The popularity of Joomla grows day by day as an open source CMS (Content Management System).

Besides the popularity, more and more individuals and businesses of all sizes start to rely on this open source CMS and get their products and services through the online.

In fact, more than 2.5 percent of websites are now running on a Joomla CMS. The latest research by SUCURI reveals that - Joomla is the second largest CMS downloaded over 68 million times and the second infected website platform.

The bad guys or hackers may try all kinds of hacking methods to attack your site or bring down your site. These range from remote file inclusion to cross-site scripting to the ever-popular SQL injection.

As the admin, you have the responsibility to ensuring your Joomla site is properly patched, updated and secure.

A properly configured instance of Joomla CMS on a properly configured server is about as secure as any other off-the-shelf solution.

As an owner of a blog or a website, you have to manage your site and may want to avoid the using of forbidden words or phrases.

If you are the all in one of your blog then there have might not anything to be tensed to manage your site but if you are running a multi-author site, then you should think about this matter.

Because it is quite impossible to keep all the authors informed about the editorial style and policy of your site.

You can warn your authors about the policy of your blog, leave editorial comments, add notes or custom statuses, but these will not monitor all the contents.

As a result, you need to review all the contents manually which means more work for you.

>The traffic that gathered from the organic search is the proven driver of the growth of business, isn't it?

There is no doubt about this matter. Therefore, everyone wants to achieve better search rankings.

But the only trouble is - Google is always changing the policies of their SEO. And you must not want to take down a penalty because of applying the wrong policies.

Today, I am going to share ten proven ways to improve your Google ranking in 2016.

In this 21st century, eCommerce has been becoming a booming industry all over the world.

You can buy and sell almost everything at your doorstep with the magic of eCommerce. It has changed our lifestyles entirely because we don’t have to spend time and money in traveling to the market.

>There has been a ripple in the number of eCommerce websites popping up over the past few years, but not every eCommerce endeavor became a successful one.

Does that mean you should abandon your dream of next eCommerce business? Definitely, not.

In this tutorial, I’ve come up with the beginner guide to setup a multivendor eCommerce website.

I will go through the major issues which play a crucial role in the success of a multivendor eCommerce site.

Read on to find out the beginner guide including major factors with the detailed description of each point.

1. All about Domain Names

One of the first, most important and crucial decision you have to make when starting a new business is choosing a domain name.

A short, and memorable domain name has always been the difference between creating a successful presence online and getting lost in cyberspace, with more than half a billion domain names in existence.

Whatever sector of your eCommerce business operates in, having a strong domain name is vital to your success.

2. Choose your System carefully

At the starting time of a new business, you may be feeling a mixture of emotions such as excitement, confusion, apprehension, and impatience.

Coping with this circumstances, another crucial decision you have to make after choosing your domain name is the eCommerce platform which you should use to power your store.

And this is one of the most confusing issues to take the decision at that time.

If you are already using WordPress or plan to build your website with WordPress, here are three familiar and open source WordPress eCommerce plugins for you.

WooCommerce:

WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin comes from the developers of the famous Woothemes and acquired by Automattic in 2015.

This plugin provides a lot of features including a dashboard widget so that you can quickly check the progress of your online businesses and promises to provide robust eCommerce facilities.

It is highly customizable and comes with multiple payment options including Paypal, Cheque, Cash on delivery and many more options.

A large number of add-ons and themes with a great and passionate user and developer community behind it make this platform more demanding.

Dokan:

Dokan is a multivendor WordPress plugin that leveraging the power of WooCommerce.

With Dokan you can easily build a multivendor marketplace like Amazon or eBay.

Every seller of your site will get a unique URL for their store that will be useful for their branding issue. They can manage their products and orders from the frontend of your site, so they don't need to visit the WordPress admin area.

As a site owner, you will get a percentage from each sale. That the way the site owner and the seller both will earn money.

Dokan has downloaded more than 13,000 times and made more than 2000 marketplaces worldwide. It has support for PayPal, PayPal Adaptive, Stripe, Bank Cheque, and Cash on delivery.

