So, care should be taken to protect your website from hacking attempts. But sometimes despite your best efforts, your website may still get hacked. The following are some sequential steps that you should take to recover your website.

Steps to repair and recover your website

1. Check your computer first: The local environment should be scanned for any viruses first. If your computer is infected, it makes the job of hackers easy. First, get your antivirus updated.

2. Change passwords: You will have to change all the passwords that may have been compromised due to the hacking attack. You will have to change passwords in the control panel of your website, your network and also your database so that the hacker no longer has access to sensitive information. You should change cPanel passwords, FTP passwords and SSH password. Also if your website has multiple user acoounts, make sure to create new passwords for all users. A hacker may use his access to create new users. If you closely scrutinize the user account administration of your website, you may be able to identify the bogus user accounts and remove them.

3. Understand what exactly happened: You should first try to determine the nature of the attack. Did the attackers inject any new code, did they include a remote file or did they hack the cPanel? Is your website the only domain hacked or did other websites also fall to the attack in case of a shared web host?

4. Contact your web host: Most web hosts have the right tools, a support team with the right skills and specific information about the hacking attack that can help you identify the nature of the problems or find a solution. They can also provide backup support. If you are on a shared hosting service, other domains hosted may have been compromised as well. So a concerted effort will be needed.

5. Update your CMS and plugins: You should always use updated CMS platform and also use the latest versions of the plugins because hackers often find a loophole in versions that have not been updated.

6. Remove your site from blacklists: Many search engines including Google may balcklist your website if they find it hacked or infected by malware. In such a case, you will have to request them to remove your website from such a list because it affects your SERP or they may even remove your website from search index.

7. Take your site offline briefly: If you can’t fix the problems immediately, take the website offline briefly. It would prevent further damage by the hacker and also stop your users from getting a malware alert which can damage your reputation. Instead, display a 503 error message to inform the users that the website is temporarily unavailable.

Conclusion

A website can be hacked due to many reasons and in many ways. But you should always take steps that mitigate chances of an attack. Don’t make it easy for hackers to attack your website. If you are not confident with coding, consult a professional in case of a hacking attack.

The post How to Fix and Recover a Hacked Website? appeared first on Stacked Site.

The problem of getting infected with malware is that Google might mark your site as “unsafe”. A message may be displayed to that effect to the visitors. It could be a great deal of embarrassment and loss of face for your company. Also, if some malicious code is embedded in your site, a search engine would continue to crawl it and the links found in the source code may get indexed to your link profile. That could get you into further trouble.

How would you know that you have been hacked?

It is not always easy to tell if your site has been hacked. You should look for malicious links in your source code first. For example, if you have a site called yoursite.com, where ‘yoursite’ represents your website, and you see links and content that does not seem remotely related to your site, it is possible that your site has been hacked.

What would you do in the aftermath of a malware attack?

If you feel that the security of your website has been compromised, you should immediately start by changing and strengthening websites. If you have a WP powered website, you should change your FTP password and your WP admin password. Try to set longer and stronger passwords which use multiple characters because hackers often use software which are extremely quick and can use brute force to guess the correct password. You may consider changing the file access permission to ‘read only’ in case you find malicious links in your ‘.htaccess’ files.

One more important tip is to check your plugins in WP because they are often infected, especially if not updated. Just disable them by renaming the directory. If the live web scanner shows that your computer is now clean, you would know that that problem was in the plugin. You can now change the name of the plugin directory to the original one, and the site would go live again.

Conclusion

If you are not very tech-savvy or someone who is not good with programming, you could leave the problem to a professional expert. You may visit stackddesign.com, and create a ticket explaining the malware problem, and the professionals at ‘stackd.design’ will take care of the malware problem for you.

The post How to Remove malware from your Website? appeared first on Stacked Site.

WordPress checks the child theme first for a particular functionality and if it does not exist, then WordPress checks its parent theme for the functionality. According to ‘ElegantThemes’, 85% of WordPress users modify themes but only 35% use child themes. The reason could be a lack of knowledge about child themes or perceived difficulty in creating one.

