Recently, one of our users asked us how they can stop search engines from crawling and indexing their WordPress site.

There are several scenarios when you would want to stop search engines from crawling your website and listing it in search results.

In this article, we will show you how to stop search engines from crawling a WordPress site.

Why Stop Search Engines From Crawling a WordPress Site?

For most WordPress websites, search engines are the biggest source of traffic. You may ask, why would anyone want to block search engines?

Here are some situations when you won’t want search engines to index your website:

When starting out, you may not know how to create a local development environment or a staging site, and instead develop your website while it’s live. You won’t want Google to index your site when it’s under construction or in maintenance mode.

There are also many people who use WordPress to create private blogs. They don’t want them indexed by search engines because they’re private.

You can use WordPress for project management or an intranet. In these cases, you won’t want your internal documents to be publicly accessible.

A common misconception is that if you don’t have links pointing to your domain, then search engines will probably never find your website. This is not completely true.

For example, there may be links pointing to your site because the domain name was previously owned by someone else. Also, there are thousands of pages on the internet that simply list domain names. Your site may appear on one of those.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to stop search engines from crawling your website. We’ll cover four methods:

Method 1: Asking Search Engines not to Crawl Your WordPress Site

This is the simplest method but does not fully protect your website from being crawled.

WordPress comes with a built-in feature that allows you to instruct search engines not to index your site. All you need to do is visit Settings » Reading and check the box next to ‘Search Engine Visibility’.

When this box is checked, WordPress adds this line to your website’s header:

WordPress also modifies your site’s robots.txt file and adds these lines to it:

These lines ask robots (web crawlers) not to index your pages. However, it is totally up to search engines to accept this request or ignore it. Even though most search engines respect this, there’s still a chance that some pages or images from your site may get indexed.

If you want to make it impossible for search engines to index or crawl your website, then you will need to password protect your WordPress site using Methods 3 or 4.

Method 2: Asking Search Engines not to Crawl Individual Pages

You might want search engines to crawl and index your website, but not include certain posts or pages in search results pages.

The easiest way to do that is using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin. It is the best SEO tool for WordPress and is trusted by over 3 million businesses.

For this tutorial, we’ll be using the AIOSEO free version as it includes the SEO Analysis tool. There is also a premium version of AIOSEO that offers more features like sitemap tools, redirection manager, schema markup, robots.txt editor, and more.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the AIOSEO plugin on your website. You can learn how to install and configure the plugin by following our step by step guide on how to set up All in One SEO for WordPress.

Once the plugin is set up, you can use it to ask search engines not to index certain posts and pages. Again, it is totally up to search engines to accept this request or ignore it.

Simply edit the post or page that you don’t want to be indexed. You need to scroll down to AIOSEO Settings at the bottom of the WordPress editor and then click the ‘Advanced’ tab.

Notice that the article is using the default robots settings. To change this, you need to switch the ‘Use Default Settings’ toggle to the off position.

Now you can click the ‘No Index’ checkbox. Once the post is published or updated, search engines will be asked not to index it.

Method 3: Password Protecting an Entire Site Using cPanel

If your WordPress hosting provider offers cPanel access to manage your hosting account, then you can protect your entire site using cPanel. All you have to do is log in to your cPanel dashboard and then click on the ‘Directory Privacy’ icon in the ‘Files’ section.

Next, you need to find the folder where you installed WordPress. Usually, it is the public_html folder. After that, you need to click the ‘Edit’ button next to that folder.

This brings you to a screen where you can turn on password protection.

Simply check the box that says ‘Password protect this directory’ and click the ‘Save’ button. If you like, you can also customize the name for the protected directory.

You will see a confirmation message saying that the access permissions for the directory have been changed.

Next, you should click the ‘Go Back’ button.

You’ll be taken to a screen where you can create a username and password that will need to be used when accessing this directory.

You need to enter a username and password and then confirm the password. Make sure to note your username and password in a safe place, such as a password manager app.

Once you click the ‘Save’ button you have successfully added password protection to your WordPress site.

Now, whenever a user or search engine visits your website they will be prompted to enter the username and password you created earlier to view the site.