WP ECommerce:

With over 50,000 downloads, WP eCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress in the market now.

It can easily use with any WordPress Themes and also easy to install. It is highly customizable and provides a broad range of payment options including Manual (cheques), PayPal, etc.

3. Choose the Best Theme

A powerful, professional, good-looking and user-friendly theme for your eCommerce store is incredibly important. It is the customer's first brand experience and exposure.

Finding the perfect theme, or even selecting a designer who understands your goals, can eat up time you don't have.

Have a look our hand-picked WordPress theme, WooSome - One of the best WordPress eCommerce theme.

This theme is powered by WooCommerce and includes Visual Composer, Revolution Slider, and PSD with it that you can save total $65.

The responsive design lets your website looks good on every screen. The variations in Header, Footer and Homepage and Theme Options Panel allows you customize everything without any knowledge of coding.

65+ shortcodes and Drag & Drop page builder will make your life easier, I promise.

4. Enhance the Security of your site

Your business website is a valuable property like your others property, and you should ensure that it’s safe from thieves and intruders.

WordPress itself built with a stable and secure framework, but this doesn’t make it immune from hackers.

There have a lot of available plugins that offer protection for WordPress websites. Below are the most powerful and well-known.

• Wordfence Security
• iThemes Security
• All In One WP Security & Firewall

5. Optimized your site for Search Engine

Search engines have become increasingly sophisticated day-by-day, but they still can't see and understand a web page the same way a human can.

That is why SEO become the most important aspect that is making a website accessible to both search engine and users to understand the site. The listed in below are the most powerful SEO plugin for WordPress.

• Yoast SEO
• All in One SEO Pack

6. Speed up your Site

According to kissmetrics report, 47% of users expect your web page to load in under two seconds, and 57% of visitors will abandon your page if it’s take 3 seconds or more time to load.

Therefore, when a visitor lands on your site for the very first time; you only have a few seconds to capture their attention to convincing them to hang around.

If your site takes too long to load, most people are gone, lost before you even had a chance.

To speed up your WordPress website use one of a plugin from below.

• WP Super Cache
• Optimus - WordPress Image Optimizer
• Optimize Database
• WP Super Minify

7. Keep attention on Online Marketing

Online marketing enables a store owner to open their business around the clock without worrying about store opening hours or overtime payments for workers.

Consumers can browse an online store at any time and place orders when it is convenient for them. Offering the products on the Internet is also convenient for them. You can use the following plugins for internet marketing.

• MailChimp
• SendinBlue Subscribe

8. Backup your Site

Suppose you have a middle-sized website with lots of contents and regular visitors. You have regular consumers and regular activity on your site.

In the course of time, the site is growing, content renewal has been attracting new visitors, and the site has established a continuous communication with them every day.

What would happen if you woke up tomorrow and your web host had accidentally deleted your website?

That is why you should backup your site every day.

Fortunately, there are plenty of excellent WordPress backup plugins available that will back up your pages, posts, product descriptions, and whatever else you have on your site.

• BackupBuddy
• UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration
• BackUpWordPress

9. Multiple Payment System

The Payment Systems is one of the most important things you should consider when building your Online Business.

Presenting your customers with a variety of payment systems will ensure the customer satisfaction from your store and also remove the probability of a consumer being lost.

By default WooCommerce provides some basic payment methods, these are Direct Bank Transfer, Cheque Payment, Cash on Delivery and PayPal.

The plugins in below let you present more payment options to your customers.

• Woocommerce Payment Gateway by Novalnet
• Stripe free payment gateway for WooCommerce
• SimplePay WooCommerce Payment Gateway

Some Last Words

Creating an eCommerce store is not a simple process to complete start-to-finish. The guidelines offered here are just some of the major steps to creating your first eCommerce store and provides a comprehensive walkthrough.

If you have any suggestions for launching an online store, please let us know through the discussion section below, we do appreciate them!

Joomla is one of most popular, free, and open-source Content Management System (CMS), as well as a great online community around this CMS.

According to Joomla.org, it powers approximately 2.7% of the 1,000,000 largest websites in the world.