Reasons for using child themes

• Makes updates easier: If you update without a child theme, you can either update or lose the changes that you have made to the theme or not update it at all. Of course, not updating the themes, plugins, and the software WordPress would make it outdated, and cause it to lose efficiency. Security may also be compromised.
• Makes the process of development easier: If you decide to make an update without a child theme, you may be adding snippets of code to the code base of the original theme, which could run into hundreds if not thousands of lines. That means, tracking the changes may become cumbersome later on. It makes more sense to make changes to the child theme which contains less number of files and also less code to handle. That makes the documentation process easier.
• Makes reverting to the original condition easier: If you think that customization of the theme did not go according to your plan, you can simply disable the child theme, and everything would go back to the original state.

Steps for creating a child theme

A child theme can be created by following these simple steps:

1. A theme directory needs to be created in the WordPress install.
2. A style sheet with appropriate information about your child theme has to be created.
3. You may now use the functionalities of the parent theme.
4. Activate the child theme, and the WordPress site would look like the original.

Conclusion

A child theme has a lot of advantages and is easy to use, contrary to popular belief. If you are a designer who makes frequent changes to your WordPress supported blog or website, start using child themes and enjoy the advantages.

The post Why should you be Using Child Theme for your WordPress Site? appeared first on Stacked Site.

While Robot.txt is an exclusion protocol and tells search engines what not to crawl on your site, sitemaps do the exact opposite. It helps search engines index important portions of the website and thus improve its visibility. Google was the first search engine to use XML sitemaps which are different from ordinary HTML sitemaps. Now, other search engines are also following suit and thus the importance of sitemaps have grown further from the point of view of SEO.

Advantages of sitemaps

1. A sitemap is like a blueprint: A sitemap is like a blueprint for building a house. It guides people who are working on the project to design a website. It should be kept in a central location and in a format that makes it easily accessible. It helps everybody working on the project to know the project status, the changes that have been made or changes that may be made. It saves wastage of resources and extra work that would have been required otherwise.
2. A sitemap helps to understand the goals: A sitemap gives a goal and a plan to the designer. It helps the designing team to understand what they exactly want from this website and what needs to be done in order to attain those goals.
3. Avoid duplication of content: It would be a waste of time and resources if you continue to create similar content again, and again, every time you need it. It is far more elegant and efficient to interlink content. A sitemap helps you to understand which pages exist where and how they have been interlinked. It makes the process of linking easier.
4. Sitemaps make it easier for search engines to index changes: Although search engines take a lot of time to index new pages or changes to your website, the process can be made more streamlined by having a sitemap which captures the changes.

Conclusion

A sitemap is an essential part of a website from the point of view of design, SEO, and navigability. Google does not even penalize sites if they have one XML sitemap and another HTML sitemap. As the importance of indexing increases and search engines come equipped with better crawling algorithms, websites would need good sitemaps to make the process of loading the site URLs quicker.

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Low PHP memory limit set by website host

Shared hosting providers often do this. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough memory for your plug-ins to run, or scripts to be executed, or both, ultimately resulting in the White Screen of Death.

There is a simple fix for this:
Simply log in to your FTP server, find the public_html folder, and open the wp-config.php file in a text editor. Add the line

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’);

to the PHP code (you should find a section starting with some lines later – anywhere between these two lines will do), save the file and close it.

Plug-ins

A faulty plug-in could be causing the White Screen of Death. In the public_html folder, look for a sub-folder named wp-content. Inside this, there should be a folder named plugins. All you have to do is rename it to something else, like ‘Betsy’ – or any other name you like. Then see if your site is working, minus the plug-ins. If it is, you now know for sure that the White Screen of Death is caused by an incompatible plug-in.

What is the solution?

Inside the plugins (or Betsy as it is now) folder, you will find a folder for each of of your plug-ins. Rename Betsy back to plugins, but try the renaming process for each plug-in’s folder (and then reloading the site) until you find out which one is causing the White Screen of Death. You find the plug-in responsible when you have renamed that plug-in’s folder and the White Screen of Death doesn’t occur.

After you have zeroed in on the culprit, see if you can find an alternative plug-in for your website. If not, try updating it to its latest version. If none of the plug-ins are causing the White Screen of Death, then it might be your WordPress theme.

WordPress theme

In the public_html folder, there should be a folder named themes. Rename it, and the site should revert back to its default theme. If the White Screen of Death no longer appears, you know your theme was causing it. Just like we did with the plug-ins, you can rename it back to themes, but before doing so, you can rename the active theme’s folder name.

This changes your theme, but better that than a White Screen of Death. You can then try downloading a new WordPress them for your site.

