8 Best Popular Posts Plugins for WordPress (Compared)

Are you looking for a way to show popular posts on your WordPress website?

Displaying popular posts helps your visitors find your best content and increase your page views. It’s also a great way to interlink your pages to boost SEO.

In this article, we will share the best popular posts plugins for WordPress.

Why Use a WordPress Popular Posts Plugin?

Using a WordPress popular posts plugin helps you point users towards the articles that other users already found helpful.

Popular posts are usually your most successful content, which means they more likely to increase user engagement, conversions, and sales.

They are also a good opportunity for internal linking to your other less popular articles. This improves the SEO score for other articles and helps users discover more content.

You can create highly engaging funnels using popular posts, related posts, and conversion optimization tools. All of which lead users to sign up and help you grow your business.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best popular post plugins for WordPress that you can on your website.

1. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress used by over 2 million websites. It lets you properly setup Google Analytics without editing code or hiring a developer.

They have the best Popular Posts feature which allows you to show your popular articles anywhere on your WordPress site. You can use also use Inline Popular Posts to show articles inside your content.

If you want to show articles in the sidebar or at the end of your content, you can select the Popular Post Widget.

MonsterInsights even lets you display your top-performing products anywhere on your eCommerce store.

The plugin offers different themes to choose from, and you can customize the design by changing the title color, size, label color, border, and more.

You can sort your popular posts based on comments, share count, or manually select posts that will randomly rotate in the widget.

If you have custom dimensions set up like post type, then MonsterInsights will automatically pick the top 5 posts from Google Analytics from the past 30 days and show them as popular posts.

Pros: MonsterInsights offers lots of options to display popular posts. You can select different themes, layouts, styling, and customize each popular post widget. It can automatically determine popular posts and show them on your website.

Cons: To get powerful features like eCommerce tracking, conversion tracking, and custom dimensions, you’ll need the MosterInsights Pro plan.

2. WordPress Popular Posts

WordPress Popular Posts plugin is one of the most downloaded popular posts plugin on the market with over 300,000+ active installs. It allows you to show popular posts with many different conditions.

You can show recently trending articles by selecting a date range. You can also show most commented or most viewed articles.

It is multi-widget capable, which means you can add the same widget multiple times into the same or different sidebar. You can apply your own custom CSS, show post thumbnails, excerpts, author, comment count, number of views, and more.

Pros: WordPress Popular Posts is a powerful plugin with all the options you would need to display your popular posts. Support for custom post types and the ability to add the widget multiple times allows you to create a different set of popular views, e.g., Popular Posts, Popular Reviews, etc.

Cons: The plugin creates two extra tables in the database to store popular posts data and cache. While some people might argue that it is a better approach to keep this data out of default WordPress tables, others may find it database intensive. Also there’s no option to connect with real analytics.

3. Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress

Top 10 Popular posts plugin for WordPress is another strong candidate in our list of the best popular posts plugins.

As far as the features are concerned, it matches WordPress Popular Posts and even adds some more features. Top 10 also comes with a highly configurable widget and shortcodes.

Despite the name, you can choose to display any number of popular posts. It allows you to select a date range to choose from. You can show post views, author, post summary or excerpt, and post thumbnails in the popular posts list.

Top 10 comes with a built-in caching system to make it less resource intensive. It also plays along nicely with WordPress caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.

Pros: Top 10 Popular Posts Plugin is feature-rich, flexible, and easy to setup. It has aggressive caching to reduce the server load, and it works nicely with WordPress caching plugins.

Cons: Plugin settings page have way too many options, and beginners may find it a bit complicated. Also there’s no option to connect with real analytics.

4. Relevant

Relevant will help you show your popular posts, featured articles, related content, and latest posts on your WordPress website. It comes with multiple widgets including one for popular posts and a neat settings page.

You can display popular posts by comments or page views. It also allows you to display post thumbnail, author, excerpt, and post date.

Don’t want to use the widget? Relevant also comes with shortcodes and template tags that you can use to display popular posts anywhere on your website. You can also enable post blocks before or after post content.