In general, Joomla is used for the sites those are slightly more static in nature, as well as it is suitable for more advanced utilities.

Joomla offers almost every configuration for its users. Today I am going to talk about Joomla Caching - the most discussed and desired topic of nowadays.

Translating your website into several languages will increase your audience notably.

Adding the multilingual functionality to your Joomla site is just a few instinctive steps away. Let me do it even easier for you.

This tutorial is going to show you how to configure a multi-language Joomla site. To perform this you need to go through the following steps:

1. Install a new language
2. Create a new content language with new parameters
3. Enable Language Filter plugin
4. Setting up Language Switcher module
5. Create menu for every installed language
6. Create menu module
7. Multilingual articles

Step 1: Install a new language

At first, let's add the language files for the desired language we want to use as the second language on our site.

So, log in to your Joomla admin panel. Now, to install the language pack you need to navigate to Extensions -> Languages.

In the screen that opens, select "Install Languages".

Another screen will be opened, tick on your desired language pack and click "Install” button.

You will see your installed language packs in Extensions -> Languages -> Installed.

Step 2: Make a new content language with new parameters

The next step is to originate a content language.

Although you have already installed a second language, still you need to add the appropriate information for this languages.

In this step, you need to navigate to Extensions -> Languages -> Content Languages.

You will see here, the default content language, to add a new content language click the "New" button from the top menu.

A new screen will open, insert the required information according to the selected language.

Look at the image below. There are five required fields.

Title: This fields for language name that will display in the Joomla backend that you can assign a specific language for your articles, modules or other items.

Title Native: Here you insert the original language name which will display in the language manager and the list of content languages.

Language Tag: The language tag consists of the language code. If you are not sure about it, you can find it next to the language name in the list of installed languages at the language manager section.

URL Language Code: This is the code that will appear in the URL. For example, here I insert "de" hence, the URL will like this when I select Germany as the desired language. www.example.com/index.php/de/

Image Prefix: This is the language code. Joomla uses this code to display the country flag images enabling the visitors to select a site language.

Step 3: Enable Language Filter plugin

The language filter plugin enables the CMS to recognize the different installed languages and display only the content relevant to the current language.

Just navigate to Extensions -> Plugins and search for the “Language Filter” Plugin and enable it.

Also, enable the "Language Code" plugin. This plugin installed with the Joomla engine by default.

Step 4: Setting up Language Switcher module

You will also have to add a menu module to display the language list on your site.

Navigate to Extensions -> Modules, a new window will open. Click “New” and select “Language Switcher” from the list.

It will open an editing window.

Insert the title as it is required, though you have an option on hand to display the title or hide.

Set the position where the switcher module will visible and set the switcher status as public.

Look at the image below. A language switcher section is visible on the right sidebar.

Step 5: Create menu for every installed language

You will need to create menus for each content language to display multilingual content on your site.

To perform so navigate to Menus -> Manage -> Add new Menu.

After that insert the "Title" and "Menu Type" and hit the save button.

Do the same process for every content language that you wish to display on your site.

You will find all your created menus in Menus -> Manage later and also edit them.

So now you need to add items in each menu, the easiest way to perform is to open your main menu then select any item and then hit the "Batch" button top of the page.

In this process, we are going to copy all the menu items from the main menu to each menu.

A popup will open, you need to set the language to which you are going to copy the item and select the menu to where you want to copy this.

Check copy from radio button and press "Process". Once it was done, do that for each one.

Now you have a menu for every language and several items on it.

You can open each menu one by one, make an item to default page and edit them.

Step 6: Create menu module

Just navigate Extensions -> Modules then select a menu from the list.

In the module section, set position for selected menu.

In advanced section, insert "nav-pills" in the menu class suffix field.

And then in menu assignment section, select "Only on the pages selected" option.

It will display only the items which you want to show in your menubar.

So, uncheck the other languages menu items.

Step 7: Multilingual articles

Let's create a multilingual article to see how it works.

Create a new post, set the language of the post in the content section.