Too technical? We can get your WordPress site back up and running for FREE. And in less than an hour!

The post Get Rid of the White Screen of Death – Permanently! appeared first on Stacked Site.

A well-organized grid reduces visual chaos and provides a breathing space to each design element so that they stand out individually as well as a single unit. A well-coordinated grid layout can help the designer to determine the right color proportions and use the right balance between design elements and white space at the margin of each row and column.

Grids are also simple. Although a grid based layout may not be suitable for all projects, a bulk of the modern design projects which need speed and efficiency are using grid based layouts to establish order without looking monotonous.

Some of the benefits of grid-based layouts are as follows

1. Aesthetic appeal: Grids can maintain clarity within chaos. It ushers in a certain order which makes it possible for the designer to clearly highlight the different design elements and use vast amounts of content in a single grid layout without cluttering the space. It is sensual without being exotic.
2. Enjoys the benefits of economies of scale: A design grid once created can be used as a road-map for future design ideas and the time of creating a new design reduces. It allows different designers to collaborate effectively since the core grid is in place and all they have to do is create different designs by switching places of components on the same grid i.e. changing the alignment or using new components on the same grid.
3. Allows creation of responsive web design: A grid-based layout is ideal for creating a responsive web design because it uses a single set of design codes to be used for the creation of a website for different devices.

A grid based layout is cost-effective and saves a lot of time. If you are building a commercial web design, in 8 out of 10 cases, you would need to use grid-based designs for their inherent advantages.

The post Why do Most Experts Prefer a Grid-Based Web Design? appeared first on Stacked Site.

If you are really serious about improving the conversion rate of your website, you should follow the below mentioned tips to make your checkout page more effective.

Visual appeal is one of the many important aspects of improving the user experience of a checkout page of a website. If the page has structured layout, it improves navigability of the page and encourages the prospect to go ahead with the purchase. Getting the balance of color, white space and content absolutely perfect is the key here. Some of the important design elements are-

1. Add the checkout button at the top and bottom of the page– A checkout button should be colorful, attractive and have animation effects if possible. More importantly though, a checkout button should be placed at the top as well as the bottom of the page so that the customer doesn’t have to scroll up and down too much to find the all important button. Experts state that putting the conversion button above the fold is a very good practice to improve user experience and thus conversion. 

2. Have the option of going back to shopping from the checkout page- When designing the checkout page make sure that you allow the users to return to the main product selection and shopping page from the checkout page. Sometimes, the consumer may forget to select a particular product when they are checking out. If they are not given an option to return to the product selection page and is checked out fully, they may not come to make the other purchase that was on their mind, especially if it requires them to sign in again. Most usability studies would red flag it.

3. Credit card logos and security seals- This improves the trust factor of a website. Include these on the checkout page to communicate to the prospect that transactions on this website are safe and very easy. Also have multiple payment gateway options.

More information on the product and payment options before the final checkout is recommended.

4. Product summary and testimonials– You can include a short description about the product they have selected on the checkout page so that the customer is absolutely sure that they have made the right decision. Hold back nothing. Be transparent. Include some believable testimonials which give the designation and place of residence of the customer who is sharing the testimonial. See that it explains how the customer has been benefited and their experience with this particular website.

5. Include promo code on the website: A lot of websites overlook it. If there is a promo code for a particular purchase, include it on the website itself so that customers won’t have to leave the website to find out the promo code and then return. A lot of them won’t return if they have to find it by doing a quick internet search.

Most of these recommended ideas have been discussed by various experts in the past. There are many more ideas that you can look at. But, these are the easiest points to get started with and implementing these ideas will surely improve the conversion rate of your e-commerce site.

The post 5 Checkout Page Strategies to Improve E-Commerce Website Conversion Rates appeared first on Stacked Site.

