40+ Most Notable Big Name Brands that are Using WordPress

Do you want to know which big name brands are using WordPress?

WordPress is used by some of the biggest and most well known companies, celebrities, and brands in the world.

In this article, we’ve created a list of the most notable big name brands that are using WordPress to power their websites.

Why Do So Many Big Name Brands Use WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular website builder and content management system in the world. It currently powers over 40% of the entire internet, including some of the biggest brands.

With WordPress, it’s possible to build nearly any kind of website, WordPress blog, online store, and much more. It has thousands of free and premium plugins that can be used to extend the functionality of your website.

Most websites use WordPress for its flexibility, beginner friendly admin panel, and massive theme and plugin library. WordPress can be set up quickly without writing any code.

With that said, let’s take a look at the most notable big name brands that are using WordPress.

1. Sony Music

Sony Music is a global music brand that uses WordPress to power its website. The site showcases its artists, latest news, sidebar Twitter feed, and more.

2. Playstation Blog

Playstation is one of the biggest gaming companies in the world. They use WordPress to power their gaming website that offers tips, game releases, insider news, and more.

3. TechCrunch

TechCrunch is a very popular tech website covering the latest news about startups, gadgets, events, and other related topics.

4. The Next Web

The Next Web is a popular technology and news website with articles about topics like coding and development, new startups, AI, sustainability, and more.

5. Time Magazine

Time Magazine is one of the longest running American news websites and magazines. The site covers topics like politics, health, tech, entertainment, science, and much more.

6. CNN Press Room

The CNN Press Room is the official website for CNN’s public relations team. The site provides access to press releases, fact sheets, press contacts, and more.

7. Disney Books

Disney Books is the official site for the publishing wing of Disney. Visitors can sort books by age, characters, best sellers, and more.

8. The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones band website showcases their latest events, music releases, online store, and more. It’s a very unique website with bold colors, interactive elements, and video.

9. Spotify Newsroom

Spotify Newsroom is the press website for the Spotify music streaming app. Readers can find news, updates, music releases, and a unique email newsletter sign up form.

10. Hypebeast

Hypebeast is a popular online magazine dedicated to streetwear, art, and fashion. The platform uses a unique navigation menu to highlight items in the store, popular brands, and more.

11. Wired

Wired is a long running monthly magazine and website that focuses on how technology impacts politics, culture, and the economy. The website features long form articles, product reviews, roundups, and more.

12. Microsoft News

Microsoft News highlights the latest happenings inside Microsoft. It features the latest news, updates, and stories about the company.

13. Boing Boing

Boing Boing is a high traffic website that covers various topics like technology, science fiction, politics, gadgets, and more. The site also embeds videos into blog posts.

14. Mashable

Mashable is a WordPress site with a global readership that covers lifestyle, technology, social good, and entertainment topics. There’s also a large deals section that highlights discounts for various products.

15. Etsy Journal

The Esty Journal is a blog for the Etsy marketplace. It features unique products, gift ideas, shopping guides, and inspiration for creatives.

16. TED Blog

The TED blog features big ideas from the popular TED Talks program. The blog shows new articles, upcoming live events, and live blogging updates from ongoing TED talks.

17. Yelp Blog

The Yelp blog offers resources for consumers and businesses and also covers product updates, trends, and career information.

18. cPanel

cPanel is the popular control panel software used by most WordPress hosting companies. They use WordPress to power their website and company blog.

19. Vogue

Vogue is a popular monthly fashion and lifestyle magazine that covers news, beauty, celebrity style, and more.

20. Angry Birds

Angry Birds is a super popular video game and movie. The website lets visitors download games, watch videos, and purchase items in the shop.

21. Usain Bolt

Usain Bolt, the world’s fastest man, uses WordPress for his personal website. The site features a full page WordPress slider and a large blog post section with the latest news and updates.

22. The New York Times Company

The New York Times Company is the corporate website behind The New York Times. It’s one of the top newspapers in the world, with over 150 million global monthly readers.

