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building a site with wordpress

Cost of Building a Site With WordPress

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WordPress is one of the top go-to sites for every amateur blogger, business, company, and basically everyone else who wants to build their own website. It is a quick and easy-to-understand site that people use to create websites mostly without the help of a professional web developer.

building a site with wordpress

Most people know that WordPress is free, but there is actually a long list of amazing features and add-ons that are quite pricey. So, in this article, we will tell you everything there is you need to know about the cost of building a site with WordPress.

For people who are completely clueless about what WordPress is, it is an open source website creation tool that is written in PHP. In other words, WordPress is the easiest and the most powerful website and blogging content management system (CMS), that is present in the world today. WordPress is used by companies such as Mashable, TechCrunch, New York Times‘ blogs, and several others.

Although the core WordPress site’s software is indeed free, the cost of building a site with WordPress depends on your personal goals and budget. This article aims to give you some insight on what pricing awaits you if you want to use additional features of WordPress.

Cost of Building a Site with WordPress: Knowing All About the Costs

The question that arises in several people’s minds—is WordPress free? Where are all the costs coming from? There are four WordPress add-ons that incur costs, and they are:

  • WordPress Hosting
  • Domain Name
  • Design
  • Plugins and Extensions

In order to create your own self-hosted WordPress website, you will need a web hosting to store your files. All of the websites you visit are hosted; otherwise, you cannot access them. In lay man’s term, hosting is important to make the sites permanently connected to the web.

In order to reach your website, you will need a domain name. This is basically the website’s name on the internet (www.youtube.com, www.google.com) and this is what the users will have to type to reach and browse your website.

On a free WordPress site, you will see a long list of themes and designs where you can choose from to design your own site. But if you wish to go beyond that list and have more advanced options, then you will have to purchase some premium templates or pay even more to have one custom made for you.

Plugins and extensions are types of software that allow you to add small features like a form, a gallery, and other custom-made functions. There are more than 40,000 plugins free of cost on WordPress.

Estimate Cost of Building a Site with WordPress

It is really tough to estimate the cost of building a WordPress site. It can start from as low as $100 to $1000 to even $25,000 and more. The kind of website that you are planning on building will generally affect the cost. Considering there are so many options to choose from and depending on the website you plan to create. Let us see the difference between building a low budget WordPress site and building a custom WordPress site.

  • Building a Low Budget WordPress Site

building a site with wordpress

To build a very basic website will not cost you anything more than a $100 or lesser. Domain name and web hosting are the first things you need when you create your own site. Domain name generally costs about $14.99 a year and hosting will cost about $7.99 a month.

Once you have purchased these two essential requirements, the next step is to have WordPress installed on your hosting account. Here is where you can save money by not buying template and designs for your website and using only the ones that are free of charge. You can choose from the thousands of professionally designed templates for your website.

After that, you can access 40,000 free WordPress plugins and extensions and choose which ones to add to your website. All of this will cost you approximately around $50 to $100 a year.

  • Building a Custom-Made WordPress Site

Unlike building a low budget WordPress site where you have to do everything yourself, having a custom-made WordPress site will allow you to have your own WordPress developer. He or she takes care of everything for you. Customized websites are ideal for medium-sized enterprises and large companies.

In order to support a custom-made WordPress site, it is ideal that you go to a managed WordPress hosting provider. This is a very WordPress centric hosting place that manages updates with a premium support and very strict security. It also has tools that are developer friendly.

Like the low budget site, you will be paying for the domain name and hosting. But, here you will also pay the developer who creates, designs, and does all the work for you.

It is really tough to estimate the cost of a custom-made website. There are several factors that should be taken into account such as the rates of the agency or the developer you hire to take care of everything.

To give you an idea about the costing, a custom theme for the site can cost you around $4000 to $5000. Adding features and functions that are necessary for your site will again increase the cost. It is not very rare to find companies paying even $50,000 for a custom site.

Hence it is always recommended to have a clear idea of what you are looking for a website when you create one. This will effectively lower the cost and help you avoid overspending.

Conclusion

We hope this article gives you an idea of the cost of building a site with WordPress. As mentioned earlier, everything wholly and solely depends on the fact of what exactly is the kind of website you are planning to build and design. It is important to know what you want exactly to ensure you don’t end up overspending.

Top Free Plugins

Top Free Plugins Your WordPress Site Must Have

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It is a known fact amongst WordPress users that plugins hold great importance on a website. These tools extend functionality to your WordPress site, and the kinds of plugins you need depend on the kind of website you own. The plugins are readily available in WordPress, but some people are not aware that they can use some of them for free. That is why in this article we are listing ten of the top free plugins your WordPress site must have.

