Where Does WordPress Store Images on Your Site?

Are you wondering where does WordPress store images on your website?

Many WordPress beginners have asked us how does WordPress store images, and what they can to do to organize their media library more efficiently.

In this article, we’ll explain how WordPress stores images on your website. We’ll also share tools and plugins that you can use to organize your images more efficiently.

How Does WordPress Store Images?

WordPress comes with a built-in system to manage media uploads like images, videos, audio, and documents on your WordPress website.

This system allows you to easily upload images and other media to a specific folder on your WordPress hosting server.

These files are then displayed in your WordPress media library. You can view all your uploads under Media » Library page. From here, you can also edit these files, manipulate them, or even delete them.

The specific folder where the image files are stored in WordPress is called the uploads folder located inside the /wp-content/ folder.

Inside the uploads folder, your media files are stored by year and month folders. Additionally, you’ll also see folders created by your WordPress plugins to save other uploads.

For instance, all your media files uploaded in June 2022 will be stored in:

/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/

You can view these files and folders by connecting to your WordPress hosting account using an FTP client or via the File Manager app under your hosting account control panel.

You’ll notice that there are several copies of each image that uploaded on your server. These image sizes are generated automatically by WordPress when you upload an image.

By default, you may see a thumbnail, medium, and large size of the image along with the original upload.

Apart from that, your WordPress theme or plugins may also generate additional image sizes for them to use.

Now you may be wondering how does WordPress display information about these files inside the media library?

To do that, WordPress also stores information about your image uploads in the database as an attachment post type under the posts table.

Apart from that, WordPress also saves information in the posts meta table when you insert images into posts/pages or any other custom post type.

For instance, when you set a featured image, WordPress saves this information as a meta key _thumbnail_id and stores it in the postmeta table of your database.

The information inside your database tells WordPress the location of the file on your hosting server. Now if you delete a file from your server using FTP, then WordPress will show those images as broken.

Similarly, if you delete the reference to an image from your WordPress database, the file will still be intact on your hosting server but not appear in your media library.

Changing How WordPress Stores Images and Media Uploads

By default, WordPress does not allow you to change the uploads location from the WordPress admin area. The only change you can make is to disable the month and year based folders by visiting Settings » Media page.

From here, you can also adjust the maximum dimensions in pixels for your image uploads.

Advanced WordPress users can follow our tutorial on how to manually change the default WordPress uploads folder.

Organizing Your Images in WordPress

For most users, the default WordPress media library would work just fine.

However, if images play a more significant role in your WordPress blog, then you may need additional tools to organize your uploads.

For instance, if you run a photography website, then you may want to organize your content in Albums or tags.

For that, you will need a plugin like Envira Gallery. It is a WordPress image gallery plugin that allows you to organize your images in albums, tags, and galleries.

Allowing Users to Upload Images in WordPress

By default, WordPress allows any users who can write posts on your website to upload images. This includes users with the Administrator, Author, Editor, and Contributor user roles.

But what if you wanted other users to upload images on your website without logging into the admin area?

To do that, you’ll need the WPForms plugin. It is the best WordPress form builder plugin and allows you to easily create any kind of forms for your website.

It also comes with a file upload field that allows users to easily upload images, documents, and other files without creating a user account or accessing the WordPress admin area.

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.

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

Next, you need to visit WPForms » Add New page to create your image upload form.

First, you need to provide a title for your form. After that, you can look for File Upload Form template to get started.

WPForms will now load the form builder interface and automatically load form fields from the File Upload Form template.

The form will include a file upload field by default. You can add or remove fields to your form, change their labels, or move them up or down.

You can click on the File Upload field to change its settings. From here, you can set which file types and how many files a user can upload. You can also set a maximum file size limit.

Once you are finished, you can save your form and exit the form builder.

Next, you need to create a new post or page or edit an existing one. On the post edit screen, go ahead and add WPForms block to your content area.

From the WPForms block settings, click on the drop-down menu to select the form you created earlier.

You can now save your changes and preview your post or page to see your file upload form in action.

You can view files uploaded by users by visiting WPForms » Entries page and clicking on your File upload form. From here you can view an entry to see the files uploaded.

For more details, see our complete guide on how to allow users to upload images in WordPress.

Optimizing WordPress Images for Performance

Images are highly engaging thus they make your content more interesting for users. However, they also take more time to load than just plain text.

This means if you have multiple large images on a page, then your webpage will load slower. This slow page speed affects user experience as well as SEO.

Luckily, there are tons of tools to easily optimize your images for the web before uploading them to WordPress.