23. Mozilla Blog

Mozilla is one of the most popular web browsers in the world. They use WordPress to power their company blog with the latest news, updates, and stories related to the web.

24. The Harvard Gazette

The Harvard Gazette is the official news website for Harvard University. It uses a very minimalist design and covers the latest news, events, and updates.

25. The White House

The White House website runs on WordPress. The site has a clean layout and presents the latest bills, legislation, statements, and more.

26. Tonal

Tonal is a popular at-home gym and personal trainer used by athletes like Lebron James. The website is powered by WordPress and uses WooCommerce to sell the fitness system.

27. Observer

Observer is a news website that covers the latest news and trends in lifestyle, arts, politics, business, and celebrities worldwide.

28. Toyota Brazil

The official Toyota Brazil website is created with WordPress. It features the latest models, news, and even lets you build out new vehicles virtually.

29. Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit that provides creative commons licenses for things like free stock photos and other works. The website highlights its different programs, an image collection, and accepts donations.

30. Dallas Mavericks

The Dallas Mavericks are one of the most exciting teams in the NBA. The site is built using WordPress and features a huge full screen slider, team schedule, news, and encourages users to sign up via push notifications.

31. thisisFINLAND

The thisisFINLAND website is the ultimate resource about what’s happening in Finland. It covers topics related to arts, culture, business, society, and more.

32. Jay-Z

The Jay-Z website is a curated digital experience that covers sports, music, fashion, art, and culture. It uses a unique header, where readers click on empty boxes to uncover parts of the site.

33. Katy Perry

The Katy Perry official website highlights the singer’s latest concerts, music releases, featured videos, and links to her social media profiles.

34. Ripley’s

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is an American franchise that covers bizarre, unusual, and strange events. The website showcases its attractions, books, videos, shop, and more.

35. 9to5Mac

9to5Mac is a go-to resource for Apple enthusiasts. The site has breaking coverage of Apple news, rumors, and products.

36. New York Post

The New York Post is a daily New York-based newspaper that covers regional and national news across various topics like business, tech, entertainment, and more.

37. Hachette Book Group

Hachette Book Group is one of the largest book publishers in the world that’s published famous books like Catcher in the Rye. The website features its new releases, genres, books, online events, videos, and more.

38. Reader’s Digest

Reader’s Digest is an American family magazine that’s been running for nearly 100 years. The website has a large and active blog that covers a range of topics like food, home, humor, holidays, and more.

39. 007

The official 007 website uses WordPress to highlight the latest stories related to the James Bond universe worldwide. Visitors can also purchase movie tickets and buy 007 related memorabilia.

40. FiveThirtyEight

FiveThirtyEight is a website that uses statistical analysis to tell stories across politics, sports, and science. It also includes a popular podcast and video content.

41. Grubhub Blog

The Grubhub blog features the latest news in food delivery, online ordering, quizzes, and fun restaurant stories.

42. Variety

Variety is a long running entertainment news website that has film reviews, box office numbers, award updates, and more.

Building Your Own Website with WordPress

Looking at all these big brands, you may be wondering how you can start your own WordPress website?

With the right tools, starting a WordPress site is simple.

There are three main things you’re going to need to get started:

• A domain name: This is the address for your website (ours is wpbeginner.com)
• A web host: To store your website files, and visitors can access your site
• A website builder: Software that lets you build your website without any code

You need to make sure you’re using the right version of WordPress.

We recommend using the self-hosted WordPress.org version because 100% free to use, you can install plugins, customize your website design, and most importantly make money from your site without any restrictions.

For more details, see our guide to the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

Usually, a domain name will cost around $15-20 per year, and web hosting will start from $7.95 per month.

This can be a big investment when you’re just getting started online.

Luckily, Bluehost has agreed to offer our readers a huge discount on hosting, along with a free domain name and SSL certificate. You can get started for as low as $2.75 per month.

