WordPress

WooCommerce vs Shopify is a showdown between two ecommerce giants. Shopify powers over 800,000 online stores, while WooCommerce claims it’s the web’s most popular ecommerce platform. But which is right for you? Shopify is powerful, reliable, and easy to use, offering lovely templates and brilliant customer support. With Shopify, you’re paying a monthly premium for a solid platform – in fact, Shopify goes on to win today’s battle (spoiler alert!). WooCommerce is the ecommerce plugin that turns any WordPress site into a powerful online store. It’s an open-source platform, and therefore free to install, making it ideal for cost-conscious users, but you’ll need to pay for things like hosting and security, however. With WooCommerce, you can create a truly bespoke, enormous online store if you know how to code (or can hire someone who does).  In this article, we’ll be discussing WooCommerce powered by Bluehost, our top-rated hosting provider for all WordPress sites. This article will tell you which of these platforms will best suit your business. We’ve conducted extensive research on over 50 platforms, so we know all the ins and outs, and we’ve pitched WooCommerce and Shopify against each other in categories such as ease of use, pricing, sales features, customer support, and more. WooCommerce vs Shopify: Pros and Cons Ease of Use Build Time Design and Themes Sales Features Plugins and Integrations Marketing Tools Payment Options and Transaction Fees SEO Security Customer Support Pricing. Shopify vs WooCommerce: Conclusion   1 : WooCommerce vs Shopify: Pros and Cons Shopify Pros and Cons Shopify Pros Shopify Cons Hosted software – Shopify includes hosting and security, plus you don’t need to use any code to build a brilliant online store Transaction fees – Shopify is the only platform to enforce its own transaction fee, unless you use its own gateway, Shopify Payments 24/7 support – have your issues resolved around the clock to keep your customers and sales figures happy Costly apps – it’s easy to rack up an expensive yearly bill for your apps Multichannel integration -sell on other channels like Amazon, Facebook, eBay and Pinterest as a built-in feature   WooCommerce Pros and Cons WooCommerce Pros WooCommerce Cons Limitless customization – as an open-source platform, you can use code to customize your store to your heart’s content Not beginner-friendly – unless you have some coding knowledge, you’ll struggle to build the online store you want on WooCommerce, unlike on Shopify Scalable – WooCommerce and its fantastic flexibility allow you to achieve your ecommerce dreams   Excellent value for money – it’s free to install, plus the extensions are mostly reasonably priced, helping you add greater functionality to your store at a low cost   2 : Ease of Use There’s little doubt that WooCommerce has a steeper learning curve than Shopify, and from our testing, Shopify is definitely easier to get to grips with for a ‘regular’ user. In our testing, Shopify scored 4.1/5 and WooCommerce scored 3.5/5, which tells you all you need to know – but let’s dive into more detail. And don’t just take our word for it. We got regular, everyday people to try out Shopify, and here are some of their thoughts: “Using Shopify, I was able to create a far cleaner website than I thought I could, which has really made my products stand out. “I really liked how you supplied the information and the products you wanted to display, and then Shopify more or less just created a website for you.” Shopify is a hosted ecommerce platform. That means it takes care of a lot of the technical side of operating a store. From your domain name and hosting (where your site lives online) to any security (SSL) certificates, Shopify has you covered. On top of that, with Shopify, you don’t have to install, manage, or update any software. No need to worry about security or backups, either. In contrast, with WooCommerce, you need to do a little more legwork, like sourcing your own web hosting and security – but that’s really easy to do. We recommend using Bluehost to power your WooCommerce store. Bluehost’s dedicated WooCommerce plans come with handy features such as WooCommerce auto-install, as well as a free domain name and SSL certificate. How cool is that? Good to know…   We’d recommend powering your WooCommerce store with Bluehost. It’s our top-rated web hosting provider and it’s been endorsed by WooCommerce itself. What’s even better, prices for new customers start at just $6.95 per month (usually $13.99). By using Bluehost, you get access to: WooCommerce auto-install Free domain name and SSL certificate Storefront theme pre-installed 24/7 support from in-house WordPress experts Shopify vs WooCommerce – Ease of Use: The Verdict Shopify is the winner. WooCommerce is a far more technical platform that will require a certain level of knowledge to use, or a willingness to spend some time learning. In contrast, Shopify is accessible to the everyday person, and you don’t need to know how to code to get the most out of it. Further Information Make sure you’re picking a quality builder for your quality business – find details in our chart of the Best Ecommerce Website Builders of 2019 Not sure which ecommerce builder is best for you? Read our review of the Best Ecommerce Platforms to find out. 3 : Build