Pros: It combines featured, latest, and related posts functionality into one convenient package.

Cons: The popular posts feature does not allow you to show popular posts in a particular date range.

5. Trending/Popular Post Slider and Widget

Trending/Popular Post Slider and Widget allows you to show popular posts in a slider, a grid block, or as a plain list. This way, you can show your best content in more engaging ways than just a list of links in your sidebar.

It comes with a simple settings page where you can choose the time range. This allows you to show posts trending during a particular year, month, or week.

The plugin comes with easy to use shortcodes that you can add to your posts or pages. You can also use the shortcode in your page builder plugin modules.

If you want to implement it directly into your theme, then you can use template tags to do that.

Pros: Ability to add popular posts sliders, carousels, and grid blocks and show them anywhere on your site.

Cons: Limited features than other popular posts plugin. The slider, carousel, and grid blocks only work with shortcodes. The widget is basically a list of links with post thumbnails, excerpts, and some metadata.

6. WP-PostRatings

WP-PostRatings is the next popular posts WordPress plugin on our list. It helps you show the most highly rated posts on your website and allows users to rate articles.

You can choose the rating icons and who can vote on articles (all users vs. only logged-in users). It supports rich snippets, and it is highly customizable through filters and template tags.

The best part about the plugin is its ratings widget, which shows top-rated posts on your website. This allows you to show popular posts by user votes. The plugin also works with WordPress Popular Posts plugin.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to add post rating system in WordPress

Pros: You can show popular posts based on user rating instead of page views or comments.

Cons: To implement the plugin, you will need to add template tags in your WordPress theme files, which can be tricky for beginners. If you haven’t done this before, then check out our guide on how to copy and paste code in WordPress.

7. Display Posts

Display Posts is a popular WordPress plugin that allows you to display WordPress posts by creating your own custom queries using shortcode.

It lets you easily showcase your top content anywhere on your site through shortcodes. For instance, you can show posts by comment count using the following shortcode:

[display-posts orderby="comment_count"]

It also works with plugins like shared counts, which allows you to display your most shared articles as well.

The plugin lets you filter posts by category and display content based on share count and the number of comments. In your display parameter, you can include excerpts, thumbnails, author avatar, and more.

Pros: Display Posts is extremely flexible and you can fetch and display any posts you want as popular posts. It offers detailed documentation and tutorials to help you get started.

Cons: The shortcode has many parameters and no styling. This would make it a bit difficult to use for beginners.

8. WP Tab Widget

WP Tab Widget is a user-friendly and fast WordPress plugin to display popular posts on your website. You can show articles based on pageviews, comments, tags, and recent posts all in a single widget.

The plugin lets you select which tab to show on your site and control the number of posts to show in each tab. The best part about WP Tab Widget is that it only loads posts when a user clicks on any tabs.

This makes the plugin lightweight and ensures your WordPress site runs without slowing down. Besides, you get different customization options such as show or hide post date, number of comments, excerpts, and more.

Pros: A super-fast plugin that doesn’t compromise website performance, as it uses AJAX to display popular posts under each tab. Plus, you get to show different types of posts in one widget.

Cons: WP Tab Widget lacks flexibility and offers limited features in the free version. To get predefined designs, drag and drop features, and more, you’ll have to upgrade to its Pro version.

Which Popular Posts Plugin is the Best?

We believe that MonsterInsights is the best popular posts plugin for WordPress. It lets you show your best content anywhere on your site and offers lots of options for customization.

You can display posts based on share count, comments, manually select articles, or automatically pick the top 5 posts from Google Analytics through custom dimensions.

With MonsterInsights, you also get additional tracking features that help you better understand your audience. Find out the source of your web traffic, top landing pages, referrals, device breakdown, and much more.

We hope this article helped you find the best popular posts plugin for WordPress. You may also want to see our list of the best WordPress plugins for all websites, and our tutorial on how to add web push notifications in WordPress to grow your traffic.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 8 Best Popular Posts Plugins for WordPress (Compared) appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 08, 2021 at 05:00PM

How to Recover and Restore Deleted Pages in WordPress

Are you trying to recover deleted pages in WordPress?