→ Click Here to Claim This Exclusive Bluehost Offer ←

After signing up for hosting, see our ultimate guide on how to make a website for step by step instructions.

We hope this article helped you learn about some of the big name brands using WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on why you should use WordPress for your website and our expert picks of the best business phone services for small businesses.

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 40+ Most Notable Big Name Brands that are Using WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

December 17, 2021 at 02:00PM

How to Add a Simple User Password Generator in WordPress

Do you want to add a simple user password generator in WordPress?

Many WordPress users end up using weaker passwords for the sake of convenience. These passwords can be easily cracked by hackers, which makes your WordPress website vulnerable.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily add a simple user password generator in WordPress. This would allow you or other registered users on your website to generate a strong password.

Why Use a Stronger Password Generator in WordPress?

By default, WordPress allows you to choose a password for your user account, but it doesn’t require that the password be secure.

The built-in password generator appears during WordPress installation, on the user registration page, and on the user profile page.

By clicking on the Generate Password button, users can generate a new strong password.

Similarly, when changing a password by editing their user profile, users can click on the ‘Set New Password’ button to generate unlimited combinations of unique strong passwords.

However, you’ll notice that it allows you to skip the password strength check by checking the ‘Confirm use of weak password’ option.

Similarly, any users registering on your website can also escape the strong password requirement by checking this option on the user registration page.

If you run a membership site or online store where many users have accounts, then this can seriously affect the security of your WordPress site.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily enforce secure passwords and require users to use the strong password generator instead.

Method 1. Enforce Strong Password Generator in WordPress

First, you need to install and activate the Password Policy Manager for WordPress plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Password Policies page in WordPress admin area and click on the Enable Password Policies check box.

After that, you can set a site-wide password policy for all users. You can choose minimum password strength, enforce special characters and number usage, expire passwords after a period of time, and more.

Below that you can set additional advanced options for password security.

For instance, you can automatically reset passwords for inactive users, prevent users from reusing old passwords, or disallow users from resetting passwords on their own.

The plugin also allows you to limit login attempts to prevent brute force attacks. You can choose the number of login attempts a user can make, after which their account will be locked and login will be disabled for 24 hours.

You can also set a lock duration after which the accounts will be automatically unlocked. Alternatively, you can choose to manually unlock accounts by an administrator only.

Set Password Policies Depending on User Roles

The plugin also allows you to set different password policies based on user roles.

For instance, you can set different password requirements and security settings for authors, subscribers, customers, or members on your membership website.

Seeing the Password Generator in Action

The plugin will now automatically display a strong password generator on registration, profile, and password change screens in WordPress.

It will also prevent users from setting weaker passwords or bypassing your password policy.

Method 2. Strong Passwords in Custom User Registration and Login Forms

The password policy method above works well for default WordPress user registration and password reset forms.

However, if you are using a custom user registration and password reset form, then users may still find ways around your stronger password requirements.

One easy way to enforce strong passwords is by using WPForms. It is the best WordPress form builder plugin and allows you to easily create any kind of form including custom user registration and login page forms.

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

Note: You’ll need at least the Pro plan to access User Registration addon.

Upon activation, you need to visit the WPForms » Settings page to enter your license key. You can find this information under your account on the WPForms website.

After that, you need to visit the WPForms » Addons page and click on the Install Addon button under the ‘User Registration Addon’.

You are now ready to create your custom user registration and login forms.

Simply head over to WPForms » Add New page. First, you need to provide a title for your form and then choose the user registration form template.

This will load the form builder where you can edit form fields.

Simply click on the password field to edit and turn on ‘Enable Password Strength’ switch. Below that you can choose minimum password strength and set it to ‘Strong’.

You can now save your form and exit the form builder.

WPForms makes it super easy to add your forms anywhere on your website. Simply edit the post or page where you want to display your custom user registration form, and add the WPForms block to your content area.

After that, you need to select your custom user registration form under the block settings.