TOP FREE PLUGINS

Plugins are essential for your site to function better. There is a plugin for practically every function on WordPress that will essentially reduce the stress and work on your part. Presently there are over 40,000 plugins on WordPress available right now, free of charge. If you are looking for something that isn’t on the list of cost-free add-ons, you can certainly purchase that particular plugin at a minimal rate.

40,000 and more plugins mean that you will find several plugins that serve the same purpose. In cases like those, you can choose one that fits your needs. Aside from free and premium plugins, there are also “freemium” plugins, which are basically free plugins that have that have an upgradeable option. Below, we’ve listed the ten of the top free plugins your WordPress site must have.

Top Free Plugins Your WordPress Site Must Have

  • Jetpack: It is a very powerful plugin that is created by the WordPress company itself. It has a series of features, making your work easier. This plugin will take care of the website’s security, its performance, image optimization, the growth of the traffic and several others.

Moreover, this plugin helps you to enhance distribution and efficiently share the website’s published content to services like third-party search engines which in turn will increase your website’s reach and traffic. It also creates sitemaps which enable search engines to index the website with ease. It has a strict security and notifies you if there are issues on your website.

  • Hummingbird: Caching stores data and serves it back when requested. This technique is responsible for the speed of the website and hummingbird is the plugin that scans your site to give you an analysis of its speed performance.

This plugin allows you to see the overall score of your website as well as the ideal number that your website must get. Aside from caching the data, it also helps in minimizing, compressing, and merging them so you can have more storage space.

  • Defender: This is a well-known plugin amongst several WordPress users. Defender keeps hackers at bay and keeps all your information safe. This plugin will search the entire website for any vulnerability, and if it does find any, it will notify you to fix them up with just one click. This is great for websites with sensitive information as it will help you clean up the website if you get hacked.
  • Google Analytics+: It is essential to know every piece of information about your website, such as at the number of users accessed your website as well as the time with the most number of visitors to your site.

The Google Analytics + tracks the page visits, average visit duration, referrers and so on. It also has a feature wherein you can track your website demographics. This plugin helps business owners in analyzing their best strategies for marketing and advertising.

  • Askimet: It is a default plugin on WordPress and comes with all the new core installation. It is basically an anti-spam plugin which will be able to check all the comments and keep the spam ones at bay.
  • Yoast SEO: Every WordPress user is aware of the importance of SEO, and Yoast SEO is the best plugin for that. It ensures that you are always creating better content so that your ranking goes higher on search engine result page. Its main focus is to help website owners to create content that is useful to other users and increase web traffic efficiently.
  • Google XML Sitemaps: XML sitemap is an important plugin because it helps search engine index your site. It is only with a sitemap where web crawlers are able to see the structure of a website and can retrieve the results more efficiently. Search engines get notified every time you post new content.
  • Ultimate Branding: If you use WordPress for your business, it is essential to replace the WordPress logo with your own business logo for a more personal touch. This plugin will help customize your branding all over the site.
  • WP Smush Pro: Images are a very crucial part of every website. How boring would a site be if all you have is written content? However, images are larger in size, so it can take up more space which could eventually affect your site’s speed performance. That’s where WP Smush Pro helps. It compresses all your images to ensure your site is always performing smoothly and efficiently.
  • BJ Lazy Load: The main purpose of this plugin is to help the webpage load faster and save on bandwidth. It replaces all your post thumbnails and post images with a placeholder and loads the content as it is approaching to enter the browser screen at the point when the visitor scrolls the page. BJ Lazy Load works with text widgets and covers embedded videos from Vimeo and YouTube.

Conclusion

Plugins are a great tool both for private individuals and online businesses because they help in boosting the overall performance of a website. There are thousands of plugins to choose from and picking the most important ones might be overwhelming for first-time WordPress users.

However, choosing plugins for your website is not as difficult as you think as long as you know what you or business needs. If you’re still confused and need help in picking the right plugins, let our list of the top free plugins your WordPress site must have help you. Give these plugins a try if you want to be more successful in the online marketplace.

Wealthy Affiliate websites come pre-loaded with important plugins that save you time and effort. You have the flexibility of adding plugins for specific tasks that you may need. It is a great way to get started.

top free plugins

Can WordPress Use SQL Server

Can WordPress Use SQL Server?

