services — there are a lot of great options!

You can do this with the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension. This versatile tool sets up automatic recurring payments, on a variety of schedules — yearly, quarterly, monthly, etc. Customers can manage their own plans, upgrading, downgrading, or canceling without having to connect with your service team. You can also access detailed reports, send renewal emails to subscribers, and more.

Brodo offers subscriptions of their delicious, nutritious bone broth. Customers can choose from pre-built bundles or build their own combination of broth flavors, then opt to get their order just once, every two weeks, or every month. Then they can easily edit their own subscription, change the frequency, skip an order, or cancel, saving Brodo customer service time and headaches.

Learn more about subscriptions with WooCommerce.

4. A donation solution for nonprofit organizations

You don’t even need to sell products or services to benefit from WooCommerce. Nonprofits can also use it to collect donations to support their cause. And, if they do sell merchandise, too, they can do so on the same site.

The Donation for WooCommerce extension allows you to accept both one-time and recurring donations, show how close you are to meeting your goals, and even allow customers to round up their order total to contribute. Or you can use the Name Your Price extension to let site visitors donate whatever amount they’d like.

Supporters of Priority One Worldwide, for example, can donate the amount they’d like one time or on a monthly basis. They can also choose a specific area to support, such as Haiti or Mexico. 

Learn more about how nonprofits can use WooCommerce.

6. An online ordering system for restaurants

Of course, restaurants want to make it as easy as possible for diners to order food. Adding an online ordering system to your website helps hungry visitors select food for pickup or delivery no matter where they are, without having to call. You get to avoid the hefty fees that come with third-party ordering apps and can even sell merchandise — seasonings, sauces, shirts — alongside your food.

The Restaurant for WooCommerce extension makes this simple, letting you quickly create a restaurant menu, add delivery options, display hours, and more.

It also works seamlessly with other extensions, so you can include add-ons (sauces, upgraded sides, etc.), create customizable meals, or design a food-hall-style marketplace.

7. An online learning system

Online courses are a great way to create relatively passive income and share your knowledge with the world. Whether you’re an expert on knitting, woodworking, accounting, cooking, or travel, there’s someone out there who wants to hear what you have to say.

And with WooCommerce and Sensei LMS Pro, you can create courses full of helpful information, media, and quizzes, then sell access to them on your website. Offer standalone classes, certification programs, or subscriptions to a course library, then let students consume your content at their own pace. You can grade their work, communicate with them one-on-one, and even offer completion certificates. 

AvantageLearn.com, for example, sells courses that prepare students for their academic exams.  The courses include video lessons, practice quizzes, and downloadable worksheets. 

8. A membership program

With WooCommerce, you can also sell membership programs online. Customers can pay a one-time fee or subscribe to get regular access to your products. And you can include a huge variety of perks in your program — videos, templates, music, discounts, free shipping, or special products. 

PHLEARN created a membership program for design professionals. They can choose to pay monthly or yearly, then get access to a library of software tutorials, presets, brushes, and more. Plus they benefit from Photoshop support just for members.

9. A hub for your services

You don’t just have to sell physical or digital products to use WooCommerce. Service-based businesses can benefit, too! 

You might accept online payments for your services, whether they’re one-time or subscription-based, in a way that’s easy for all of your clients. You could charge for service upgrades, book appointments, create a client portal, offer digital guides and manuals, and more.

YourBenefitStore.com offers insurance services, allowing clients to select between a variety of plans based on their needs. This creates a perfectly seamless system and reduces paperwork and phone calls for the company’s team.

Learn more about why a service-based business needs an online store.

10. A booking system

If you sell accommodations, excursions, in-person classes, or even virtual consultations, you can use WooCommerce for bookings. Customers can book appointments, rentals, or reservations directly on your site, choosing between the time slots you make available. 

You can offer multi-person classes or single-person consultations, let attendees cancel or reschedule through their online account, and send reminders when the date is getting close. It’s a complete booking management system, all on your website.

Icon Cookery School, for instance, offers access to their in-person cooking classes. Interested patrons select the number of people who will attend, along with the date, then pay for the class online.

11. A customer relationship management system (CRM)

A CRM is incredibly valuable for any type of business, compiling all of the details about your customers and clients in one central location. Collect order details, contact information, communication history, and more, so that team members can always be up-to-date on a specific lead. And you can use this data to send hyper-personalized emails to increase loyalty and sales.

But there’s no need to use a completely separate platform from your website. With WooCommerce and Jetpack CRM, you can pull all of this powerful functionality directly into your site. Your WordPress dashboard becomes your CRM dashboard, and you can do everything from view information and create marketing emails to send invoices all in one place. Your sales data will seamlessly sync, letting you avoid complicated third-party connections.

Learn more about why your online store needs a CRM.

Why choose WooCommerce as your ecommerce solution?

Now that you know a bit more about WooCommerce and how businesses use it, let’s take a look at why it’s the best ecommerce solution.

1. It’s free to install and use

Like WordPress, WooCommerce is completely free to install and use. There are also a variety of free extensions you can use to add functionality for shipping, marketing, payments, and more. For the majority of online stores, this will be more than enough for you to get off the ground running!

That being said, there are premium extensions available for more advanced functionality.

2. It’s flexible 

The flexibility of WooCommerce cannot be beat. You can sell absolutely anything you’d like, from physical and digital products to subscriptions, memberships, bookings, services, online courses, and more. 

You can create any design you can imagine thanks to the WordPress block editor. Drag and drop paragraphs, headings, images, videos, columns, and more to build custom pages. And WooCommerce blocks for products, categories, reviews, filters, and checkout elements enable you to construct landing pages and checkout experiences that are perfect for your customers.

There’s also an entire library of free and premium extensions that provide any additional functionality you can imagine. From marketing and growth tools to payment gateways, shipping options, and third-party integrations, there’s something for everyone.

3. It integrates seamlessly with WordPress

Do you already have a WordPress site? Then WooCommerce will feel like an old friend. It’s built and supported by Automattic, the team behind WordPress.com, and integrates seamlessly. You’ll use the same dashboard you’re already familiar with to add products and manage your store. And you can trust that it works with the latest version of WordPress and popular themes and plugins.

4. You gain access to a close-knit community

The WooCommerce community is like no other, full of store owners and developers who are ready to help. Connect via in-person or virtual meetups, dive into the active support forums, chat with experts on the official Slack channel, or get involved on Facebook.

5. It scales with your business

WooCommerce is equipped to grow alongside your online store, no matter how many products, visitors, or customers you have. You can add an unlimited number of products and variations, and won’t experience any sort of additional fees because of your growth. The code is optimized and regularly updated for scalability, and there are powerful extensions designed specifically for large stores. 

Get the detailed answer to the question, “Can WooCommerce scale?”

6. It works for any experience level

Even if you have very little tech experience, you can work with WordPress and WooCommerce. Use the block editor to design a beautiful site without any code whatsoever. Add products using a simple interface. Get help from detailed documentation and excellent support.

And if you are a developer, you can take advantage of the open-source nature of WordPress and WooCommerce. Edit the code however you see fit, and use the REST API to connect with external applications.

How to install and use WooCommerce

Ready to get started with the top ecommerce platform? Let’s take a look at the process of creating an online store with WooCommerce. Note that if you already have a WordPress site, you can skip to Step 4.

1. Find a domain name and host for your WordPress site

Your first step is to purchase a domain name — the URL that a visitor types in to access your site. You’ll want to pick one that’s easy to remember and representative of your business.  

Then, find a hosting provider for your site. A host stores your website files and makes them available to visitors online. It’s the foundation of a quality site, affecting things like security and speed, so it’s important to choose one that’s high quality.

When choosing a host for your online store, look for ones that offer excellent support and maintenance, keep their servers updated, include security and speed features, allow you to scale easily, and have lots of WordPress experience. 

Jetpack has an in-depth list of recommended WordPress hosts to help you get started. Or, for a simple and reliable route, try the WordPress.com eCommerce plan. It includes absolutely everything you need to build a WooCommerce store in one managed package. 

2. Install WordPress

Now, it’s time to install WordPress. Most hosting providers offer easy, one-click installations and WordPress.com comes with the software already installed. But for a full guide, check out the documentation from WordPress.org. Then, take the time to log in and explore a bit.

Want a quick overview? Check out our guide to the WordPress admin dashboard.

3. Choose a WordPress theme

The theme that you choose impacts the design and layout of your site, along with some of the functionality that’s available to you. Some themes work as blank canvases, letting you create absolutely anything that you can imagine. Others include in-depth templates and block patterns that are essentially ready-made sites. Just switch out your content and you’re good to go!

No matter which route you want to take, pick a theme that has excellent reviews, is regularly updated, loads quickly, integrates with WooCommerce, and is mobile responsive. You’ll also want to make sure that support and documentation are included. 

Want ultimate flexibility? Choose a block theme, which allows for Full Site Editing. This enables you to use blocks — pieces of content like paragraphs, images, and columns — to build your entire website. This means ultimate customizability for more than just pages and posts, but also headers, footers, sidebars, templates, and more.

You can find free and premium themes in the WordPress repository, in the WooCommerce theme store, and from trusted third-party sources.

4. Install the WooCommerce plugin

Next, you’ll need to install WooCommerce. Simply log into your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New and search for “WooCommerce.” Click Install Now → Activate.

You’ll be met with the WooCommerce setup wizard, which will walk you through all the steps you need to get started. It will even customize instructions and settings based on the specific needs of your store!

5. Create pages

The specific content you create for your site will vary based on your needs, products, and audience. Think through the information that potential customers will find most helpful. Most stores will need pages for Home, About, Contact, FAQs, and Shipping. 

You can use the WordPress block editor to build those pages in an intuitive, visual way. Start by going to Pages → Add New, then add a title for your new page.

Click the + icon at the top left to view all available blocks. You can either search for one you’d like, or scroll through to get some inspiration. You can also look at block patterns to get ready-made page sections, like pricing tables.

Drag the block you’d like to use anywhere on the page. You can then click on that element to open settings that will vary based on the specific block you’re using. For example, an Image block has options for alignment, filters, size, radius, etc. 

Continue to build out your page using blocks until you’re happy with it. Click Preview in the top menu to get a sneak peak of how it looks, or click Publish to push it live. You can then add pages to your menu.

6. Create products

Ready to add products to your store? All you have to do is go to Products → Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Start by adding the name of your item in the Product Name box. Then, you can include a quick summary under Product short description, and more details in the large text box underneath the title.

In the Product data box, click the dropdown to choose a type of product. Simple products are items that have no options, while variable products allow for choices like size and color. Here, you can also set your product to be virtual and/or downloadable.

In the Product data section, you can set inventory levels, define shipping details, choose related products, and more.

On the right-hand side of the page, add a featured image, the photo that will represent your product, along with secondary images that visitors can scroll through. You can also assign categories and tags to your products, which will make them easier for shoppers to filter through.

When you’re ready, you can click the Preview button at the top right, or go ahead and click Publish to make your product live. 

Check out this guide to managing products for more details.

7. Choose a payment gateway

Your payment gateway allows you to securely accept payments online, and makes sure that money ends up in your bank account. You’ve probably heard of options like PayPal and Stripe, but there are lots of providers you can choose from.

When picking a payment gateway, consider factors like the currencies you want to accept, whether or not you want to offer recurring payments, and the fees involved with each specific provider. 

One excellent, simple option for the majority of businesses is WooCommerce Payments. It lets you accept debit and credit cards, alongside digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Take more than 135 currencies, process subscription payments, and manage everything directly in the WordPress dashboard. 

8. Set up shipping

If you’re selling digital products or services, you can skip this step, though it’s important that you have a seamless way to deliver those to customers as well. But for physical items, you’ll need to determine the best, safest, fastest way to get them into the hands of your buyers.

There are a variety of ways you can structure shipping. You might offer free shipping for all purchases, or only over a certain amount. You could charge based on purchase total or weight. And there are many carriers you can choose from. This ecommerce shipping guide from WooCommerce walks you through it all. 

WooCommerce Shipping is a great place to start. This free extension lets you purchase and print USPS and DHL labels directly from your dashboard, saving you money in the process.

9. Install a security plugin

Security is absolutely critical for any website, but that’s even more true for ecommerce stores. A WordPress security plugin like Jetpack helps you lock down your store and protect both your data and your customers’ private information.

There are several plans available that include features like:

• Real-time backups: A copy of your store will be saved every time a major change is made, like an updated page, installed plugin, added post, or placed order. You never have to worry about losing anything on your site!
• An activity log: Keep track of everything that happens on your site, along with who performed each action and when it took place.
• Malware scanning: This tool scans your website for malware, alerting you if it finds anything. It can also fix the majority of known issues with one click.
• Downtime monitoring: You’ll receive an instant alert if your site goes down, so you can identify and fix the issue quickly.
• Spam protection: Automatically filter and discard comments and contact form spam. 
• Brute force attack protection: Block hackers and bots that try to access your site by testing thousands of password and username combinations.

View all available Jetpack Security plans.

10. Optimize your site for speed

Speed is an important component of a great user experience. After all, people aren’t just going to wait forever for your site to load. And Google prioritizes websites that load quickly in the search results.

There are a variety of factors that go into building a fast site, including the theme and hosting provider that you choose. One of the simplest steps you can take is to install a WordPress speed plugin like Jetpack Boost.

This tool takes just a few steps to configure, and it handles some of the biggest speed optimization tasks, like optimizing CSS loading and deferring non-essential JavaScript. It also runs a performance test on your site so you can get an idea of where you stand and make improvements as necessary.

You can also use Jetpack’s additional performance tools to make even more speed improvements. VideoPress takes the weight of hosting videos off of your server, delivering lighting-fast media without any third-party ads. Jetpack CDN delivers your content from servers located around the world, displaying your site from the location closest to each individual visitor.

Learn more about Jetpack’s WordPress speed tools.

Frequently asked questions about WooCommerce

Still have questions? Find the answers to some common ones below.

Is WooCommerce secure?

Yes, WordPress and WooCommerce were built with security in mind, and are regularly updated to patch any potential vulnerabilities. However, like any website platform, WooCommerce sites can be hacked. It’s important that you take additional security steps to lock down your site as much as possible. This includes:

• Using quality passwords
• Choosing a hosting provider that prioritizes security
• Only giving full site access to trusted members of your organization
• Regularly scanning for malware
• Blocking brute force attacks
• Using two-factor authentication to safeguard your login page
• Setting up automatic backups and storing them in a secure location
• Regularly updating WordPress, themes, and plugins

Jetpack Security offers a full suite of WordPress security tools that takes care of the majority of these tasks all at once. It’s an excellent starting point for stores of any size.

Is WooCommerce free?

Yes, WooCommerce, like WordPress, is completely free to install and use. There are also a variety of free tools directly from WooCommerce, like WooCommerce Payments and WooCommerce Shipping.

There is, however, a library of premium extensions that add functionality to your online store. You can purchase these individually or in packages to create the exact setup you need.

Does WooCommerce take a percentage of sales?

No, unlike many other platforms, WooCommerce does not take a percentage of sales. You’re free to grow your store as large as you want without paying any additional fees to WooCommerce.

What is the difference between WooCommerce and WordPress?

WordPress is a free website-building tool that enables you to create any sort of site you can imagine. WooCommerce is the ecommerce leg of WordPress, built and maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. It’s an extra, free plugin that provides all the functionality needed to turn your WordPress site into an online store, from product listings to checkout tools.

You can build a WordPress site without WooCommerce, but need WordPress to have a WooCommerce store.

Does WooCommerce only work with WordPress?

Yes, you can only install WooCommerce on WordPress sites. It was built specifically for the WordPress platform, and the two work seamlessly together. 

Does WooCommerce have a mobile app?

Yes, the WooCommerce mobile app makes running your online store on the go easy. From your mobile device, you can create products, print labels, view store data, and manage orders. Plus, you’ll get real time alerts when customers place an order.

How many items or products can WooCommerce handle?

WooCommerce can handle an unlimited number of items and products. ISC Sales, for example, uses WooCommerce to list more than 17,000 products. And, unlike other platforms, you won’t be charged any additional fees for extra listings or variations.

Can WooCommerce handle high-traffic stores?

Yes, WooCommerce can scale to handle an unlimited amount of traffic. It regularly supports shops with thousands of sales per minute and was built to handle spikes in site visitors. 

It is important, however, that large stores choose a hosting provider and plan that can also support large volumes of traffic, and take steps to optimize their WooCommerce site for speed.

Can WooCommerce handle coupons and gift cards?

WooCommerce has built-in coupon functionality, yes. You can create coupon codes, choose the amount and type of discount you want to offer, include free shipping, set usage restrictions, and more. You can also use extensions for more advanced features like coupon personalization, store credits, free gifts, etc.  

It doesn’t offer gift card functionality out of the box. However, with the Gift Cards extension, you can offer gift cards to your customers, then allow recipients to use them to make purchases on your store.

Can I add a blog to a WooCommerce store?

Yes, you can absolutely add a blog to your store. Since WooCommerce is an extension of WordPress, you can take full advantage of the powerful blogging features built into the content management system (CMS). 

You can use the visual block editor to create beautiful posts, dragging elements like text, images, videos, quotes, and social media feeds wherever you’d like on the page. Then, you can categorize those posts, display them on the front-end of your site, and share them with the world.

Is WooCommerce an SEO-friendly ecommerce platform?

Yes, WooCommerce is a very SEO-friendly ecommerce tool. Again, you can harness the blogging power of WordPress to create high-quality content, one of the most important considerations when it comes to ranking well on search engines. WooCommerce is also mobile friendly, and uses clean, SEO-friendly code.

However, there are also steps that you should take to optimize your online store for SEO. You may want to install an SEO plugin to help you make the most of meta descriptions, page titles, schema markup, and more. It’s also important that you use tools like Jetpack Boost to ensure that your site performance is top-notch.

What are WooCommerce extensions?

WooCommerce extensions are plugins built to specifically add functionality to WooCommerce stores. They’re available directly from the WooCommerce team and there are both free and premium options. WooCommerce extensions offer tools for everything from marketing and growth to merchandising, shipping, and collecting payments.

Where are WooCommerce products stored in the database?

Since WooCommerce products are a custom post type, they’re stored in the wp_posts table. Product data — like price, stock status, etc. — is stored in the wp_postmeta table.

Where are WooCommerce orders stored in the database?

Again, WooCommerce orders are a custom post type, so they’re stored in the wp_posts table. The remaining information about orders — like billing and shipping information — is stored in the wp_postmeta table.

What are good tutorials on how to enhance WooCommerce?

WooCommerce offers in-depth documentation on the platform itself, along with all of its extensions, directly on their website. There, you can also find guides, developer resources, and blog posts designed to help store owners build and grow.

You can also find WooCommerce tutorials on Jetpack’s blog, including:

• The Complete WooCommerce Security Checklist
• 9 Ways to Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store
• How to Back Up WooCommerce
• Site Search for WooCommerce
• How to Sell Digital Products and Downloads with WooCommerce

Picture this: an excited fan comes to your site to buy your newest product, or read your latest article. They go to the search box, type it in…and it doesn’t work. Sadness.

No matter the size of your site, people expect a working search box. That’s why we’re excited to bring the power and ease of Jetpack Search to even the smallest sites.

We’ve simplified our pricing, and also added a free tier and a 3-month free trial. Add Jetpack Search to your site to see how much it helps your fans find what they’re looking for — available today through Jetpack, the new standalone Jetpack Search plugin, and WordPress.com.

Try Search for Free

Sites of all sizes can take advantage of our new free tier — it has a limit of 5k records and up to 500 requests per month. We do not cut off your site from going over the limits for the first three months, so the free tier is also a good way for any sized site to see how Jetpack Search benefits your site and visitors.

Note that sites on the free plan include “Search powered by Jetpack” at the bottom of the UI, support is limited to forums, and searching across multiple sites is not supported. To remove the Jetpack branding, get email support, or search across multiple sites you can upgrade to a paid tier.

Simplified Pricing Based on Monthly Requests and Records

To make our pricing easier to understand and plan around, we’ve gone from having six separate tiers to simply charging $8.25 per month per 10k records or requests. As a reminder, records are all posts, pages, and other types of content you want to be indexed. And requests are every time a visitor searches for something on your site. The price is calculated based on the maximum of either how many search records your site has or the median number of search requests from the past three months. 

An example: if your site has 25,000 records and the number of requests for the past three months are 120k, 35k, and 25k then your plan will auto-renew with a 40k limit. At $8.25 per month, the new price with the 40k limit is $33 per month, compared to $60 under the old pricing. We won’t penalize you for one busy month, so you won’t get a surprise bill.

Just like before, we don’t cut a site off for going over the limit, we just recalculate the limit and price when your plan renews based on the recent usage.

This new pricing does not yet affect existing Search customers. We will reach out by email before your pricing changes and it will only change when your plan renews.

Want to try Jetpack Search without adding the rest of Jetpack? We now have a separate Jetpack Search plugin for a streamlined experience.

If you have a particularly large site with millions of monthly requests/records, then please reach out to our sales team.

Add Jetpack Search to your site today and get a 3-month free trial.

When you’re working on a page or post in WordPress, you’ll likely go through several versions or “revisions.” WordPress revisions are the drafts of content you create using the editor. The revisions system works in the background to ensure that you always have previous versions of your work on hand. 

In this article, we’ll outline everything you need to know about WordPress post revisions. We’ll discuss how they work, where you can find them, and how to use them.

What are WordPress revisions?

When you’re creating a page or post — or even making edits to one over time — you probably save every once in a while to make sure you don’t lose your work. Each of these saved drafts, along with any published updates, is stored as a “revision” in WordPress.

WordPress stores multiple revisions for each page or post. However, the exact number depends on how your specific site is configured. By default, there’s no limit to the number of revisions that are saved. 

One key benefit of the revisions system is the ability to view and compare different versions of your content. You can see the current page right next to a previous version in order to review changes or decide which one you want to publish. You can also see who made each change and when it occurred, which is helpful if you have multiple users on your site.

It’s important to note that WordPress post revisions show the content using HTML code, which includes information about the blocks you use and your page or post layout. While you won’t need to edit this code, it could be confusing if you’re not familiar with it.

Where to find revisions in WordPress

You can find revisions by opening a specific post or page in the WordPress Editor. Once you land on a page, select Settings → Post and click on “_ Revisions.” The blank here will show the number of revisions you have available. 

This will launch a new page that includes all available revisions for the post or page you’re working on. You can use the slider near the top of the screen to switch between content versions.

How to use and manage WordPress revisions

Let’s take a deeper dive into all aspects of the WordPress revisions system, from comparing and restoring versions to even disabling them altogether!

How to preview and compare revisions

To preview and compare revisions, you need to make sure the post or page you’re currently editing has past drafts saved. You can do this by opening the Block Editor, navigating to the Settings → Post menu, and looking for the Revisions option.

If you don’t see this in the post settings menu, there are no revisions available. This may be because you haven’t saved multiple drafts, the revisions system is disabled, or you deleted the previous revisions.

If the Revisions option is available, click on it. This will launch a new page that enables you to preview existing revisions and compare them.

After selecting a revision, it will appear side by side with the current version of the page or post. Now, you can compare the differences between them. 

The previous version of the post will be in the left-hand column, with the newer version on the right. You can use the slider at the top to switch between all available versions. 

By default, WordPress displays revisions in succession. If you want to compare two versions that don’t immediately follow one another, check the box next to Compare any two revisions. This allows you to pick any two specific revisions to compare next to one another.

All new content will be highlighted in green, and any content that was removed will be highlighted in red.