Method 4: Password Protecting WordPress With a Plugin

If you are using a managed WordPress hosting solution, then you may not have access to cPanel. In that case, you can use a WordPress plugin to password protect your site.

Here are the two most popular solutions:

SeedProd is the #1 coming soon and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress, used on over 800,000 websites. It comes with complete access control and permissions features that you can use to hide your website from everyone including search engines. We have a step by step how-to guide for SeedProd.Password Protected is a very simple way to password protect your WordPress site with a single password (no user creation needed). See our step by step guide on how to password protect a WordPress site.

We hope this article helped you stop search engines from crawling or indexing your WordPress site. You may also want to learn how to speed up your website performance, or see our ultimate step by step WordPress security guide for beginners.

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 Stop Search Engines from Crawling a WordPress Site first appeared on WPBeginner.

Are you looking to serve scaled images on your WordPress site?

Beginners often slow down their websites by uploading images without paying attention to their size. Serving images that have the correct dimensions will improve your WordPress performance without reducing quality.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily serve scaled images in WordPress.

Why Serve Scaled Images in WordPress?

On your WordPress website, you’ll need images for your blog posts, thumbnails, page headers, cover images, and more.

Depending on your theme, these images will occupy a certain number of pixels. For example, your featured image might occupy 680×382 pixels, and a thumbnail 100×100 pixels.

It is important to use images that have been scaled to fit the correct dimensions needed for your site. For example, if your featured images occupy 680×382 pixels, then you should save them at exactly that size.

Otherwise, your site can be slowed down or the quality of the user’s experience will be lowered. Here are a few of the common reasons for this:

Your visitors will have to download larger files than necessary, increasing load times. If you use images with fewer pixels than the space allowed, then they will look blurry when displayed at a larger size.Your website will have to change the image sizes on the fly, which means it has to run more processes before it can show the content to users

Regardless, it will give your users a bad experience and may also have a negative impact on your image SEO.

That’s why if you test your website performance using GTMetrix scan, it will often recommend that you serve scaled images to speed up your website.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to easily serve scaled images in WordPress. We’ll cover two methods:

Method 1: Serving Scaled Images With a Plugin

The simplest way to serve images scaled is to use a plugin that automatically displays your website images at the correct size. This method is the easiest but doesn’t allow as much flexibility as the second method.

The free Optimole plugin is one of the best WordPress image compression plugins and will automatically scale your images. However, if you get over 5,000 visitors per month, then you’ll need the premium version.

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

Upon activation, you will be automatically taken to the Media » Optimole page and asked to sign up for an API key or enter your existing API key. This is very easy.

Simply make sure that your email address is correct, then click the ‘Create & connect your account’ button. The connection to Optimole will then happen automatically. You won’t even need to visit another website or manually paste the key.

Optimole will now start to optimize your images in the background. It will automatically choose the correct image size for each visitor’s device and browser, and the images will be served from the fast Optimole Cloud Service CDN.

When you click on the Settings tab, you will see that the images in your posts and pages will be automatically replaced with those optimized and scaled by Optimole.

This isn’t done on the fly because it’s through a CDN, meaning your site will not take a performance hit.

Also, the plugin has enabled lazy load, which means that images on the page that are not currently visible won’t be loaded until they are needed. This is another effective way to reduce page load time and improve website performance.

These settings will work well for most websites. However, you can customize Optimole further using the settings on the ‘Advanced’ menu to see what works best for your website.

If you make any changes to the settings, then don’t forget to click the ‘Save changes’ button at the bottom of the page.

Method 2: Serving Scaled Images Manually

You can also scale images without a plugin. There are three ways to do this: you can use the image editing software, the image editing feature in the WordPress Media Library, or by changing the values in the WordPress Media Settings.

Scaling Images With Image Editing Software

You can scale your images to the right dimensions before you upload them to your website by using photo editing software on your computer, such as Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo.

The software allows you to choose the correct number of pixels for your image and save it with a small file size and the file format you prefer.

For example, here’s a screenshot demonstrating Affinity Photo’s crop tool.

Besides getting the image size right from the beginning, there are other things you can do before you upload your images to make sure they don’t slow down your website.