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Blogging is perhaps one of the most popular social media activities especially for people who love to share and discuss ideas, passions, and interests. And for bloggers who are determined to have their own site, WordPress has become their go-to space.

With an increasing number of bloggers becoming interested in this app, a question arises—can WordPress use SQL server for its installation?

Installing anything that requires more than clicking “Next, Next, Finish” can get tedious, especially for users who don’t have the necessary experience. That being said, there are plenty of tutorials out there which people can use for more complicated tasks.

Installing WordPress on a SQL server is one of these tasks that require a bit more finesse. But before going into it, it’s important to take a look at WordPress and SQL separately.

What is WordPress?

WordPress was launched in 2013 and has grown to be one of the most popular blogging systems and website management tools worldwide. Currently supporting over 60 million websites around the world, its popularity has grown not only because it offers free access to a personal website once the account has been created, but also because it is user-friendly and very customizable.

So how does WordPress actually work? For the end user, it’s simple—an URL in the search bar opens a fully functional website. At its core, WordPress is open source software designed to support the average web interface.

The fact that it is open source means anyone can check the base code and further develop their own themes and apps for a more personalized usage. While end-users might be intimidated by the idea, developers have managed to work wonders using the open-ended nature of the software.

What is SQL?

Without diving into very complicated explanations, SQL is, at its core, a programming language. Based on calculus and algebra, SQL is an ideal language for managing RDBMS (relational database management system) files.

The main idea behind it was to access large quantities of files by using simplified commands, increasing productivity for a lot of PC users.

SQL has seen improvements over the 47 years it’s been in use. Currently, there are a lot of platforms that still use it as a base language.

MySQL is open-source data management software based on the SQL language. It’s used in a client-server model, MySQL not being able to function without the presence of a server on which it has to run.

Can WordPress Use SQL server?

WordPress can’t be installed like the typical Microsoft app. The user must first create a MySQL database by opening the Database Wizard. The name of the database isn’t relevant, so the user can pick a custom label for it.

The account used with the database must have full privileges—it’s a very important step that must not be overlooked. It’s recommended that the user and server info is saved on a notepad for ease of access.

can wordpress use sql server

From wordpress.org, the latest version of the software must be downloaded. On the WordPress website, under the “Download WordPress” tab, the developers state that only the database info is required for a successful installation.

Please note that there are different menu options which should be explored, especially the “Requirements” tab to ensure that the machine is fully equipped with running the software.

Under the same tab, other useful materials are hyperlinked, such as the address to the forum, where users can seek guidance for installing the tool. The installation kit comes in a .zip format. This means that archive tools are required to access the kit. 7zip is perfect for this task.

FTP software is required to access the website’s data. FileZilla is another free choice which is perfect for this purpose. After logging into the server, the user must then access the public_html server folder.

Within the public_html server folder, the unzipped WordPress files must be stored in a new directory.

Using a web browser, the user must access the WordPress directory by typing in an address which will look something like “address.domain/WordPress Folder”. The browser will then prompt a message which reads “There doesn’t seem to be a wp-config.php file.”

Using the “Create a Configuration File,” the user will be able to link WordPress to their existing database by using the information saved on the notepad. This includes User and Database name, password, and Database Host.

If all of the data filled is correct, the user will be prompted to the WordPress setup page, where they can name the website, change the credentials, and more. The process itself takes around 5-10 minutes, as stated on the download page.

MySQL: Why it’s a Good Choice

MySQL is by no means cutting edge software. While it doesn’t stand out, it’s freeware that’s still getting constant and consistent updates, addressing security issues and other problems that might be relevant for storing sensitive data.

Since it’s been acquired by Oracle, MySQL has become less-open ended, with close-ended modules stripping it of its reputation. That being said, the InnoDB storage engine is also an Oracle proprietary product, meaning that development for the two would often address a lot of compatibility issues.

Moreover, it has support for modern hardware, since it’s constantly being updated. Because it’s designed specifically for high data traffic management, it’s an ideal choice for website data management.

Conclusion

Can WordPress Use SQL server? The answer is, yes! SQL is the programming language which is the basis of MySQL. The fact that SQL is accessible by a lot of developers has translated into a lot of products based on this programming language.

Installing WordPress on MySQL is a pretty trivial thing to do, provided that all the steps are respected. It takes under five minutes, as stated on the WordPress website.

If the installation doesn’t go as planned, there are WordPress forums where you can meet knowledgeable people who can help you troubleshoot a lot of common errors and give plenty of valuable advice.