Again, note that the page or post content is shown as code, not as blocks like in the WordPress Editor. However, this is relatively straightforward to navigate, even if you’re not a developer, thanks to HTML comments, which explain the code that follows. Let’s look at a couple of examples from the image above.

First, you’ll see this code:

<!-- wp:paragraph -->

<p>Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!</p>

<!-- /wp:paragraph -->

This tells you that there’s a Paragraph block here, with the text content, “Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!”

Then, you’ll see this:

<!-- wp:image {"id":238,"sizeSlug":"large","linkDestination":"none"} -->

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ze-ferrari-careto-v5Px2pav-MM-unsplash-1024x683.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-238"/></figure>

<!-- /wp:image -->

This code tells you the following:

• This is an Image block, using a media file with the ID 238.
• The size of the image is Large and it currently doesn’t link to anything.
• The media file URL is http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ze-ferrari-careto-v5Px2pav-MM-unsplash-1024×683.jpg.

If you run into anything that you’re unsure of, you can use resources like W3Schools to learn what a piece of code means.

If you want to exit the Revisions panel, simply click Go to Editor at the top left. This will take you back to the WordPress Editor for this page or post.

How to revert to a previous WordPress revision

While comparing WordPress revisions, you can select the Restore This Revision option. This will restore the revision in the right-hand column.

It’s always best to thoroughly review the content before restoring a revision, because WordPress doesn’t ask for confirmation first. And once you restore a past version of a post or page, you may not be able to revert to the most current draft you were working on.

How to limit WordPress revisions

By default, WordPress stores an unlimited number of revisions for each page or post. However, some hosts may limit this number. For example, WordPress.com saves 25 revisions for Free, Personal, and Premium plans, and 100 revisions for Business and eCommerce plans.

If you have lots of revisions, they can clog up your database and slow down your site. So, you may want to limit the number that your site saves. You can limit WordPress revisions by manually editing the wp-config.php file. The best way to access this file is by connecting to your site via FTP using a client like FileZilla.

Once you establish an FTP connection, navigate to the WordPress root directory. This might be called public_html or your site name. Open it and look for the wp-config.php file. Right-click on it and select the option to edit the file.

Look for the following line of code. The number at the end will vary because it determines the number of revisions your site can store:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3 );

If you can’t find that line within the file, copy the code above and paste it at the end of the wp-config.php file. You can change the 3 to any value you’d like, depending on the number of revisions you want to store. Here are some other options:

• Use “true (default), -1” to store every revision
• Use “false, 0” to not save any revisions at all

If you don’t feel comfortable editing code, another option is to use a plugin. One of the most user-friendly options is WP Revisions Control.

This plugin allows you to modify the number of revisions stored for different content types. For example, you can disable revisions for pages or products while increasing the number of stored versions for posts.

How to disable WordPress revisions

Although revisions are enabled by default in WordPress, you can easily disable them by taking similar steps to the ones discussed above. To disable WordPress post revisions, you’ll need to modify the wp-config.php file.

You can find instructions on accessing the file in the previous section, where we cover how to limit WordPress revisions. Once you find the file, you’ll need to edit the WP_POST_REVISIONS code to disable them entirely. This is the new line you’ll use:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

Keep in mind that simply deleting the code won’t disable WordPress revisions. Instead, it will reset the system to WordPress’s default configuration.

Alternatively, you can use a plugin to disable post revisions in WordPress. Several tools are designed for this purpose, but one of the most straightforward options is called Disable Post Revision.

The plugin adds new settings to the WordPress dashboard, allowing you to disable revisions for posts, pages, and other types of content, all without touching a single line of code.

How to enable WordPress revisions

Revisions are enabled in WordPress by default. But if you’ve disabled them manually or using a plugin, you may want to enable them down the road. The exact method of doing so depends on how you disabled them to begin with.

If you modified the wp-config.php file manually, you can edit the code and set the number of revisions to a positive value, like in this example:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3 );

By using that code, you tell WordPress to store up to three revisions for every post. 

If you’re using a plugin to disable WordPress revisions, you’ll need to either edit the settings or deactivate the plugin altogether. 

How to optimize revisions in the WordPress database

In most cases, “optimizing the database” refers to deleting unnecessary content like revisions, autosaves, leftover data from plugins and themes, etc. While there are a variety of other speed optimization tasks that can make more substantial improvements, deleting revisions from the database can make a small difference.

One popular plugin for optimizing revisions is Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions. With this tool, you can choose which types of revisions you want to delete from the database, then set the tool to do so immediately or on a specific schedule.

Unfortunately, most database optimization plugins don’t let you choose which posts or pages to exclude from the cleanup process. That means you’ll lose access to most, if not all, of your revisions afterwards.

Frequently asked questions about WordPress revisions

If you still have questions about WordPress revisions, this section will answer them. Let’s start by talking about any potential downsides of the revisions system!

Are there any downsides to WordPress revisions?

The only potential downside to WordPress revisions is that they take up storage space. Every revision translates to an entry in your WordPress database. If you have a website with hundreds of posts and pages, revisions can contribute to a lot of additional data stored.

This may not necessarily be a problem for websites with a great hosting plan, but it can be limiting for other sites. Depending on your setup, relying on real-time backups that are stored off-site might be a better option. These don’t take up space on your server, and ensure that you always have a copy of your site on hand, even if your host is compromised.

Jetpack Backup is an excellent option here. It automatically saves your site whenever you make a change — updating a page, publishing a post, adding a plugin, etc. And, restoring a previous version of your site only takes a few clicks, even if it’s completely down!

Do WooCommerce products have revisions?

WooCommerce supports the WordPress revisions system, but this feature isn’t turned on by default. To enable revisions for WooCommerce products, you’ll need to edit the functions.php file for the theme you’re currently using.

We always recommend using a child theme when editing theme files, so that your work is saved even when you update the parent theme. 

Then, you’ll simply need to add the following code to your child theme’s functions.php file:

add_filter( 'woocommerce_register_post_type_product', 'wpse_modify_product_post_type' );

function wpse_modify_product_post_type( $args ) {

     $args['supports'][] = 'revisions';

     return $args;

}

Does WordPress support revisions for custom post types?

By default, WordPress only supports revisions for posts and pages. But you can add support for custom post types by editing the functions.php file for the theme that you’re using.

Again, we recommend using a child theme if you decide to edit theme files so you don’t lose your code when you update the parent theme.

What is the optimal number of WordPress revisions?

The optimal number of revisions will vary depending on your specific site. If you run a busy blog and update your posts regularly, you may want to keep several revisions on hand just in case. However, if your site is relatively stagnant, this feature may not be as important.

Of course, it’s always recommended to have full-site backups on hand in case of a hack or other issue. This is the best way to protect your content and customer data. Learn more about how to back up a WordPress site.

Can I only restore part of a revision?

No, unfortunately the WordPress revisions system restores the entire draft of the page or post. You can’t, for example, revert a single paragraph to a previous version. 

If you only want to restore part of a revision, you can use the revisions feature to copy the code for a specific block. Then, you can paste the code into the Code Editor of the page or post you’re working on.

You can find this by clicking the three vertical dots at the top right of the WordPress Editor. From there, simply choose Code Editor and make any changes you need to.

Should I delete revisions from the database?

Deleting revisions from the database can improve the performance of your website, especially if you have a lot of pages and posts, and accompanying stored versions. However, the potential downside here is that if you delete all the revisions, you won’t have any that you can restore.

Another option is to simply limit the number of revisions that WordPress stores. Following the instructions above, you can configure WordPress to store just one or two versions of each page or post. That way, you’ll always have a revision available in case something goes wrong.

Why aren’t WordPress revisions showing in my screen options?

If revisions aren’t showing for a specific post or page, there may not be any available. Perhaps you haven’t saved any drafts of the content. Or, it’s possible that you or another member of your team disabled the revisions system for your site.

You can use the instructions in this article to see if revisions are disabled in your theme’s wp-config.php file. You may also want to check with your hosting provider’s support team to see if they disabled revisions for any reason.

What’s the difference between WordPress revisions and autosaves?

WordPress automatically saves a copy of your work in case the Editor closes due to an unexpected error. These are called autosaves, and only one is stored at a time.

Each individual WordPress revision is a saved draft of a page or post. You can save an unlimited number of these, compare different versions, and restore a previous one if needed.

Protect your work with WordPress revisions

Revisions are a helpful part of WordPress. You can save multiple drafts of your work, review previous versions, and restore them nearly instantly. The number of revisions you access will depend on your site’s configuration.

Keep in mind that you should also use backups alongside revisions if you want to save the rest of your site’s data.

Jetpack Backup offers you automated backups that are stored off-site. It creates copies of your site whenever you make a change and stores them for up to a year, depending on your plan. 

Get started today! 

Sometimes, a plugin can cause a fatal or critical error in WordPress that results in loss of access to a site’s web pages or WP Admin area. When a fatal error occurs on a WordPress site, it’s usually due to a bug in a plugin or theme’s code that causes the site’s server to become stuck and unable to respond to requests.

Usually, WordPress displays a critical error message when a bug is preventing the site from working. An email is also sent to the site administrator with more details about the error. If you cannot find that email, the next best step would be to check the PHP error logs in your web hosting account, if those are available. 

If you’re unsure about how to access those logs, your web host can help you. You can also put WordPress in debug mode and check the error messages displayed when you attempt to visit your site.

The message should include the name of the plugin, theme folder, or file causing the error. Now, you just need to deactivate the plugin to resolve the issue, which can seem tricky without access to your WP Admin area. Thankfully, there is a straightforward solution. 

Here’s how to deactivate a plugin without access to WP-Admin:

Step 1: Get your site’s SSH, SFTP, or FTP credentials

Since your site is down, you aren’t able to access your WordPress dashboard, and will need to find another way to deactivate the plugin. SSH (Secure Shell), SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol), FTPS (also known as FTP-SSL, and FTP Secure), and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) are different types of server access protocols/schemes.

These credentials allow you, or a service like Jetpack Backup, to directly access your site’s files on the server powering your website. You can get these from your hosting account dashboard or with the help of your hosting provider’s support team. Note that these server access credentials are unique and different from your WP Admin login details and, in most cases, your host’s control panel or dashboard login.

Step 2: Download a file transfer client application

For the next step, you’ll need to use a file transfer client app/software like FileZilla or Transmit. The file manager option in your hosting control panel (like cPanel) could also be a good option, but it’s typically better to use ftp because of its additional functionality and security.

Step 3: Connect to your server using the credentials

Once you have your FTP credentials and a file transfer app installed on your device, proceed to connect to your site using the credentials. FileZilla has some usage instructions that should help guide you along the way. Transmit also has a helpful guide on using their Quick Connect feature to connect to your server.

While the exact process depends on the tool you’re using, you’ll typically need to enter information like the server address, username, password, port, and WordPress installation path. Once you’ve done that, click Connect or the equivalent on the file transfer app of your choice to connect to your server. When you have successfully connected, you should see a list of files and directories in the remote path you provided.

Here’s what that looks like in Transmit:

Step 4: Rename the plugin folder to deactivate it

Now that you’re connected and can see your site’s files and folders, navigate to the /wp-content folder. Inside this folder, you’ll see a folder called plugins where WordPress stores the files for all plugins installed on your website.

Open this folder, select the plugin culprit, and right-click to view more options. Click Rename or the equivalent on your chosen file transfer client. Then, set the new name of the folder to something like plugin-name.deactivate. In other words, add .deactivate to the name of the folder.

Here’s what the rename option looks like in Transmit:

Once you rename the plugin, it will be deactivated because WordPress won’t be able to find the plugin folder in that location. If that plugin was the cause of the critical error, you should regain access to your WordPress site and the admin area. If you navigate to WP Admin → Plugins, you should see a notification saying that the plugin has been deactivated because the plugin file does not exist.

That’s it. You can follow the same steps to deactivate a theme if a theme is responsible for the critical error. Only this time, you should navigate to wp-content/themes when you’ve connected to your site via FTP. 

Now you know how to easily deactivate a plugin that’s causing an issue on your site! 

An easier way to restore access to your WordPress site

No matter your experience level, WordPress sites will occasionally run into issues outside of your control. 

Jetpack Backup stores a real-time copy of your site on secure, independent servers so that you can quickly fix errors without any complicated problem solving. Even if your site is completely down, you can access and restore a backup 24/7. 

It’s part of Jetpack’s entire suite of WordPress security tools that can prevent hacks and issues, alert you of any problems that do occur, and resolve them with as little as a single click. 

See everything that Jetpack has to offer. 

It’s common for a plugin to cause a fatal or critical error in WordPress that results in loss of access to a site’s public web pages or WP Admin area. That fact that it is common doesn’t make it any less terrifying to experience. When a fatal error occurs on a WordPress site, it is usually due to a bug in the responsible plugin or theme code that causes the affected site’s server to become stuck and unable to respond to requests.

Usually, the WordPress.org software displays a critical error message when a bug on the site is causing an error preventing the site from working. WordPress also emails the site administrator with more details about the error. If you cannot find that email, the next best step would be to check the PHP error logs in your web hosting account, if those are available. If you’re unsure how to access those logs, your web host can help you. You can also put WordPress in debug mode and check the error messages displayed when you attempt to visit your site.

However you get the error messages, the entire message should include the name of the plugin, theme folder, or file causing the error. Upon discovering the plugin causing the error, you might wonder how to remove the plugin or theme and get your site working again when the plugin error prevents you from accessing your WP Admin area. Deactivating plugins via WP Admin is not the only way. There’s another way:

Step 1: Get your site’s SSH, SFTP, or FTP credentials

Now that your site is down, you’ll need the correct credentials to access your site’s files remotely via other non-HTTP means. SSH (Secure Shell), SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol), FTPS (also known as FTP-SSL, and FTP Secure), and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) are different types of server access protocols/schemes.

These credentials allow you, or a service like Jetpack Backup, to directly access your site’s files on the server powering your website. You can get these from your hosting account dashboard or with the help of your hosting provider’s support. Note that these server access credentials are unique and different from your WP Admin login details and, in most cases, your host’s control panel or dashboard login.

Step 2: Download a file transfer client application

For the next step, you will need to use a file transfer client app/software like FileZilla or Transmit. The file manager option in your WordPress hosting control panel is also a good option, but it might be better to use a file transfer client as they consistently provide better interfaces for viewing your site’s files than many hosting account file managers.

Step 3: Connect to your server using the credentials

Once you have your SSH, SFTP, or FTP credentials and a file transfer app installed on your device, proceed to connect to your site using the credentials. FileZilla has some usage instructions that should help guide you along the way. Transmit also has a help guide on using their Quick Connect feature to connect to your server.

The general process is to choose the protocol or server type and to fill out the form with the details (server address, username, password, port, and remote WordPress installation path that you have gotten from your hosting account, support, or server administrator). Once you have done that, click Connect or the equivalent on the file transfer app of your choice to connect to your server. When you have successfully connected, you should see a list of files and directories in the remote path you provided. Here’s what that looks like in Transmit:

Step 4: Rename the plugin folder to deactivate it

Now that you’re connected and can see your site’s files and folders, navigate to the wp-content folder. Inside this wp-content folder, you will see a folder called plugins where WordPress stores the files for all plugins installed on your website.

Navigate to the plugins folder, select the plugin culprit and right-click to view more options. Click Rename or the equivalent on your chosen file transfer client. Then set the new name of the folder to something like plugin-name.deactivate. In other words, add .deactivate to the name of the folder. Here’s what that the rename option looks like in Transmit:

Once you rename the plugin, it will be deactivated because WordPress won’t be able to find the plugin folder when it looks there. If that plugin was the cause of the critical error, you should regain access to your WordPress site and the admin area. If you navigate to WP Admin > Plugins, you should see a notification saying that the plugin has been deactivated because the plugin file does not exist like so:

That’s it. You can follow the same steps to deactivate a theme if a theme is responsible for the critical error. Only this time, you should navigate to wp-content/themes when you have connected to your site via SSH, SFTP, or FTP. If a theme bug is actually stopping you from accessing your site, then renaming the theme folder should resolve the issue.

Hopefully, this article has helped you resolve a critical error on your site. You may want to check out our Jetpack Backup product or the Jetpack Security bundle to keep your WordPress site’s data safe. With regular malware scans, a web application firewall, real-time backups, and one-click restores, you can relax and focus on publishing awesome content for your readers.

When you’re trying to access a website, the last thing you want is to experience technical difficulties. Unfortunately though, you’re likely to encounter a few, like the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error, at some point while managing a site.

The good news is that there are plenty of steps you can take to resolve the issue relatively quickly. The key is understanding what the error message means and following some simple troubleshooting steps to fix it. Regardless of which device or operating system (OS) you’re using, you should be able to get your browsing experience back on track with minimal effort.

In this post, we’ll explain what the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error means and some common things that cause it. Then, we’ll walk you through the steps you can take to fix it on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

What the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error means

There are a wide variety of WordPress error messages you might encounter when trying to access your website. Some have to do with WordPress directly while others, like the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error, arise from other sources.

The above error message is what you’ll see using Google Chrome. But, you may also encounter it on other devices, browsers, and operating systems. If you’re not using Chrome, the exact wording of the error message may vary.

For instance, in Mozilla Firefox, it might look something like this instead:

In Microsoft Edge, it usually appears similar to the following:

Meanwhile, Safari displays a message like this:

The DNS_PROBE FINISHED NXDOMAIN error is returned if the nameserver cannot find the requested domain. This may happen due to a number of reasons. It’s often seen when trying to connect to a website using a web browser. Typically, it indicates an issue with your network or “DNS.”

Before we get into what might be causing this error message, it’s helpful to understand what each element of the response code means. DNS stands for domain name system. A DNS server is responsible for translating human-friendly domain names (like http://www.Jetpack.com) into internet protocol (IP) addresses (like 192.168.0.1).

Your web browser does this automatically when you type in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) into the address bar. To put it simply, when you type a URL in your browser, you’re asking the DNS server to translate the name into an IP address.

This process of requesting your computer to find the IP address of a website is referred to as a DNS probe. If the DNS server does not have a record for the requested name, then it returns an NXDOMAIN (Non-Existent Domain) error.

Common causes of the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error

There are many reasons why you may be seeing the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error message. Some of the most common causes include:

• A typo in the URL or an incorrect IP address: Sometimes it can be as simple as mistyping the URL of the website you’re trying to visit. 
• Antivirus or firewalls blocking access to the name server: It’s not uncommon for antivirus or firewall software to block access to certain websites, resulting in the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error.
• Misconfigured server settings or DNS configuration: Your computer may be configured to use the wrong DNS server or your internet service provider’s (ISP) DNS server may be unavailable.
• Mismatched hostname: The hosts file on your computer may be blocking access to the website you’re trying to visit. You can check and edit your hosts file to see if that’s the case.
• A DNS lookup timeout: The DNS lookup process can time out if it’s taking longer than expected. 
• Browser cache and cookies: Another common cause of this error is an outdated or corrupt cache and cookies in your browser.

It’s also possible that you’re seeing this error message simply because the server is down. If that’s the case, you’ll want to check back again in a few minutes.

Keep in mind that you might not be able to identify the source of this error message until you begin troubleshooting. You may have to attempt a handful of potential solutions before you uncover the problem and, in turn, take the necessary steps to remedy it.  

How to fix DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN on desktop (Windows & Mac)

Now that we understand a bit more about what the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error is and what might be causing the problem, it’s time to get into how you can go about resolving it. The exact steps you should take will depend on the device that you’re using. To start, we’ll show you how to fix it on desktops, including both Windows and Mac. 

1. Restart your device and router/modem

It’s possible that you’re seeing this error message because of your internet connection. So, after you’ve confirmed that you’ve entered the correct URL, it’s a good idea to check your internet connection, to make sure it’s working properly.

If everything seems to be operating as it should, the next step is to restart your device, as well as your router (or modem). You’ll need to power down your computer, then unplug your router or modem and wait a minute or so.

After that, you can plug it back in. Once you’re connected to the internet again, turn your computer back on and try revisiting the website. This may seem obvious, but it’s a tactic you won’t want to skip. 

2. Clear your browser cache and cookies

If you’re experiencing issues with a particular website, one thing you can try is clearing your browser cookies and cache. Browser cookies and cache are two web technologies that are used to store data in order to improve the web browsing experience.

In a nutshell, browser cookies are small files that are stored on a user’s computer by the websites they visit. They’re used to store data such as login information, preferences, and other details that can help improve the user experience (UX) on a site.

Cache is a type of storage that is used by web browsers and servers in order to save frequently accessed data so that it can be quickly retrieved when needed. Both browser cookies and caching can help improve the speed and performance of web browsing. However, if not managed properly, they can also lead to privacy and security issues.

Clearing your browser cookies and cache will remove any temporary data that could be causing the problem.

2.1 Windows

To do this in Windows, go to the Start menu and type “Internet Options” into the search bar. Then, click on the Internet Options icon when it appears in the results.

In the Internet Options (or Internet Properties) window, go to the General tab and click on Delete in the Browsing history section. Make sure to check both the cookies and website data and the Temporary Internet files and website files options. Then, click on Delete.

Alternatively, you can clear your browser cookies and cache within the browser you’re using. 

For instance, if you’re navigating with Google Chrome, you can click on the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner followed by More tools → Clear browsing data. In the window that appears, make sure the three items are selected, then click on the Clear Data button.

2.2 Mac

On a Mac, you’ll have to clear your cache in Safari. To do this, open Safari and click on Safari → Preferences in the top menu bar.

In the Preferences window, go to the Privacy tab and click on Remove All Website Data.

This will remove all cookies and cached data for all websites. Select Remove Now to confirm. Then, restart your browser and try loading the website again.

3. Refresh your DNS cache

Similar to a browser cache, a DNS cache is a type of storage that is used by DNS servers in order to save frequently accessed data. DNS servers use this in order to save time when resolving IP addresses.

If the DNS server has recently resolved an IP address for a certain website, it will be able to quickly retrieve the IP address from its DNS cache rather than having to look up the address again. This can help improve the speed of web browsing. But if it becomes outdated or corrupt, it can also lead to a wide range of issues, including the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error.

3.1 Windows

To flush your DNS cache in Windows, go to the Start menu and type “cmd” into the search bar. Click on the Command Prompt icon.

In the Command Prompt window, type “ipconfig /flushdns” and press Enter.

3.2 Mac

To flush your DNS cache on Mac, open the Terminal application. You can do this by going to the Applications → Utilities folder or by searching for it in Spotlight.

In the Terminal window, type “dscacheutil -flushcache” and press Return. This will clear your DNS cache.

4. Release and renew your IP address

If you’re still seeing the error message, the next step is to release and renew your IP address. This allows your computer to communicate with the network more effectively, which can improve your internet speeds and reduce any connectivity issues you may be experiencing. 

4.1 Windows

To do this in Windows, you’ll want to return to the Command Prompt window. This time, type the following commands, pressing your Enter key after each:

ipconfig /release

ipconfig /renew

4.2 Mac

If you’re using macOS, you can navigate to your Terminal application. Then enter the following:

sudo killall –HUP mDNSResponder

After that, hit your Return key. Note that it may ask you to enter your device admin password to proceed. 

5. Change your DNS servers

If you’re still having trouble accessing a website, you can try selecting a different DNS server. While there are a handful of alternatives you can use, a popular choice is the standard Google Public DNS. Google Public DNS is a free, global DNS resolution service.

It can make your internet browsing both faster and more secure. The service uses modern Anycast technology to spread traffic across multiple servers around the world. It also leverages DNSSEC to validate responses.