If you accidentally deleted a WordPress page, then it is possible to recover it from Trash.

In this beginner’s guide, we’ll show you how to easily recover deleted pages in WordPress and WooCommerce.

How WordPress Handles Deleted Pages?

Just like your computer, WordPress moves deleted items into a ‘Trash’ folder. Doing that removes those items from your website and admin screens, but they’re not deleted permanently right away.

After 30 days, WordPress automatically deletes the item permanently from the trash, and your WordPress database.

If the page you deleted is still in the trash, then you can go ahead and restore it. We’ll show you how in a minute.

However, if it has been deleted from trash too, then you will need to try other ways to restore the deleted page in WordPress.

Sometimes you may accidentally delete a page and not notice it for a while. For instance, if you have multiple pages with the same name, and you end up deleting one that you actually needed.

Another common scenario that we have seen is users accidentally deleting pages needed by WooCommerce or their WordPress membership plugin.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily restore deleted pages in WordPress and WooCommerce. Here is quick table of content, so you can jump to the section that best fit your needs.

• Recover Deleted Pages from Trash in WordPress
• Recover Deleted Pages in WordPress Using a Backup Plugin
• Recover Deleted WooCommerce Pages
• Recover Selected Pages from a WordPress Backup (Advanced)

Method 1. Recover Deleted Pages from Trash in WordPress

This method is the easiest, and you should try it first before doing anything else.

Normally, when you delete an item in WordPress, it is sent to the trash folder, and you can recover it for the next 30 days. After that, it will be automatically deleted forever.

Simply go to Pages » All Pages inside your WordPress admin area. From here, you need to switch to the ‘Trash’ tab to view all the pages that have been deleted during last 30 days.

If the page(s) you want to recover is listed there, then simply take your mouse over the page title, and you’ll see the option to ‘Restore’ it.

You can also restore multiple pages at once by selecting them and then choosing ‘Restore’ from the Bulk Actions drop-down menu at the top.

You can now go to Pages » All Pages and locate the restored page there.

That was quick and easy, but what if the page you deleted is not listed under Trash?

Don’t worry, there are other ways to restore deleted pages in WordPress.

Method 2. Restore Deleted Pages in WordPress Using a Backup Plugin

Backups are one of the best WordPress security and productivity tools. All WordPress websites must set up a proper WordPress backup plugin.

These WordPress backup plugins not just help you recover a hacked WordPress site, but they can also help you recover deleted content including pages.

Note: WordPress backup plugins allow you to restore your entire website to an earlier point. This means any other changes you made to your website after that time can be lost.

If you know when you deleted a page, then you can access the last back up before that time to restore your website.

If you don’t have a WordPress backup plugin installed, then there is still a fairly good chance that your WordPress hosting company does, and you can still restore it via cPanel.

For step by step instructions you can follow our guide on how to restore WordPress from a backup. It shows how to restore WordPress from a backup using UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, phpMyAdmin, cPanel, and more.

Method 3. Recover Deleted WooCommerce Pages

By default, WooCommerce creates pages for the checkout, cart, shop, and account management. These are important pages for your WooCommerce store to function properly.

If you accidentally delete a WooCommerce page, then you can first try restoring it by looking into the Trash (see Method 1 above).

If you cannot find the page in trash, then you can simply create a new one. For instance, you can go to Pages » Add New and then create a blank page titled ‘Cart’.

Similarly, you can create other WooCommerce pages as well for shop, checkout, and account.

After you have created new pages, you can tell WooCommerce to use these new pages instead. Simply go to WooCommerce » Settings page and switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab.

From here, you can select pages you created earlier under the Page Setup section.

For the shop page, you’ll need to switch to the ‘Products’ tab and then select the page you want to use as your Shop page.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save changes’ button to store your settings.

Method 4. Restore Selected Pages from a WordPress Backup (Advanced)

This method is a bit complicated, unreliable, and is not recommended for beginners. However, it would be useful if you don’t want to restore a complete a website and lose any changes you made after that backup.

You can simply restore your WordPress back up to a local server installation and then copy and paste the page contents that you wish to restore.