For instance, you can use a WordPress image compression plugin to automatically optimize each image that you upload to your website.

You can further boost performance by using a CDN (content delivery network). This allows you to load images from a global network of servers instead of your hosting server.

We recommend using Bunny.net which is the best CDN service on the market. It is super easy and comes with its own WordPress plugin for quicker setup.

We hope this article helped you learn where WordPress stores images on your site. You may also want to see our guide on how to find royalty free images for your WordPress blog, or see our beginner guide on how WordPress actually work behind the scenes.

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 Where Does WordPress Store Images on Your Site? first appeared on WPBeginner.

June 25, 2022 at 03:00PM

7 Best Backlink Checker Tools – Free & Paid Options (Compared)

Do you want to see where your backlinks are coming from? Or check on a competitor’s backlinks?

Backlinks can help boost your search rankings and increase your traffic.

In this guide, we’ll compare the best backlink checker tools that you can use to audit your site’s backlinks as well as a competitor’s backlink profile.

What Are Backlinks and Why Are They Important?

A backlink is a link to your website from another website. In the eyes of search engines, backlinks are a bit like votes for your site. The more links you have, the higher your site is likely to rank in search engines.

Not all backlinks are created equal, though. The best backlinks are ones from big, respected websites. Backlinks from spammy or suspicious websites can be actively harmful to your site.

After installing a WordPress SEO plugin like All in One SEO or Yoast and following the best practices, the next step is to think through your backlink strategy.

There are a lot of ways to get backlinks to your site, but the process always starts with using a backlink checker to check existing backlinks for your site and your competitors.

That being said, let’s take a look at the best tools to track backlinks of any website.

1. Semrush

Semrush is our top recommendation for a backlink checker. It’s one of the best keyword research tools on the market, and it has lots of powerful tools to let you analyze backlinks.

To use the backlink features, login to Semrush, select ‘Backlink Analytics,’ and type in the name of the domain you want to investigate. You’ll then see lots of information about the domain and its backlinks.

If you want to dig into more details on any section of this overview, just click the link beneath that section to view the full report.

You can use Semrush to check your site’s links, which could help you pinpoint any issues such as low-quality links. In fact, Semrush makes this easy for you by letting you see how many total links a page linking to you has. If the page has hundreds of links, that can indicate a spammy website.

When it comes to competitors’ backlinks, you can use Semrush to see which high-authority sites are linking to them, what keywords they are ranking for, and so much more. This can give you a whole list of sites to target for your own backlink building.

Price:

Semrush costs from $119.95/month and goes all the way to $449.95 per month.

You can get an exclusive 7-day free trial by going through our link to Semrush. If you want step-by-step instructions on how to get this deal, check out our Semrush coupon code page.

2. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best SEO plugin for WordPress. Over 3 million professionals use the plugin, making it super easy to optimize your website for search engines without requiring technical knowledge or hiring an expert.

AIOSEO offers a Link Assistant feature that helps you check internal backlinks on your website. Internal backlinks or internal links, help connect one post or page with each other.

With AIOSEO Link Assistant, you can create better internal links and boost your WordPress SEO score.

It helps identify orphan pages with no internal links and offers recommendations to create internal links. There’s even an option to bulk add internal links automatically with just one click.

Plus, the Link Assistant shows linking opportunities from different blog posts and pages. This helps save time and ensures that you don’t miss out on creating an internal link that could benefit your site.

Other than that, AIOSEO also lets you audit outbound links on your website and ensure that there are no broken links.

Pricing:

AIOSEO pricing plans start from $49.50 per year. However, the Internal Link Assistant feature is available in the Pro version and will cost you $199.50 per year.

Each premium plan comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee. There’s also an AIOSEO Lite version which you can use for free.

3. LinkMiner

LinkMiner is explicitly designed to check backlinks. It’s a tool from Mangools, so you’ll need a Mangools account in order to use it.

As with other tools, LinkMiner lets you filter links by nofollow, deleted, new, and lost.

One handy feature you’ll want to try is the ability to ‘favorite’ backlinks so that you can come back to them easily. This could be a great way to make a shortlist of competitors’ backlinks to target.

You could also use this feature to keep track of any of your own backlinks that you want to fix. For instance, you could create a list of lost backlinks that you want to concentrate on recovering.

While LinkMiner isn’t as fully featured as SEMRush, it is a great option if you’re on a tight budget.

You’ll likely want to use it in conjunction with Mangools’ SiteProfiler to view details like a site’s total backlinks and top referring domains.