Make a copy of this post or make more copy as you want. Set different languages for each post.

And now again edit the post, go the "Associations" section, associate the post with the copy of this post.

Save and close it.

As a result, when you click a flag it will change both the menu and the articles to the desired language.

Look at the image below, how I associate the posts to each other.

So, we are at the finishing stage. Just take a look how it works.

Make this process easier with an extension:

In the first section, I talk about the manual process.

Now here, in the second section, I'll show you how to create a multilingual website using an extension.

In our previous article we discussed about Neno translation extension for joomla and today I am going to use the another popular extensions JA Multilingual Component.

It's free Joomla multi-language translation extension.

This extension is light in weight but robust at speed. To boost up your multilingual website, it will do almost everything what you need.

Let's see how it works through the following steps:

1. Download JA Multilingual Component
2. Component Installation
3. Translate Language

Step 1: Download JA Multilingual Component

At the beginning stage, you need to download JA Multilingual Component from their official site.

It is free of cost. To download this extension, you need to create an account on their site because they don't admit to providing their service to non-users.

Step 2: Component Installation

Navigate Extensions -> Manage -> Install.

In the new window that opened, you will see a file upload option.

Just point to your download file and hit Upload & Install button. After a few seconds, the extension will successfully install.

Step 3: Translate Language

Navigate Components -> JA Multilingual.

Here you see a notification that asks to configures authenticate API (Application Programming Interface) to translate the site.

Just press the Options from the top. Insert the API key and save and close the current window.

You can install languages as you want and then press Translate All to do all tasks immediately. Wait a few moments until it is done.

Take a look how it works.

Final Words

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and now you can create a multilingual site using Joomla. Let us know about your further query and share your opinion.

Broken links refer the links on your website that directs or points your visitors to a page or a file that no longer exists. It is also known as dead links.

How do you feel when you click on a link and end up with “404 page not found” error? In general, you become annoyed with this kind of actions.

Truly, Broken links are annoying and create the bad user experience. And the most important issue is, it's bad for your website’s SEO.

So how do you know if you have any broken links?

There are several process to check for broken links depending on which platform you are using.

Google Webmaster:

In general, Google Webmaster Tools provide a free service for all kind of platforms. It will show you the “crawl errors”, which include your broken links.

You can see exactly how many broken links you have on your website and exactly which URLs no longer existed and were generating 404 errors. Google Webmaster also provide you other useful diagnostic information for best SEO practice.

Broken Link Checker - WordPress Plugin:

If you are using WordPress platform, there are lots of plugins to help. Among them, the Broken Link Checker plugin is the most popular and is active on more than 400,000 WordPress sites.

This plugin can detect your articles, comments, and other content within your website, for redirects, broken links, and missing images and prevent search engines from following those broken links.

Methods to fix website's broken links:

After creating a list of broken links on your site, you can proceed to repair them. There are a few methods in which you can do this.

Correct the Links: If you have linked to a website with incorrect information or URL, you need to edit all the URL and replace it with the correct value.

Regenerate the Links: If you have referenced a resource that is no longer exists, or has not updated in a couple of years, just replace the referenced website with an alternative resource.

Remove the Links: You may want to remove the link permanently if it is no longer exists, or is no longer relevant.

Here I'll show you how to remove broken links using Google Webmaster Tools.

Step 1: Open your webmaster tool account and click on Crawl Errors as shown in the screenshot. Now click on download and saves these as an excel file.

Step 2: Go to Google index at left most side and then click Remove URLs. Then a new page will open which would ask you to Temporarily hide request. Click on Temporarily hide request and enter one of your broken link URL, which you had previously stored in your excel file.

Step 3: Press the button of "Submit Request".

Step 4: In this step, you will get a notification about "Your requested URL has added for removal".

After few hours, your broken links or URLs will be removed from the web and will never disappoint your organic traffic.

Finishing Words:

Which platform you are using it doesn't a big issue, but broken links on any site are not good for a website's SEO.

Hope this post will help you to fixed the broken links successfully. Let us know your experience or suggestion through the comment section.