WPForms will then load a live preview of your form inside the editor.

You can now save and publish your post / page and preview your custom user registration form.

You’ll notice that as users fill in the password field they will be asked to use a stronger password. The form will not be submitted with a weaker password.

We hope this article helped you learn how to use the simple user password generator in WordPress and enforce stronger passwords on your WordPress website. You may also want to see our step-by-step guide on how to properly move from HTTP to HTTPS, or our expert pick of the best WordPress plugins for small business.

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 a Simple User Password Generator in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

December 16, 2021 at 05:00PM

How to Require Terms of Service Agreement in WordPress

Do you want to require a terms of service agreement in WordPress?

Requiring users to agree to your terms of service can help protect your website while still offering a good user experience.

In this article, we’ll show you how to add a terms of service agreement to your WordPress website.

What is a Terms of Service Agreement and Why Add to WordPress?

A terms of service (TOS) agreement is a set of conditions users must agree to in order to use your website, submit a form, request a quote, order products, join your email list, and more.

By adding a terms of service agreement to WordPress, you can help to prevent spam, limit your liability, and have users agree to specific website policies.

With that said, let’s show you how to require a terms of service agreement on your WordPress site.

Create a Terms of Service Agreement in WordPress

If you don’t have a terms of service agreement yet, then you’ll need to create one and add it to WordPress.

There are multiple ways to create a TOS agreement. For example, you can use an online generator, copy the text from another site, hire a lawyer, or use a TOS plugin to generate one for you.

Editor’s Note: We recommend consulting a professional lawyer to create your website’s term of service. The automatic term of service generator plugin below can work, but it cannot guarantee compliance.

For this tutorial, we’ll be using the WP AutoTerms plugin to generate a generic terms of service, but you can use the method that works best for you.

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

After that, navigate to WP AutoTerms » Add Legal Pages in your WordPress admin panel.

Then, click the ‘Create’ button in the ‘Terms and Conditions’ area.

Next, you need to give information about your business.

This includes your WordPress website URL, company name, location, and more.

You also need to answer the questions that will help to create a terms and service best for your website.

Once you’re done, click the ‘Create’ button.

This brings you to a page where you can view your terms of service agreement.

If you’re satisfied with the page, then click the ‘Publish’ button.

Next, you want to copy the terms of service text to add to your WordPress form below.

Simply select the text, right click, and then click the ‘Copy’ option.

Add Your Terms of Service Agreement to WordPress Forms

Once you’ve created your TOS agreement, you can require users to agree in order to take specific actions on your site. In this case, we’ll add the TOS agreement to a WordPress form.

To do this, we recommend using the WPForms plugin. It’s the best WordPress form plugin in the market used by over 5 million sites.

You can quickly build out any kind of WordPress form using the drag and drop builder including online order forms, simple contact forms, donation forms, and much more.

Note: We’ll be using the free version of the plugin to create a terms of service contact form, but you can also use the pro version that gives you access to additional features, form templates, and more.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once you’ve activated your plugin, go to WPForms » Add New to create a new WordPress form.

First, you need to choose a form template. Simply hover over a template and click the ‘Use Template’ button.

For this tutorial, we’ll select the ‘Terms of Service Contact Form’ template, since it has a TOS checkbox built in.

This will bring you to the form editor screen.

The form can be completely customized. You can drag fields from the left hand menu to your form on the right.

To edit individual form fields simply click on them.

This brings up an options menu that lets you customize each individual field.

Once you’re finished customizing your form, click on the ‘Terms of Service’ form field.

This brings up an options panel where you can change the terms of service ‘Label’, checkbox description, and paste your terms of service text that you copied earlier.

Then, make sure the ‘Required’ toggle is selected.

Next, click on the ‘Advanced’ tab.

Here, you can click the ‘Hide Label’ toggle if you want to hide the terms of service label.

Once you’re happy with how your form looks, you can click ‘Save’ and exit the form builder.