• De-clutter your site landing pages. A site that has too much going on will leave visitors both overwhelmed and confused. They won’t be able to spot that CTA button amidst all that clutter. It can also leave users under the impression that you are trying too hard to win them over. You want to keep your site design simple and appealing.
• While it’s not a bad idea to do up your site a little differently than other sites out there, you don’t want to miss out on the basics in the process. Online users have come to expect a certain few basics on all sites- About Us, Careers, Investors, Social Media, Store Locator, Privacy Policy, and Contact Us pages for example. You will usually find most of these tabs on the footer of the page. Make sure your website has these basics covered, so site visitors do not feel as if they’re in unfamiliar online territory.
• Icons and images do a good job of upping that professional quotient of your website. Images are great storytellers. In fact. some of the biggest brands out there have full-blown images as the backdrop for their site. Icons are equally important for a professional touch. Whether you’re talking about the features of your service or why customers should choose your business, the use of icons makes it look more professional and believable.
• Keep the navigation simple, so visitors easily find what they’re here for. Online users are usually quite impatient to find things. A site with navigation that is complex or not user-friendly will negatively affect user experience, and may cause users to leave the site. A search bar and site map are indispensable for professional sites. A smooth, intuitive navigation could mean lower bounce rate and higher conversions for your brand.

A quick site audit from a professional Brisbane web design agency can reveal what changes your site needs to appear professional. Remember, how your site looks not just affects whether or not users decide to stay on your site, but also their purchase decisions with your brand.

The post How to Give Your Website a Professional Appeal appeared first on Stacked Site.

Clear message

Can a user understand the service/product/value you offer within the first few seconds of visiting your site?

The average site has under 7 seconds to help make a visitor understand what it does, according to digital marketing Brisbane experts. Given how user attention spans are getting lower, don’t be surprised if some visitors spend as much as just 3 seconds to decide whether or not they want to stay on your site.

Your website should be designed so it sends through a clear message to the visitor. Ask any professional Brisbane graphic design agency and they will tell you how image sliders and too much information translate to higher bounce rate.

Businesses like the idea of using clever tag-lines and quirky web design formats for their pages. But given how little a time users take to decide whether or not they want to stay on your website, you are better off sticking to standard web design formats and punchlines that convey a clear business message.

Visual cues

Visual cues are a great way to capture the attention of users. However, if you include too many visual cues, you will leave the user confused. So you want to use visual cues sparingly, and strategically, say advertising agency Brisbane experts.

You may be tempted to use stock photos for your website landing pages as it an easy option, but they don’t always have the intended impact. Try using exclusive images of your business instead, so you can connect better with your customers.

For instance, if you operate a food delivery service, have a professional photographer take pictures of your staff in action during their workday, and that of happy customers, instead of run-off-the-mill photos.

Videos can be a great way to keep site visitors hooked as well, say marketing agency Brisbane. Rather than explaining what your business does in page-long content, put up a video for users to watch so they can understand what you do.

Of course, you do not want your video to be set on auto-play; if anything it will dissuade the user from watching the video, as most users like to choose the what and how of consuming online content.

The post Is Your Web Design Aligned With Your Digital Marketing Strategy? appeared first on Stacked Site.

Separate SEO and web design strategies

SEO and web design go hand in hand. Businesses with sound SEO performance will tell you how important it is to incorporate SEO logic into web design.

Your website pages need to be optimized for SEO and conversion. You want conversion-critical pages to get noticed, and not get drowned in all the noise created by the other pages. Too little content and crawlers have very little information to work with to index your page to the right audience. You want your site content optimized so it draws the target audience.

Businesses that are operating with separate SEO and web design strategies would do good to start with a site audit, so they can redo their site with a common strategy.

Broken links

Broken links are not just looked down upon by users, but by Google as well. The Google search engine uses crawling activity to index websites online. When website crawlers come across a broken link, the site is naturally seen as one that has poor usability, which in turn affects your rankings.

Whether you have inbound dead links, or links to other sites that are broken, it gets in the way of visitors trying to access information, and hurts your site’s trust quotient. There are various web tools, apps and plugins that you can use to spot broken links on your site and fix them.

Lack of mobile-friendly site strategy

When the Mobilegeddon occurred, many sites instantly lost their high ranking status. Mobile device usage cannot afford to be ignored, and setting up a mobile site has become mandatory.

Statistics show that 40 percent of users access sites through their mobile devices. If you do not have a mobile-friendly site then you are not just missing out on a large portion of potential customers but also losing search engine ranking points.

Google’s recent search engine algorithm updates focus on mobile device usage. It’s pretty clear that you will be out of the search engine race if you do not have a mobile-friendly site.

You have two options here. You can set up a single responsive site that automatically adapts itself to fit the dimensions of the device that it is being viewed on. Or you can get separate sites for desktop and mobile devices, to take your mobile-friendly strategy forward.

The post Website SEO Mistakes You Want to Avoid appeared first on Stacked Site.