For more information, see our guide on how to optimize images for web performance.

Scaling Images in the WordPress Media Library

Did you know that you can do basic image editing in WordPress? The WordPress ‘edit image’ feature allows you to crop, rotate, flip, and scale images.

When editing a post or page, you need to click on the image you wish to edit. Next, you should click the ‘Replace’ button and then select ‘Open Media Library’ from the menu.

This will open the WordPress Media Library with the image selected.

On the right is an area where you can add alt text, a title, a caption, and a description for your image. You will also find an ‘Edit Image’ link.

Just click that link to be taken to the ‘Edit image’ page.

Here you’ll find a preview of the image, editing buttons, and several other options that are useful when scaling or cropping the image.

To scale the image, simply change one of the ‘New dimensions’ values under Scale Image on the right.

For example, this image has a very large resolution of 2560×1637 pixels. We can reduce it to a width of 1200 pixels by typing in the first ‘Scale Image’ field.

All you have to change is the Width because the image’s height value will be changed change automatically to keep the image in proportion.

After that, just click the ‘Scale’ button to change the resolution of the image.

Note that you can only scale an image down in WordPress. You cannot make images larger by increasing the image dimensions.

For detailed instructions, see our guides on how to do basic image editing in WordPress and how to crop and edit WordPress post thumbnails.

Adjusting Image Sizes in Media Settings

When you upload images to your website, WordPress automatically creates several copies in different sizes. You can customize these sizes by visiting the Settings » Media page in your WordPress admin area.

Here, you can easily change the dimensions for thumbnail, medium, and large image sizes.

On some websites, you may need more image sizes than just thumbnail, medium, and large. You can learn how to create these sizes by following our guide on how to create additional image sizes in WordPress.

If you change the default image sizes or create additional image sizes, then only new images will be affected. You need to regenerate the image sizes for existing images.

When you add an image to a post or page, you can select an image size in the block settings on the left of the page.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to serve scaled images in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to create a landing page or check out our list of social media plugins for WordPress.

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 Easily Serve Scaled Images in WordPress (Step by Step) first appeared on WPBeginner.

Are you looking for a plugin to add a table of contents to your WordPress website?

A table of contents can improve readability and make it easier for users to digest lengthy content by letting them jump ahead to any section of a post or page. Google will also use your table of contents to index and rank your pages and posts in search results.

In this article, we’ll show you the best table of contents plugins for WordPress.

Why Use a Table Content Plugin in WordPress?

Adding a table of contents (ToC) to your WordPress website is a great way to help visitors navigate longer blog posts and pages.

You can easily organize and structure your content so it’s easier for people to scan through the article and jump to any section they’re interested in.

It also helps with your WordPress SEO, since search engines like Google can add jump-to-section links next to your website in the search results. Google can also display your table of contents list in featured snippets.

You can manually add a table of contents in WordPress by writing HTML code and CSS or by using advanced settings in the block editor. However, this is time-consuming and can be tricky for beginners because the slightest mistake would mean your table of contents won’t work.

An easier way to create a table of contents is using a WordPress plugin. You won’t have to edit HTML code, and there are more customization options.

Let’s look at some of the best table of contents plugins for WordPress.

1. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin. It helps you optimize your website for search engines without technical knowledge or having to hiring a professional.

AIOSEO makes it super easy to add a table of contents to your WordPress site. It offers a table of contents block in the WordPress content editor that you can add anywhere in your blog post.

The AIOSEO block will automatically generate a table of contents using your heading levels from H1 to H6.

Unlike other automatic table of content plugin though, AIOSEO actually lets you hide an individual heading or even completely customize the title as needed in the table of content. You can also reorder the headings and change the style from bullet format to numbers.

Aside from that, AIOSEO helps you create XML sitemaps for your site, so search engines can easily discover new content. It also helps add schema markup and increase the visibility of your content in rich snippets.

You can also use the plugin to conduct an SEO audit and see if everything is optimized correctly. AIOSEO will suggest fixing different issues that might stop your site from ranking higher in search results.