Now, you need to add the form to your WordPress website. Simply open up a page, or create a new one, then click the ‘Plus’ add block icon and select the ‘WPForms’ block.

Next, select the name of your form from the drop down list.

This will automatically load a preview of your form in the page editor.

Then, click the ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ button to make your form live.

Now, you can visit your form page to see your terms of service agreement form in action.

Adding Digital Signature Agreement to WordPress Forms

On top of requiring users to agree to your TOS, you might want to give users the option to digitally sign your form as well.

This works great for applications, contracts, volunteer forms, and more.

With WPForms creating a contract agreement form is simple. There’s a signature field addon that makes it easy to add digital signatures to your WordPress forms.

For more details, see our guide on how to create a contract agreement form with digital signatures in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to require terms of service agreement in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to choose the best web design software and our expert picks of the best free website hosting.

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 Require Terms of Service Agreement in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

December 15, 2021 at 01:00PM

WPBeginner v6 – Behind the Scenes of Our New Site Design

If you visited WPBeginner in the last few weeks, then you probably noticed that we got a new website design. While it has a lot of similarities to the last one, there’s a lot that changed behind the scenes.

As I promised in the newsletter, I want to share the thought process behind our redesign, what we learned, what’s new on the site, and most importantly how you can use some of our learnings to improve your website.

A Little Background

I started WPBeginner in 2009, and like most new creators, I changed our website theme design four times in the first 3 years.

As my business grew, I realized that website redesigns take up a lot of time and resources which could be better spent on fulfilling our core mission:

Help small businesses grow and compete with the big guys through our tools, team, and training.

So I made it a point to dedicate all my focus on our core mission and our business grew tremendously.

The last redesign of WPBeginner was launched in 2016, and we’ve come a long way since then.

Here’s what happened in the last 5 years:

• We created over a thousand free WordPress tutorials on WPBeginner blog and added hundreds of new video tutorials on our YouTube Channel.
• We launched our WPBeginner Engage community on Facebook which is now the largest WordPress facebook group with over 80,000 members (it’s free to join).
• We launched the WPBeginner Growth fund to invest in some of our favorite WordPress plugins including MemberPress, Pretty Links, Formidable Forms, Uncanny Automator, and 6 others.
• We launched two new WordPress plugins, TrustPulse, a WordPress social proof plugin, and RafflePress, a powerful WordPress giveaway and contest plugin.
• We acquired five WordPress growth plugins including the famous AIOSEO (all in one SEO plugin for WordPress), SeedProd (drag & drop WordPress site builder), Smash Balloon (#1 social media feeds plugin), PushEngage (website push notification plugin), and AffiliateWP (affiliate management plugin for WordPress).
• We also acquired five WordPress platform & infrastructure plugins including the famous WP Mail SMTP plugin (to fix email deliverability), SearchWP (powerful WordPress search plugin), Easy Digital Downloads (popular eCommerce plugin for selling digital products), WP Simple Pay (easy plugin for accepting credit card payments), and Sugar Calendar (simple event calendar plugin for WordPress).

Collectively our plugins are now used by over 19 million websites, and 4 of our plugins are in the top 20 WordPress plugins of all time.

While all of those are great accomplishments, we have a new set of challenges that needed to be addressed, so we can continue to improve and serve our mission.

This brings me to WPBeginner v6.

Design Focused on Content Discoverability

WPBeginner started out as a simple tutorial blog, but it has really become the Wikipedia for WordPress.

Our users repeatedly told us that when they wanted to find an answer to their WordPress problems, they simply Google the keyword and add WPBeginner at the end to find the best solution.

To help our readers quickly find the answer to their WordPress questions, we made the Search feature a big focus on our new homepage.

Whether you’re a returning visitor coming to search our content library, or a new reader just getting started with WordPress, the homepage of WPBeginner now makes it easy for you to find what you’re looking for.

You will also notice a similar search widget in our sidebar on all single post pages as well as on our website header when you click the search icon.