5.1 Windows

To change your DNS servers in Windows, go to Control Panel → Network and Internet. Then, select the Network and Sharing Center option.

Once there, click on the Change adapter settings in the left sidebar.

This will open the Network Connections window. Right-click on your active network connection and select Properties from the drop-down menu.

In the Properties window, go to the Networking tab and select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) from the list of options, followed by the Properties button. 

In the IPv4 Properties window, select the Use the following DNS server addresses radio button.

Next, you can enter “8.8.8.8” for the Preferred DNS server and “8.8.4.4” for the Alternate DNS server. Click on OK to save your changes and close the window.

5.2 Mac

You can use these same addresses for Mac. But, to get there, you’ll need to open the System Preferences application by clicking on the Apple icon in the top menu bar. Then select System Preferences from the drop-down menu.

In the System Preferences window, go to Network and choose the network interface you want to configure in the left sidebar. Next, click on the Advanced button.

In the window that opens, go to the DNS tab and select the + icon.

This will allow you to enter a custom DNS server. When you’re done, you can click on the OK button.

6. Temporarily disable your antivirus or firewall

6.1 Windows

To disable your antivirus and firewall in Windows, navigate to your Control Panel then go to the System and Security section and click on the Windows Firewall option.

In the Windows Firewall screen, click on the Turn Windows Defender Firewall on or off option in the left sidebar.

After that, click on the Off (not recommended) radio button for both the Private network settings and Public network settings options. Select OK to save your changes and close the screen. 

6.2 Mac

To disable your antivirus and firewall on Mac, open the System Preferences application, then go to the Security & Privacy application.

Select the Firewall tab. Next, click on the Turn Off Firewall button.

You will be prompted to confirm your decision. Simply click on the Turn Off Firewall button again to confirm.

7. Check your hosts file

A hosts file is a text file that maps hostnames to IP addresses without using a DNS server.

When a computer visits a website, it first checks the hosts file to see if it can resolve the hostname to an IP address. If it can, then it will connect to the website using the IP address. Otherwise, it will use DNS to resolve the hostname.

7.1 Windows

To check your hosts file in Windows, go to the Start menu and type “Notepad” into the search bar and select the Notepad application.

Click on the File menu and select Open from the drop-down menu. In the Open window, navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and select the hosts file.

Make sure that All Files is selected in the drop-down menu next to the File name field. Click on the Open button to open the hosts file in Notepad.

Within this file, check whether the website that you’re trying to access that’s throwing the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error is listed. If it is, delete it, save the file, then try refreshing your browser.

Also, you don’t necessarily need to use the Notepad application to do this. You can use any text editor in Windows that lets you access and modify your files. 

7.2 Mac

To check the hosts file in Mac, open the Terminal application. In the command prompt, type “sudo nano /etc/hosts” and press Enter. This will open the hosts file in a text editor. 

Again, look for the site that you’re trying to access and delete it if you find it listed. When you’re done, press on your Ctrl+X keys to exit the Nano text editor and save your changes.

That’s it! After completing the above steps, you should no longer see the NDS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error message on the WordPress website you’re trying to access from your computer. 

How to fix DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN on Mobile (iOS & Android)

As we mentioned, you can also come across this error message when you’re browsing on your mobile device, not just a desktop computer. The process for resolving this issue is slightly different than if you were using a PC. Below is how you can fix the DNS_PROBE_FINSIHED_NXDOMAIN error on mobile for both Android and iOS.

1. Check for any app or system updates

To get started, first try restarting your mobile device. This may help resolve any minor connection issues you’re experiencing that may be leading to the error.

If this doesn’t work, the next step is to check to see whether your system or browser app requires any updates.

1.1 Android

On Android devices, you can do this by browsing to Settings → System.

Navigate to System update. If there is a new version available, it will tell you. In that case, simply update it, then try visiting the site once more. 

To check for any updates on your Chrome app, you can open the Play Store, then search for “Chrome.” If one is available, you can click on the Update button next to it.

1.2 Apple iOS

If you’re using Apple iOS, you can check for system updates by selecting the Settings application (the gear icon), followed by General.

Next, click on Software Update.

If one is available, it will inform you on the screen. You can select Update Now to proceed. 

To update any browser apps you use, you can navigate to the Apps Store from your home screen. Select the icon in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Here, you can find all the applications on your device that currently have an updated version available.

Scroll through the list and update any browser apps that you use. When you’re done, restart your device and try accessing the website again. 

2. Clear your browser cookies and cache 

As with desktop devices, you might be able to resolve this error message by clearing your browser cookies and cache.

2.1 Android

If you’re using Android, you can open your Chrome app and then select the three vertical dots.

Next, navigate to Settings → Storage → Apps → Chrome.

After you select Free up storage space, you’ll be prompted to do so. This will clear any unnecessary files or data. 

2.2 Apple iOS

In Apple iOS, you can open your Settings application then scroll down to Safari.

On the next screen, scroll to the bottom to locate the Privacy & Security section.

Next, select Clear History and Website Data.

In the popup that appears, click on Clear History and Data. This will remove your history, cookies, and other browsing data. 

3. Change your DNS settings

As with a desktop, the DNS settings of your mobile device may be to blame when you’re seeing this pesky error message. So, the next step is to try changing your network settings.

3.1 Android

If you’re an Android user, you can do this by opening your Settings app, then navigating to Network & Internet.

Next, tap and hold the Wi-Fi network connection, then click on Modify network.

In the Advanced options section, select Static then scroll to the bottom to locate the DNS server addresses fields.

For the preferred DNS value, you can enter “8.8.8.8” for DNS 1 and “8.8.4.4” for DNS 2. Save your changes then refresh your browser.

3.2 Apple iOS

For iOS, open your Settings application then select your Wi-Fi connection and select it again on the next screen. Scroll down to the DNS section and click on Configure DNS.

On the next screen, select Manual followed by Add Server.

You can then enter the same values as above into the fields. When you’re done, click on the Save button in the top right-hand corner of the screen. 

Why backups are a WordPress site’s best friend 

At this point, hopefully, you’ve learned how you can resolve the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error in WordPress.

To help minimize the potential damage that may occur as a result of website or browser errors, it’s essential to consistently create backups of your website. When it comes to WordPress site maintenance and management, the importance of backups can’t be stressed enough.

One of the reasons they should be a priority is that they help ensure your website’s content will always be available, even if something happens to your original files. Backups also make it easy to restore your website if it is ever hacked or damaged.

Plus, having a backup can save you a lot of time and money if you ever need to rebuild your site from scratch. The more frequently you back up your website, the more likely you are to have an updated version of it to restore in an emergency.

How often should you back up your WordPress website? It depends on how often you make changes to it. If you only update your site occasionally, then backing it up once a month or so should be sufficient. However, if you are constantly tweaking your site, then you may want to consider a solution that saves every change.

Real-time backups mean that your website’s content is constantly being saved as you make modifications. They also make it easy to restore your website to a previous state in a matter of minutes.

For WordPress users, Jetpack Backup is a trusted option for those looking to protect their work.

It offers a complete solution for handling website backups. It’s intuitive, easy to use, and lets you restore your site from anywhere, even if it’s offline.

Take control of your WordPress maintenance

If you see the DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error when you’re trying to connect to a website, it likely means that the DNS can’t find the address of the page you’re trying to reach. This can happen for a number of reasons. Luckily, there are a few simple steps you can take to resolve it.

As we discussed in this post, you can often fix this error by simply checking and refreshing your DNS and network settings. In addition to configuring proper DNS and browser settings, it’s also important to make sure you’re creating regular backups of your website so you can quickly resolve other site or browser-related errors in the future.

It takes mere seconds for visitors to decide whether they want to stay on your website or go elsewhere. So it’s important that you grab their attention immediately and convince them to explore the rest of your site.

A great way to captivate and impress your audience is with a video background. In this post, we’ll take a look at the benefits of adding a video background to your site. Then, we’ll discuss some best practices and show you four easy ways to do this in WordPress. 

What is a video background?

Video backgrounds are a way for you to provide a more engaging experience for your visitors. Instead of adding a solid color or image behind pieces of your content, you can use a video instead. These videos often loop (repeat) and are silent so as to enhance rather than take away from the rest of the page.

You can add a video background behind blocks of text, images, buttons, forms — whatever you’d like! — or even use it as the background of an entire landing page. 

Strandberg Guitars, for example, displays a beautiful video background of their products in action right when visitors land on their site. Their header, intro text, and call to action button are layered on top of the video in a way that all content is still visible.

What are the benefits of a video background?

There are many benefits to using a video background. To begin, it can make your pages look more professional and attractive. When someone arrives on your site and sees a moving video, it grabs their attention in a way that stagnant content cannot. 

Video backgrounds can also be an excellent way to showcase products and services in action. Feature the beautiful rooms in your bed and breakfast, show kids happily playing with the toys you sell, or share clips of the experiences you offer. 

Best practices for adding a WordPress video background

If you’ve decided that your site can benefit from a video background, there are a few important things to consider. First, you’ll want to use videos sparingly but effectively. Having too many large videos on your WordPress site can slow it down and dilute the impact. 

You’ll also most likely want to disable the audio. Sound can be off-putting for visitors when they simply want to view your website. The last thing you want is for your music to disrupt a visitor’s meeting or appointment. 

If you’re placing content like text and buttons on top of your video background, it’s important that there’s enough of a contrast so that people can easily read them. This is particularly important for visitors with visual impairments. This color contrast checker is a great way to get a quick read on your site. Just type in your URL, and it will identify any improvements you need to make. 

Finally, it’s always a good idea to use a fallback image. This sets the picture you want to display in the background if, for some reason, your video doesn’t load. 

How to add a video background in WordPress

Now that you know a little bit more about video backgrounds, let’s explore some ways you can add them to your WordPress site.

1. Use the built-in Cover block

This is the simplest and most effective solution, requiring no external plugins or tools. With the Cover block, you can layer content like text, buttons, and forms on top of a photo or video background. This makes it a great option for hero sections or banners.

To get started, create your new page/post or open an existing one. Then, click the blue + icon in the top left corner. This will open up all the block options. Search for “Cover block,” then add it wherever you’d like on the page. 

In the toolbar that appears, select Add Media. There you can either select a video from your media library or upload your own.

You can customize your video settings in the right-hand panel. Choose a focal point, select the opacity of the overlay, and more.

Then, add any blocks that you’d like on top of your video background by clicking the + icon within the cover block. For example, you might add a heading, line of text, and button. Remember, it’s important for that content to stand out from the background, so adjust the color and the background opacity as needed.

Once you’re happy with your cover block, save or publish your changes, and that’s it! Just a few simple steps to achieve an effective, beautiful video background.

2. Use a video plugin

If you’re looking for a very specific feature — like a full-site video background or scroll effects — video plugins could be a good alternative. 

In this example, we’re going to use the Advanced WordPress Backgrounds plugin.

This tool enables you to create a range of background types, including images, self-hosted videos, and videos from third parties like YouTube. The best part is that it still works from within the WordPress block editor. 

Once you’ve installed the plugin on your site, head to the page or post where you want to add a video background. Then, click the + icon to add a new block and search for “Background (AWB).” Add it wherever you’d like on the page.

In the right-hand settings panel, select the Video tab, then choose between YouTube/Vimeo and Self Hosted. Depending on which you select, you can either upload your video or enter an external URL.

Then, click the + icon within the Background (AWB) block to add the content you want to display on top. In this case, we’ve chosen to add a contact form.

From there, you can customize the settings using the right-hand toolbar. Choose a video start and end time, select the devices on which you’d like it to appear, add parallax effects, and more. When you’re all finished, save your page.

3. Use a page builder

If you’re already using a page builder like Elementor, you can use that to add a video background to your site. Create your new page with the builder and drag an Inner Section element onto the screen.

By adding your video to a section, you can overlay additional elements like text and buttons on top of your footage. Click on the dots at the top of the section to open the Section Editor. Then, navigate to the Style tab.

Next to Background Type, click Video and paste your video link into the box.

Here, you can determine start and end times, and adjust other display settings. You can also set a fallback image in case your video doesn’t play. You can then add any elements that you’d like on top of the video as you typically would.

Under Layout, you can change the height and width of your content. Then, you may want to add a background overlay and adjust the opacity to make other content in the section more visible. You can access these settings by scrolling to the bottom of the Style section. 

4. Add a video background with your theme

Some themes automatically enable you to upload images, videos, or GIFs as background elements. These can fill your entire screen, or you can use them as headers or sliders.

To find a theme that allows for video backgrounds, head to your WordPress dashboard and click Appearance → Themes → Add New. Next, search for “video background” and select a theme that offers this functionality. Or, you can always upload your own premium theme.

Colibri WP is one excellent, free option. Once you’ve installed and activated the theme, go to Appearance → Customize. Then, select the Settings icon beside the Hero element.

Switch to the Style tab and change the Background type to Video.

You can either paste an external URL or upload a video file to the media library. 

Then, you’re all set to customize your video background. You can apply color overlays and tweak the opacity of your video. Once you’re happy with your design, publish your changes.

Frequently asked questions

Let’s look at some frequently asked questions about using video backgrounds in WordPress.

Will a video background slow down my site?

Large video files can negatively affect your site’s performance. But the good news is that you can use a tool like Jetpack VideoPress to minimize the impact that they have on your site. It hosts your videos off-site and serves them through a powerful CDN, while helping you avoid third-party ads. 

If you’re looking for ways to almost instantly improve your WordPress speed, Jetpack Boost is a great option.

In just a few clicks, you can optimize CSS loading, defer non-essential JavaScript, and turn on image lazy loading without using any custom code. This tool focuses specifically on Google’s Core Web Vitals, which are measurements of your site’s performance in real-world scenarios. Improving these metrics can positively impact your user experience and search engine rankings.

What’s the easiest way to add a WordPress video background?

The built-in Cover block is the simplest way to add a WordPress video background because it requires no additional plugins, tools, or custom code. 

Instead, you can create your video background directly in the WordPress editor. This makes it an excellent option for all users, even complete beginners. However, you can still customize your background, with options for overlays, focal points, and more. This is just one great example of how the WordPress block editor makes creating a beautiful, effective site accessible to everyone.

Where should I host my videos?

You can host your video on the same server as your website. This way, you can skip the limitations of third-party platforms and provide an ad-free experience for your visitors. 

But, self-hosted videos can require a lot of server bandwidth and you might be unable to upload large files. What’s more, they could slow down your user experience and result in a lot of buffering and other distractions. 

VideoPress is the best of both worlds. It takes all of the weight off of your server, but also gives you control over how you display your files. Plus, there are no ads to pull visitors away from your content. 

With VideoPress, you can manage your videos in the same space that you manage your site. 

Boost engagement with video backgrounds

With so much competition on the internet, it can be difficult to make your site stand out. Fortunately, you can add a WordPress video background to grab your visitors’ attention and create an engaging experience. The key to success is choosing the best method for hosting and displaying this valuable content.

VideoPress is one of the best video hosting solutions for WordPress. It’s easy to use and can be accessed directly from your WordPress dashboard. Plus, it can help you provide an excellent user experience with fast-loading, ad-free videos. 

This month we have worked on several under-the-hood improvements to enhance your Jetpack experience, including updates to forms, notification emails, and Jetpack Social.

In this release:

• The Consent field result from forms will now show up in notification emails and feedback views.
• Jetpack Social will now highlight if a previously connected social account has a broken connection in the editor.
• The form block has had several small interaction enhancements and bug fixes.

This release also includes other minor bug fixes and improvements — check the changelog for more

Automattic listed in Newsweek’s “America’s 100 Most Loved Workplaces 2022”

Our parent company Automattic has been listed #31 in America’s 100 Most Loved Workplaces 2022 by Newsweek.

We continue to grow and have some exciting open positions at Automattic, including in Engineering, Product, Marketing, Design, Business Development, HR, Customer Support, and more. Work for us, from anywhere: https://automattic.com/work-with-us/

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to this release:

Adnan Haque, Adrian Moldovan, Andrew Dawes, Aneesh Devasthale, Antony Agrios, Brad Jorsch, Brandon Kraft, Chris Jean, Christian Gastrell, Damián Suárez, Daniel Post, Dean Sas, Dehan, Derek Smart, Dognose, Douglas Henri, Dylan Munson, Foteini Giannaropoulou, Gergely Márk Juhász, Heyde Moura, Ivan Ottinger, Jason Moon, Jasper Kang, John Caruso, John Webb, Juanma Rodriguez Escriche, Kevin L, Kuba Birecki, Luiz Kowalski, Maciej Grabowski, Mike Stott, Nauris Pūķis, Nino Mihovilic, Osk, Paul Bunkham, Philip Jackson, Piotr Stankowski, Rafael Agostini, Renato Augusto Gama dos Santos, Renzo Canepa, Robert Felty, Robert Sreberski, Roberto Aranda, Samiff, Sergey Mitroshin, Siddarthan Sarumathi Pandian, Siobhan Bamber, Steve D, Tim Broddin, Yaroslav Kukharuk, bindlegirl, dkmyta, jcheringer, kirahsapong, leogermani, nunyvega, robertf4, thingalon

When putting together a WordPress site, it’s easy to get lost in the details. The content management system (CMS) offers so many features and options, it can be hard to decide what’s best for your website.

There’s a lot of talk about topics like what pages to include or how to set up a site header and menu. However, a slightly less talked about feature is the widget.

Thankfully, that’s the focus of our article today. We’ll break down what WordPress widgets are, explain how they work, and offer examples of how to set up widgets on multiple areas of your website.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started.

What are WordPress widgets?

A WordPress widget is a drag-and-drop content feature that you can place almost anywhere on your WordPress website.

Widgets were originally designed to give users more control over their sidebar content. Over time, however, the WordPress community found new and improved ways to use widgets throughout a site.

For example, most WordPress themes now come equipped with widget-ready areas that can be used to display all sorts of helpful information.

This includes things like social media feeds, email opt-in forms, search bars, and more. You can even use widgets to create custom navigation menus in certain areas of your site.

In other words, widgets are versatile tools that can be used in a number of ways to improve the overall design and functionality of a WordPress website.

How do WordPress widgets work?

Now that we know what a WordPress widget is, it’s time to take a look at how they work.

For the most part, working with widgets is a pretty straightforward process. That said, there are a few key things you need to know before diving in and adding your first widget.

1. Widgets require a widget-ready area

As we mentioned before, not all WordPress themes come equipped with widget-ready areas. If you want to use them on your site, be sure to check and see if your theme has pre-designed locations for them.

If your theme does have widget-ready areas, you’ll be able to find them by navigating to the Appearance → Widgets section of your WordPress admin panel. Here, you should see a list of all the available widget areas on your site, as well as which ones are currently populated with content.

If you don’t see any widget areas listed, it’s likely that your theme doesn’t support them. In that case, you’ll need to either choose a different theme or look into installing a WordPress plugin that can create custom widget areas for you.

2. You can add widgets via the Appearance → Widgets section

The Appearance → Widgets area of the WordPress dashboard is where you’ll go to add, remove, and manage all the widgets on your site.

To add a new widget, simply drag and drop it from the list of available widgets into the desired location. Once you’ve added a widget to an area, you can then configure its settings to better suit your needs.

Let’s say you want to add a social media icon widget to your site. Drag and drop the Social Icons block wherever you’d like, then click on the widget to open its settings panel. 

This will appear on the right side of the page, and allow you to choose which social media platforms to display links for, as well as how many links to show, what order they should be displayed in, and more.

Some widgets will have more settings than others. For example, a simple text widget will only let you add content, whereas a more complex widget, like the Jetpack Display WordPress Posts widget, has settings for blog URL, the number of posts you’d like to display, whether the links should open in a new tab, etc. 

3. You can add widgets to multiple areas

For example, if you want to display a social media widget in both your sidebar and footer, you can simply add it to both areas from the Appearance → Widgets section.

This can be helpful if you want to make sure that your content is being seen by as many people as possible. It can also be useful for testing purposes, as you can easily add and remove widgets from different areas of your site without affecting the rest of your content.

What are some popular WordPress widgets?

There are all sorts of different WordPress widgets available, ranging from simple text boxes to complex social media plugins. If you’re using a block theme, you can also add any block that you’d like to a widgetized area.

Some of the most popular widgets include:

• The social media icons widget: This widget lets you display links to your social media profiles in a variety of ways.
• Social media feed widgets: A social feed widget lets you display a feed of your social media content on your website. This can be helpful for promoting your latest posts and engaging with your audience.
• A search bar: The search bar widget lets visitors quickly look for a specific piece of content on your site. This is especially helpful if you have a large volume of posts or pages.
• Email opt-in forms: An email opt-in form widget lets you collect email addresses from visitors so that you can add them to your mailing list. This is a great way to grow your list and promote your content.
• Calendar widgets: A calendar widget can be helpful for displaying events or deadlines on your site.
• Slideshow widgets: A slideshow widget lets you display a series of images in a rotating carousel. This is a great way to showcase multiple images on your site.
• RSS feed widgets: An RSS feed widget lets you display the latest content from another website on your site. This is helpful for keeping your content fresh and up-to-date.
• Weather widgets: A weather widget can be used to display the current weather conditions. This is useful for sites that are weather-dependent, such as a ski resort or golf course.

Of course, this is just a small sampling of the types of widgets that are available. There are hundreds of different plugins and themes that offer their own custom widgets, so do your due diligence in finding those that best serve your needs.

If you’re using Jetpack, you’ll enjoy access to quite a few widgets and blocks by default, including: 

• Embeds for external social platforms and services like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Loom, Eventbrite Checkout, and Pinterest. 
• Monetization widgets for accepting payments, integrating with OpenTable, and adding payment buttons. 
• Growth widgets for adding business hours, contact forms, Mailchimp integrations, and opt-in forms. 
• Widgets that enable you to add special content like authors, blog stats, media, GIFs, maps, star ratings, and tiled galleries. 

How and where to add WordPress widgets 

Now that we’ve covered some of the basics, let’s take a look at how you can actually add widgets to your WordPress site in detail.

The Appearance → Widgets section is where you’ll find all the available widget areas on your site. Simply click the + sign in the designated widgetized area and select from the available widgets. 

It’s important to note, however, that because widgets don’t have autosave or revisions functionality, you should always back up your WordPress site before adding new widgets or updating existing ones.

Here’s a brief rundown of how to add widgets to various places on a WordPress website. Note that these instructions assume that you’re using the Block Editor on your site.

1. In your sidebar

To add widgets to your sidebar, simply click Appearance → Widgets then click on the + icon and search for the widget you want to add.

In this example, we’ve added a business hours widget to the sidebar. 

By default, this widget will appear on all posts and pages. Be sure to click Update at the top of the screen to save your changes.

2. In your header

If your theme includes widget areas in the header, you can add blocks by going to Appearance → Widgets. All you need to do is locate the widgetized section that reads “Header” then click the + sign within it to search for and select a widget. 

Or, if you’re using a block theme, you can go to Appearance → Editor, open the Template Parts list, and click on Header. Then you can drag and drop blocks just like you would elsewhere on your site. 

3. In your footer

If your theme includes widget areas in the footer, you can add blocks from the Appearance → Widgets section. Just click the + sign under “Footer,” then select the appropriate widget to insert. 

Or, if you’re using a block theme, you can go to Appearance → Editor, open the Template Parts list, and click on Footer. Then you can drag and drop blocks just like you would elsewhere on your site. 

4. On specific pages or posts

If you want to conditionally display WordPress widgets (i.e. show or hide widgets based on certain conditions), you can do so using Jetpack. Simply install and activate the plugin, then go to the Appearance → Widgets section. 