Time Are you looking to build a powerful store, but want to get the ball rolling quickly? Or are you willing to invest a bit of time to have greater control? In a nutshell: Shopify will let you get your store live quicker than WooCommerce. If you’re starting from scratch or have limited technical skills, Shopify is the best option. Getting your store ‘live’ is far quicker and easier. You have your hand held as you set up your store, and can give it a look and feel by choosing and editing themes. Unlike setting up a store with WordPress, the process is not manual, while Shopify stores everything you need in one place. WooCommerce is more suited to users that aren’t looking to gain masses of sales immediately. Building stores on this platform is more of a creative project than it is on Shopify – you’ll have lots of creative control, and you can make the

Do you want to add HTTP security headers in WordPress? HTTP security headers allow you to add an extra layer of security to your WordPress website. They can help block common malicious activity from affecting your website performance. In this beginner’s guide, we’ll show you how to easily add HTTP security headers in WordPress. What are HTTP Security Headers? HTTP security headers are a security measure that allows your website’s server to prevent some common security threats before it affects your website. Basically, when a user visits your website, your web server sends an HTTP header response back to their browser. This response tells browsers about error codes, cache control, and other statuses. The normal header response issues a status called HTTP 200. After which your website loads in the user’s browser. However, if your website is having difficulty then your web server may send a different HTTP header. For example, it may send a 500 internal server error, or a not found 404 error code. HTTP security headers are a subset of these headers and are used to prevent websites from common threats like click-jacking, cross-site scripting, brute force attacks, and more. Let’s have a quick glance at what HTTP security headers look like and what they do to protect your website. HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) header tells web browsers that your website uses HTTPs and should not be loaded using insecure protocol like HTTP. If you have moved your WordPress website from HTTP to HTTPs, then this security header allows you to stop browsers from loading your website on HTTP. X-XSS Protection X-XSS Protection header allows you to block cross-site scripting from loading on your WordPress website. X-Frame-Options X-Frame-Options security header prevents cross-domain iframes or click-jacking. X-Content-Type-Options X-Content-Type-Options blocks content mime-type sniffing. That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add HTTP security headers in WordPress. Adding HTTP Security Headers in WordPress HTTP security headers work best when they are set at the web server level (i.e your WordPress hosting account). This allows them to be triggered early on during a typical HTTP request and provides maximum benefit. They work even better if you are using a DNS-level website application firewall like Sucuri or Cloudflare. We’ll show you each method, and you can choose one that works best for you. Here are quick links to different methods, you can jump to the one that suits you. Adding HTTP security headers using Sucuri Adding HTTP security headers using Cloudflare Adding HTTP security headers using .htaccess Adding HTTP security headers using WordPress Plugin Testing HTTP security headers 1. Adding HTTP Security Headers in WordPress using Sucuri Sucuri is the best WordPress security plugin on the market. If you are using their website firewall service too, then you can set HTTP security headers without writing any code. First, you will need to sign up for a Sucuri account. It is a paid service that comes with a sever level website firewall, security plugin, CDN, and malware removal guarantee. During sign up, you will answer simple questions, and Sucuri documentation will help you set up the website application firewall on your website. After signing up, you need to install and activate the free Sucuri plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin. Upon activation, go to Sucuri Security » Firewall (WAF) page and enter your Firewall API key. You can find this information under your account on Sucuri website. Click on the Save button to store your changes. Next, you need to switch to your Sucuri account dashboard. From here, click on the Settings menu on top and then switch to the Security tab. From here you can choose three sets of rules. The default protection, HSTS, and HSTS Full. You will see which HTTP security headers will be applied for each set of rules. Click on the ‘Save Changes in The Additional Headers’ button to apply your changes. That’s all, Sucuri will now add your selected HTTP security headers in WordPress. Since it is a DNS level WAF, your website traffic is protected from hackers even before they reach your website. 