One of the reasons why WPBeginner has become the largest WordPress resource site for non-techy users is because we explain complex WordPress topics in plain English, step-by-step.

In the new design, we have added live search feature to our WordPress glossary section, so you can easily familiarize yourself with common WordPress lingo. This is basically like a dictionary for WordPress terms.

As a WPBeginner user, you get exclusive access to the best WordPress discounts on popular plugins, premium themes, hosting, and other marketing tools.

Our team truly has done a great job negotiating the best deals for you, and this section has grown quite a bit to have over 100+ coupons and deals.

Due to popular user request, we have also added Live Search on our Deals section, so you can quickly find the best deal on your favorite WordPress products.

As we go into 2022, a big priority for us is content discoverability.

This helps us deliver the best user experience, increases time on site, boost pageviews, and reduce our overall bounce rate.

I believe that in 2022, user experience optimization (UXO) is going to play a critical role in SEO.

If you want to beat your competitors and get a competitive advantage, I strongly recommend paying attention to UXO.

I’ll be sharing tips through out this article on how you can implement similar features on your site like we did in our new theme.

How to Improve WordPress Search

The default WordPress search feature isn’t very powerful, so if you want to customize the ranking algorithm and control what shows up for each search, I recommend using the SearchWP plugin.

Alternatively, you can also use Google custom site search which uses the Google algorithm, but the downside is that Google will display ads on your search pages which doesn’t look very good.

If you’re looking to add live search on your site like we have done on the Deals section or Glossary, then follow this tutorial on how to add AJAX live search in WordPress.

Other WordPress search tutorials that you might find helpful are how to create a custom WordPress search form, and how to add a search bar in WordPress menu.

New WordPress Mega Menu

Going along the theme of content discoverability, we upgraded our old WordPress dropdown menus into new multi-column Mega Menus.

This allows our new users to quickly and easily find our very best content.

It also allows us to better highlight our new products, the free business tools that we’ve building, and more.

How to Add a Mega Menu in WordPress

Although we’ve built a custom solution for WPBeginner, you can follow this tutorial on how to add a mega menu in WordPress to better highlight your top pages.

The WordPress Block Editor (Finally)

In 2019, WordPress introduced the super powerful block editor (aka Gutenberg) for creating content.

I immediately started using it on my personal blog, but since WPBeginner was using a legacy theme with a lot of custom coded features, the switch wasn’t as easy.

So for the last two years, we were stuck using the Classic Editor on WPBeginner site while all of our newer websites got the latest and greatest features of the WordPress block editor.

Finally with our new theme, we can now use all the awesome features of the WordPress block editor.

For example, now I can add a really cool “Did You Know” block without writing any code:

WPBeginner – Fun Fact:

Our team has now grown to over 200+ people across 39 different countries. We’re hiring for full-time remote positions. If you’re interested, check out our Careers page.

We also completely redesigned several of our landing pages using the WordPress block editor.

For example, check out our new free WordPress blog setup landing page.

We also redesigned our free business tools using the block editor to highlight some of the recent free tools that we have built.

We will still be using SeedProd for creating completely custom landing pages when needed because it’s a proper drag & drop WordPress page builder.

While it was fun learning how to use Gutenberg to create a custom landing pages, it still requires A LOT of coding to be done for the setup before marketing teams can create a custom landing page.

Whereas when you’re using a page builder plugin, marketing teams can quickly create custom landing pages, funnel layouts, etc without any help from the dev team.

WordPress core team is working hard on the full-site editing features, but it still needs a lot of work before it can compete with the powerful features that you get with page builders like

SeedProd, Divi, or Beaver Builder.

With that said, the block editor is pretty darn awesome, and there are plenty of WordPress block plugins that you can use to create cool design elements to enhance your content.