Insert the widget as you would normally, then click the gear icon on the right hand side of the screen to access customization options. 

From there, scroll down to the Advanced section. Click the drop down, then select the button that says Add new rule. 

From here, you can choose whether you wish to show or hide this widget and choose where you’d like the rule to apply. 

Here, we’ve selected to Show widget on the Services page, and only that page. 

As always, be sure to click the Update button at the top of the Widgets screen to save these changes.

5. On specific categories or tags

This works similarly to the process of setting your preferences for the widget to appear on certain pages or posts.

Insert your widget where you’d like it to appear, then click the gear icon, and scroll down to Advanced. Click Add new rule and select Show this block under Visibility. Next to If select Category, then next to is, select the category pages on which you’d like the widget to appear.

If you want the widget to appear in multiple categories, you’ll need to set a new rule and repeat this process for each one. If you want it to appear for most categories with the exclusion of just a few, you’d be better served to select Hide this block, then choose the category for which you’d like to hide the widget. 

The process is identical for setting visibility rules for tags, date, author, and, if you have WooCommerce installed, taxonomy. 

6. Only to logged-in users

You can set visibility rules for how and when widgets appear for logged-in users as well. To do this, you’d perform the same tasks described previously: insert the widget, click the gear icon, select Advanced → Add new rule. 

Then choose Show this block and, next to If, select User. Next to Is, select Logged In. 

This can be especially helpful if you want to provide site maintenance and management resources for members of your team while they’re logged in or include exclusive content for members of your program. 

7. Only on specific devices or screen sizes 

There are certain instances where displaying widgets (especially sidebar widgets) would be intrusive and generally in the way. This mostly applies to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. 

In these instances, hiding widgets on all mobile devices — or electing to only show them on devices with a certain screen size — is a great way to avoid this issue. 

To do this, you will need a plugin. Widget Options is ideal for the job. 

To install it, go to Plugins → Add New, then search for “Widget Options.” Install the plugin and click Activate. 

Next, go to Appearance → Widgets and select the widget for which you’d like to apply special device/screen size display rules. 

In this instance, we’ve selected the Search widget. You can see how the Widget Options plugin has added numerous visibility controls. 

Here, click the tab with the device icon. Select which devices you’d like the widget to be hidden on and click Save. 

How to add a new widget area in WordPress

In some cases, you might want to add an entirely new widgetized area to your WordPress site. The first thing you’ll need to do is to back up your site before making any changes. And you should also work with a child theme to avoid any mishaps. 

Next, you’ll need to add a new widget area to your functions.php file. You can do this by adding the following code, as detailed by Qode Magazine:

function register_custom_widget_area() {
register_sidebar(
array(
'id' => 'new-widget-area',
'name' => esc_html__( 'My new widget area', 'theme-domain' ),
'description' => esc_html__( 'A new widget area made for testing purposes', 'theme-domain' ),
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<div class="widget-title-holder"><h3 class="widget-title">',
'after_title' => '</h3></div>'
)
);
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'register_custom_widget_area' );

Now that you have your new area registered in functions.php, you can start adding widgets to it from the Appearance → Widgets screen in your WordPress dashboard.

If you’re using the Block Editor, click the + sign below the new widget area and add widgets as you would normally.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll still need to add a bit of additional code to one of your theme’s files to make the new widgetized area appear on your site. Place the following code snippet (again from Qode Magazine) in the appropriate file, e.g. footer.php, sidebar.php, etc: 

<?php if ( is_active_sidebar( 'new-widget-area' ) ) : ?>
<div id="secondary-sidebar" class="new-widget-area">
<?php dynamic_sidebar( 'new-widget-area' ); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

How to export and import WordPress widgets

In some cases, you may need to export and import WordPress widgets. For example, you may want to move widgets from one WordPress site to another.

Exporting and importing WordPress widgets is a straightforward process. First, you need to install and activate a plugin to assist. You can use the Widget Options plugin discussed above to accomplish this task. 

Go to Settings → Widget Options and click Enable next to Import & Export Widgets. 

Then go to Tools → Import / Export Widgets. 

The options presented are super simple. You can either export widgets to then upload to another site or import widgets that you’ve already downloaded from elsewhere. 

Select the file(s) you’d like to upload if importing. Or, select where you’d like to save the exported files to on your computer. That’s all there is to it. 

Other plugins are available that perform this same function as well, including the Widget Importer & Exporter plugin.

How to disable widgets in WordPress

In some cases, you may need to disable widgets in WordPress. For example, you may want to disable the Recent Posts widget if you don’t publish content very often.

Disabling widgets in WordPress only takes a couple of steps. While logged into the WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance → Widgets and click on the one you’d like to disable. If you’d like to just get rid of the widget altogether — including any customization or settings you’ve configured — just click the widget and hit backspace or delete on your keyboard. 

If you’d like to maintain the settings you’ve ascribed to this widget, however, drag it by clicking the drag icon and placing it in the Inactive Widgets section. 

Frequently asked questions about WordPress widgets

Now that you’ve learned how to use WordPress widgets effectively, let’s answer some frequently asked questions.

Why are my WordPress widgets not displaying?

If your WordPress widgets aren’t displaying, the most likely reason is that you haven’t added any widgets to your sidebar. To fix this, go to Appearance → Widgets and add an element to the widgetized area that you’d like. 

Another reason why your WordPress widgets may not be displaying is because your theme does not support widgets. If that’s the case, then you need to switch to a widget-ready WordPress theme or manually add a widget area to your site as described above.

Why are my WordPress widgets not updating?

If you’re adding new widgets or updating existing widgets and the changes are not reflected on your website, then the most likely cause is caching. Caching enables browsers to serve saved copies of your website to returning visitors so that it loads much faster. However, this can occasionally cause temporary delays in displaying your updates to your site. 

If you’re using a caching plugin, then you need to clear the cache to see the changes on your website. If that still doesn’t work, you may need to check your hosting provider’s cache or clear your own browser cache.

Why is the widgets area not showing up in the admin dashboard?

If you don’t see the widgets area in your WordPress admin dashboard, then it is most likely because your theme doesn’t support widgets. In that case, you need to switch to a widget-ready WordPress theme.

How can I change the size of a WordPress widget?

The size of a WordPress widget is determined by the theme that you’re using. If you want to change the size of a widget, then you need to edit your theme’s stylesheet. Or, you can use a plugin like Widget Options to set the specific dimensions of each widget.

But with a block theme, instead of editing your theme’s code, you can use the WordPress Editor to make template changes. For example, if you have a Post Categories block in your footer, you can simply open the Footer template, then edit the dimensions for that specific block in just a few clicks — no code required! In fact, you can control significantly more aspects with the WordPress Editor than with widget areas. Customize everything from font and background color to button appearance. 

Where are widgets stored in the WordPress database?

Widgets are stored in the wp_options table under the name widget_sidebars. If you want to view all the widgets that are currently active on your website, then you can use the following SQL query:

SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE '%widget%'

This query will show all the records from the wp_options table that have the word “widget” in their option_name.

Do WordPress widgets slow down my website?

No, WordPress widgets do not slow down your website. However, if you’re using a lot of widgets, then it can make your website look cluttered and affect the user experience. Don’t get carried away with excessive widgets.

What’s the difference between a widget and a plugin?

A WordPress plugin is a piece of software that you can install on your website to add new features and functionality. Widgets are small blocks of content that you can add to your website’s sidebars and other widget-ready areas. Unlike plugins, widgets do not need to be installed and activated. However, you can install plugins to add additional widgets and blocks to your site.

WordPress widgets vs blocks — which to use and when?

WordPress widgets and blocks are two different ways to add content and functionality to your website. Widgets are older and have been around since WordPress version 2.2. Blocks, on the other hand, were introduced in WordPress version 5.0. 

Widgets are small pieces of content that you can add to your website’s sidebars and other widget-ready areas. Blocks are similar to widgets in that they add specific kinds of content to your site. The block-based widget editor was introduced to bring blocks to even more areas of WordPress, including the sidebar, header, and footer.

As long as you’re using a theme that supports the Block Editor, you can use blocks anywhere. You aren’t just limited to widgetized areas — but you can put a block in a widgetized area.

In many cases throughout this article, we use these terms interchangeably. 

Get started with WordPress widgets

We hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful and that you understand what WordPress widgets are and how to add them to your site. There are lots of fun and useful widgets to explore. Have fun creating a great site for your visitors and exploring unlimited possibilities with WordPress!

Including a contact form on your WordPress site gives visitors an easy way to get in touch with you. They don’t have to leave your site, dial a phone number, copy an email address, or do anything else. Plus, it gives you an opportunity to communicate with prospects while keeping personal information private.

There are a few different ways to add a contact form to your WordPress site. In this article, we’ll show you everything you need to know about contact forms, including how to create them, embed them, and secure them.

Why having a contact form is a good idea 

There are a few reasons you might want to add a contact form to your WordPress site. Here are some of the most common ones:

• It helps keep your email address private. By having a contact form, visitors can get in touch with you, but you don’t have to publicly share your email address. This can help to cut down on spam emails.
• It’s more user-friendly than an email link. A lot of people are hesitant to click on email links because they don’t want to go through the trouble of opening and using an email client. Plus, if they’re not super familiar with your site, they might not want to click unknown links for fear of being directed to less-than-friendly sites. With a contact form, they can send a message quickly and safely. 
• It looks more professional than an email link. If you’re running a business website, then you’ll want to come across as professional as possible. Having a contact form can help with that.
• It offers spam protection. You can add contact form spam protection to cut down on the amount of unwanted submissions you receive.
• It aids in lead generation. If you’re looking to generate leads, you’ll want to provide several easy ways for people to reach out. A contact form is a top choice for many users, and you don’t want to leave them out of your lead generation process. You can add a form to your website and offer something in exchange for visitors’ contact information, like an eBook or white paper.

Now that we’ve gone over some of the reasons that having a contact form is a good idea, let’s take a look at how to create one.

How to create a contact form with a plugin

There are a few plugins that you can use to create a contact form, each bringing something a bit different to the table. Here are a few of the most popular options:

• Contact Form 7: This is one of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress. It’s free and easy to use, with a simple interface that allows you to create complex forms with just a few clicks.
• Gravity Forms: Gravity Forms is a premium plugin that offers a great deal of flexibility when it comes to creating forms. It’s perfect for creating forms with multiple steps, such as order forms or surveys.
• WPForms: WPForms is another popular contact form plugin that boasts an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface. With this tool, you can create intricate forms without having to write any code.

And while these are all solid choices, the best option for adding contact forms to WordPress is Jetpack. 

Creating a contact form with Jetpack

1. Install and activate Jetpack

To begin, you’ll need to install and activate the Jetpack plugin. To do this, head over to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugins → Add New.

In the search bar, type in “Jetpack” and hit enter. Click Install Now.  After the plugin is installed, click Activate.

Lastly, once you’ve activated the plugin, you’ll be prompted to connect it to your WordPress.com account. If you don’t have a WordPress.com account yet, don’t worry — you can create one for free.

2. Create a contact form

Once you have Jetpack installed and activated, creating a contact form is easy. Simply navigate to Pages → Add New in your WordPress dashboard to get started.

If using the Block Editor, you can add a contact form block by clicking on the (+) symbol and selecting it from the list of available blocks. Scrolling down should take you to the section with Jetpack blocks. Or, you can search for it by name. Click Form when you find it. 

From there, you can select the type of form you wish to create, including: 

• Contact Form 
• Newsletter Sign-up
• RSVP Form 
• Registration Form 
• Appointment Form 
• Feedback Form 

3. Configure your contact form settings

Now it’s time to configure your contact form settings. Here, you’ll be able to specify which email address you want the form submissions to be sent to, as well as what you want the subject line of the email to be.

To access these options, click on the pencil icon on the upper right-hand side of the block: 

Here you can adjust the email address your contact form submissions are sent to, what the email subject line says, and what message someone sees upon submission. You can also choose to send users to a specific URL once they’ve completed their submission. 

4. Choose which fields you want to include in your contact form

The default contact form appears as follows: 

However, you can make adjustments to this. Jetpack includes a variety of default fields, such as name, email, website, and message. 

You can do this by first selecting the form field you’d like to change and then clicking the green icon on the left.

In the above example, we selected the default name field. You can change this (or any) field to whatever you’d like, including: 

• Text
• Name
• Email
• Website
• Date Picker
• Phone Number 
• Message

To make a field required (or optional), click on it, then select the asterisk.

To add a field to your form, click the blue + icon at the top left, scroll down to Jetpack blocks, and select the field type. You can then change the order of the form fields by dragging them.

5. Preview your contact form

Once you’ve configured your settings, it’s a good idea to preview your contact form to make sure everything looks correct. To do this, simply click on the View button at the top of the page.

The next logical step would be to publish your form, but before we discuss that process, let’s first talk about security concerns and some of the more advanced customization options available.

How to secure and customize your contact form

Now that you know how to create a contact form, it’s important to discuss some of the security concerns you’ll need to keep in mind. By default, contact forms are not secure, which means they’re susceptible to spam submissions and other malicious attacks.

Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to mitigate these risks:

1. Use a CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test that helps to ensure that only humans can submit your contact form. Visitors will need to answer a question or solve a math problem to prove that they’re an actual person.

There are also more advanced options, called reCAPTCHA, that involve checking a box or that even work invisibly to identify robots based on common user characteristics. 

Learn more about stopping contact form spam on WordPress.

2. Block spam with Akismet

Another great way to combat spam submissions is by using Akismet. Akismet is a plugin that often comes pre-installed with WordPress, and it does an impressive job of automatically filtering out spam comments and contact form submissions.

It works behind the scenes so it doesn’t add any extra work for your users. It utilizes global learning from millions of websites to identify spam based on phrases used, IP addresses, and other characteristics of known spammers. It automatically filters out spam submissions so you never see them, but you can review them manually at any time if you’d like. 

To configure Akismet for your contact form, go to Plugins → Add New. Search for “Akismet,” then click Install Now → Activate. 

You’ll need to configure a few more things. Follow this guide to activating Akismet to be up and running in just a couple of minutes!

3. Add a honeypot field

A honeypot is a hidden form field that helps catch spam submissions. By default, Jetpack includes a honeypot field in all of its contact forms. Some other form plugins have options to add a honeypot field as well. If the one you’re using does not, you’ll need to add one manually.

Use the CSS style “display: none !important;” to make the field hidden and tabindex=”-1″ autocomplete=”false;” to ensure the field is empty by default. 

Once you’ve done this, be sure to mark the field as required so that it’s always filled out when the form is submitted.

4. Customize the look of your contact form

In addition to securing your contact form, you may also want to customize its appearance to match the overall look and feel of your website. Advanced users can do this by adding custom CSS. 

But the good news is that you can make many appearance changes from within the block editor.  

For instance, if you select the button on your form, you can make changes to it via the settings panel that appears on the right-hand side of the screen.

You can change the button to be filled or outlined, change the text and background colors, and adjust the border radius. Here’s an example after playing around with the settings: 

Or you can set the background color to a gradient, even going so far as changing the angle of the gradient, how much of each color is shown, and whether you’d like the gradient to be linear or radial.

You can also change the background color of the entire form by first selecting the form block, then scrolling down to Color in the block’s settings. Again, choose between a solid color and a gradient.

Want to change the width of individual fields? That’s an option, too. Simply select the field you want to edit, then choose Field Width in the settings panel. In the example below, we’ve changed the Name field to only take up 50% of the form’s width. 

5. Add radio buttons and checkboxes

In addition to standard text-based fields, you can add options like checkboxes and radio buttons to your form. You’ll do this by following a similar process to adding other fields. 

Navigate to the form you want to edit. Press the blue + icon at the top left of the screen. 

Find the section titled Jetpack and choose from the list of fields. For example, if you want a list of radio buttons, choose the Radio field. Then, drag it into your form. 

You can click the + icon within the block to add the options that visitors will choose from. 

6. Add conditional logic to your contact form

Another useful customization is conditional logic. This allows you to show or hide fields based on how a user fills out your form. While Jetpack doesn’t include this functionality, you can do this with a plugin like Gravity Forms.

Let’s say that you offer interior design services. You might have a form field that asks visitors whether they’re interested in a virtual or in-person consultation. If they select “in-person,” you want to find out where their home is located.

We’re assuming that you’ve already installed Gravity Forms and created your initial form. Now, you would need to start by adding an Address field. Click on the field and scroll down in the Settings panel. Expand the Conditional Logic section and toggle the box to enable it. Choose “Show” and “All” for the first two dropdowns. Then, select the “What type of consultation are you interested in?” question for the next dropdown, followed by “is” and “In-Person.” 

Now, the address field will only appear when someone is interested in an in-person consultation. And feel free to play around here — there are a variety of options you can choose from.

7. Enable file uploads

You might also want site visitors to be able to upload files. Perhaps you’d like them to submit a  photo of the project they want help with or a PDF version of their resume. You can also do this with the Gravity Forms plugin.

When editing your form, go to Add Fields and expand the Advanced Fields section. Then, drag and drop the File Upload field into your form. Click on it to configure settings like file size and whether or not you’ll accept multiple files at once.

Where and how to embed your contact form

There are a variety of places you can embed contact forms other than pages and posts. Let’s take a look at a few options.

1. In the sidebar

The sidebar can be a great place to add a contact form because it appears on multiple pages or posts throughout your site. If you’re using a block theme with full site editing capabilities, you’ll need to use the Editor to make changes to your sidebar.

In the WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance → Editor, then select the template you want to edit from the top dropdown. You’ll want to click Browse All Templates to see the full list of templates. For example, if you want to edit the sidebar on all of your blog posts, choose the Single Post template.

Now, click the + icon at the top left of the Editor, search for your form block, and drag it into your sidebar column. Make any necessary changes and click Save.

If you’re not using full site editing, go to Appearance → Widgets and then expand your Sidebar area. Click the + sign to add a new block and select the appropriate Form block associated with your plugin.

2. In a template file

If you’re using a block-based theme that allows for full site editing, you can also add your contact form into any templates that you create. 

Let’s say you want to add a form to your blog post template. In the WordPress dashboard, navigate to Appearance → Editor and select the template you want to edit from the dropdown at the top. You might need to click Browse All Templates to see the full list.

Now, simply click the blue + icon at the top left, find your contact form block, and drag it into the template. There, you can edit the settings and make whatever changes you’d like. 

3. In the footer

You might want to add your contact form to the footer so that visitors can access it no matter where they are on your site. If you’re using a block-based theme with full site editing, the steps are similar to adding a form to a template. In the WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance → Editor and select Footer from the dropdown at the top.

Click the blue + icon at the top left, find your contact form block, and drag it into the footer wherever you’d like it to go. Make any necessary changes, and save them.

If you’re not using the full site editor, you can still add a contact form to your footer. Navigate to Appearance → Widgets in the WordPress dashboard. Scroll to the Footer section — you may have multiple footer columns — click the + sign and add your contact form block wherever you’d like. Now, just edit the settings and save!

4. As an on-click popup

If you want to display your contact form as an on-click popup, there are a few WordPress plugins that can help. Let’s look at how you can do this using WPForms and the Popup Maker plugin. 

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugins, simply head to WPForms → Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Then, select Use Template. Build your form and click Save.

Next, you’ll need to create a popup. Go to Popup Maker → Create Popup in your WordPress dashboard. Give it a name. Then click the Add Form button. Select the form you just made a few moments ago from the dropdown list and then click Add Form. This will insert a shortcode for the form. 

Next go to Popup Settings and click the Triggers tab to configure the settings related to how and when your popup will appear. Be sure to click Add when done making your selections and customizations. 

From there, go to the Targeting tab and select the conditions for where the popup will appear. This is where you’ll choose which pages, devices, etc. it’ll display on. 

Continue clicking through the tabs in Popup Maker to set the popup’s appearance. Once you’re done making changes, click Publish. Be sure to navigate to the page(s) where you’ve set the popup form to appear to verify it’s working properly. 

How to create a WordPress contact form without a plugin

If you don’t want to use a plugin to create your contact form, you can always do it yourself using WordPress core functionality. However, this method is more complex and requires some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and PHP.

You’ll also have to code all of the error handling and form field validation that comes by default when using a dedicated plugin, making what should be a simple task complex and time consuming.

If that doesn’t deter you, let’s dive in.

Note: Any changes made here should be done a) after a full WordPress website backup and b) using a child theme. 

We’re now going to walk you through how to create a very basic contact form, with fields for name, email address, and message. Of course, you can add more fields if you’d like to. You’ll start by adding the HTML for the form — this specific code was created by Daext:

<form id="contact-form" action="<?php echo esc_url( get_permalink() ); ?>"
    method="post">
    <input type="hidden" name="contact_form">
    <div class="form-section">
        <label for="full-name"><?php echo esc_html( 'Full Name', 'twentytwentyone' ); ?></label>
        <input type="text" id="full-name" name="full_name">
    </div>
    <div class="form-section">
        <label for="email"><?php echo esc_html( 'Email', 'twentytwentyone' ); ?></label>
        <input type="text" id="email" name="email">
    </div>
    <div class="form-section">
        <label for="message"><?php echo esc_html( 'Message', 'twentytwentyone' ); ?></label>
        <textarea id="message" name="message"></textarea>
    </div>
    <input type="submit" id="contact-form-submit" value="<?php echo esc_attr( 'Submit', 'twentytwentyone' ); ?>">
</form>

Now, you’ll need to sanitize the data from your contact form, which means cleaning or filtering it. WordPress offers data sanitization functions to make this process easier. In this case, you’ll use the sanitize_text_field() and sanitize_texarea() functions.

Next, you’ll need to set up form validation, which validates that fields aren’t left empty when the form is submitted. You’ll also add error messages that appear if a field doesn’t pass validation. You can use the following code to do this, editing the messages if you’d like:

//Validate the data
if ( strlen( $full_name ) === 0 ) {
    $validation_messages[] = esc_html__( 'Please enter a valid name.', 'twentytwentyone' );
}
if ( strlen( $email ) === 0 or
    ! is_email( $email ) ) {
    $validation_messages[] = esc_html__( 'Please enter a valid email address.', 'twentytwentyone' );
}
if ( strlen( $message ) === 0 ) {
    $validation_messages[] = esc_html__( 'Please enter a valid message.', 'twentytwentyone' );
}

You’ll also need to add code to display the error messages, send an email with the form submission to the site administrator, and create a shortcode that allows you to add the form to one of your pages. You can then style the form to match your site’s design.

You can find more detailed instructions and code for all of those functions in the walkthrough from Daext. 

Frequently asked questions

Now let’s review a few of the most commonly-asked questions about creating contact forms in WordPress.

1. Do I need a plugin to create a contact form in WordPress?

There are plugins that can assist you in creating a contact form, but you may also accomplish it without one. This approach is more difficult and necessitates some fundamental HTML, CSS, and PHP knowledge.

2. How do I add a contact form to my WordPress website?

There are two methods you can use to add a contact form to your WordPress website. You can either use a plugin or do it yourself using code.

If you want to use a plugin, Jetpack is a great choice. It’s easy to use and comes with everything you need to create a powerful contact form.

3. What should I do if I’m not receiving emails from my contact form?

If you’re not receiving emails from your contact form, there are a few things you can check.

First, contact your hosting provider to see if there are any restrictions in place that could be blocking the email from being sent.

Next, check the settings of your contact form to make sure the email is being sent to the correct address.

If none of that fixes the problem, you may need to use an SMTP plugin to help validate and send your emails.