2. Adding HTTP Security Headers in WordPress using Cloudflare Cloudflare offers a basic free website firewall and CDN service. It lacks advanced security features in their free plan, so you will need to upgrade to their Pro plan which are more expensive. To add Cloudflare on your site, see our tutorial on how to add Cloudflare free CDN in WordPress. Once Cloudflare is active on your website, go to the SSL/TLS page under your Cloudflare account dashboard and then switch to the Edge Certificates tab. Now, scroll down to the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) section and click on the ‘Enable HSTS’ button. This will bring up a popup with instructions telling you that you must have HTTPS enabled on your WordPress blog before using this feature. Click on the Next button to continue, and you will see the options to add HTTP security headers. From here, you can enable HSTS, no-sniff header, apply HSTS to subdomains (if they are using HTTPS), and preload HSTS. This method provides basic protection using HTTP security headers. However, it does not let you add X-Frame-Options and Cloudflare doesn’t have a user interface to do that. You can still do that by creating a script using the Workers feature. However, creating an HTTPS security header script may cause unexpected issues for beginners which is why we wouldn’t recommend it. 3. Adding HTTP Security Headers in WordPress using .htaccess This method allows you to set the HTTP security headers in WordPress at the server level. It requires you to edit the .htaccess file on your website. It is a server configuration file used by the most commonly used Apache webserver software. Simply connect to your website using an FTP client, or the file manager app in your hosting control panel. In the root folder of your website, you need to locate the .htaccess file and edit it. This will open the file in a plain text editor. At the bottom of the file,

WordPress is the biggest content management system available in the market. Using WordPress, you can create almost any type of website on the internet. You can create a business website as well as an E-commerce website. It does not matter what kind of business you are running on the internet, communication with users is the most important. It’s even better if users can communicate with each other to discuss about the product. The best way to achieve this is to create a forum where your visitors/customers can discuss. If you are looking for the best Forum plugin for WordPress, You are at the right place. It is because we have created a list of the best free and paid plugins you can use to create a forum on your WordPress site. Creating a forum on a wordpress site is the best way to communicate with users in terms of question-answer, discussions, problem-solving, etc. These plugins are powerful and efficient. Each one of them has it’s own pros and cons. We have also listed the main features that a specific plugin provides. You can select the plugin that suits your requirements the best. Finally, Let’s get started with the list and the most popular Forum plugin in WordPress. 1. BBPress bbpress plugin is one of the most-favored plugins in the market, it’s like a trendy plugin. It is the robust plugin that helps you build a community on your website, trusted by over 300,000 users. The most interesting thing about the plugin is it will try to match your wordpress theme as much as possible. Bbpress is easy to use, easy to integrate, if you wish to look bbpress demo then you can check its forum page. BBPress itself has themes and plugins. It means that you can even customize or personalize your BBPress forum according to your requirement. BBPress is completely free to use. It is an open source plugin developed by the WordPress community. And here is the list of features available in the plugin: Easy to set-up and moderate Fully integrate One-click installation  Allow for the creation of a multisite forum Fast and lightweigh The UI is easy to use and intuitive Offers customizable templates Now, Let’s take a look at the second plugin from the list. 2. BuddyPress Buddypress allows you to create and manage your online community, in which users can make profiles, join groups, and send private messages. Like bbpress, BuddyPress is also completely free and open-source. However, both plugins were made by the same development groups. BuddyPress interface is easy to use and can launch on your website without getting any trouble. Buddypress allows you to make a community website for colleges and schools with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, etc. If you use BuddyPress then you need to install BuddyPress theme plugins for a better result like youzer, buddyboss wall, BuddyPress user blog, etc. It will help you to create a popular brand, and make good revenue. Features: Users can create and update profiles Users can befriend one another Users can allow sending private messages Users can follow a particular activity stream Users can participate in forum discussion 3. Asgaros Forum Asgaros forum is a perfect wordpress plugin for your site if you want to extend your website with a light-weight discussion board. This plugin is fast and secure for any kind of business. You can add asgaros by inserting a shortcode into the page. Asgaros forum is a free plugin, there is no premium version of this plugin. Due to only the free version of this plugin, it lags when it comes to depth of functionality. Although it gives you functionality like approval, banning, reporting, notifications, feeds, permissions, reactions, search, statistics, guest