First, you’ll need to download your WordPress backup files to your computer. Simply go to your WordPress database backup plugin page and you will be able to see recent backups.

For instance, here is how you’ll see your recent backups listed in the UpdraftPlus.

Simply click on the database backup to download it to your computer.

Next, you will need to restore your WordPress site to a local server. You can install WordPress on your computer using WAMP (or MAMP for Mac).

After that, you can use can install your WordPress backup plugin on local server installation and restore using the backup files.

Optionally, if you have only the database backup, then you can restore that using phpMyAdmin as well.

Once you have restored the WordPress database, you will need to update WordPress Site and Home URLs in the database. To do that, simply open phpMyAdmin on your local server by typing the following URL:

http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

After that, you need to select your WordPress database from the left column and then click on the wp_options table. Switch to the browse tab and locate the rows containing ‘siteurl’ and ‘home’ under the option_name column.

You’ll notice that the option_value column contains the URL of your live website. You need to edit both of these rows and replace your option_value to match your local server WordPress site.

After that click on the ‘Go’ button to save your changes.

You can now login to your localhost installation, and you’ll see all your old pages listed under Pages » All Pages.

Go a head and edit the page you want to restore. All you need to do is copy the content and paste it to your live WordPress website as a new page.

Don’t forget to update or publish changes on your live website.

We hope this article helped you learn how to recover deleted pages in WordPress. You may also want to see our complete WordPress security guide to keep your WordPress site safe and secure, and our list of the must have WordPress plugins for all websites.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Recover and Restore Deleted Pages in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 07, 2021 at 05:30PM

How to Add Keywords and Meta Descriptions in WordPress

Do you want to properly add keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress?

Meta keywords and descriptions allow you to improve your website’s SEO ranking. This means more traffic, leads, and sales for your business.

In this article, we will show you how to easily add keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress.

Why Add Keywords and Meta Descriptions in WordPress?

Keywords and descriptions allow you to tell search engines more about the content of your posts and pages.

Keywords are important words or phrases that people are likely to search to find your content. A meta description is a brief description of what your page or post is about.

It’s your meta title, description, and keywords that shows up in Google search results:

Meta keywords and meta description are HTML meta tags. They form part of your website’s header code. They don’t appear on your page or post for visitors to see. However, search engines and browsers can use them.

WordPress SEO plugins make it super easy for you to add them from your WordPress admin area for each post and page on your website.

How Important are Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions for SEO?

Like most WordPress users, you are probably wondering will adding meta keywords and meta descriptions will improve my WordPress SEO rankings.

While search engines don’t exactly share how much weight they assign to keywords or description, SEO experts always recommend adding proper meta description and keywords for on-page SEO optimization.

Meta descriptions are widely used by search engines. In Google’s search results, they appear below your content’s title, with the search term shown in bold.

An effective meta description will encourage users to click through and read your content. And what we do know is that a good click through rate means Google will likely rank your content higher.

Now when it comes to meta keywords, most modern search engines either assign very little importance or don’t use them at all. The main exception is the Russian search engine Yandex.

Instead search engines prefer that you add your focused keywords in your title, description, and through out your content. This is why SEO plugins like AIOSEO comes with a TruSEO score that helps you optimize your content for focused keywords and keyphrases.

Our Recommendations for Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions

We recommend adding a meta description for all the posts and pages on your site, including your homepage, category pages, and tag pages.

Note: Google customizes the description based on the search query, so it will only use your meta description some of the time. However, it’s still worth creating a meta description. It will appear for around 30% of users, and it can help your SEO.

When it comes to meta keywords, it’s up to you whether or not to use them. They will not harm your site, but they may not have much benefit either.

Having said that, let’s take a look at how to easily add keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress.

How to Add Meta Description and Keywords in WordPress (Video Tutorial)

If you prefer the written tutorial, then please continue reading.

Installing and Activating All in One SEO for WordPress

For this tutorial, we will be using All in One SEO (AIOSEO) which is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It allows you to easily optimize your entire WordPress site for better SEO and comes with comprehensive set of tools to grow your business.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the All in One SEO plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, All in One SEO will take you through a simple setup wizard. Just follow the step by step instructions to get everything set up for your site.