WordPress shortcodes introduced in its early version 2.5 before about six years ago and since that time, shortcodes are used to increase the functionality of WordPress.

The shortcodes are a particular tag that you can enter into a post or a page which gets replaced with different content when visitors are viewing the post or page on the website.

You’ve probably used shortcodes before, but did you know it’s pretty easy to create your own, with no plugins necessary?

In this tutorial, I will show you how to build some simple WordPress shortcodes for the subscription that will help you to create any functionality in future as you like.

You can directly create your shortcode function in the functions.php file or build a simple plugin. I'll show you both but at first, I go through the functions.php file.

Simple Facebook Follow ShortCode

In the beginner part of this tutorial, I will create a simple shortcode that will do the similar task in every time whenever you type it in the editor.

First, you need to create the callback function that will return the message what you want to show (in shortcodes we don’t echo anything, everything returned).

Just go to your functions.php file and paste the code snippet at bottommost.

function subscribe_link(){
    return 'Follow us on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.facebook.com/ThemeXpert/">Facebook</a>';
}
add_shortcode('subscribe', 'subscribe_link');

Test the ShortCode

Our shortcode is ready to use. Just add the code [subscribe] to your post or page wherever you want to show it.

See the image in below; it works correctly.

How To Add Parameters in Shortcode

Usually, you need to add a dynamic functionality in your shortcode and don't want to show the same content in every time.

As I am talking about subscription, there are lots of social networking sites in today's world; you may also want to get touched with your audience through many social sites. Therefore, I will show you how to add a parameter to the shortcode to change URL of social sites.

Again, just go to your functions.php file and add the following codes in there.

function subscribe_link_att($atts) {
    $default = array(
        'link' => '#',
    );
    $a = shortcode_atts($default, $atts);
    return 'Follow us on '.$a['link'];
}
add_shortcode('subscribe', 'subscribe_link_att');

Test ShortCode Parameteres

Now insert the following code to your post or page wherever you want to show it.

[subscribe link='https://www.facebook.com/ThemeXpert/']
[subscribe link='https://www.twitter.com/ThemeXpert/']

So, here is the image that shows it works correctly.

Working with Content

You have noticed that the previous example shows the direct link to social sites, but this process is not user-friendly. It looks good if it is possible to bind the links in HTML anchor tag.

Therefore, I will now show you how to working with contents within a shortcode.

It is quite same with the previous example just a tiny differences.

You need to add one extra parameter in the function and initially declare its value as null. And then call the do_shortcode function to use the contents.

See the following code.

function subscribe_link_att($atts, $content = null) {
    $default = array(
        'link' => '#',
    );
    $a = shortcode_atts($default, $atts);
    $content = do_shortcode($content);

    return 'Follow us on <a href="/.$a['link']." style="color: red">'.$content.'</a>';
}
add_shortcode('subscribe', 'subscribe_link_att');

Testing Content ShortCode

Insert the following code to your post or page.

[subscribe link='https://www.facebook.com/ThemeXpert/']Facebook[/subscribe]
[subscribe link='https://www.twitter.com/ThemeXpert/']Twitter[/subscribe]

Look at the image. I have add style in the anchor tag. Hence, the link text looks red.

ShortCode with a Plugin

If you don't want to customize your functions.php file, you can create a simple plugin to utilize this shortcode functionality.

To create a plugin just go to your plugin folder and make a folder named subscriptions and create a PHP file inside it with the same name, that means the plugin folder name and PHP file name will be same.

Now add the heading details of the WordPress plugin. You may follow the example in below:

/*
Plugin Name: Subscriptions
Plugin URI: http://example.com
Description: A very basic test plugin for subscriptions
Version: 1.0
Author: ThemeXpert
Author URI: http://example.com
License: GPL2
*/

Cut the code from your functions.php file which you added a few minutes ago and now insert here in the plugin file, below the heading information of plugins file.

Now you can see your plugin in the plugins directory. Just activate the plugin and follow the same process as before.

I hope you have enjoyed this whole tutorial on creating a unique shortcode for your WordPress website. Share your opinion through the comment section.