posting, and much more. Asgaros forum lets you create an unlimited forum and organize them in a good manner with different categories. You can also create a sub-forum inside a specific forum. To set the forum icons, you can choose from the inbuilt dash icons, but you can’t upload your own icons. And here is the list of important features of Asgaros forum. Easy to Integrate Powerful Editor Customizable themes Profiles and members list Supports complex parform SEO friendly 4. DW Question and Answer It is a powerful plugin that helps you to create question and answer system on your website. You can build up your community with a Question-Answer system.it allows the user to vote for the answer and because of that, the best answer comes to the top. You can also categorize answers as per your requirement. Once you installed the plugin, it will automatically create two pages in “Pages->All Pages” called “DWQA ask Question” and “DWQA Question” in which you have to include the following shortcodes DWQA Ask Question: [dwqa-submit-question-form] DWQA Question: [dwqa-list-questions] This plugin also allows you to set-up email notification regarding new comments, questions, and answer, in which 4 email templates are there which is following: New Question New Answer New comments on Question and Answer Subscriber Notification And here are some important features that this plugin provides: Manage questions on Front-end Voting System Views count system E-mail notifications Multi-language support (More than 20 languages available) 5. wpForo Forum wpForo Forum is one of the best forum plugin, used by more than 30k users. It gives you an easy and lightweight solution for your website. wpForo is responsive for all kinds of devices, which means you get a perfect layout on desktops, tabs, and mobiles. It provides 3 layouts: “Extended”, “Simplified”, “Question and Answer” which fit almost all types of discussion needs. You can create and customize new themes and keep them in the active wordpress theme folder. wpForo is an SEO-friendly plugin with built-in SEO functions. It provides an informative profile system with statistics, bio, and subscription pages. It gives you a fully customizable user rating system based on a number of posts. wpForo helps you to set parent-child relationships and forum list order by using only the drag and drop system. It provided a dashboard

Ultimate Member WordPress plugin issued a patch for three critical and severe exploits that grant attackers total control of a site. Today it was announced that “critical and severe vulnerabilities” affect a WordPress community building plugin called, Ultimate Member was patched. This vulnerability is easy to exploit and gives the attacker administrator level access, meaning they can do whatever they want to the site. This is how Wordfence describes the seriousness of this exploit: “This vulnerability is considered very critical as it makes it possible for originally unauthenticated users to easily escalate their privileges to those of an administrator. Once an attacker has administrative access to a WordPress site, they have effectively taken over the entire site and can perform any action, from taking the site offline to further infecting the site with malware.” Ultimate Member WordPress Plugin The Ultimate Member WordPress plugin is a form of community building plugin that allows a WordPress publisher to allow readers to become members who can receive various levels of access as well as interact with each other socially. It’s a solution that can also be used to restrict access to the content to registered users only and to grant various levels of membership privileges, like publishing to the site. Ultimate Member Vulnerability There are three exploitable vectors in the plugin and all three are privilege escalation exploits. A privilege escalation exploit is when an attacker can increase their user privilege. For example, if someone is registered with a site as a subscriber they can do things like read articles and comment on them. But with a an exploit they can elevate their site privileges from subscriber to an administrator level and thus grant themselves the ability to do whatever they want with the site. An authenticated privilege escalation exploit is when someone needs to have some kind of authentication, like a subscriber role. With an Unauthenticated Privilege Escalation exploit, a person doesn’t even have to be a registered user. The exploit affect the Ultimate Member plugin involved two unauthenticated exploits and one authenticated exploit. The Authenticated Privilege Escalation exploit allows a registered user to upgrade their privileges. The Unauthenticated Privilege Escalation exploit allows an attacker to use the registration form as an attack vector. These exploits are serious, rated critical and severe. Here’s how WordFence describes it: “…this vulnerability is considered critical as it allows originally unauthenticated users to escalate their privileges with some conditions. Once an attacker has elevated access to a WordPress site, they can potentially take over the entire and further infect the site with malware.” Update Immediately Don’t let Click Fraud take advantage of youStart a free trial with Clickcease and experience GoogleAds marketing in a fraud-free environment.