AIOSEO premium plans start from $49.60 per year. There is also an AIOSEO Lite version you can try for free.

2. Easy Table of Contents

Easy Table of Contents is a popular plugin that you can use to add a table of contents to your blog posts, landing pages, sidebar, and custom post types.

The plugin is user-friendly and automatically generates a listing using content from the headings in the article. It works seamlessly with the WordPress block editor, classic editor, Divi and Elementor page builders, and more.

Using the plugin, you also get an auto-insert functionality for adding the table of contents in different post types.

Plus, you get other customization options like changing the table’s width, editing the font size, choosing a theme, and selecting the number of headings to use when creating a table of contents.

3. LuckyWP Table of Contents

LuckyWP Table of Contents is the next WordPress ToC plugin on our list. It has multiple customization options to change the look and feel of your table of contents.

For instance, you can pre-built color schemes to match your brand. You also get options to edit the appearance by changing the width, font size, item font size, and colors.

The plugin lets you choose bullets or numbers to show items in the table contents. You can also use decimals and roman numerals in the listing.

Besides that, the plugin offers 3 options to add the table of contents anywhere on your site. For example, you can use a shortcode, widget, or WordPress content editor block.

4. Joli Table Of Contents

Joli Table of Contents is an SEO-friendly table of contents plugin for WordPress.

It’s lightweight and doesn’t hinder the performance of your website. The table of contents only loads when it’s supposed to display. Plus, the table is fully responsive, so you don’t have to worry about optimizing it for different devices.

With the Joli Table of Contents plugin, you get many options to customize the appearance of the table of contents. It comes with 2 themes for the table and 4 free icons for the expanding and collapsing buttons.

Besides that, the plugin lets you choose a numbering prefix, change the font size, adjust the table’s width, add a shadow, and more.

5. CM Table Of Contents

CM Table of Contents by CreativeMindsSolutions is a super easy-to-use plugin for creating a table of contents.

In the plugin, you can choose which post types you’d like the table of contents to appear on, including blog posts, specific pages, sidebar widget areas, and custom pages. You also get to make the table collapse and expand in your content.

The best part about using the CM Table of Contents plugin is that you get different performance settings. This helps you ensure that are no delays when the table of contents loads.

Besides that, there are many styling options for your table of contents. You can change the size, color, weight, and style for each level in the table. The plugin also lets you show the TOC in one or two columns.

6. SimpleTOC – Table of Contents Block

SimpleTOC is the basic WordPress table of contents plugin. It’s beginner friendly and offers standard features.

You can easily add TOC to your blog posts using the SimpleTOC block in the WordPress content editor. The plugin doesn’t require additional configuration, and you can control all the settings from the content editor.

SimpleTOC lets you select the maximum and minimum heading levels it should include in the table of contents, show/hide the table’s heading, and more.

On the downside, you don’t get any customization options compared to other plugins on our list, like AIOSEO. To style the table of contents, you’ll need to use the native styling options in the WordPress theme customizer or full site editor.

7. Heroic Table of Contents

Heroic Table of Contents is another table of contents WordPress plugin that you can use to provide better navigation of your blog posts. The best part is that it’s 100% free.

The plugin offers a WordPress block that you can use to add a table of contents to your post and pages. It provides 4 pre-built table styles to choose from, including outlined, rounded, contrasted, and gray.

Additionally, you can show a collapse or expand icon for your TOC, use bullets, numbers, or plain text in the table, and more formats. Heroic Table of Contents is SEO friendly and mobile responsive, so you don’t have to worry about your site’s load time and user experience.

Which is the Best Table of Contents WordPress Plugin?

If you’re looking for the best plugin to help you optimize your content for search engines and easily add a table of contents, then we recommend All in One SEO (AIOSEO).

You can use the AIOSEO block to add a table of contents, customize it, and hide headings inside the WordPress content editor. Besides that, AIOSEO helps you create sitemaps, optimize your content for SEO, and so much more.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a dedicated table of contents WordPress plugin, then check out Easy Table of Contents. It is beginner friendly and offers multiple customization options.

We hope that this article helped you learn about the best table of contents plugins for WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to start a WordPress blog and the best web design software.