4. Can I add a contact form to my WordPress sidebar?

Yes! If you want to add a contact form to your WordPress sidebar, just insert the Jetpack Form Block into your page or post template (if using full site editing) or sidebar widget area.

5. Do I need a separate contact page on my WordPress website?

No, you don’t necessarily need a separate contact page on your WordPress website. However, you may want one so that visitors can easily find your contact form. Plus, it gives you an opportunity to include additional information about how visitors can get in touch with you.

For example, you may want to include your email address, phone number, and social media links on your contact page. This way, visitors can choose the method they’re most comfortable with.

6. Do I need a separate contact form for each page on my WordPress website?

No, you don’t need a separate contact form for each page on your WordPress website. However, this could allow you to collect more relevant data from your visitors.

For example, if you have a form on your contact page, you may want to ask visitors for their name and email address. But if you have a contact form on a support page, you may want to ask for their name, email address, and to select a type of issue they’re experiencing. 

7. What is the best way to stop spam on WordPress contact forms?

There are a few things you can do to stop spam on your WordPress contact forms.

We recommend enabling Akismet. Using AI learning from millions of websites to identify common traits of spam, it works behind the scenes to stop unwanted messages before they ever reach your inbox.

Social media has changed a lot in the last ten years since Jetpack launched its social sharing tools. Remember 2012? Pinterest exploded onto the scene, MySpace relaunched, Facebook went public, and also bought a little photo-sharing network called Instagram.

Today, social networks have long been established as a pillar of any marketing or communication plan. In fact, Generation Z may be more likely to find answers through social media instead of Googling. You already know you need to get your message on social media to reach your audience where they hang out. But who has the time to manage that, along with everything else? That’s why we created Jetpack Social.

Write once, post everywhere

You’re already sharing posts, pages, and products on your website. Jetpack Social goes one step further and shares your content directly from the WordPress Editor to your social media channels. Whether your fans are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Tumblr, you can easily reach them with a few clicks.

You can set a featured image and update the message for your social channels through the simple interface. You’ll get a preview to see what it looks like, so you can be confident before you publish.

Finish writing your posts on your time. Schedule them to go live when it’s convenient for you and we’ll take care of the rest. And coming in November, you can re-share your content, which is excellent for those evergreen posts you want to remind your readers about.

Over 1 million posts are shared every day with Jetpack Social. If you haven’t tried it yet, find out what you’ve been missing.

Free for casual users

All of Jetpack Social’s features are free for up to 30 shares per month. If you share a post on Twitter, that’s one share. Share it on Twitter and Facebook, that’s two shares. That’s one post per day, for free!

If you’re a power user, our basic plan is best for you. Get up to 1,000 shares and hit that re-share button until your heart’s content. To celebrate the launch of Jetpack Social, we have a $1 introductory offer for the first month, and after that, it’s $10 per month.

If you’re already using Jetpack social media tools

Thanks for using Jetpack! We’re happy that our sharing feature saved people so much time over the last ten years. And now we’re excited to give Jetpack Social the time it deserves. We have a new team focusing on how to make the product even better so we can help you get your message out and grow your business.

All the features you’re used to are still free, and we moved social previews and re-sharing out from the paid plans to the free plan. Be sure to give those a try!

If you want to share your content more than 30 times per month, you’ll need to upgrade to the Social Basic plan. The first month is just $1, and will be $10 monthly after that.

Try Jetpack Social today.

A First Contentful Paint (FCP) score gives you an indication of how much time it takes your site to render. A poor score means your visitors are likely having to wait longer than they should. 

Fortunately, there are steps you can take to improve this. By optimizing your website’s resources, you can ensure that your content loads quickly and keeps users engaged. 

In this post, we’ll explain what FCP is, why it’s important, and how to test your website for this metric. Then, we’ll show you how to improve a poor FCP score in WordPress.

What is First Contentful Paint (FCP)?

First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a measurement of the amount of time it takes a browser to load the first text or image on the page. Put simply, this is the delay between the start of the loading process to when the page begins to display content.

FCP is one of the main metrics in Google’s Core Web Vitals. These metrics evaluate the user experience of a website, and include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A measurement of loading performance.
• First Input Delay (FID): A measurement of interactivity.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A measurement of visual stability.

You should work towards improving all of these metrics in order to give users the best possible experience. And while it’s not a primary core web vital, First Contentful Paint is a supplemental metric that can help you identify and improve upon loading issues.

Google wants to send searchers to sites that deliver an excellent experience, and so great scores are not only a goal for a quality user experience, but may result in an improvement in search rankings. 

How FCP impacts user experience

When a visitor first clicks on a website, they expect it to load quickly. If your website is too slow, they might leave the page and find the iinformation they’re looking for from a competitor. 

First Contentful Paint marks the time it takes for a visitor to see the first element on a page. 

This is important because, even if the page takes a while to load everything or become fully interactive, as long as a visitor can see some sort of progress, they may be more likely to give a few extra seconds to finish. If, instead, all they see is a blank screen, they’ll probably just leave completely. 

Potential causes of a poor FCP score

According to Google, the ideal FCP score should be under 1.8 seconds. If you have a poor score, this could be the result of a few factors:

• Slow server response time: If your website has a high Time to First Byte (TTFB) score, this can impact First Contentful Paint. 
• Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS: An inefficient script queue can halt the rendering process until heavy scripts are processed.
• Script-dependent elements above the fold: Since JavaScript loads from top to bottom, it’s important to avoid JavaScript-heavy elements above the fold.
• Lazy loading images above the fold: Although lazy loading images can improve page speed, this process uses JavaScript, which can increase FCP. 
• Inefficient font loading: Fonts can have bulky files that delay the text from rendering. 
• An excessive Document Object Model (DOM) size: Having too many nodes in your DOM can cause inefficient loading.

As you can see, there are several things that can affect your website’s First Contentful Paint. Most performance analysis tools will help you identify a specific cause. This can make it easier to target the source of the issue and implement the right solution. 

How to measure your website’s First Contentful Paint

Before you start implementing measures that will affect your FCP score, it’s important to evaluate your site’s current performance. Let’s look at a few different tools that you can use. 

PageSpeed Insights

First Contentful Paint can be measured in both the lab and the field. With a field tool, you can track how your page performs for real users. But lab tools just simulate results.

PageSpeed Insights is a tool that can evaluate your website using both lab and field results. You can simply enter your site’s URL and instantly analyze its Core Web Vitals metrics.

At the top of the page, you’ll see your Core Web Vitals Assessment. This will indicate whether you passed or failed tests like LCP, FID, CLS, and more.

You’ll find your First Contentful Paint score under Other Notable Metrics. If it’s 1.8 seconds or less, you’ll achieve a ‘Good’ rating. Any score over 1.8 seconds will require some improvements.

These results will automatically be set to Mobile. You can click on Desktop to view your FCP score for those devices.

If you see a ‘Poor’ or ‘Needs Improvement’ rating for the FCP section, you’ll need to implement some optimization methods. 

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is a lab tool that can audit any web page for accessibility, Core Web Vitals, and more. This software will compare your FCP time to other websites. 

To use Lighthouse, right-click on the page you want to analyze in the Google Chrome browser and select Inspect.

In the Chrome DevTools window, find the double arrow icon. Then, select Lighthouse from the resulting dropdown menu.

Next, you can select the elements that you want to include in your Lighthouse report. When you’re finished, click on Analyze page load.

After Lighthouse processes your website, you’ll see your overall performance score. Below this, you’ll find your First Contentful Paint.

If you see a green circle next to this section, you have a good FCP score. If you get a yellow square or red triangle, your content takes too long to render.

GTmetrix

Another free tool you can use to measure FCP is GTmetrix. Using Lighthouse data and audits, GTmetrix provides a detailed analysis of your website’s performance.

First, paste your URL into the search bar and click on Test your site.

Then, you can view your First Contentful Paint score in the Speed Visualization graph.

If your FCP is too slow, it will be under Top Issues. In this FCP audit, you can see how specific resources are impacting your score.

By identifying the cause of the problem, you can implement the right solution. Plus, GTmetrix will provide suggestions to help you improve your FCP score. 

How to reduce First Contentful Paint time in WordPress 

Don’t worry if your site has a poor FCP score — there are several things you can do to boost your performance. Let’s look at some effective ways to improve this metric.

1. Install a core web vitals optimization plugin

There are many different WordPress plugins that you could use to improve your First Contentful Paint score. Although you can install different tools to minify site files or get rid of render-blocking resources, it’s best to find an all-in-one Core Web Vitals plugin.

Jetpack Boost is a free tool that can optimize your site’s performance in many ways. Developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, this plugin can help you improve your Core Web Vitals scores with just a few clicks.

First, install and activate Jetpack Boost. Then, you’ll receive an automatic evaluation of your page speed on desktop and mobile devices.

It will also give you a few performance optimization options. By enabling these settings, you can easily optimize CSS, defer non-essential JavaScript, and implement lazy image loading.

You can then run another speed test to see if your performance score has improved. As you can see, using Jetpack can be one of the fastest and easiest ways to improve First Contentful Paint in WordPress.

2. Reduce server response time

Server response time, or Time to First Byte (TTFB), is the time it takes the server to send the first byte of information back to a browser. This measures the delay between the start of a request and the beginning of the response.

First Contentful Paint depends on TTFB. Here’s an example of how FCP and TTFB work together in the loading process:

FCP = TTFB + Render Time

This means that reducing server response time can be an effective way to improve First Contentful Paint in WordPress. One of the easiest ways to do this is by finding a quality web hosting service.

Often, it’s best to choose a host that’s configured specifically for WordPress. A WordPress hosting service can optimize your dynamic content and improve your server response time. This may, in turn, boost your FCP score.

It also helps to have servers close to your audience. Therefore, when you’re evaluating a web host, you’ll want to check its server locations. If your audience is spread out geographically, you may also want to invest in a WordPress CDN so visitors can access your site from a server closer to them. 

Once you choose your new hosting provider, you can easily migrate your WordPress site. Then, you can enjoy faster loading speeds, reduced server response time, and improved FCP. 

3. Eliminate render-blocking resources

When someone tries to visit your website, all the elements on the page have to render. During this process, your site’s code downloads from top to bottom. Before your content appears, the browser needs to read this entire queue of scripts.

Unfortunately, there may be render-blocking resources that prevent the page from loading. In this case, an unnecessary HTML, CSS, or JavaScript file has to be rendered, which stops the browser from loading important content.

These files are usually large and don’t contain vital information. When render-blocking resources are processed at the top of the queue, your images, text, or other essential visual elements can take longer to appear. As you can imagine, this can negatively affect your FCP, as well as LCP and Total Blocking Time (TBT).

Using PageSpeed Insights, you can easily check to see if this is a problem for your site. In the Opportunities section, look for an Eliminate render-blocking resources alert.

To fix this problem, you can use the Jetpack Boost plugin to optimize CSS, defer non-essential JavaScript, and defer off-screen images. This will improve your file structure for faster loading.

If you want to edit your scripts manually, you can install the Async JavaScript plugin. 

This tool enables you to add async or defer attributes to specific files, but the process can be a little complicated. With Jetpack Boost, you can easily optimize your site files without working with code.

4. Optimize your CSS structure

When you write code, you may include spaces so that people can easily understand it. The problem is that these additional characters can take up more disk space. Plus, browsers don’t need white spaces to process coding.

CSS optimization involves taking out extra spaces and characters from your CSS files. By eliminating unnecessary information, you can decrease a page’s size. This can make it easier for a browser to read it, and can therefore improve your FCP score.

Jetpack Boost lets you do this in one simple step. By enabling the Optimize CSS Loading setting, the plugin will minify your files to only load critical CSS.

With Jetpack Boost, you can also generate the Critical Path CSS for the page with the click of a button. This is the minimum amount of CSS coding needed to display above-the-fold content.

Creating Critical Path CSS manually can be a daunting task, but you can use a tool like Pegasaas to automate the process. By simply entering your site’s URL, you can access this code.

Then, you can add this CSS inside the <head> section of your HTML. When done correctly, this will immediately render the above-the-fold content without asynchronous stylesheets.

5. Avoid JavaScript-dependent elements above the fold

Even after you optimize your JavaScript, it can still take more time to load than HTML. Since FCP measures the amount of time it takes the first element to render on a page, it’s important to make sure that these aren’t JavaScript-heavy.

When structuring your website, you’ll want to avoid making your layout dependent on JavaScript above the fold. To improve First Contentful Paint, many people choose to delay or eliminate JavaScript. If your first elements depend on heavy scripts, your page won’t load very quickly.

Here are some JavaScript elements that should be moved below the fold:

• Heavy animations
• Sliders
• Social media widgets
• Google Ads

Since JavaScript code is executed from top to bottom, it can be beneficial to move these elements further down the page. If they are below the fold, visitors can see your content much faster.

6. Avoid lazy loading images above the fold

One of the best ways to speed up your website is to implement lazy loading for images. Essentially, this involves processing images once they appear on the screen. If someone is looking at the top of the page, any images below it won’t have to load yet.

Although lazy loading images can have many benefits, they may actually harm First Contentful Paint. Lazy loading implements a script that defers images from loading. Since it uses JavaScript, it can delay your FCP score.

When using Jetpack Boost, you can specify which images to exclude from lazy loading. For images above the fold, you can add the CSS class skip-lazy.

You can also apply the jetpack_lazy_images_blocked_classes filter. This will inform Jetpack to avoid applying lazy loading to any image with a certain class.

Here’s what that code looks like in practice:

function mysite_customize_lazy_images( $blocked_classes ) {
    $blocked_classes[] = 'my-header-image-classname';
    return $blocked_classes;
}
add_filter( 'jetpack_lazy_images_blocked_classes', 'mysite_customize_lazy_images' );

It can also be a good idea to disable lazy loading for your site logo. By doing this, your logo will be rendered faster, encouraging users to stay on the page. 

7. Optimize and compress images

Usually, images aren’t the first elements to render on a page. For this reason, you might not have to optimize images to improve FCP. Still, you’ll want to consider performing this step to reduce your loading time and put less strain on your server resources.

First, you can switch your file format to SVG or WebP. Your site is likely using JPG, PNG, or GIF image files. By using a format with better compression, you can possibly decrease First Contentful Paint.

You can also use an image compression plugin. With a tool like TinyPNG, you can automatically optimize JPEG, PNG, and WebP images as you upload them to WordPress.

If certain images don’t need high-quality resolution, you can inline them. This can be useful for above-the-fold images like logos, icons, and banner images. When you inline these elements, the browser won’t use as many requests to download them.

To inline an image, you have to convert it into a Base64 or SVG format. The Base64 Image tool can automatically change JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP, SVG, and BMP files into a Base64 file.

Then, you can add your Base64 images to your website. Here’s the HTML code you can use:

<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,/uj/…[content]..." width="100" height="50" alt="this is a base64 image">

For CSS, here’s how you can insert a Base64 file:

.custom-class {
    background: url('data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/…[content]...');
}

If you’re using an SVG file, you can inline the image in HTML:

<body>
  <!-- Insert SVG code here, and the image will show up! -->
    <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
        <circle cx='50' cy='25' r='20'/>
    </svg>
</body>

Keep in mind that inlining images can increase their size, as well as the overall page size. Plus, these images can’t be delivered by your Content Delivery Network (CDN). 

8. Leverage server-level caching

Once someone clicks on your website, their browser requests data from your server. Then, the server processes the requests and sends back the relevant resources.

With server-level caching, your server temporarily stores these files for reuse. After the same user sends the request a second time, your server will send the saved copy of the web page. 

By using a cache, your server won’t have to generate the content from scratch every time. This can effectively reduce the strain on your server and enable users to view content sooner.

To start using a server-level cache, you can install a caching plugin like WP Super Cache. Then, your server will deliver generated static HTML files instead of processing PHP scripts.

Plus, you can easily set up your cache in the WP Super Cache settings. All you have to do is select Caching On.

This can be one of the simplest ways to decrease your server processing time. With caching, you can ensure a fast and pleasant experience for repeat visitors. 

9. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Another way to improve your FCP score is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers that can deliver online content across large distances. When someone visits your site, the CDN delivers your content from the server that’s closest to their location.

By implementing a CDN, you can decrease the distance between your server and visitors. As a result, these visitors can experience faster loading times.

Fortunately, Jetpack comes with a free built-in WordPress CDN. After activation, you can go to Jetpack → Settings → Performance & speed and enable the site accelerator.

This can effectively speed up the delivery of your images and static files. No matter their location, visitors will be able to access your content without a significant delay. 

10. Reduce your DOM size

The Document Object Model (DOM) is an interface that represents the structure and content of a web document. If you have overly-complicated pages on your website, it can increase your DOM size. This can harm your performance, including your First Contentful Paint.

Lighthouse will let you know if you have an excessive DOM size. In general, you’ll only be warned if the body element has more than 800 nodes. If there are more than 1,400 nodes, you’ll receive an error message.

If you’re editing your DOM yourself, you’ll want to make sure that you only create necessary nodes and delete non-essential ones. If you have a WordPress site, these tasks will be completed by themes, plugins, core software, and page builders.

Here are some alternative ways to reduce your DOM size in WordPress:

• Separate long pages into smaller ones
• Reduce the number of posts in your archive and home page
• Avoids using unnecessary <div> tags
• Use fewer CSS selectors

It can also be beneficial to choose an optimized WordPress theme. Using a fast and lightweight option like Twenty Twenty-Two can help you decrease your DOM size.

11. Ensure text remains visible during webfont load

Often, fonts have large files that take a long time to load. In some cases, a browser will delay rendering the text until the font is fully loaded. This is known as a Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT).

To prevent this from happening, you can temporarily show a system font. This involves including a font-display: swap in the @font-face style.

Here’s what that can look like: 

@font-face {
 font-family: 'Pacifico';
 font-style: normal;
 font-weight: 400;
 src: local('Pacifico Regular'), local('Pacifico-Regular'), url(https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/pacifico/v12/FwZY7-Qmy14u9lezJ-6H6MmBp0u-.woff2) format('woff2');
 font-display: swap;
}

Alternatively, you may want to import a font from Google Fonts. In this case, you can apply the &display=swap parameter to your Google Fonts link:

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:400,700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Instead of showing a flash of invisible text, your website will reveal a Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT). This can enable your website to display content immediately, improving First Contentful Paint.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about First Contentful Paint

Let’s look at some common questions about First Contentful Paint.

How can I measure my WordPress website’s FCP score?

You can use a few different tools to measure your First Contentful Paint. With PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, or GTmetrix, you’ll be able to identify your FCP score and troubleshoot specific issues. 

What is a good FCP score?

A good FCP score should be 1.8 seconds or less. A metric between 1.8 and 3 seconds will likely need improvement. Anything higher than 3 seconds will require immediate attention. 

How can I easily optimize my FCP score?

One of the simplest ways to improve your FCP score is to use the Jetpack Boost plugin. This free tool can optimize your Core Web Vitals all in one place.

First, install and activate Jetpack Boost. Then, click on Jetpack to start upgrading your website’s performance.

Here, you can optimize CSS loading, defer non-essential JavaScript, and use lazy image loading. By simply enabling each feature, you can automatically improve your First Contentful Paint in WordPress. 

Display your online content right away

By improving your First Contentful Paint, you can make sure that your content loads more quickly for visitors. Without this measure, you could experience a much higher bounce rate.

To measure your FCP, you can analyze your website with PageSpeed Insights. If you receive a poor score, you can use Jetpack Boost to optimize your scripts and image files. Additionally, you can use the plugin to enable lazy loading and use a CDN.

Once you implement these measures, your visitors can start experiencing faster loading times. This means a lower bounce rate and more engaged audience! 

Your WordPress website’s availability is crucial to its success. If it’s down often, you’re going to miss out on new visitors and probably push away existing supporters as well. To make sure this isn’t happening, you’ll need a reliable way to oversee your page performance.

Luckily, there are plugins and services that can monitor your WordPress website and alert you to any issues that may arise. By keeping track of your site’s uptime, you’ll have a better idea of how it’s performing. That way, you can catch any issues and take action to address them. 

In this post, we’ll discuss what uptime monitoring in WordPress is and some reasons downtime occurs. Then, we’ll talk about how to track uptime and suggest some plugins and tools you can use to do so. 

An introduction to WordPress uptime monitoring (and how it works)

When you visit a website, a conversation occurs between your web browser and the site’s server. The website returns an HTTP status that will then determine if you can access the page or not. If everything is functioning correctly, the site you’re trying to access will show up in your browser. 

An uptime monitoring service does something similar. It will ping the server and read the HTTP code. It takes no action if your site is up and running, but if it detects that your site is down, it will send you an alert. 

The core purpose of an uptime monitoring service is to track whether your website is online or not. Checking your website’s server at a regular frequency allows this service to notify you when your website goes offline for any reason, so you can then take the necessary steps to resolve the problem. 

While 100 percent uptime for your page would be the ideal, 99.99 percent is considered to be excellent. Website uptime monitoring is important because it helps keep you in-the-know as to how your site is functioning. Interruption of your page — or downtime — causes a variety of problems that can hinder its success. 

The consequences that come with downtime can include:

• Poor user experience (UX): If a user tries to access your site and finds it isn’t working, they might not come back or try to visit a second time.   
• Decreased profits and income for eCommerce sites: Online stores that suffer from regular downtime will likely scare off customers, which can cause a drop in sales. 
• A negative impact on your search engine rankings: Search engines like Google use bots to index your site. If they’re met with an offline page, this can prevent them from ranking it well.

The good news is that uptime monitoring can help mitigate all of these issues.

Common reasons downtime happens in WordPress

There are few things more frustrating than a website that isn’t working. Numerous factors can cause downtime, so it can take some digging to figure out the cause. 

One big reason for downtime has to do with your WordPress host. If you use a shared hosting service, there are limitations that come with it. 

To put it simply, with shared servers, websites are essentially competing for space. That means servers can go down at times due to too much traffic. Since you don’t know who your server ‘neighbors’ are, you can’t anticipate these surges in traffic, which can take away from your site’s availability and performance.

Downtime can also be caused by updates that go awry. Plugins, themes, and the latest version of WordPress are all aspects of your site that need to be kept up-to-date. And while one-click updates might seem harmless, they can sometimes end up breaking your website.

Another reason could be hacking attempts on your site. This is when someone intentionally tries to break your site, whether through brute force or other malicious tactics such as malware. 

One common method is Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS attacks. This involves a hacker overwhelming your web pages with traffic, which can eventually break your site if they’re successful. Other problems include faulty website code, plugin or theme conflicts, and Domain Name System (DNS) issues. 

Four ways to set up uptime monitoring in WordPress

Fortunately, there are many steps you can take to monitor your website’s uptime and prevent downtime. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can do this for your WordPress site.

1. Use WordPress uptime monitoring plugins

The best way to monitor your site’s uptime is with a WordPress monitoring plugin. They are simple to install and can notify you immediately when downtime occurs. Here are three options you may want to consider:

Jetpack 

Jetpack offers a convenient solution for monitoring your website. It’s easy, fast, automated, and was built specifically for WordPress sites. Many would argue that it’s one of the best WordPress plugins, because you can also add advanced WordPress security, performance, and marketing services — like real-time site backups — from the same install. 

Jetpack features:

• Uptime and downtime monitoring that runs every five minutes
• Immediate email or SMS alerts when any changes occur
• Brute force attack protection
• Automatic plugin updates
• Secure authentication

Additionally, you can access the tool directly in your WordPress dashboard, making it highly beginner friendly. No coding is required, and all of its features can be activated in a few clicks.

Pricing for Jetpack:

The basic plugin, which includes downtime monitoring, is free. You’re also able to upgrade to one of the premium versions, which start at $4.95 per month. This will give you more versatility and features to work with. 