Tips on how to protect a WordPress site from getting hacked, including recommended security plugins. WordPress is a frequent target for hacking. Hackers are targeting the theme, the core WordPress files, plugins and even the login page. These are the steps to take to make it less likely to be hacked and to be able to recover easier if it should still happen. How Hackers Attack WordPress All sites on the web are under constant attack, whether it’s a phpBB forum or a WordPress site, all sites are being probed by hackers. It’s not unusual for a hacker to scan thousands of pages or try to login in hundreds of times a day. And that’s just one hacker. Sites are under attack by several hackers at the same time. Typically it’s not a person who is trying to hack you. Hackers employ automated software to crawl the web to probe for specific weaknesses in website. These automated software programs crawling the web are called bots. I call them hacker bots in order to distinguish them from scraper bots (software that is trying to copy content). Protect Your WordPress Site with a Firewall A firewall is a software program that blocks an intruder. In my opinion, the best WordPress firewall is a plugin called Wordfence. What Wordfence does is to check if a website visitor’s behavior matches that of an abusive bot. If the bot breaks certain rules, like asking for too many web pages in a short amount of time, Wordfence will then automatically block the bot. Wordfence is also programmed to allow legitimate bots like Google and Bing on the site. There are advanced features that let a publisher see what bots are attacking a site and to view where the bot is coming from, like if it’s bad bot coming from Amazon Web Services or Bluehost for example and then give you the ability to block the bot by their IP address, the entire IP address range or even by the fake user agent that the bot is using. Some bots pretend to be a person on Windows XP. So you can actually block all visitors with a user agent that displays Windows XP and stop those bots automatically. With one rule that a publisher creates with Wordfence, they can block thousands of hackers. Wordfence is a powerful tool on its own but some of the advanced features allows you to block even more hackers. And that’s with the free version of Wordfence. The paid version can block entire countries. So if you don’t have legitimate site visitors from certain countries, you can block every visitor that’s coming from those countries. Additionally, the paid version of Wordfence will protect you in advance from many compromised themes and plugins before those plugins are fixed. Once Wordfence researchers are aware of an exploit they will update their paid users to give them protection from those exploits, usually well before the exploit is patched by the compromised theme or plugin developer. Website Security Hardening Another free plugin that provides an additional layer of protection is called, Sucuri Security. Sucuri (owned by GoDaddy) helps harden the WordPress security to block bad bots from taking advantage of certain kinds of attacks. It also has a malware scanning feature that checks all files to see if they’ve been altered. Sucuri will alert you every time someone logs into your site, helping publishers to identify if a hacker is logging in. Sucuri can also alert a publisher if a file was changed, something that hackers do. These are the features of the free version of Sucuri: “Security Activity Auditing File Integrity Monitoring Remote Malware Scanning Blacklist Monitoring Effective Security Hardening Post-Hack Security Actions Security Notifications” The paid version of Sucuri includes a website firewall. Limit Logins to Your Site WordFence is able to block bots that are repeatedly filling in user names and passwords in the WordPress login page. But if you want to focus on limiting those logins, there is a plugin called, Limit Login Attempts Reloaded that allows publishers to automatically block all hackers who enter a set number of failed name and password combinations. For example, you can set it to block hackers after three attempts to guess the password. These are the features of the login blocker: “Limit the number of retry attempts when logging in (per each IP). This is fully customizable. Informs the user about the remaining retries or lockout time on the login page. Optional logging and optional email notification. It is possible to whitelist/blacklist IPs and Usernames. Sucuri Website Firewall compatibility. XMLRPC gateway protection. Woocommerce login page protection. Multi-site compatibility with extra MU settings. GDPR compliant. With this feature turned on, all logged IPs get obfuscated (md5-hashed). Custom IP origins support (Cloudflare, Sucuri, etc.)” The Limit Login Reloaded plugin provides a fast way to shut down hack bots that are trying to guess a password. Backup Your WordPress Site It is important to automatically create a daily backup of your website. Any catastrophic event that takes the site down can be recovered from with a backup. There are many backup solutions but the one that I have found to be