After completing the setup, simply click the ‘Finish Setup and Go to the Dashboard’ button.

Enable Meta Keywords Support in All in One SEO

All in One SEO comes with built-in support for meta description and keywords. However, the meta keywords feature is turned off by default. This is because many search engines give little or no importance to keywords in their rankings.

To enable it, go to All in One SEO » Search Appearance » Advanced in your WordPress dashboard. Then, switch the meta keywords toggle from No to Yes.

After enabling meta keywords in WordPress, you will see some additional options. You can generate a post’s keywords from its categories and/or tags. Also, you can dynamically generate keywords on your blog posts and archive pages.

It’s up to you whether you want to use these automated options or not. Regardless, you will always be able manually define keywords for each post and page.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page after making changes.

Adding Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords to Your WordPress Posts and Pages

First, you need to edit a post or page where you want to add your meta keywords and meta description.

AIOSEO works on both WordPress block editor (Gutenberg) and WordPress classic editor.

Once on the content editor screen, scroll down to the ‘AIOSEO Settings’ box below the content area.

Adding a Meta Description to Your Post or Page Using AIOSEO

You will see your site’s title and an automatically generated description as the snippet. Below that, you’ll see the Meta Description field.

Go ahead and enter a description into your Meta Description field. All in One SEO will let you know how many characters you’ve used. This is important because Google will only show 160 characters in the search results.

You’ll see that your snippet preview automatically updates as you type your meta description.

Once you’ve finished, simply save or publish your post to save the changes to your meta description.

Using All in One SEO’s Dynamic Tags in Your Meta Descriptions

Optionally, you can add tags to your meta description. The ones that All in One SEO offers by default are Page Content and Separator, but you can add other dynamic tags as well.

For example, we’ve added the author’s name to our meta description here.

To add a tag, simply type the # character into the meta description box. You’ll then see a dropdown menu of available tags.

Adding Meta Keywords to Your Post or Page Using AIOSEO

To add your meta keywords, you need to click the Advanced tab for your AIOSEO settings.

Simply type in your keywords, and press Enter after each one. It’s important to only use keywords that are relevant to your content. Adding irrelevant keywords will not give you any SEO benefits.

Tip: Meta keywords are completely separate from your Focus Keyword. You can set a Focus Keyword under the General tab. This is for All in One SEO to give you recommendations about improving your content. The Focus Keyword doesn’t automatically become a meta keyword for your post or page.

Adding Meta Keywords and Meta Description for Your Homepage

You can also add meta keywords and a meta description for your website’s homepage in WordPress. Here is how to do that using All in One SEO.

First, go to Search Appearance » Global Settings in your WordPress admin. Then, scroll down to the Home Page section.

On this screen, you can easily enter a meta description and keywords, just like you would for a post or page.

All in One SEO will use your tagline as your meta description by default. You can leave that in there or you can customize it.

You can also click on the other options to add those tags into your meta description. Alternatively, you can add different tags by typing the # character in your meta description, as described above.

Tip: It’s better to use these tags rather than manually typing your site title, tagline, or separator character. This is because your meta description will automatically be updated if you later make changes to any of those.

Make sure you click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page after adding your meta description and keywords.

Meta Keywords and Description for WordPress Category Archives

You can also add keywords and description to your category and tag archive pages.

First, you need to visit the Posts » Categories page. Take your mouse over to the category you want to edit and then click on the ‘Edit’ link.

Scroll down on the category’s page to the AIOSEO Settings box. Here, you just need to enter a meta description for your category. Again, you can use All in One SEO’s tags within this if you want to.

To add keywords, simply click on the Advanced tab like you would for any post or page.

Make sure you save the changes to your category before moving on.

Your meta description and keywords will now be used for the category page, which is the archive of posts in that category.

You can repeat the process to add meta keywords and descriptions to your blog’s tags and other custom taxonomy archive pages.