ManageWP Worker

ManageWP Worker is a WordPress plugin that features automated updates, cloud backups, client reports, as well as performance and security checks. This management plugin also offers premium add-ons, and you can connect it to multiple Google Analytics accounts to keep track of all your metrics.

ManageWP Worker features: 

• A single dashboard where data is compiled from numerous sites 
• Free monthly incremental backups
• Automatic backups before theme and plugin updates
• Email and SMS notifications when a site is down

One advantage of ManageWP Worker is that it provides you with instant downtime alerts and the ability to manage a high volume of sites. Additionally, it’s easy to install and get set up. However, one downside is that the Uptime Monitor is a premium feature, which means you’ll need a paid plan to get it.

ManageWP Worker pricing: 

There is a free version of this plugin, but uptime monitoring will cost you $1 per website per month.

Super Monitoring

Super Monitoring offers around-the-clock scanning and a Google Analytics integration. The software uses multiple locations to prevent false alarms. It can help minimize losses if you’re in the middle of a launch or advertising campaign. 

Super Monitoring features:

• Minute-by-minute scanning of your site
• Instant mobile and email alerts
• A worldwide network of monitoring stations to avoid false positives
• File integrity monitoring

Multiple location server checks and minute-by-minute scanning make Super Monitoring a solid option. Still, it’s important to note that Super Monitoring is a bit more expensive than most other WordPress monitoring plugins. Furthermore, you’ll have to pay extra for mobile alerts.

Super Monitoring pricing: 

Super Monitoring plans start at $5.99 per month plus an additional $7 for mobile alert credits. There is no free version.

2. With a third-party service

There are also third-party tools you can use that will help you track or simply check on your website’s uptime and availability. For example, the IsItWP tool lets you test the availability of your website. You can enter in your URL to have it instantly analyze the status of your page. 

You’ll then receive your site’s results:

As you can see, IsItWP gives you minimal information. Still, this can be highly useful when you suspect that your own device is preventing you from accessing your website, but you want to confirm.

Another, slightly more elaborate third-party tool you can take advantage of is Uptime.

Once you enter your URL, Uptime provides you with a detailed description of your website’s availability results. This will include DNS lookups, redirects times, request times, download speeds, and more.

It even offers a map showing you where your site’s servers are located.

Another free tool, Internet Vista, gives you response time, average speed, and a performance score.

It also provides you with a visual display of your results.

These three sites are free to use. They can give you immediate access to your page data so you can see whether or not it’s performing well. 

3. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

On top of improved security through DDoS mitigation, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps promote your site’s uptime by increasing its availability. In a nutshell, a CDN is a network of servers located worldwide which provide cached internet content from the network located closest to the visitor. 

The goal of this network is to deliver content as quickly as possible, preventing downtime in the process. There are CDN performance tools that will give you detailed reports of your website. For instance, Uptrends will give you resolve, connection, and download time, as well as display the IP address of your site.

Another solution, Upzilla will give you similar results when you add your IP address.

Both of these solutions offer features that enable you to track uptime through CDNs. While some CDNs come with a more robust set of features, the main purpose of these two is to help ensure that your website doesn’t suffer from downtime. This can be good if you don’t want to overcomplicate things.

4. Choose a host with uptime monitoring 

Certain WordPress hosting companies come with uptime monitoring built into their plans. Here are a few hosts that include this service: 

Bluehost

Bluehost is a quality WordPress hosting service that offers many features — including uptime monitoring. It has a tool called Maestro, which will send you alerts when your site goes down. This lets you address the problem right away. It also gives you the ability to track your site’s uptime percentage, so you know how well it’s performing. 

Bluehost pricing: 

Bluehost pricing starts at $4.95 per month for a Shared plan. 

HostPapa

HostPapa is a Canadian-based WordPress hosting company. In 2021, it acquired the uptime monitoring service UptimeMate. The provider bundled this service into its portfolio of managed plans, including PapaCare+. This lets you be in-the-know about what’s happening with the performance of your WordPress site at all times. Plus, it has a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for all plans, which means that your website should experience almost no downtime. 

HostPapa pricing:

The Starter plan for HostPapa starts at $2.99 per month.  

What should I do when my WordPress site is down?

Before you jump into troubleshooting, there are certain steps you can take if you suspect your website is offline. This way, you can be sure that it’s down before you invest any time in resolving the problem.

1. Confirm that it’s really down

There are tools you can use to confirm that your website is offline. Sites like isitdownrightnow.com allow you to enter in your website URL.

This will perform a server status check and provide you with data like response time, the last time it was down, and, of course, whether it’s currently online or not now.

This diagnosis will help inform you on the next action you should take. For this step, you could also use any of the other third-party services we mentioned previously in this article.

2. Check with your web hosting service 

Downtime could very well be a result of your hosting service, but this isn’t always unplanned. Your provider might have scheduled downtime for maintenance, security, or repair purposes. So, you’ll want to check with them first to see if this is what’s causing the issue.

Downtime could also be a result of the limitations of your hosting plan. If your package doesn’t include unlimited bandwidth and disk space, you might have reached your cap. If you have, you may want to consider upgrading to a larger hosting plan.  

3. Verify that there are no security issues

If you want to prevent downtime caused by cyber-security issues, you might consider installing a WordPress plugin designed specifically to combat this. Jetpack Security is an excellent choice that allows you to minimize the risk of brute force attacks, take advantage of malware scanning, and implement spam protection. 

You can look at Jetpack’s WordPress activity log and latest malware scan results to get a quick indication of whether or not downtime could be the result of a security breach. 

4. Check your themes and plugins 

Themes and plugins may seem like minor aspects of your site since they aren’t visible on the front-end. Still, they’re often responsible for important functionality and can encounter issues that lead to a down site. Most frequently, outdated and low quality plugins can cause incompatibility issues. 

So, when your site is down, it’s a good idea to scan your plugins and theme to ensure that they’re still supported. If you’d like to prevent plugin issues before they happen, it’s always wise to choose WordPress plugins carefully.

5. Restore a backup 

Of course, preventing issues in the first place is the best solution. However, some problems are inevitable. That’s why it’s best to safeguard your website in case of emergency. 

Luckily, you can easily create and restore a backup of your WordPress site with Jetpack Backup. This allows you to recover both your files and your database if anything goes wrong. 

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about WordPress uptime monitoring

Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals of uptime monitoring and what to do when your site is down, we’re going to go over some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). This way, you hopefully won’t be left with any lingering doubts about WordPress uptime monitoring.

Is uptime monitoring free on WordPress?

This will depend on the solution you’ve chosen to monitor your site. But the recommended solution, Jetpack, is free to install and use. 

Will I get alerts when my WordPress site is down?

Depending on what tool you use to monitor your website, you’ll be able to receive alerts when your site is down. Many tools offer you immediate text and email alerts the moment they detect downtime, so you’ll know when something’s wrong. 

What else should I monitor on my WordPress site?

There are numerous aspects of your WordPress site to keep an eye on. As an example, if you have numerous WordPress users, an activity log can provide you with a record of changes made to your site. This will then enable you to know who made what modifications to your site (and when).

You’d also be wise to regularly check your WordPress site for malware. Detecting and removing this type of dangerous software is critical if you want to run a successful website.

Ensure a successful WordPress site with uptime monitoring

Preventing downtime on your WordPress website is crucial. If your site is constantly broken, this can have negative effects on its search engine rankings, UX, and more. This will likely keep you from achieving your goals. That’s why it’s important to have the right tools in place to ensure that your site is up and running. 

An uptime monitoring plugin, like Jetpack, can notify you when your site is down. While there are other third-party tools such as CDNs and the limited options included with some hosting plans, plugins are the most comprehensive and convenient choice. They can help you ensure that your WordPress site is successful and you can manage them right from your dashboard.

We have shipped several under-the-hood improvements for an enhanced Jetpack experience in this release. You can check the changelog to see all the bug fixes and improvements.

To use the latest Jetpack version on your site, update your existing installation or install Jetpack.

Put your site in your pocket

The Jetpack mobile app gives you everything you need to create, design, manage, and grow your WordPress website. Here are some cool things you can do from your phone with the Jetpack app:

• Write, edit, upload, and publish content even when you’re away from your desk.
• Get updates when your favorite site publishes a new post, when someone comments on your post, or when you get a new subscriber.
• Watch your traffic grow with industry-leading stats and helpful insights. Learn more about your visitors and their habits.
• Easily share your website content on all your social media channels from one place. Auto-publish on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr.
• Comment, like, or save a post to read it later.

Visit jetpack.com/app or scan this code with your mobile device to download the Jetpack mobile app :

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to this release:

Adrian Moldovan, Andrés Blanco, Anna McPhee, Bogomil Stoynov, Brad Jorsch, Brandon Kraft, Briley Hooper, Chris Jean, Damián Suárez, Daniel Bachhuber, Daniel Post, Dean Sas, Dognose, Douglas Henri, Dylan Munson, Foteini Giannaropoulou, Gergely Márk Juhász, Grant Kinney, Grzegorz Chudzinski-Pawlowski, Hsing-yu Flowers, Igor Zinovyev, Jared, Jason Moon, Jasper Kang, Jeremy Herve, Juanma Rodriguez Escriche, Karen Attfield, Kevin L, Kolja Zuelsdorf, Luiz Kowalski, Marcelo Serpa, Michael Kelly, Miguel Torres, Miguel Xavier Penha Neto, Nate Weller, Nauris Pūķis, Olaseni Oluwunmi, Osk, Panos Kountanis, Paul Bunkham, Piotr Stankowski, Renato Augusto Gama dos Santos, Richard Ortiz, Sagar Nasit, Samiff, Sergey Mitroshin, Siddarthan Sarumathi Pandian, Siobhan Bamber, Steve D, William Viana, Wojtek Naruniec, bindlegirl, erics1989, jboland88, leogermani, nunyvega, philipjohn, thingalon

If you have a WordPress website, you might want to be able to track the activity that happens on it. By tracing every single modification on your site (and who completes it), you’ll be better equipped to resolve any problems that may arise.

Fortunately, you can use a WordPress plugin to track user activity on your site. There are many tools available that enable you to monitor changes made to your content. 

In this post, we’ll discuss why tracking user activity is important and what kinds of actions to prioritize. Then, we’ll explain how to track and log user activity in WordPress, and list six plugins that get the job done.

Why track user activity and changes in WordPress?

The ability to track user activity is important to maintaining a secure and efficient website. It helps improve transparency and streamlines any troubleshooting you may find necessary.

Additionally, it enables you to monitor suspicious activities, like failed login attempts from the same IP address. The activity log will tell you if someone’s trying to log in from an unusual location so that you can stop a WordPress security breach before it’s too late.

But it can also be useful when it comes to keeping track of your team’s activity. You can easily see if a team member is doing their job, as well as identify suspicious behavior. Let’s say a post disappears from your website. You can look back at the list of changes in the activity log, and see exactly who deleted it and when.

And with Jetpack Backup, you can use the Jetpack activity log to identify a specific point in time to which you want to restore a backup — like right before a post was deleted or a plugin update caused an issue.

What kind of user activity should you track?

There are different kinds of activities that you can track on your WordPress site. For security purposes, you might want to monitor plugin additions and changes. If users add or deactivate plugins without your consent, it could put your site at risk. 

If you run a blog, you might want to track any changes made to your posts. For instance, you can see when a contributor creates and publishes a new article. You’ll also be able to see who changed the status and content of your posts. 

Additionally, you might want to oversee any changes made to your site’s settings. Some people might modify your permalink structures or site title. They might also add new users to your site. These modifications could be fine, or they could signal potential malicious activity. So you’ll want to make sure these actions are only taken by authorized individuals. 

Lastly, you may want to monitor your comments. If anyone modifies or deletes a comment without permission, it can cause serious headaches. 

How to set up user activity tracking and logging in WordPress

By default, WordPress doesn’t enable you to track user activity. Fortunately, Jetpack lets you easily set this up. The plugin’s Activity Log keeps a record of all activities on your site, including plugin and theme updates, user logins, and settings modifications. 

Once you install the plugin, you can simply navigate to Jetpack → Activity Log in your WordPress dashboard to start monitoring your changes.

Here, you can see the most recent activities on your site. If you have a premium Jetpack plan, you can filter events by date range and activity type.

Six best plugins for tracking user activity in WordPress

Now that you know why it’s important to track activities on your website, let’s take a look at some tools that can help you do this. We’ve rounded up six WordPress user tracking plugins that will help you monitor changes on your site. 

1. Jetpack

Jetpack is a multipurpose plugin that can help you run a safer, faster, and more successful site. One of the features it includes is a WordPress activity log. There’s a free version available, but Jetpack also offers paid plans that not only boost the features of the activity log, but include essentials like real-time backups, one-click restores, malware scanning, and more. 

Jetpack logs many types of events, including login attempts, and published or updated posts and pages. You can also monitor plugin installations and updates.

Key features of the Jetpack activity log:

• A full list of events that occur on your site, including login attempts, published and edited pages/posts, comments, settings modifications, updated or deleted plugins/themes, and more.
• Access to the 20 most recent events or up to a full year of activity, depending on your plan
• Information about each action, like the time it occurred, the user that performed it, and specific details
• Easy integration with paid tools for one-click restores, real-time backups, malware scanning, etc.
• Filters that enable you to view activities based on activity type and time range (for premium plans)

Pros of the Jetpack activity log:

• It’s easy to set up, going to work on your site immediately after installation.
• It’s made by the team behind WordPress.com, so it works seamlessly with the CMS. 
• It’s compatible with WooCommerce, so you can view activity around sales, product changes, etc.
• You can view your activity log even if your site is completely down.
• It integrates with Jetpack Backup, enabling you to restore your site to a specific point in time based on when an action took place.

Cons of the Jetpack activity log:

• The free plan doesn’t include personalized support.

Ease of use:

Jetpack is beginner-friendly and easy to set up. There are also plenty of resources to help you get started. 

Pricing:

• The majority of features are available for free. 
• The Backup plan starts at $4.95 per month and includes real-time backups, priority support, a 30-day archive of all activities, and filters.
• The Security plan costs $10.95 per month and adds real-time malware scanning, anti-spam tools, and other helpful features.
• The Complete plan costs $39.95 per month, includes a one-year archive of activities, and adds tools like super fast search functionality and a premium Jetpack CRM plan.

Each plan comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not satisfied with the plugin’s performance, you can get a full refund. 

2. Activity Log

Activity Log is a solid tool that has basic features to help you track the most important changes on your WordPress site. This plugin lets you see any new modifications right away, so you can act quickly. The setup process is simple, so you won’t need to spend lots of time figuring out how it works. 

Key features of Activity Log:

• Around-the-clock user activity tracking for single or multisite websites
• The ability to spot suspicious behavior immediately to prevent hacking
• Real-time monitoring and email notifications when dangerous activity occurs

Pros of Activity Log:

• It lets you look for specific information using a text search feature and a variety of filters.

Cons of Activity Log:

• It doesn’t provide many details on activities. 
• It doesn’t offer many configuration options for the activity log. 

Ease of use:

Activity Log is very easy to use. The interface is intuitive, and there’s a search feature that helps you find the data you’re looking for more easily. 

Pricing:

Activity Log is free to download and use. 

3. User Activity Log

This plugin tracks a wide range of activities, including category changes, media uploads, user exports, and menu edits. The premium version lets you select which activities to track and export your log. You’ll also get customizable email notifications. 

Key features of User Activity Log:

• A detailed activity log, including an old/new comparison
• Password security 
• Ability to add custom events for generating activity logs
• Ability to export CSV file of log details

Pros of User Activity Log:

• It tracks many different kinds of user activities on your website.
• The premium version is very customizable.

Cons of User Activity Log:

• The functionality of the free version is pretty limited. 

Ease of use:

User Activity Log is relatively simple. You’ll need to configure some preferences, but it isn’t too complicated to set up. 

Pricing:

• The Lite version includes basic activity log functionality.
• The Pro version includes additional features like password security, custom logs, and sorting options, and more for $99.

4. Stream

Stream helps you keep track of all user activity on your site. It displays actions performed by contributors to help trace the source of any issue that may arise. This plugin also supports WordPress multisite networks and provides email alerts. 

Key features of Stream:

• Built-in tracking for popular plugins like Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, and Yoast SEO 
• Multisite view of all activity records on a network
• Live updates of user activity records 
• The ability to export your Activity Stream as a CSV or JSON file

Pros of Stream:

• This tool enables you to filter your activity log by user, action, and role. 
• It gives you the option to exclude specific types of activity or users. 

Cons of Stream:

• Stream limits your options for customizing email alerts, which can lead to unnecessary messages.
• It doesn’t offer many details in the activity log, so you may have to do some digging to find out more information. 

Ease of use:

Stream is a straightforward plugin to use — all you need to do is upload it to your WordPress site. 

Pricing:

Stream is free to use and download. 

5. Simple History 

If you run a blog or a smaller site with less activity, Simple History may be a good choice for you. It keeps track of the most important modifications on your site, including plugin activation, content edits, and changes to user profiles.

Key features of Simple History:

• See who added, updated, or deleted attachments, taxonomies, posts, and pages
• Monitor privacy data exports and failed login attempts
• View details about changes made to your site settings, including permalink structures

Pros of Simple History:

• It’s easy to use and you don’t need to sort through a lot of data to find what you’re looking for.
• It lets you track changes on your dashboard or by exporting the data to a CSV file.

Cons of Simple History:

• This plugin doesn’t provide many details and only tracks basic changes, so you may miss some important activities.
• It doesn’t offer much when it comes to log management features and search filters.

Ease of use:

This tool lives up to its name and is easy to use. You can sort through the logs without hassle — they’re displayed on your dashboard’s home page and provide a quick update on any changes that were made since your last login. 

Pricing:

Simple History is free to install and use. 

6. WP Activity Log

WP Activity Log is a comprehensive plugin that offers a robust set of features for WordPress, including multisites. It enables you to turn events on and off, and offers granular details about the time, user, and component that was altered. 

Key features of WP Activity Log:

• Instant SMS and email alerts for suspicious activity
• The ability to manage user sessions in real-time
• The capacity to search and find specific activity within seconds
• The ability to generate any type of WordPress report from the activity log

Pros of WP Activity Log:

• It’s compatible with other well-known plugins like WooCommerce and Yoast SEO. 
• It tracks a broad range of activities in WordPress and offers more specific details about each change.
• It includes plenty of support through its knowledge base, forums, and email.

Cons of WP Activity Log:

• This plugin requires the premium version to get access to its advanced features. This includes fully configurable instant notifications and integration settings. 

Ease of use:

The interface can be a bit complicated to use, but the plugin is quite customizable. 

Pricing:

• There is a free version of WP Activity Log. 
• The Starter plan costs $99 per year and includes email notifications, text-based search, and search filters. 
• The Professional plan costs $139 and offers SMS notifications, WordPress reports, and the ability to see logged-in user sessions in real-time. 
• The Business plan starts at $149 a year and includes the ability to save the activity log in external databases, and other advanced features. 
• The Enterprise plan starts at $199 per year and comes with priority support. 

Comparison of the best plugins for tracking user activity

Frequently asked questions about WordPress activity logs

There are plenty of powerful tools that you can use to track user activity in WordPress, but you might still have some concerns or queries about the process. Let’s address some of the most common questions about monitoring changes on your site.

Can tracking user activity slow down my WordPress website?

If you choose a plugin like Jetpack, you won’t need to worry about slow loading times. It’s also important that you only use one activity tracking plugin at a time. Otherwise, you might experience compatibility issues that affect your site’s performance. Additionally, having too many plugins on your site can slow it down. 

How much does user activity tracking cost on WordPress?

The amount you’ll pay for tracking user activity will depend on the tool you choose. There are many free plugins available as well as paid options, and they all offer different features. 

A more robust plugin will provide you with more security and granular control. Jetpack is one of the best options on the market. It’s free to install and you can use it for detailed tracking of recent events. If you’re ever looking for more features, you can upgrade to a premium Jetpack plan. 

What else can I monitor and track to further secure my WordPress site?

There are many actions you can monitor and track on your WordPress site. For example, activity logs provide you with a record of changes made to plugins. This way, you can stay up to date with any modifications made on your site. 

Another crucial element to monitor is your password. This is the gateway to your website and should be prioritized when it comes to protecting your data. There are ways to optimize your site’s security, like changing or resetting your password on a regular basis. 

Your WordPress login page is another essential feature to keep safe. This page is vulnerable to hackers, so it’s important to monitor any suspicious activity like failed login attempts from the same IP address. 

Other ways to keep your website safe include monitoring the uptime of your WordPress website, implementing brute force protection, and running regular WordPress security scans. 

Ensuring the safety of your WordPress site

Having a secure WordPress website can be a challenge if you have a lot of hands on deck. Using an activity log plugin is one of the most effective ways to track changes in WordPress. The process is simple, and you’ll be able to access this data if needed. 

You can use a plugin like Jetpack to track user activity on your WordPress site. The Activity Log feature helps you monitor and store events like login attempts. It also enables you to get to the root of any issues that come up on your site. 

When you think about hosting videos for your business, popular video sharing sites, such as YouTube or Dailymotion, may be the first things that come to mind. But these are usually not the best choice for those who want to include videos on their WordPress site. They come with restrictions, advertising, and limited control over how your videos are presented and who can see them. Instead of winning more business, or wowing people with your latest creation, your videos could actually push them away. 

Today we’re going to look at private video hosting platforms designed for the needs of businesses and professional creators. We’ll explore their features as well as the pros, cons, and costs of the best options available. 

Lights, camera, action! 

Why host your videos on a private platform?

Private video hosting has many benefits for your business, including:

1. You retain complete control over the use of your content

Free video hosting sites provide little control over who can find, view, and share your content. When you upload a file to a public video hosting service, you grant a license to that service, which means you no longer have complete control over your content. For example, according to their terms of service, you automatically grant YouTube a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable license to use and change your videos. 

Private video hosting services help you avoid these issues by allowing you to host your videos without giving away your rights. They also generally give you control over the visibility of your content and who can share it — perfect for hosting exclusive videos for your audience, subscribers, customers, or clients. 

2. Your videos don’t slow down your site 

Hosting videos yourself is another option that bypasses free video sharing sites like YouTube, but doing so comes with a significant burden on your infrastructure. Videos are large files that take up a lot of precious server resources. If you host these yourself, the result is usually a slow-loading site or even a total crash. And poor-performing sites mean fewer visitors will stick around and you won’t be able to achieve your goals.

Third-party video hosting platforms — like the private ones we discuss in this article — remove the pressure on your infrastructure by storing and serving your videos to your viewers using their own enterprise-level systems. They also utilize tools like a content delivery network that can display videos quickly to lots of people around the world all at the same time. 

If you want a fast site that reflects well on your business or creations, it’s usually more cost-effective to use a third party to host and serve your videos. 

3. You can avoid third-party ads and distractions

In return for hosting your videos for free, public video platforms like YouTube and Dailymotion place advertisements before, during, and after your content. Not only can this be off-putting for your visitors, there’s typically nothing to stop them from seeing ads for your competitors. Free video hosting platforms often feature “recommended” videos that autoplay after yours have been watched, meaning your viewers can quickly get distracted and pulled away from your content. 

Private video hosting platforms are generally ad-free and won’t recommend other businesses’ videos to your viewers — helping keep viewers’ attention on your amazing content. You can sometimes even choose which ones to recommend at the end of your videos or include other lead-capturing calls to action!