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 Table of Contents Plugins for WordPress (Expert Pick) first appeared on WPBeginner.

Are you comparing push notifications vs email to figure out which is better?

Push notifications and email marketing are two of the most effective marketing tools to increase conversions and sales. But how are they different and which one should you focus on?

In this article, we will compare push notifications vs email marketing with pros and cons to find out which one is better.

Push Notifications vs Email: Which One is Better?

Push notifications and email marketing are two different marketing channels that each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Both can help you achieve similar goals like increasing conversions, recovering cart abandonment, boosting sales, and getting more user engagement.

When used properly, they can help you significantly grow your online business.

Due to the difference in the delivery platform, one method could be better suited over the other. For instance, in some places email will be less effective than a push notification and vice versa.

That being said, let’s take a look at push notifications and email and see what are their pros and cons and when one of them is more effective than the other.

Email Marketing – Pros and Cons Explained

Email marketing is the most effective marketing tool available on the market. However, what most people are unclear about is what makes email so effective and when they are using it wrong.

Pros of Email Marketing

Following are some of the advantages of using email marketing in your business strategy.

1. High ROI with Low Costs

As a business, one factor in your decision-making is the costs and what kind of return you should expect.

For every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made in return. That’s an ROI of 4400% (source). 

Email marketing has a very high ROI due to low-cost email marketing platforms. These services allow you to send thousands of emails to your customers for a very low cost.

2. Wider Availability to All Customers

Most internet users today have 24/7 access to their email inbox via a variety of devices laptops, mobile, and even smartwatches.

An average internet user checks their email several times a day and due to cheaper unlimited storage, many people don’t bother deleting emails.

This increases the chances of your subject line and a snippet been seen by users even if they don’t open the email.

3. Perfect for Longer Content

Emails can be as long as you need, so you have plenty of room to create an effective copy for your email.

We generally do recommend keeping it short and sweet. However, sometimes you may need to add more information to your email.

You can place multiple calls to action if needed, add several products, provide users instructions on how to do something on the website, and more.

4. Emails Are More Customizable

Emails can be in plain text, or you can use HTML and CSS to create beautiful newsletter templates. You can also add images, link to YouTube videos, create buttons, and more.

Most email service providers allow you to use smart tags to personalize your emails. Plus, you can segment your email list into different user groups.

For instance, you can segment your email list into users who have already made at least one purchase and users who have never bought from you.

You can also set up automated drip notifications that send a sequence of emails with a set frequency to users.

All of this allows you to make your emails look more personalized, professional, and persuasive.

5. Email Isn’t Time Limited

Unlike push notifications, which demand the user’s urgent attention, emails are more relaxed and users can decide to read them later.

Once the email arrives in a user’s inbox, it will sit there until the user takes an action.

Most users check email several times a day, so even if they don’t open it right away, they will scan through your subject line multiple times.

Cons of Email Marketing

Email is cheap and highly effective. There is no doubt that it will remain one of the most efficient marketing tools for businesses in the future.

However, there are certain areas where email puts you at a slight disadvantage.

1. Too Frequent Blog Post Emails

Sending users an email for every blog post doesn’t work very well. Specially if you publish daily or several times a day.

That’s why you see a ton of blogs (including WPBeginner) sending weekly emails with a recap of all the blog posts they published this week.

2. Competition in Your Customer’s Inbox

An average internet user gets a lot of marketing emails each day. Each one of them tries to come up with a creative subject line to get their attention.

You are competing with many other businesses for users’ attention, and this affects your open rates. You have to learn how to write better emails that users actually open and take action.

3. Email Apps like Gmail Assigning Low Priority Labels

Due to huge volume of marketing emails, popular email clients like Gmail may not display any notification for new emails to your users.

Your email may be labeled low priority promotional email among hundreds of other marketing emails. This may reduce the visibility, open rates, and CTR for your email campaigns.

Push Notifications – Pros and Cons Explained

Push notifications are a highly effective marketing tool with higher click-through and open rates. Let’s compare how they stack up against email marketing.

Pros of using Push Notifications

Following are some of the advantages of using push notifications over emails in your marketing strategy.