Here’s another cool block that our new theme has for highlighting featured plugins:

SeedProd is the most beginner-friendly drag & drop page builder for WordPress. It comes with over 150+ pre-made templates, and their theme builder feature allows you to build completely custom WordPress themes (without any code). Try SeedProd Today »

In the coming blog posts, I’m sure you’ll see more content design blocks that we have to further enhance our content readability.

Switching from Yoast to AIOSEO

For the longest time, WPBeginner site was using a very old & customized version of the Yoast SEO plugin (v 2.3.5).

To put in perspective, they’re on version 17 right now.

I didn’t want to update Yoast because their team had removed some essential features that I thought were important for SEO.

I also felt that the overall WordPress SEO space had stopped innovating.

So beginning of 2020, we acquired AIOSEO, the original all-in-one SEO plugin, and I had my team completely revamp it.

I’m super proud of the work our team has done, and it has all the SEO features you need to get a competitive advantage.

Like the block editor, our newer websites started switching to AIOSEO and started to see their rankings improve, so I was eager to start using it on WPBeginner.

Now, we’re using the latest and greatest of SEO features from All in One SEO.

We now have features like video sitemap to help boost our content rankings with videos, RSS sitemap to help our content indexed faster, advanced SEO modules to have more fine-tune control over our site SEO, and tons more.

I truly believe it’s the best SEO plugin in the market, and most importantly it’s priced fairly for small businesses and agencies.

I plan to do a full write up in the coming weeks about why we switched with a detailed feature breakdown, but in the meantime, you can try the free version of All in One SEO, or check out the Pro version that has all the powerful features that I’m using on WPBeginner.

WordPress Speed Improvements

Numerous studies have shown that faster websites improve user experience, increase time on site, and overall conversions.

This is also why Google made website speed a SEO ranking factor.

Now if you’ve been following the site for a while, then you know that I’m obsessed with performance optimization.

WPBeginner site was already pretty fast thanks to our amazing WordPress hosting partner SiteGround. They offer a highly optimized WordPress hosting solution built on top of the Google cloud platform.

And of course we were following the WordPress speed best practices, but with our new theme design, we made several notable speed improvements.

Here’s our Google Page Speed results:

Here’s the result of the homepage from GTMetrix and Pingdom:

And we got this result despite adding new sections, more content to the homepage, wider images, etc.

And before you ask, the WPBeginner site has 68 active plugins currently.

So you might be wondering how did I manage to add more content on the site while reducing the page size and making everything faster?

Well, I removed things that I felt we no longer needed, and these are somethings that I really want more website owners to consider doing as well.

Not only will this help speed up your site which helps SEO rankings, but it will reduce your overall bandwidth consumption, reduce costs, and improve your website’s carbon footprint.

Disabling Gravatar from WordPress Comments

WordPress comes with a built-in 3rd party service called Gravatar short for Globally Recognized Avatars.

This allows you to see a user’s profile photo or avatar when they leave a comment on your WordPress site.

The challenge is that it requires your website visitors to setup a Gravatar account which most users don’t. So instead your website just loads the gray mystery man avatar which doesn’t look good.

Now let’s say that you have a popular blog post with 50 comments where only 10% of the users have a Gravatar image and 90% don’t. Well, that’s 50 additional images that your page is loading that really don’t add significant value to the content.

That’s why a lot of popular blogs have started to disable Gravatar, and we’re doing the same on WPBeginner.

This simple change has drastically improved our page load times and site speed score.

Removing 3rd Party Custom Fonts

I will be honest, I never thought twice about custom fonts in the past.

It was something that just felt normal and made the site look good from a typography point of view at least if you’re lucky enough to have a fast internet.

In the old WPBeginner theme, we used a custom Adobe font called Proxima Nova, a popular icon font called FontAwesome, and our OptinMonster popups were using the Source Sans Pro from Google fonts.

When I visited the site from a remote location with poor internet quality, I truly realized how big of a performance impact these fonts have on the user experience.

In our new design, I wanted to solve this problem, so we can make it easy for students and business owners in developing countries to access WPBeginner, learn WordPress, and grow their online presence.

