Thankfully, WordPress is the most expandable platform on earth and the number of options and features you can add is seemingly limitless.

Compiled below are the eight most essential WordPress plugins to enhance your blog that you should add today.

Contact Form 7

According to a 2015 marketing report, the second most important thing to blog visitors – coming in just under the actual content of your blog – is your contact information. In fact, 44% of surfers stated that they would leave a website if it did not contain a contact form.

Contact information plays a powerful role in establishing trust between you and your readers and can even create new opportunities for you and your website. It’s no surprise, then, that Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. It makes it easy to create contact forms and includes a spam filter and CAPTCHA.

W3 Total Cache

Slow websites are a drag. Literally.

It is no secret that blogs that load slowly are less frequented than those that provide zippy load times. In fact, users will opt for a competing website if it loads even just a few hundred milliseconds faster! In such an impatient world, what is one to do?

W3 Total Cache can speed up your WordPress blog by avoiding re-downloading data that already exists in a user’s browser. This reduces your website load time significantly – often by a few seconds – and can mean the difference between a bounce and reader. That even makes Google happy, as faster websites are known to do better in SEO ranking.

Accelerated Mobile Pages

The Google-backed Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP) Project aims to speed up the mobile web by creating sites that load blazingly fast and are optimized to perform well across devices. This near-instant loading provides proven engagement increases and gives you a leg up on non-AMP sites.

A responsive design can only go so far and taking your website to the next level with AMP is as simple as installing a plugin. See results instantly and discover why the biggest names on the internet back this extraordinary project.

TinyMCE Advanced

There is no doubt that the WordPress visual editor is the best way to create and edit blog content. Sometimes, however, it can feel incomplete, preventing users from creating truly creative and interactive content.

TinyMCE works to fix that by adding the features that the developers missed, including the ability to change fonts and font sizes, search and replace, create different lists, and add and edit tables. It’s so effective, you may not have to use the text editor again!

Better Click to Tweet

You already remind your readers to share your content with social prompts and buttons, but sometimes it takes an additional push to really nudge them in the right direction.

Better Click to Tweet engages users by allowing you to create tweetable text that your users can share without having to leave your website. These pre-made tweets are effective and also make your content more appealing and interactive. They even link to your article and your Twitter handle and serve as yet another way to build a bridge between you and your visitors.

Yoast SEO

Even if you create interesting content, if your blog does not conform to basic SEO guidelines, you might be missing out on huge numbers of potential visitors and readers.

Solve your SEO problems today with the Yoast SEO plugin. Not only can it do a page analysis of all of your posts, it ensures that you write a meta description with your focus keywords, that you use subheadings to make your content more readable, and that your site is visible for all of the right reasons.

iThemes Security

An average of 30,000 websites are hacked every day. With an alarming stat like this, it’s important to protect your site behind a powerful security suite.

iThemes Security (formerly known as Better WP Security) provides you with over 30 different ways to secure your blog. Features include two-factor authentication, scheduled malware scanning, password expiration, Google reCAPTCHA, online file comparison, and many other features that ensure not only your safety, but that of your readers.

Jetpack

The ultimate supplement to all of the aforementioned plugins is Jetpack.

Jetpack includes tools that track and increase traffic, secure and backup your website, assist in content creation, and improve interaction with your readers. While some of these features are paid, the plugin offers enough free features to make it worth your while. Some features of Jetpack are also available for certain site building platforms as well.

Why do you need Jetpack if you have the first seven plugins, you ask? Although plugins work great as standalone products, much like WordPress itself, there are always holes to patch and improvements to be made. Using Jetpack will nicely supplement your plugins.

With just a bit of work and a lot of help from these eight amazing plugins, your website is sure to reach new highs!

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Those who have migrated a site before probably know that moving from one server to another -especially when you have a large database- is real headache. It’s not written or told anywhere prior to starting a website, but to choose the right WordPress hosting company to work with is one of those key decisions. Quality content one thing, but no matter how good your content is, the speed and reliability of your server as well determines whether or not if you are going to have returning visits.

When an application is open source and widely being used, it’s expected to have security releases. WordPress has made it easy for end users to update their software with one-click through admin panel but what if something goes wrong during the process. That is where Managed WordPress comes to rescue of those who wants to worry only about their content and leave technical part to techy people. Nowadays you will see a lot of companies around ready to provide support for WordPress. But back in time there were only a few of them and WP Engine is one of first companies in the market that has been around and concentrated on WordPress hosting only. Below, is an interview that we had with WP Engine to shed some light for those who are interested don’t yet know the company.

Q. How long have you been in business?
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has offices in San Francisco, California; San Antonio, Texas; London, England; and Limerick, Ireland.