The top six platforms that offer private video hosting

1. Jetpack VideoPress

Jetpack VideoPress is a powerful private video hosting platform that lets your content shine. 

VideoPress comes with an impressive 1 TB of storage, allowing you to upload your videos in full 1080p or 4K HD. Automattic, the team behind WordPress.com, built VideoPress, meaning it integrates perfectly with your existing WordPress site. 

Your videos will load quickly for all of your viewers, no matter their location or internet speed, thanks to the combination of adaptive bitrate technology and Automattic’s state-of-the-art global CDN. Your visitors will love viewing videos on your site, thanks to the fully responsive video player, which gives them full control over their experience. They can select the resolution in which they’d like to watch your content, turn on subtitles, change the playback speed, and use the picture-in-picture feature to “pop out” the video for easier viewing. 

VideoPress features an immersive design that puts your content front and center, and it will never distract your visitors with any ads or logos. You can fully customize the appearance to meet your brand or let it cleverly adapt to match the colors of each video. 

This is an ideal enterprise video hosting service for teams. You can create as many user accounts as you need, so that everyone can seamlessly collaborate and utilize the power of VideoPress. You and your team can also keep an eye on the performance of your content thanks to the integration with Jetpack Stats, enabling you to see how each video performs.

Key features of VideoPress:

• Video hosting using a powerful global CDN
• Fully responsive design
• Seamless integration with WordPress
• Full 4K HD support
• Picture-in-picture support
• The ability to add videos to the background of your pages
• Subtitle support
• Private video support
• Variable playback speeds
• Unlimited logins for your team
• 1 TB of storage
• A maximum video upload size of 5 GB
• No ads or co-branding
• A responsive player that’s customizable

Pros of VideoPress:

• VideoPress provides a generous 1 TB storage allowance that you can fill with as many individual videos as you need. 
• The video player is fully responsive and features adaptive bitrate technology, so your visitors have a great experience no matter what device they use.
• You can display your content in high definition with support for 4K, 1080p, and fast-motion videos at 60 FPS. 
• VideoPress also allows you to showcase your content on your WordPress site as full-width video backgrounds. 
• It provides a totally ad-free experience, with no VideoPress branding visible to your visitors.
• You can create a membership site by restricting videos to logged-in users. 
• The video player automatically adapts to the color of each video, or you can easily customize the player to match your brand.
• VideoPress is built and maintained by the team behind WordPress.com, meaning it integrates perfectly with WordPress.
• You can try it out with one video for free, then upgrade to add more videos to your site.

Cons of VideoPress:

• VideoPress doesn’t offer any built-in lead generation tools. 

Ease of use:

VideoPress was designed to be simple to use and works perfectly with WordPress sites. You can drag and drop your videos, then add them to your content using the WordPress Block Editor, making the learning curve pretty much nonexistent. 

VideoPress also provides easy-to-read documentation, and they have a team of Happiness Engineers to help you if you run into any issues.

Cost:

• VideoPress is available for $5.95 a month for the first year. 
• You can get VideoPress as part of the Jetpack Complete plan, which also includes a vast range of WordPress security, speed, and growth tools, for $29.96 per month for the first year. 

2. Wistia

Wistia is a video hosting platform designed for digital marketers. After uploading your videos, you can add layers of features to support your marketing efforts, like asking users to enter their email address to unlock your video or including interactive call-to-action buttons on the videos themselves. It also integrates with other marketing tools like popular email service providers and CRMs. 

Key features of Wistia:

• The ability to add calls to action and lead capture features to videos
• Tools to create interactive videos with on-screen messages, buttons, and text
• A customizable video player
• Options to create channels and “up-next” recommendations for your videos
• Video analytics
• Integration with other popular marketing systems

Pros of Wistia:

• Wistia provides a range of marketing tools, including lead generation, integration with CRM systems, and the ability to use your videos to create custom audiences for remarketing. 
• Wistia includes detailed analytics that let you see your video’s performance alongside every action a viewer takes, such as pausing the video or clicking a link. 

Cons of Wistia:

• Wistia does not directly integrate into WordPress, meaning you must upload videos on Wistia’s website and use the embed codes to add videos to your posts and pages. 
• It’s targeted at marketing and lead capture videos, so may not be suitable for all creators.
• Even on paid plans, Wistia limits the number of videos you can host.

Ease of use:

Wistia has a range of marketing features that can take some time to learn and use effectively. Using embed codes to add your videos to WordPress requires extra work and could confuse some people. 

Cost:

• There’s a free version of Wistia with limited features and a ten-video limit. 
• Paid plans start at $19 a month for the Plus plan, which allows up to 20 videos.
  

3. Spotlightr

Spotlightr is a versatile platform that provides private video hosting for businesses. Alongside hosting on their global CDN, Spotlightr allows you to add various features to your videos, including chapters, overlays, and call-to-action buttons. And you can fully customize the video player to match your brand. Spotlightr also supports audience segmentation and funnels, which allow you to show different videos based on a user’s characteristics.

Key features of Spotlightr:

• A fully customizable video player 
• Support for pay-per-view videos
• Options to add CTAs and video overlays
• Evergreen “live” mode to simulate live video
• Detailed analytics, including video heat maps, audience segmentation, and engagement graphs
• Social sharing
• The ability to add your own pre- or post-roll ads
• Video funnels
• A drag-and-drop uploader

Pros of Spotlightr:

• Spotlightr provides detailed video analytics, including heat maps showing which parts of your videos were most viewed.
• It allows you to manage and embed videos uploaded to YouTube and other public hosting sites, so you can see analytics from all your videos in one place. 
• Spotlightr has a WordPress plugin that allows you to access some features, including uploading videos to your WordPress website, which you can then add to posts via shortcodes or the Spotlightr block. 

Cons of Spotlightr:

• You can only add 25 videos on the basic paid plan, and video storage space and bandwidth are limited on all paid plans. This means that you’ll end up paying for additional storage space if you exceed those limits.

Ease of use:

The drag-and-drop feature offered by Spotlightr makes adding videos easy, and an extensive suite of training videos is provided. 

Cost:

• The Spark plan costs $7 a month and is limited to 25 videos and 50 GB of bandwidth a month with restricted features.
• The Aurora plan includes most features, costs $19 a month, and provides unlimited videos and 200 GB of storage and bandwidth.
• The Polaris plan offers 600 GB of storage and bandwidth, along with all features, for $49 a month.
  

4. SproutVideo

SproutVideo is a private video hosting platform for businesses that supports uploaded content and live streams. You can create an engaging video experience for your visitors through custom playlists, call-to-action buttons, and a fully customizable player.

Key features of SproutVideo:

• Automatic bandwidth detection and quality adjustment
• Support for up to 8K resolution
• Team collaboration features
• A fully customizable player
• Custom video playlists
• Autoplay and loop abilities
• Video analytics
• Post-roll screens
• In-player call-to-action buttons and lead captures

Pros of SproutVideo:

• SproutVideo supports videos with up to 8K resolution and works to prevent buffering by automatically adjusting the quality served to your visitors based on their bandwidth.
• The video player is fully customizable, and you can set individual styles for different videos.

Cons of SproutVideo:

• SproutVideo does not have a WordPress plugin, so you must use an embed code to add your videos to posts or pages.
• Storage and bandwidth are limited to 500 GB per month.

Ease of use:

The number of features included in SproutVideo means the service has a sharp learning curve, and some users will likely find using embed codes confusing. Support is offered through the knowledge base and live chat.

Cost:

• The Seed plan costs $24.99 a month and includes video hosting and analytics. 
• Additional features are available on SproutVideo’s advanced plans, which range from $59.99–$499.99 a month. 

5. Vidyard

Vidyard is a video hosting platform for businesses that features a drag-and-drop uploader and a fully customizable video player. You can also record and edit videos and screencasts within Vidyard. While you can embed a limited number of videos on an external website, Vidyard is centered around your own video landing page, which makes it most useful for creating and sending personalized marketing videos.

Key features of Vidyard:

• A drag-and-drop video uploader
• A screen recording tool
• Call-to-action features
• Video analytics
• Basic video editing tools
• Video player customization
• Video playlists

Pros of Vidyard:

• You can record and edit videos and screencasts from within Vidyard.

Cons of Vidyard:

• On Vidyard’s paid “Plus” plan, only 20 videos can be embedded at any time. You also cannot embed video playlists. 
• You cannot restrict access to videos.
• You can only set one call to action, which applies to all videos, and call to action buttons can only be added at the end of videos.
• While a plugin is available that allows you to embed Vidyard videos, you have to upload and manage videos on Vidyard’s website. 

Ease of use:

The drag-and-drop interface and built-in recording features make Vidyard easy to use, and an extensive knowledge base is provided. 

Cost:

• Vidyard has a free plan that allows you to upload 25 videos, five of which can be embedded. 
• Premium plans start at $19 a month for the plus plan, which will enable you to embed up to 20 videos. 

6. Vimeo

Vimeo is a video hosting platform that began as a video sharing platform, like YouTube, but is now focused solely on the needs of businesses and creators. It has impressive features, including video creation, asset management, and live streaming. Vimeo also allows you to fully customize the video player to match your brand, and has powerful collaboration and analytics tools. 

Like most private video hosting platforms, Vimeo will never run ads on your videos or distract your visitors with other people’s “recommended” content, and it contains a range of features to allow your viewers to customize their experience.

Key features of Vimeo:

• A fully customizable video player
• A WordPress plugin
• Video analytics
• Video creation tools
• Video playlists
• Monetization options
• Video review tools
• Support for resolutions up to 8k
• Live streaming support
• Call-to-action buttons for videos
• Screen and webcam recording
• The option to password protect videos
• Integration with popular editing tools
• The ability to reuse your videos across social media and email

Pros of Vimeo:

• Vimeo has a dedicated WordPress plugin, which enables you to upload videos within your site and add them to your posts and pages through integration with the WordPress block editor. 
• It has a range of powerful features geared towards video creators, including collaboration tools and integration with Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and other popular video editing software. Vimeo also provides a video review tool that lets your team put time-stamped feedback on videos. 
• Vimeo allows you to create videos with its online editor, which contains useful templates and stock videos for you to use. You can even create videos for your WooCommerce products from within your WordPress site. 

Cons of Vimeo:

• Vimeo has a higher cost than many other private video hosting tools on this list and restricts the number of videos you can upload per month. 

Ease of use:

The Vimeo WordPress plugin makes uploading videos and adding them to your content easy. Some advanced features have a slight learning curve, but Vimeo has its own video school to help you use the platform to create great videos alongside a detailed knowledge base. 

Cost:

• There’s a free plan, but it’s highly limited. You can upload or create up to two videos per month and take advantage of an ad-free environment, but most other features are exclusive to paid plans.
• The Starter plan includes five videos per month and features like screen recordings, password protection, video embedding, and video stats for $12 per month.
• The Standard plan includes ten videos per month and additional features like call-to-action buttons and branding of the video player for $35 per month.
• The Advanced plan includes a 20 video per month upload limit and adds the ability to host webinars with interactive features like polls and chats for $55 per month.

A comparison of the best private video hosting platforms

WordPress video hosting FAQs

Still have questions? Check out the answers to some FAQs below.

What’s the best private video hosting platform?

For businesses that power their website with WordPress or want a fully customizable and scalable video environment, Jetpack VideoPress is the best private video hosting platform. It offers a cost-effective, enterprise-grade video solution packed with features. VideoPress is made by the team behind WordPress, so it’ll integrate perfectly with your site, and you’ll have access to support from Jetpack’s Happiness Engineers. 

Of course, there are a few situations where a different service will be more suitable, and the best private video hosting platform will always depend on what features your business is looking for. Our handy comparison table above will help you make the best choice for your business. 

Which platform offers the best bang for your buck?

As you can see from our comparison table, private video hosting varies significantly in price. However, it’s clear that Jetpack VideoPress, at only $5.95 a month for the first year, offers the best value without compromising on features. For this low price, you get an impressive set of enterprise video hosting features, including 1 TB storage and an immersive video experience for your visitors.

Get started with private video hosting today

Videos are a powerful tool for every business, but it’s crucial that you use a video hosting service designed with your needs in mind. When you use a private video hosting service for WordPress, you avoid advertisements on your videos and the rights issues often associated with public video sharing sites. You simply have more control.

Why not experience the benefits of private video hosting for yourself and sign up to Jetpack VideoPress today? 

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS). It powers over 40% of all websites and more than 64% of those that use a CMS. It’s easy to use and customize. But is it the best option for enterprise websites? 

WordPress continues to grow in popularity as large companies realize its capabilities for building a robust site that can scale with their needs. But if you want to use WordPress for enterprise, it’s essential to understand how it works. It’s also worth exploring examples of how you can use the CMS, along with some plugins and hosting options you can leverage. 

In this post, we’ll discuss what to expect from the WordPress enterprise ecosystem, its benefits, and the best WordPress plugins to use. We’ll also cover real-world examples of WordPress enterprise sites and wrap up with frequently asked questions (FAQs).

Is WordPress enterprise ready?

An enterprise CMS is a system used to manage websites for large organizations. It handles content, workflow, user roles, and other aspects of site administration. 

But is WordPress powerful enough to be a viable option for your big company? The short answer is yes. WordPress is a robust CMS used to power some of the largest websites in the world. It’s flexible, easy to use, and highly customizable.

If you want to make WordPress completely enterprise-ready, however, there are a few things you’ll need to do first, including:

• Choosing reliable, fast hosting
• Installing helpful plugins
• Adding multilingual functionality
• Implementing security solutions

How robust is the WordPress enterprise ecosystem?

WordPress has been around since 2003, making it one of the oldest content management systems. This long history means that it’s mature, with a rich ecosystem of developers, resources, and tools.

The WordPress community is one of the most active worldwide, with thousands of developers contributing to its development and management. If you run into any issues with security or performance, there’s a good chance that someone else has already solved it. They’ve likely also made their solution available for you to use, too.

Furthermore, WordPress has a huge library of plugins and themes that allow you to customize your site however you’d like. 

What are the benefits of using WordPress for enterprise sites?

WordPress offers many advantages over other content management systems, including ease of use, cost savings, and flexibility for customizing enterprise-level sites. Here are just a few of the benefits:

1. Powerful and automated backup solutions

With WordPress, there are a variety of excellent options for backing up your website. This protects you in case anything ever goes wrong, like a hack or coding error. 

You can always manually save a copy of your site from your hosting provider or with file transfer protocol (FTP) software. Or, you can use a plugin like Jetpack Backup, which backs up your site in real time. 

This solution is incredibly powerful, because it means that every action that takes places on your site — a product sale, a contact form submission, an updated page, an added plugin — is saved automatically. You’ll always have a copy of the latest version of your site on-hand, that you can restore in just a few clicks.

Your backups are also stored on trusted servers — the same ones used for all of the WordPress.com sites — completely separately from your hosting provider. So if your host’s server is compromised, your off-site backups won’t be. 

This type of backup solution is critical for enterprise-level businesses who simply can’t afford to have their site down for long periods of time or, even worse, lose all of their content or data completely.

2. Enterprise-grade security options

No platform is ever completely safe from hackers or security vulnerabilities. But WordPress developers are constantly working on the platform to ensure that it’s built with high-quality, clean code, and they respond quickly if any vulnerabilities are ever found. Unlike other tools like Joomla, you can also turn on auto-updates to automatically update your software to its latest version. This will apply any security patches and protect your site from potential vulnerabilities.

And since WordPress is so flexible, you can use any number of top security solutions to further safeguard and protect your website. While there are lots of great options out there, Jetpack Security is a complete WordPress security tool, providing a range of features all in one plugin.

In addition to the real-time backups we discussed a moment ago, you’ll also benefit from:

• Automatic malware scans: Jetpack uses an always-updated database of known malware and suspicious indicators to spot any problems on your site. It scans your files 24/7 and sends you an instant alert if anything is found so you can take care of it right away.
• Downtime monitoring: Large companies can’t afford downtime. Find out the second your site goes down so you can troubleshoot and get it back up again quickly.
• Two-factor authentication: Along with their account information, require administrators to enter a one-time code sent to their mobile device each time they log in.
• An activity log: Keep track of every action taken on your site and find out who performed it and when. This is great for monitoring activity from various team members and also identifying the source of any problems. For example, if your site goes down, you might be able to identify that the cause was a plugin update. You can also use this to restore a backup from right before a hack or other issue occurred.
• Spam prevention: Automatically filter comments and contact form submissions so that annoying and dangerous spam never reaches the front of your site.
• Brute force attack protection: Block hackers who try to get into your site by trying thousands of passwords per second. 

When you’re running an enterprise site, security is more important than ever. Every minute your site is down or compromised means lost revenue and a damaged reputation. And if you hand customer or client information over to malicious actors, it could be devastating.

But putting your trust in a platform like WordPress — which understands and optimizes for security at a high level — and taking advantage of resources like Jetpack Security enable you to protect your site and sleep well at night.

3. Enterprise content management support

Content is at the heart of many enterprise websites. It educates clients and customers, keeps you top of mind, and is integral for a variety of marketing strategies. So it’s important that the CMS you choose enables you to create beautiful, effective content easily and quickly.

That’s exactly what WordPress does. Creating beautiful pages and blog posts is simple thanks to the built-in block editor. You can add all sorts of elements — paragraphs, images, videos, columns, social media feeds, calls to action, and more — to a post just by dragging and dropping it. 

And managing content is just as easy. You can create user roles for your various team members, restricting their level of access to just what they need to fulfill their role. For example, your marketing manager might have full administrator-level access, while content writers may just be able to load their own post into the dashboard without making any other changes.

Speaking of the WordPress dashboard — it acts as a central hub for your website and content management. There, you can add and edit your posts, respond to comments, schedule your posts to publish, and more. 

WordPress VIP takes things one step further for enterprise sites, adding powerful and agile content marketing and management capabilities. 

What does this mean exactly? WordPress VIP helps you respond quickly and adapt to the frequently-changing market. Here are some things you can accomplish:

• Create custom publishing workflows.
• Integrate with tools you already use like Salesforce. If there’s not a ready-made integration, you can take advantage of the WordPress API to create one.
• Define customer structures and taxonomies for your content.
• Add plugins for Accelerated Mobile Pages, Progresssive Web Apps, and Web Stories.
• Take advantage of a platform that automatically scales to accommodate traffic spikes.
• Dive into in-depth analytics, with real-time data, conversion attribution, and audience segmentation.

Learn more about the WordPress enterprise platform. 

4. An abundance of top-quality developers

WordPress is extremely developer-friendly, with endless opportunities for customization. It’s an open-source platform, so developers have full access to all of the code so they can customize it to meet your exact needs. They can also use the powerful WordPress REST API to connect your website to any third-party tools that you use for appointments, client relationship management, marketing, and more.

And because WordPress is so popular, there’s a wealth of top-quality developers available to assist with any needs that you have. Want a custom-built site with very specific requirements? There’s a developer for that. Need something to maintain your enterprise website on a weekly basis? There’s someone who can help with that, too.

Looking for an eCommerce-specific developer? Check out the WooExperts marketplace, with agencies personally vetted by WooCommerce.

5. Extensive flexibility and scalability

As your company grows, you want your website software to be able to accommodate a lot more traffic, more users, and any additional functionality that you might need. 

Say you’re using WordPress as a static website for your service-based business. But, as you grow, you decide to add a forum for your customers, an option to book appointments online, and an online store for supplementary merchandise. You can add all of those tools to your existing site without having to switch platforms or craft any complicated code.

WordPress also enables you to choose any hosting provider that you’d like. This means you can find a plan that suits your needs and scales to accommodate your website traffic. You can also choose a plan that includes extras like a super-fast CDN, caching tools, and staging sites for testing changes.

Since WordPress is completely free, you’re not nickel and dimed each time you get more site visitors or list more products. 

Finally, WordPress code is regularly checked and updated with scalability in mind. A global team works to update the software to meet the latest standards in performance, accessibility, and more. All of this combined means that you can trust WordPress for your enterprise site, no matter how much you grow.

6. Easy customization and usability 

A lot of the benefits we’ve talked about already go back to the same thing — customization and usability. Thanks to the huge library of available free and premium plugins, you can add any sort of functionality you’d like to your site and meet any need that your enterprise has.

You can also choose from a variety of themes that help dictate the design of your site. Work with something super flexible and customizable or choose a theme with pre-made demos and switch out content related to your business. 

And if you have a variety of team members who contribute to your website, the onboarding process is much simpler than with other enterprise CMS options. Without any code or development knowledge whatsoever, someone can create a new page or post using the block editor, edit colors or fonts with the Customizer, respond to comments, add new products, and more. Website maintenance and management is incredibly duplicatable and easy to scale. 

What are the best WordPress plugins for enterprise sites?

Plugins add extra functionality to your website, and there are both free and premium options available. If you have a need, there’s almost certainly a plugin available to fill it. Let’s take a look at just a few great options for enterprise WordPress sites:

1. Jetpack 

Jetpack is packed full of features that provide a ton of necessary functionality for large websites, from security and backups to performance, analytics, marketing, and more. But you can also disable any functionality that you’re not using to keep your site lightweight. There are both free and premium features available, including:

• Real-time backups: Save every single action that takes place and restore a backup in just a few clicks, even if your site is down.
• Additional security tools: Protect your site with downtime monitoring, malware scanning, brute force attack prevention, two-factor authentication, and more.
• Performance tools: Speed up your website by implementing a super fast CDN, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, lazy loading images, and more.
• Spam prevention: Get rid of offensive and distracting spam comments and contact form submissions. 
• Site search: Implement super fast site search, with powerful filters and spelling correction.
• Video hosting: Speed up your videos while avoiding third-party ads.
• Analytics: Get insights into how your site is performing and who makes up your audience.

Jetpack also offers a WordPress CRM (customer relationship management tool), which is essential for any enterprise-level business. It enables you to manage your leads, prospects, clients, and customers, helping you grow your company and streamline your marketing efforts. 

With Jetpack CRM, you can send quotes and invoices, see all of your contacts in one place, manage your sales funnel, view client history and interactions, assign leads to specific team members, and more. And you can do all of this directly in the WordPress dashboard!

And since Jetpack and Jetpack CRM are maintained by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, you can benefit from seamless integration, simple setup, and world-class support.

2. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the go-to eCommerce solution for WordPress, providing everything you need to sell online — product listings, cart and checkout pages, payment solutions, and more. It’s maintained by Automattic and is built to scale, with no limit on number of products or sales. The best part? It’s completely free.

It’s also super flexible, just like WordPress, and offers a library of free and premium extensions that provide tons of additional functionality. Want to sync inventory with your warehouse? Integrate with Facebook or Google Shopping? Sell in multiple currencies? There’s an extension for that.

And you can sell more than just physical items, too. Offer digital downloads, memberships, subscriptions, bookings, accommodations, wholesale products, and more. Or combine any of those to create your own custom solution.

WooCommerce also integrates seamlessly with Jetpack CRM and a variety of other marketing tools to make your life just a little easier.

3. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a powerful tool for converting leads and capturing email subscribers. You can create a huge variety of pop-up types, including:

• Lightboxes: Traditional style pop-ups you can use to display announcements and sales or capture email addresses
• Floating bars: Sticky bars in your header or footer that are perfect for sales, important messages, free shipping notices, and more
• Spin a wheel popups: A fun concept that allows visitors to spin a wheel to win a randomized coupon code
• Inline signup forms: Perfect to insert in the middle of blog posts and other content

There are endless ways you can use this plugin. And you can craft all of your pop-ups with a drag-and-drop builder that keeps things super simple. It even integrates with your favorite tools, like Campaign Monitor, HubSpot, Drip, and more. There’s a free version available, along with a premium option that includes additional features.