All in One SEO integrates seamlessly with other popular WordPress plugins. This allows you to add keywords and meta description for your WooCommerce product pages, SeedProd landing pages, MemberPress course pages, and more.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily add keywords and meta description to your WordPress posts and pages. You may also want to see our step by step guide on how to create an email newsletter to grow your website traffic, and our comparison of the best WordPress contact form plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Add Keywords and Meta Descriptions in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 06, 2021 at 06:00PM

How to fix cURL error 28: Connection timed out after X milliseconds

Are you seeing the cURL error 28: Connection timed out error on your WordPress site?

The cURL error 28 is a common WordPress REST API issue that can affect your website’s performance and may cause it to behave unpredictably.

In this article, we will show you how to easily fix the ‘cURL error 28: Connection timed out’ issue on your WordPress website.

What is cURL in WordPress?

The cURL is a software utility used by WordPress and many other web applications to send and receive data requests using URLs.

WordPress uses cURL to handle several API requests. It is available as an extension of the PHP programming language, and your WordPress hosting company takes care of that.

The cURL library plays a crucial role in how WordPress works behind the scenes. If it is not configured properly, then your WordPress website will not function properly.

What Causes cURL error 28 in WordPress?

Failure to respond back to the server’s data requests in a timely manner causes cURL error 28 in WordPress.

WordPress uses REST API (a programming technique) to send and receive data requests. If these requests time out, then you’ll see it as a critical issue in the Site Health report with the title ‘The REST API encountered in error’.

Expanding the error will show you further details including the error message:

Error: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after x milliseconds with x bytes received (http_request_failed)

You may also see another related issue with the title ‘Your site could not complete a loopback request’. It will have a similar error message with the following description.

‘The loopback request to your site failed, this means features relying on them are not currently working as expected.’

What may cause cURL to timeout?

A number of scenarios may cause the cURL to time out in WordPress.

For instance, a WordPress firewall plugin may block a REST API request considering it to be a suspicious activity.

If your DNS server is not working correctly, then this may also fail HTTP requests and cause the cURL timeout error in WordPress.

A poorly configured WordPress hosting server may simply have a very low timeout threshold which may stop certain WordPress processes to run properly.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to troubleshoot and fix the ‘curl error 28: Connection timed out’ issue in WordPress.

1. Temporarily Disable WordPress Firewall

If you are using a WordPress firewall or a security plugin, then go ahead and temporarily deactivate it.

After that, you need to visit the WordPress site health report page to see if your issue has resolved.

If it has, then you need to check your WordPress firewall logs to see which API requests have been blocked.

This would either identify the source of the issue or you can adjust firewall settings to not block legitimate API requests.

2. Deactivate All WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins make their own API requests to send and receive data. If these calls are too frequent or take too long to complete, then this may cause the cURL error in your site health report.

The easiest way to figure this out is by deactivating all WordPress plugins. Simply go to the Plugins » Installed Plugins page and select all plugins.

After that, click on the Bulk Actions drop down to select ‘Deactivate’ and then click on the ‘Apply’ button.

You can now visit the Site Health report to see if the issue has disappeared. If this resolved the issue, then you can start activating your plugins one by one until the issue reappears.

This will help you find the plugin that may be causing the issue and you can then ask the plugin author for support.

3. Ensure Your Hosting Server is Using the Latest Software

The next, step is to make sure that your WordPress hosting server is using the latest versions of PHP, cURL library, and OpenSSL.

You can check that by looking at the system information tab under Tools » Site Health page.

Simply switch to the ‘Info’ tab and expand the ‘Server’ section. From here you can get the information about software installed on your WordPress hosting server.

Ideally, your server should be using PHP 7.4.13 or higher, curl 7.74.0 or higher, and OpenSSL 1.1.1 or higher.

If it doesn’t, then you need to contact your WordPress hosting company and request them to update the software for your hosting account.

4. Fix SSL Insecure Content Issues

If your WordPress site is using HTTPS / SSL, but it is not configured properly, then this could also lead your web server to block insecure cURL requests.