Price:

You can take a free 10-day trial without entering any credit card details. After that, you’ll need to pay $26.91/month.

This fee covers all Mangools’ tools. These are LinkMiner, KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, and SiteProfiler. It’s a great budget option.

4. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a tool from Neil Patel. The main tool offers keyword research features, but there’s also a Backlinks tool that you can use to view details of your site’s backlinks.

Ubersuggest has similar features to the other tools we’ve been looking at. For instance, it can show you new backlinks, backlinks you’ve lost, which backlinks are marked as nofollow, and more.

You can use the free version to see this information, but you’ll only get details of a small number of backlinks for each domain. You need to upgrade to the paid version of Ubersuggest if you want everything.

Ubersuggest’s other tools can analyze traffic and help you come up with keyword and content ideas.

Price:

Ubersuggest’s free version can give you a good sense of what the tool can do. To do any serious backlink analysis, you’ll want the Pro version, which costs $29/month or $290/year if you pay upfront.

There’s a 30-day “no questions asked” money-back guarantee.

5. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another powerful keyword research tool. Like SEMRush, it’s easy to use. It’ll give you an overview of your chosen domain, and you can drill down to look at lots of details of backlinks.

Ahrefs also makes it really easy to see backlinks that you’ve lost. These are links you once had that have now vanished. Perhaps the website owner deleted the page that linked to you, for instance.

You can also identify backlinks that are broken. These links point to your site, but using a broken URL that lands on your 404 page. You might need to contact the site owner to fix them.

You can also use Ahrefs to examine internal links on your site. You can filter these to check for internal links you’ve accidentally nofollowed, so you can fix those.

Price:

You can take a 7-day trial of Ahrefs’ Site Explorer for just $7. After that, it’s priced from $99/month. If you pay for the year upfront, it’s $82/month.

6. Moz Pro

Moz Pro, the suite of SEO tools from Moz, includes their Link Explorer tool.

Link Explorer can give you a detailed link profile of your site, which you can compare with the profile of up to 4 competitors. This lets you figure out what they might be doing differently from you.

It also has a handy tool called Link Intersect, where you can see which sites are linking to your competitors but not to you. These sites are great ones to target for building links.

Like the other tools we’ve looked at, Moz also lets you see what backlinks you’ve lost. This gives you the chance to try to get those links replaced.

As well as the backlink tools, you’ll also get access to all Moz’s other SEO tools. These include Campaigns to track and analyze your site, Rank Checker to evaluate your search engine performance, and more.

Price:

Moz costs from $99/month ($79/month paid upfront annually). There’s a 30-day free trial, though, which gives you full access to all their tools.

7. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is designed to let you analyze your content and your competitors’ content. It’s a great way to come up with topic ideas, but you can also use it to help you with your backlink strategy.

You can simply type in a keyword or a domain name to see the most popular content for that keyword, or the most popular content on that domain. You can then click the link icon next to any of the results to see the backlinks for that piece of content.

You can even type in the URL of a specific piece of content and see just the backlinks that point to that. This could be a great way to see which sites are linking to your competitors’ top posts.

Their straightforward Backlinks tool lets you find the pages linking to a specific URL or domain. This is an easy way to see your competitors’ backlinks at a glance.

You can easily filter the backlinks to view ones from various periods of time between the past 24 hours and the past 5 years.

Price:

The basic version of BuzzSumo is free. For in-depth backlink analysis, though, you’ll need to upgrade to BuzzSumo Pro. It costs $99/month, or $79 if you pay annually.

There’s a 30-day free trial available, too. You don’t need to enter any credit card details for this.

Which Is The Best Backlink Checker Tool?

Any of these backlink checkers could help you build your site’s backlinks and rank more highly in search engines. Some of them offer a lot more helpful information than others.

Our top recommendation is SEMRush. It is one of the best SEO tools on the market and helps you grow your business. On the other hand, if you want a detailed overview of internal backlinks and want to improve your internal links, then we recommend All in One SEO (AIOSEO).

If you’re on a tight budget, though, LinkMiner and Ubersuggest are good value. And OpenLinkProfiler is completely free.

We hope this article helped you learn about the best backlink checker tools. You might also like to take a look at our ultimate guide to WordPress SEO for beginners and our tips on how to increase your blog 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 7 Best Backlink Checker Tools – Free & Paid Options (Compared) first appeared on WPBeginner.

June 24, 2022 at 03:30PM

How to Add Multiple Locations Schema for Local Business in WordPress

Are you managing a local business website that have multiple physical locations?

In that case, you would need to add local business schema markup for multiple locations on your site, so Google and other search engines can display detailed information about your various business locations.