Q. Q. How are package upgrades handled?
We do patching and updates regularly throughout the week and this is all transparent to the customer as there is no negative impact to their sites.

Q. What are discounts for paying ahead?
Customers receive 2 months free for pre-paying for an annual subscription.

Q. Are there excess bandwidth charges?
We do not currently charge for excessive bandwidth, instead we work with customers to understand what’s going on with their site and recommend best practices.

Q. Is the tech department available 24/7?
Yes, by phone, chat, and ticket.

Q. How do you handle site security?
Security is an important and broad topic. Here is a link to a page explaining our processes regarding security, as well as answers to specific security questions in greater detail can be found here.

Q. Spam complaints?
We investigate all Spam Complaints quickly and thoroughly and do not tolerate Spam on our platform.

Q. How many customers are on each server?
There is no specific number because all sites are not created equal, it’s a science, not a rule when running our shared platform.

Q. Do you offer support for scripts installed through the control panel?
There is no way to install a script through our control panel. Customers can use Git or SFTP but we do not provide technical support for custom code.

Q. What is your average monthly uptime & backup frequency?
We backup daily. Everyday. And on average a customer has 100% uptime in any given month.

Q. Do you offer a money-back guarantee?
Yes, 60 day money-back guarantee.

Q. What makes you the best choice?
WP Engine is the world’s leading WordPress digital experience platform that gives enterprises and agencies the agility, performance, intelligence and integrations they need to drive their business forward faster. WP Engine‘s combination of tech innovation and an award-winning team of WordPress experts trusted by over 60,000 companies across over 140 countries to provide counsel and support helps brands create world-class digital experiences.

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Our Christmas promotion is now officially available. This holiday sale will let you choose 1 or more themes for your website so don’t miss the opportunity to pick up any of our themes at 50% off.

To Redeem This Offer:
1. Visit our Theme Shop
2. Add one or more theme(s) to your cart
3. Enter promo code 2017 at checkout and receive 50% off your entire order.

This offer is only valid until 11:59pm UTC on Jan 2, 2017. We won’t have any similar offers for quite sometime, so we suggest not to miss this opportunity. Check out our Themes page to pick your theme with 50% off.

Wishing all you WordPress users a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The post Xmas and Winter Sale 2017 appeared first on Gabfire.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Enjoy the meals & fun time with the loved ones while our team continues to develop robust WordPress themes and new plugins.

Black Friday Deal: 50% Discount – Today Save on Everything

To celebrate Turkey day, Black Friday, and of course Cyber Monday, we’ve just launched our traditional campaign. Enjoy Thanksgiving and Black Friday madness with 50% off all our themes. But don’t wait, this deal ends on Nov 30 at midnight (UTC). So get your themes today and enjoy the holidays with a new face for your website.

All you need to do is to use the coupon code BLACK on checkout and get 50% off all our themes & services.

Check our Theme Store

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Whether you are a business looking for the perfect theme or just starting an online news or community site, we have a WordPress Theme to meet your needs. There’s a wide range of themes available, so start browsing and don’t miss this sweet campaign.

• Go to our Theme Store to select a theme
• Use EASTER16 discount code to check out. Coupon applies to all our WordPress Themes.

This offer is only valid until 11:59pm UTC on March 29, 2016.

The post Happy Easter Holiday – Save 50% with Easter Special appeared first on Gabfire.

That being said, you will love the new design and features in our next theme.

Following the release of our new WordPress magazine theme, we have an e-commerce theme in the pipeline. Stay tuned for more announcements or sign up to RSS feed or our monthly newsletter.

The post Preview of Next Gabfire Theme appeared first on Gabfire.

Our Christmas promotion is now officially available. This holiday sale will let you choose 1 or more themes for your website. Don’t miss the opportunity to pick up any of our themes at 50% off.

To Redeem This Offer:
1. Visit our Theme Shop
2. Add one or more theme(s) to your cart
3. Enter promo code NEWYEAR at checkout and receive 50% off your entire order.

This offer is only valid until 11:59pm UTC on Jan 5, 2016. This is the last sale of the year and we are not going to have any similar offers for quite sometime. We suggest not to miss this opportunity. Check out our Themes page and pick your theme now.

Wishing all you WordPress users a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The post Xmas and Winter Sale 2015 appeared first on Gabfire.

Happy early Thanksgiving folks. We hope that you are going to have a special week with your family and enjoy the meals & fun time with the loved ones.

This year we decided to start our Black Friday and Cyber Monday special a little earlier than usual. All you need to do is to use the coupon code BLACK on checkout and get 40% off all our themes & services.

Check our Theme Store

This special offer is valid until the end of the month – midnight on November 30 (UTC).

The post Black Friday – 40% off everything! appeared first on Gabfire.