Similarly, if your WordPress site doesn’t use HTTPS / SSL, but it made an API call using an HTTPs URL, then those requests will fail too, and you may see the following cURL error instead:

‘Error: cURL error 7: Failed to connect to localhost port 443: Connection refused (http_request_failed)

To fix this, you can ask your hosting provider to re-install SSL certificate for your website. If the issue persists, then follow our guide on how to fix common SSL issues to properly set up SSL on your WordPress website.

5. Seek Help from Hosting Provider

If the above steps fail to resolve the cURL error 28 on your WordPress site, then the problem is most likely a hosting environment issue.

There are many factors that can only be controlled and fixed by your hosting company. For instance, if their DNS servers are unable to resolve requests in a timely manner, then this will cause cURL requests to timeout.

Another scenario could be slower connectivity or networking issues with your hosting server.

Simply drop them a support request with the error details and their technical staff can troubleshoot and apply a fix to solve it.

We hope this article helped you learn how to fix the cURL error 28 in WordPress. You may also want to bookmark our WordPress troubleshooting tips and our ultimate handbook on fixing common WordPress errors.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to fix cURL error 28: Connection timed out after X milliseconds appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 05, 2021 at 06:00PM

How to Highlight Text in WordPress (Beginner’s Guide)

Do you want to highlight text in a WordPress post or page?

Being able to highlight text can help you point user’s attention to a specific text area. This can be great to highlight a call to action, special offer, or simply add emphasis on specific sentences.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily highlight text in WordPress both with or without a plugin.

Why and When to Highlight Text

Text highlighting is an easy way to emphasize important information in your content. This helps you direct user’s attention to important calls to action.

Here’s a sample of what text highlighting can look like:

By default, the WordPress content editor does not come with the option to simply select and highlight any text. You can still emphasize text by making it italic, change text color, or making it bold.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily highlight text in WordPress.

Method 1. Highlight any Text in WordPress (No HTML Required)

The easiest way to highlight text is by using a WordPress plugin.

First, you need to install and activate the Advanced Editor Tools plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Advanced Editor Tools (formerly known as TinyMCE Advanced) adds more formatting options and extends the WordPress block editor.

Once the plugin is activated, you can edit the WordPress post or page where you want to highlight some text. Simply select the text you want to modify and then click on the dropdown arrow for more formatting options.

From the drop-down menu, you need to select the ‘Mark’ option. This will highlight the text using the default colors.

However, the actual color may vary depending on your WordPress theme colors. You can now save your post/page and preview it to see the highlighted text in action.

Easy wasn’t it?

However, if you don’t need to highlight text very often, then this next method allows you to do the same without using a plugin.

Method 2. Manually Highlight Text in WordPress

This option requires a little bit of code, but it’s easy to implement.

For this example, we’ll be using the HTML ‘mark’ element. This can be used to highlight and bring attention to a certain part of your writing.

Simply edit the post or page where you want to highlight the text. Next, go to the paragraph containing the text and then click on three-dot menu in the block toolbar. From here, you need to select ‘Edit as HTML’ option.

Next, you’ll see raw text in HTML format. Simply wrap the text you want to highlight inside the <mark> and </mark> tags like this:

<mark>highlighted text</mark>

You can now switch back to the visual mode by clicking on the three-dot menu again and selecting ‘Edit Visually’ in the block toolbar.

The block area will switch back to the visual mode, and you’ll notice your selected text highlighted.

Your highlighted text may look different depending on your WordPress theme. However, normally it is just a yellow background.

If you would like to change it, then you can do so by adding your own custom CSS.

Simply go to Appearance » Customize page to launch the theme customizer. From here, you need to switch to the ‘Additional CSS’ tab.

Here you can paste your custom CSS. You can use the following CSS code as a starting point.

mark {
background-color: #ffd4a1;
}

Once you’re done, hit the ‘Publish’ button to save your changes. You can now visit your WordPress blog to see your highlighted text in action.

We hope this helped you learn how to highlight text in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on the best WordPress page builders to help you create completely custom designs without any code, and our comparison of the best email marketing services to grow your traffic.

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The post How to Highlight Text in WordPress (Beginner’s Guide) appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 04, 2021 at 05:03PM