The new WPBeginner v6 theme uses the default System Fonts which have come a long way. They look great across all devices, and of course it’s super fast.

No flash of unstyled text (FOUT), no cumulative layout shift (CLS), and significantly reduced blocking time.

If you login to the WordPress dashboard or use Github, then you’ll notice that our fonts are similar because both of these platforms made the switch to system fonts earlier.

While removing custom fonts may not be a viable solution for all business websites, it’s definitely something I believe both designers & developers should be mindful about when it comes to speed.

Some best practices that can help:

• Instead of using two separate fonts for heading vs content, consider using the same font for both.
• Instead of using multiple different font weights and styles such as thin, regular, semibold, bold, extra bold, black, and then italics version of all these, consider reducing the font weights to only two: regular and bold.
• Instead of loading the entire FontAwesome or another icon font library, consider adding direct SVGs of the icons that you need.

Disabling Custom Fonts in OptinMonster

Once the theme was designed and coded, I still had to solve one more problem with fonts.

My website popups and email subscription forms use OptinMonster, and they were still loading Google fonts.

Now disabling OptinMonster wasn’t an option since it helps me get more email subscribers and boost our website conversions.

Luckily, it’s one of my companies, so I asked the development team for a solution to disable Google fonts.

Turned out, I wasn’t the first one who requested this feature, and OptinMonster already had an API solution that allows for not only disabling Google fonts, but also loading any custom web font that you want.

I’m fairly tech savvy and can implement the small snippet the team shared in the documentation, but I know many of our customers aren’t.

So now our team has actually built this feature inside the campaign builder (no coding needed).

But if you’re comfortable with code and don’t want to manually toggle this setting off for each campaign, you can just follow the hack that I’m using.

First add the following JS snippet to disable OptinMonster from loading any web fonts on your site:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.addEventListener('om.Scripts.init', function(event) {
event.detail.Scripts.enabled.fonts= false;
});
</script>

Next, add the following CSS in your style.css file:

html .Campaign * { font-family: "Proxima Nova", Helvetica, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif !important; }

Of course don’t forget to change the fonts to match your website fonts. This will basically apply the font-family above to all OptinMonster campaigns that load on your site.

Switched from W3 Total Cache to WP Rocket

For the longest time, I was running a highly customized configuration of W3 Total Cache plugin on WPBeginner.

While it got the job done, it was no match for WP Rocket which we have been using on all our product sites.

So with this redesign, I finally switched to WP Rocket which comes with A LOT of great website speed features most notably a reliable cache pre-loading and file minification.

This plugin is crucial if you want to improve your website speed.

Just a quick note if you’re using ThirstyAffiliates or Pretty Links to manage your affiliate links, then make sure that you exclude them from being cached.

Simply go to the Advanced Rules tab and add your affiliate slug under the Never Cache URLs setting.

If you don’t do this and you have cache pre-load enabled, then WP Rocket will attempt to cache your affiliate links since they look like internal links.

This can artificially inflate your click counts and impact your affiliate metrics.

I have asked the WP Rocket team to see if they can automatically detect popular affiliate plugins and pre-fill the excluded URL tag to make it more beginner friendly, and I hope they implement the suggestion.

What’s Coming Next?

I have big plans for 2022 that’s why I wanted to get the new site design live before the end of this year.

We’re planning to launch a whole new section on WPBeginner that a lot of you have been asking about for the last 2 years.

It’s coming soon, and I hope to launch it by beginning of Q2 2022.

I’m also planning to experiment more with in the new block editor to create a better overall reading experience for you.

Other than that, keep an eye out on our YouTube channel as we’re going to be doing some really cool things there in 2022.

As always, I want to thank you all for your continued support and feedback over the years.

Yours Truly,
Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

The post WPBeginner v6 – Behind the Scenes of Our New Site Design first appeared on WPBeginner.

December 14, 2021 at 04:00PM