In this article, we’ll show you

how to properly add local business schema markup for multiple locations in WordPress to improve your SEO.

Why Create Local Business Schema Markup for Multiple Locations?

Schema markup or structured data is HTML code that provides more details about your content to search engines.

By adding schema markup to the source code of your WordPress website, search engines can easily find the extra information and display it in the search results as featured snippets. For instance, you can show FAQs in search results, add Google Maps in WordPress, display recipes, and more.

If you have multiple business locations like retail outlets, restaurants, or regional offices, then you can display them on Google and Bing search results through schema markup.

For example, if you search for McDonald’s locations in Florida, Google will show you a featured snippet with the different destinations and a map with pinned locations.

Creating multiple local business locations with schema markup helps improve your website SEO rankings.

Since the featured snippets are placed right at the top of the search results, it helps you to increase your click rate in search. That means more organic traffic and more conversions.

That being said, let’s take a look at how you can create local business schema for multiple business locations in WordPress.

Creating Multiple Locations Using Schema Markup

The easiest way of setting up local business schema markup in WordPress is by using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin. It’s the best SEO tool for WordPress that’s used by over 3 million website owners and professionals.

AIOSEO removes the need for any technical knowledge or hiring an expert to boost your search engine visibility.

For this tutorial, we’ll be using the AIOSEO Pro license because it includes the Local SEO addon which is what you need to dominate local business SEO. It also other powerful features like the redirection manager, advanced sitemap, link assistant, and more. If you’re on a budget, then you can use the free version of AIOSEO to get started with SEO optimization.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the AIOSEO plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you’ll see the setup wizard. Go ahead and click the ‘Let’s Get Started’ button.

After that, follow the onscreen instructions in the setup wizard to configure the plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to properly setup AIOSEO in WordPress.

Next, you’ll need to head over to All in One SEO » Local SEO from your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Activate Local SEO’ button.

Once the Local SEO addon is active, you’ll see different Location Settings.

Go ahead and click the ‘Multiple Locations’ toggle to enable the option. This will add a new menu in your WordPress admin panel called Locations.

After that, you can scroll down to the ‘Advanced Settings’ section.

Here you can see the permalink AIOSEO will use to show your multiple business locations and location category. If you wish to use a custom link, then simply check the ‘Use custom slug’ box and enter your permalink url structure.

Next, you can also switch on the ‘Enhanced Search’ option, which will include your business locations in your WordPress site search results.

When you’re done, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Next, you can go to the ‘Opening Hours’ tab and configure the times for your local businesses.

By default, the ‘Show Opening Hours’ option will be set to Yes. If you don’t want to show opening hours, then simply click the toggle to No.

After that, you can scroll down and change the labels for when your business is open or closed.

There are also options to change the opening and closing timings for specific days or set it to open 24/7.

Note: The opening hours will be used across all the locations you add in WordPress. However, you can disable them for specific locations in the content editor.

AIOSEO also lets you integrate Google Maps with your WordPress website which helps show your local business on Google Maps. For more details, you can see our guide on how to add Google Maps in WordPress.

Next, you’ll need to add your multiple business locations in WordPress.

Adding Multiple Business Locations in WordPress

When you enable the Multiple Locations option in AIOSEO, a new ‘Locations’ option will appear in your WordPress admin panel.

To add your local business locations, simply go to Locations » Add New from your WordPress dashboard.

Next, you’ll need to add your location details in the WordPress content editor. Here you can add a title for your business location, which can be the location name.

Under the title, you can add more details or description about your location. You can also create location categories from the settings panel on your right.

After that, simply scroll down to the AIOSEO Local Business metabox.

In the ‘Business Info’ section, you can add your business name, select a business type (industry), add an image, enter the address for your location, business phone, payment info, area served, and more.

Next, you can switch to the ‘Opening Hours’ tab under the AIOSEO Local Business metabox.

AIOSEO will use the default settings automatically. However, you can disable the ‘Use Defaults’ option and then configure the opening and closing hours for your local business.

Next, you can go to the ‘Maps’ tab and configure how your local business will appear on Google Maps.

For instance, you can change map style and upload a custom marker to pin your location on the map.

When you’re done, go ahead and publish your location page.

Now you can simply repeat this process for other locations you want to add to your WordPress website.

We hope this article helped you learn how to create multiple locations in WordPress with schema markup. You may also want to see our guide on must have WordPress plugins for business websites, and our comparison of the best email marketing services 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 Multiple Locations Schema for Local Business in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

June 23, 2022 at 03:00PM