4. LiveChat

LiveChat is a feature-rich tool that enables you to add a chat box to your enterprise WordPress site. You can add 24/7 support, with automatic quick replies to frequently asked questions, and even send targeted messages to visitors based on the actions they take on your site.

While the plugin itself is free, you do need a paid LiveChat account to activate its features.

5. Yoast SEO 

Yoast SEO is a plugin specifically designed to help you implement search engine optimization strategies across your site. Without having to edit code, you can make changes to your sitemap, edit meta descriptions and titles for posts, pages, and custom post types, update indexing settings, and more. 

For each page or post, you can insert the keyword that you’re targeting and Yoast will generate a list of suggestions for each one. For example, it might advise you to use your keyword more frequently, increase the length of your content, add more external links, and include alt text for your images. 

The premium version of the plugin has additional features like link suggestions and content quality analyses.

6. Echo Knowledge Base 

Adding a knowledge base to your website can be extremely beneficial, whether you’re using it for product documentation, service documents, or employee handbooks. Echo Knowledge Base makes it easy to create that documentation, organize it by type, order it based on a variety of factors, and more. You can even add a search bar to make it easy for customers to use.

Like many of the other plugins here, there is both a free and premium version available, with varying features.

7. Connections Business Directory

You can use a business directory for a variety of purposes — display all the members of your team, showcase everyone in your club or organization, or maintain an internal staff directory. And the Connections Business Directory plugin is a free plugin that makes creating one easy and fast. You can even extend its capabilities with add-ons for creating extra fields, sending marketing messages, and more.

8. WPML

WPML is a multilingual tool that helps you translate your content and display your website in multiple languages. This, of course, is extremely beneficial if your enterprise business works with clients and customers across the globe.

You can either manually translate content yourself, use the automatic translation tool, or send your text to WPML’s trusted translation partners. And the tool can translate everything from paragraphs and headings to alt text, widgets, menus, product data, and text in plugins and admin screens.

WPML is a premium plugin, with several plans based on the features you need.

9. PublishPress 

This plugin offers a set of tools that level up your publishing process within WordPress, including:

• An editorial calendar to help you plan and schedule content
• Custom post statuses that you can set based on your specific process
• Editorial comments to facilitate discussion between team members
• The ability to group posts into a series
• Custom viewing and editing permissions
• Publishing checklists and to-do lists

You can purchase features separately or bundled together.

And remember — these are just a handful of the great WordPress plugins for enterprise sites. You can check out free options in the WordPress.org repository, or find premium plugins across a variety of reputable marketplaces.

Real-world examples of WordPress enterprise websites

Businesses of all niches and sizes can use WordPress. Let’s look at real-world examples of WordPress enterprise websites to give you a better idea of some possibilities!

1. ISC

ISC provides industrial products for equipment manufacturers and other companies. Built with WordPress and WooCommerce, their site features hundreds of products alongside helpful resources like blog posts and FAQs. They also offer a live chat feature and request a quote functionality.

2. Nalgene 

Nalgene is a popular outdoor brand that offers BPA-free water bottles and accessories. They used WordPress and WooCommerce to build their online store, which is packed full of items that can be easily accessed through a mega menu. Customers can even create their own custom water bottle directly on the site.

3. Dr. Scholl’s 

Dr. Scholl’s is a globally-known foot care brand that sells shoe inserts and various treatments for feet problems — all using WooCommerce and WordPress. Customers can purchase products on their site or use the Where to Buy tool to find them in their local store. There’s also a robust blog available to visitors, along with a nifty tool that advises shoppers on the right insole for their specific needs.

4. The National Archives 

The National Archives is the British government’s official online archive. It stores everything from wills and military service records to medals, passenger lists, and war diaries — more than 32 million descriptions of records, nine million of which are available for download. Visitors can search the large database and find detailed information about each record.

5. The New York Times 

The New York Times is one of the most popular and prolific American newspapers, with a corporate website powered by WordPress. It provides information about the company behind the news articles, stories, and op-eds that are available to visitors across the globe. 

6. Qualtrics 

Qualtrics is a research platform that offers customer, market, and employee insights. The American customer experience management company uses its WordPress website to provide cloud-based subscription software and collect customer feedback.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about using WordPress as an enterprise CMS

At this point, we’ve covered just about everything there is to know about using WordPress for enterprise. But to make sure we didn’t miss any important points, let’s wrap up with some FAQs!

What features should an enterprise CMS offer?

There are a handful of features that an enterprise CMS should offer. Security is one of the most important considerations. As your site grows, it’s more important than ever to protect it against hackers and other threats. 

You’ll also need access to automated backups, scalable and flexible software, and premium support. 

Is WordPress the best enterprise CMS?

Yes, WordPress is considered to be the best all-around enterprise CMS. But that’s not just because of its popularity. Since millions of people use WordPress every day, there are tons of plugins, themes, and developers who can help you customize your site.

WordPress is incredibly flexible, offering functionality for online stores, forums, directories, and more. It also integrates with a variety of tools your business may already use, like CRMs, marketing platforms, and warehouse solutions. WordPress is easy to customize and use, highly extensible and scalable, and secure by nature.

However, the specific CMS that you choose will depend on your unique business and needs.

How do I choose a host for my enterprise-level site?

The most important thing is ensuring that your enterprise WordPress site has a solid foundation. You can’t expect your website to perform at its best using subpar hosting. 

So it’s essential to choose a company that offers WordPress enterprise-grade hosting, with servers and plans specifically optimized for large volumes of traffic. You’ll also want to look for 24/7 support and a guarantee of 99%+ uptime.

WordPress VIP is an excellent option for enterprise-based sites. It’s a managed WordPress hosting service from Automattic, with powerful features specifically for large businesses. It’s built on a solid, super fast foundation that responds effortlessly to traffic spikes and keeps your data super secure.

Start building your WordPress enterprise site today

WordPress is an excellent option for enterprise websites, offering an extensive library of plugins, themes, and tools, access to a plethora of developers and resources, and strong security and content management solutions.

With a reliable and fast hosting provider and plugins that meet your needs, you can grow your business with WordPress!

Are you ready to start building your WordPress enterprise website? Download WordPress or get started with WordPress VIP.

If you have a WordPress site, you understand the value of a top-notch user experience. It impacts your conversion rate, your subscriber count, your ad views, your search engine rankings, and more.

And poor core web vitals can negatively impact that user experience.

But what exactly are core web vitals? Why are they so important? And how can you improve WordPress core web vitals? Let’s take a look.

What are core web vitals?

Core web vitals are a set of metrics used by Google to determine how websites perform. Unlike other performance measurements, they use real world data to examine how specific aspects of load time impact your user experience. There are currently three core web vitals metrics:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which relates to loading performance
2. First Input Delay (FID), which relates to interactivity
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which relates to visual stability

Why are core web vitals important for a WordPress site?

Why do they matter? Well, first of all, because they measure how your visitors interact with your website, they’re tied to your user experience. The happier your visitors are, the more likely they are to subscribe to your newsletter, purchase your products, or inquire about your services. And if they have to wait and wait for your website to load, they might leave and visit a competitor.

But Google also uses core web vitals as a ranking factor. This means that they consider them when determining where your website shows up on search engines for your target keywords. After all, Google wants to provide the best quality results for searchers, so it’s no surprise that they value these user experience metrics.

Which metrics make up core web vitals?

Without further explanation, the list of core web vitals might seem confusing or overwhelming. So let’s take a closer look at each one.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP relates to the perceived load speed of your website, reporting the time it takes for the largest element to fully load on the page. In many cases, this is a large hero image or video at the top of the page, though this can vary from site to site. In some cases, it might even just be a block of text. This can also be different on desktop and mobile devices. 

Largest contentful paint only applies to elements that render and are visible to a visitor. So scripts loading in the background wouldn’t impact this metric. 

Ideally, you’d like your LCP to be as low as possible. Google considers less than 2.5 seconds to be a “good” score, less than or equal to 4.0 seconds to “need improvement,” and more than 4.0 seconds to be a “low” score. 

Learn more about largest contentful paint on WordPress.

First Input Delay (FID)

FID relates to how interactive your website is, measuring the time between when a visitor takes an action on a page to when their browser actually reacts to that action. Let’s break this down a little more.

When someone clicks a button on your site that opens a pop-up, their browser has to process the request. If it gets stuck trying to process a large JavaScript file, then it will take longer for the pop-up to open. Not good. 

The faster your site reacts to an action, the lower your FID score is, and the happier your visitors (and search engines!) are.

Those actions, by the way, are things like taps, clicks, and key presses. Scrolling and zooming are considered separately from first input delay, as they’re continuous actions.

The interesting consideration here, however, is that some people will visit your website and never take a specific action. They might read through your content, then go elsewhere without clicking or opening anything. Because of this, some visitors will have absolutely no FID value, which can make measuring first input delay perhaps a bit inaccurate.

Regardless, it’s still a valuable metric to understand and work on improving if necessary. Google considers a good FID score to be less than 100 ms. A score that needs improvement is between 100 ms and 300 ms. Anything over 300 ms is poor.

Learn more about first input delay in WordPress.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS measures how often site visitors experience unexpected shifts in the layout of a page. What does that mean exactly?

Let’s say that a follower is reading a recipe on your food blog. They’re about to click on a link to an ingredient when, suddenly, the entire page shifts and they end up accidentally clicking on an ad for insurance instead. They’re taken off-site to the advertiser’s landing page and, frustrated, decide not to come back to your blog at all.

This is a perfect example of why CLS is so important. If your page suddenly moves, it can cause visitors to have trouble reading your content or click on something by mistake. In the worst case scenario, they may even end up purchasing something they didn’t intend to. That’s a surefire way to lose fans, readers, and customers. 

Google defines a layout shift as “any time an element that is visible within the viewport changes its start position…between two frames.” But what exactly causes this to happen? A poor CLS score is typically caused by elements on the page loading at different times — an image without a defined size, an ad without set dimensions, custom fonts, or other third-party embeds.

CLS score is measured as the difference between the original loading site and the final place that an element ends up. A good score is anything less than 0.1. Scores between 0.1 and 0.25 need improvement, while anything above 0.25 is considered poor.

Learn more about cumulative layout shift in WordPress.

How to measure core web vitals on WordPress

Now that you know what WordPress core web vitals are and why they matter, let’s find out how you can test your site. There are several tools you can use to do this:

1. PageSpeed Insights 

PageSpeed Insights is a tool directly from Google that provides a wealth of information about your website’s performance, including your core web vitals. All you have to do is enter your URL, and in a few seconds, you’ll see a speed report for both desktop and mobile. 

At the very top, you’ll see your core web vitals, with scores for LCP, FID, and CLS. They’re presented very visually, so you’ll know right away if your site is good to go or if it needs improvement. You’ll also get related speed metrics that aren’t part of Core Web Vitals, like Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Time to Interactive. You can click Expand View to see more information about each one.

If you keep scrolling, you’ll see a list of opportunities for improvement, which you can filter based on the core web vital that each suggestion applies to. 

Click the arrow to the right of each one to see more details. Finally, at the bottom, there is a list of Passed Audits, which are all the things your site is doing well. 

2. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another Google-owned tool that’s chock full of information about SEO. There’s a lot you can do here, from submitting your sitemap to viewing and fixing indexing issues. And, of course, since core web vitals are related to SEO, there’s an entire section dedicated to them.

If you don’t already have a Google Search Console account, you’ll need to register your website. First, find the Select Property dropdown and click Add Property. You’ll then be presented with two options: 

1. Domain: Covers all of the URLs, including both https and http, and all subdomains. This is the most exhaustive option but also the most complicated to set up as it involves editing your DNS records.
2. URL prefix: Covers just the URLs that fall under the domain name that you enter. So, if you enter example.com, it would include example.com/contact-us, but not blog.example.com. This route also allows for a variety of verification methods.

For the purpose of this example, we’re moving forward with the URL prefix method. Enter your URL in the box provided and click Continue.

Now, you’ll see several different verification options:

• HTML file: Download an HTML file and upload it to your site via FTP or cpanel.
• HTML tag: Copy the meta tag provided, then add it to the <head> section of your site’s homepage.
• Google Analytics: Use your existing Google Analytics account to verify your site.
• Google Tag Manager: Use your existing Google Tag Manager account to verify your site.
• Domain name provider: Edit your DNS records to associate your site with Google.

Choose whichever method is easiest for you — Google provides additional instructions on each one — and proceed forward. Once your site is verified, you can click on Core Web Vitals in the left-hand menu of Google Search Console.

There, you’ll see charts for both the mobile and desktop version of your site that give you an overview of how it’s performing. 

Click Open Report for more information. There, you can view how each of your URLs stacks up when it comes to core web vitals. You can even come back here once you’ve made improvements to resubmit the page to Google and validate your fixes.

3. Google Lighthouse

Google Lighthouse is a tool designed for developers and site owners for improving the quality of their websites. It runs tests based on accessibility, performance, SEO, and more. There are several different ways you can run Google Lighthouse: 

• With Chrome DevTools
• Using a Chrome extension
• With a Node module
• With a web User Interface (UI)

For the purposes of this post, we’ll walk you through how to use Chrome DevTools to find your core web vitals in Google Lighthouse.

In the Google Chrome browser, navigate to your website. Right click anywhere on the page and select Inspect from the options that appear. This will open a variety of tools that you can explore, but you’ll want to click on the Lighthouse tab. 

Now, select the Mode, Device, and Categories you want to test. You can select as many categories as you’d like if you want additional information, but to find core web vitals, make sure you check the box next to Performance. Click Analyze page load.

Once the audit is complete, it will show you your core web vitals, along with other data and metrics about your site performance.

How to improve core web vitals on WordPress

At this point, you should have a good idea of how your website performs. Next, let’s take a look at how you can improve your WordPress core web vitals.

1. Install a plugin designed for core web vitals

The absolute easiest step you can take is to use a core web vitals WordPress plugin like Jetpack Boost. It was created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, so you can trust that it works seamlessly with your site, themes, and plugins. The best part? It’s completely free to use!

This tool enables you to perform some rather complicated optimization tasks by just toggling a few buttons. Here’s how to get started:

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New. Search for “Jetpack Boost” and click Install Now → Activate. Then, navigate to Jetpack → Boost. Click the green Get Started button.

Jetpack will then calculate a performance score for your site as it stands currently.

You’ll then be able to activate three key tools:

1. Optimize CSS Loading: Turning this on generates critical CSS for your site. What exactly does this do? Before a browser can show your page to visitors, it has to download and analyze all of the CSS for that page. If your CSS files are large, this can take a significant amount of time, slowing down your site. Generating critical CSS, however, extracts the code that’s strictly necessary for the content that’s visible above the fold to render. It prioritizes that CSS so the rest can be loaded in the background. This speeds up load time tremendously and helps improve your LCP score.
2. Defer Non-Essential JavaScript. This causes JavaScript code that isn’t immediately essential to render after the rest of the page loads. Not only does this help the visual content of your page load faster, it can also improve your FID and LCP scores.
3. Lazy Image Loading. This loads images as a visitor scrolls down the page rather than taking the time to load them all upfront. This, in turn, speeds up your site and improves your LCP score.

Once you’ve enabled any or all of these settings, you can click Refresh to recalculate your performance and see the improvements made.

How simple is that? No editing code. No figuring out complicated settings. Just click a few buttons and you’re good to go!   

2. Minify your CSS

Minifying CSS means removing unnecessary characters and spaces in order to reduce the size of the CSS files. Let’s take a look at what this might mean in practice.

Developers typically format their code to make it as easy as possible for others (and them!) to understand. That means spacing out lines of code so it’s easier to read. Here’s an example:

h1{
  font-size: 32px;
}
#top-section{
  background-color: green;
}

The problem with this is that, even though it’s convenient and helpful, it takes up unnecessary space in your CSS files. And when extra characters and spaces are multiplied over hundreds or thousands of lines of code, that can really slow things down! Here’s how you would rewrite that same code, but minified:

h1{font-size:32px}#top-section{background-color:green}

This is somewhat straightforward, especially for an experienced developer. But doing this manually, of course, can be very time-consuming and prone to error. Thankfully, there are a variety of tools available that can minify your CSS automatically, including Toptal’s CSS Minifier and a variety of free WordPress plugins. Once you do this, you should see an improvement in both your page speed and your LCP score.

Before you do this, make sure you back up your WordPress site in case minifying your CSS files causes any issues.

3. Defer render-blocking resources

Render-blocking resources are exactly what they sound like: files that block the rendering of a page on your website. This means that when a browser loads the page, it has to stop and fully load these resources — typically CSS or JavaScript files — before displaying other elements. This can really slow down your website and, of course, increase your LCP score.

The solution here is to defer the render-blocking resources, instructing the browser to load important, critical content first. But how do you do this?

Your first task is to identify the render-blocking resources, which you can do using Google PageSpeed Insights. Once you run your URL through the tool (see above for more instructions), scroll down to the Opportunities area and expand the section titled Eliminate render-blocking resources. This will provide a list of your render-blocking resources.

This list also shows the potential time savings you can gain if you eliminate each render-blocking resource. 

Your next step is to actually eliminate or defer these resources. If you’re familiar and experienced with code, you can use this guide from web.dev to do this manually. To eliminate the resource, you’ll need to move each individual line of code to an inline <script> tag in the HTML of the page you’re working on. Alternatively, you can use the <defer> attribute to tell browsers not to wait for the resource to load before displaying the rest of the page.

Learn more about eliminating render-blocking resources in WordPress.

If this all sounds a bit complicated, don’t worry! Turning on Jetpack Boost defers this code automatically, without requiring any work on your end.

4. Implement a CDN

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that’s distributed around the world. It takes the load off of your host by splitting up the workload between its servers, which reduces the resources that your website consumes. It also displays your site from the location that’s closest to each individual visitor, so they see it as quickly as possible. This can help improve both your FID and LCP scores, plus provide a variety of other benefits.

There are quite a few ways to add a CDN to WordPress, and they vary based on price, features, and ease of use. Some can be pretty tricky to implement if you’re not a developer. That’s where Jetpack’s WordPress CDN fills the gap.

This completely free tool was created specifically for WordPress sites, so you don’t have to worry about conflicts with major plugins and themes. Plus, you’ll know that it’s optimized specifically for your website and software. The best part is that you can get started in a single click — no editing your DNS or configuring complicated settings!

To turn on this tool, go to Plugins → Add New in your WordPress dashboard. Search for “Jetpack” and install and activate the plugin. Follow the instructions to connect to your WordPress.com account. Then, navigate to Jetpack → Settings in your dashboard.

Click on the Performance tab at the top, then toggle on the setting for “Enable site accelerator.” That’s it! You should start to instantly see a speed improvement. 

5. Optimize your images

Images are typically some of the largest files you have on your website. And the more you have, the more they can slow things down and negatively affect your LCP score. But that’s okay! You can still display your portfolio or use those gorgeous photo backgrounds. All you have to do is take the time to optimize your images properly.

One way to do this is by compressing them before uploading them to your media library. There are several different free tools you can use to do this, including ImageOptim. All you have to do is set your compression level (target a balance of optimization and image quality) and drag and drop your images into the tool. 

Or, if you’d rather, you can compress your images as you upload them to your website. Jetpack CDN actually does this automatically, even optimizing them specifically for mobile devices.

6. Set dimensions for images, ads, and embedded content

When it comes to CLS, images, ads, and other embedded content are some of the biggest culprits. By specifying their dimensions, you can reserve their allotted space while the page is loading and prevent major shifts in your layout.

For images, all you have to do is open the settings tab of your image block in WordPress, and add measurements for the width and height.

For other third-party content like ads, your best solution is to use CSS to set dimensions for those elements. Since the ads that show up can vary some in size, you might want to set aside a larger amount of space. This might result in blank space around smaller ads, but is more than worth it to prevent page shifts.

7. Consider switching hosting providers

Your host forms the foundation for your website speed and, in turn, your core web vitals. And if, in spite of making many of the changes on this list, you’re still experiencing a slow site, you may need to upgrade plans or even switch providers entirely.

If you’re on a shared hosting plan, one option is to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated plan. Shared hosting plans involve putting a bunch of different websites on the same server. Since they’re all splitting a set amount of resources, those resources are limited. This can ultimately slow down all of the websites on the server.

A VPS hosting plan still has multiple sites on each server, but there are specific resources allocated to each one, and fewer websites piled on top of one another. This is a great step up from shared hosting. 

Dedicated hosting plans provide ultimate flexibility and speed. Each individual site has their own server with their own assigned resources. Some plans are managed, with the provider taking care of server maintenance, while others are unmanaged, so each site owner will need to take care of their own server. 

Should you decide to switch hosting providers entirely, look for one that prioritizes speed. Good indications of this are built-in speed features like CDNs and caching, frequently-updated software, and WordPress-specific plans. 

Not sure where to start? Check out a list of our recommended WordPress hosts.

8. Cut back on heavy features 

The more features your site has, the more code it has to load and the more your core web vitals and speed are impacted. So, it would stand to reason that keeping things as simple as you can is helpful.

That doesn’t, of course, mean that you can’t have a beautiful, professional, highly-functional website. It just means that you should be thoughtful about the decisions you make.

Choose high-quality plugins, and limit them to only the ones that you absolutely need. When possible, use plugins that provide multiple tools at once. For example, Jetpack provides performance, security, design, and marketing functionality in a single WordPress plugin. 

Instead of a slider at the top of your homepage, try using a static image. Limit the number of ads you have on each page. Think about replacing simple videos with GIFs, which are much more lightweight. These are all small changes that can really add up.

Frequently asked questions about WordPress core web vitals

Still looking for information about core web vitals in WordPress? Let’s answer some frequently asked questions.

Do core web vitals impact SEO on WordPress?

Yes, core web vitals can impact your WordPress SEO. In fact, Google made core web vitals a ranking factor, meaning that they’re considered when the search engine determines the order in which websites rank for certain keywords.

This is because core web vitals are a great indication of user experience. If a site takes a long time to load valuable content or moves around a lot when someone’s using it, this can really negatively impact their experience. And since Google wants to provide the highest-quality results to searchers, this is important to them.

Do core web vitals impact user experience on WordPress?

While core web vitals don’t exactly impact user experience, they are a measurement of the quality of your user experience. Think about it — let’s say you’re visiting your favorite blog or online store and it takes a long time for the hero image to load. Perhaps you click a button and nothing seems to happen for several seconds. Or maybe you’re scrolling and, all of a sudden, the page jumps and you completely lose track of where you were. 

If any of those things were to happen to you, it would be frustrating, right? You might even leave the site entirely and go somewhere else. At the very least, your opinion of the brand would be impacted.

And that’s exactly why core web vitals are connected to your site’s user experience. Poor core web vitals are a sign of difficulty interacting and engaging with your content which, of course, you never want no matter what type of site you run.

How can I easily optimize my core web vitals right now?

The easiest, fastest way to quickly optimize your core web vitals in WordPress is to use a plugin like Jetpack Boost. It’s the best WordPress speed plugin, designed specifically to address core web vitals. By just toggling a few settings, you can optimize CSS loading, defer non-essential JavaScript, and turn on lazy image loading. 

And it couldn’t be simpler to set up! All you have to do is install and activate the plugin, run an initial speed test, then turn on toggles for each setting you want to enable. That’s it!

No matter your experience level or the type of site you own, you can use Jetpack Boost to quickly and easily optimize your core web vitals. Ready to take the first step towards a better user experience and improved search engine rankings? Get started with Jetpack Boost.