1. Easy to Subscribe

Push notifications are very easy to subscribe to. Users simply need to click a button to subscribe for notifications.

Whereas in a traditional email sign-up forms, users will have to first go through popups and opt-in forms to fill in their email address, submit the form, and then confirm their subscription via double opt-in.

This easy subscription option in push notification works very well for users as it instantly gets out of their way once they click subscribe. Most push notification software offer 1-click subscription options.

2. Messages Are Delivered to Users Instantly

Push notifications appear on users’ screens as soon as they receive them. Unlike emails, they don’t need to open them separately.

They work on all platforms and are particularly more effective on mobile phones. Basically, users will get the message instantly as a notification regardless of which device they are using.

This increases the visibility of push notifications and makes them much more effective than email marketing.

3. Push Notifications Add Urgency and FOMO

Push notifications appear as mobile notifications, which adds urgency to them.

Users feel that they will not see the notification if they dismiss it, so they don’t want to miss out on anything important.

4. Users Cannot Provide Fake Signup

Push notifications work on users’ browsers, so users cannot provide fake sign-up information.

This is far more effective when comparing to email sign-ups. Many users now enter disposable email addresses that they have made particularly for subscriptions.

Users may also provide wrong email addresses or makeup fake ones to signup. As marketers, this affects the open and CTR rates of your email campaigns.

5. Highly Effective Personalization

Push notifications can be customized for individual users and triggered based on user activity.

You can do this with emails too. However, it becomes more effective when combined with the urgency and FOMO effects of push notifications.

For instance, a user added a product to the cart, you can use push notifications to nudge them into completing the purchase.

You can also add drip push notifications which work very well for blog post alerts and many publishers / bloggers send targeted push notifications based on user’s interest.

Cons of Using Push Notifications

Push notifications work great for most websites. However, to avoid misusing them, you need to keep in mind the following disadvantages.

1. No Lengthy Content

Push notifications have a character limit which varies on different platforms and browsers.

For instance, you can use 30-70 characters for titles and 65 to 200 characters for descriptions.

You’ll have to keep your messages short and persuasive with in these limits.

2. Limited Media Options

Platforms like PushEngage allow you to create rich push notifications with hero images, Gifs, videos, and emojis.

There is still a limit on what you can use to make your notifications more interactive.

3. Can Easily Get Excessive

Push notifications have a much higher CTR, which may compel some website owners to use them more frequently.

This could ruin user experience as they may start getting more than usual notifications.

On the other hand, if the user has signed up for too many notifications, their notification panels may get too many messages from different websites which may affect how they feel about web push notifications.

Which is Better, Push Notifications vs Email?

Push notifications are better than email due to the higher click-through rates, urgency, personalization, and easy subscription options.

However, email is still highly effective for transactional emails, upsells, newsletters, and other campaigns.

We believe that they are two separate tools. While one of them can be more efficient in particular scenarios, the other one may excel in other areas.

Combining email and push notifications is ultimately the best win-win strategy for most businesses.

This is why we use both push notifications and email marketing in our business to get maximum results.

How to Get Started with Push Notifications

To send push notifications, you’ll need to sign up for a push notification service.

We recommend PushEngage because it is the best push notification service on the market.

PushEngage comes with powerful customization options, triggered notifications, automatic drip campaigns, A/B testing, and more features to grow your business.

Plus, it is extremely beginner friendly and much easier to set up without any special technical skills.

For more details, see our tutorial on adding web push notifications to your WordPress site.

How to Get Started with Email Marketing

You’ll need to sign up for an email marketing service to get started.

We recommend using Constant Contact, which is the best email marketing service for small businesses and bloggers.

Constant Contact comes with easier setup, beautiful email templates for every type of campaign, engagement reporting, and dynamic personalization.

For more detailed instructions, see our article on how to start an email newsletter in WordPress.

We hope this article helpes you compare push noticiations vs email and which one is better for your business. You may also want to see our practical tips to grow your email list quickly or see our complete conversion tracking guide.

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 Push Notifications vs Email: Which Is Better? (Pros and Cons) first appeared on WPBeginner.