immensely useful is called UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin. UpdraftPlus is trusted by over two million users, it’s a well regarded choice. It can be configured to email the backups every day or send them to a cloud storage location like Dropbox. I once accidentally removed all the theme layout files from a site, completely removed the look of the site. But I was able to restore the site to exactly how it was before by using an UpdraftPlus backup. It was easy to do and I was so thankful. Update all Themes and Plugins It’s important to always update all themes and plugins. WordPress provides a way to update all plugins automatically, which is convenient for publishers or businesses who don’t log in and do updates often. By enabling the autoupdate feature a publisher can be

Install WordPress Theme Using FTP Client Filezilla We can modify our WordPress site’s appearance and layout using WordPress themes. WordPress theme is a collection of templates and stylesheets used to define the appearance and display of a WordPress powered website. WordPress theme changes the look of our WordPress sites in an elegant way without changing the core functionalities of the site. Most WordPress Themes provide: The overall design and style of our site. Font styling. Colors. Widget locations. Page layouts. Styles for blog posts and blog archives. Additional stylistic details. There are several free and paid WordPress Themes available. You can download themes from the WordPress Theme Directory, those themes are checked and inspected, and are free for downloading or you can download the themes from third-party websites which offer free or paid WordPress themes. You can also download themes which are not available on WordPress Theme Directory from the third-party websites which offer free or paid themes and you can install the downloaded theme using Filezilla, an FTP client. The steps to installing a WordPress theme using Filezilla are listed below: Before installing a theme which is downloaded from a third-party site, consider the following: Evaluate whether you really trust the theme provider. Check out the reviews of the theme and the specific theme provider. Make sure the file is truly a .ZIP file once it’s downloaded. The prerequisites for this method are a .ZIP WordPress theme file, FTP hostname, username, password, and Filezilla. 1) Unzip the downloaded .ZIP theme in your local system. 2) Open Filezilla and enter the host, username, and password then click “Quickconnect”. 3) Select the target directory, “wp-content/themes,” on your web server in the right pane. 4) In the local site (left pane), locate the folder where you saved the theme. In this tutorial, we will use the hitchcock theme saved in the desktop. Then right-click on the “hitchcock” folder in the local site and click “Upload” 5) Now you have just uploaded the new theme in WordPress. Login to WordPress dashboard to make the theme in use. Then Go to Appearance > Themes. 6) You can see the uploaded theme was listed in your WordPress dashboard. 7) To activate the new theme, move the mouse pointer to the Hitchcock theme. The Activate and Live Preview button will appear. Click “Activate”. 8) Go to your WordPress site and see the newly activated theme.   If you need any further assistance please contact our support department.

WordPress is the most popular CMS that are is used for creating websites. WordPress is used for creating any style of the website from a simple blog to a full-featured business website. If you are facing issues that the WordPress keeps login out, then the steps provided in this tutorial provide you the best fixes for the login issue you were encounter. Main causes: The main cause is the browser cache when you try to login to your WordPress. It set a browser cookie which authenticates your login session. If there are any errors on those cookies, then you are unable to authenticate and it keeps you logging out. To resolve such issues, please follow the below steps: 1) If you are continually logged out from your WordPress dashboard, then the most common reason is conflict in your URL settings. WordPress is always authenticate logged in users through browser cookies. If the WordPress URL and Site address are different, then it will be unable to authenticate your credentials and you will be logged out. Login to your WordPress dashboard and make sure that you have set the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) are exactly the same. You can check it from your WordPress Dashboard >> Settings >> General. If there any differences, this could be the reason for this error. For example, if one the URL is beginning with “https://” and the other uses “http://”, or one has WWW in front and the other doesn’t, then you would need to correct it, Both the URLs should be exactly same. If you are unable to access the WordPress dashboard, then you can edit the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) from the file wp-config.php You can use FTP to the server and edit the mentioned file there. define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://yoursite.com); define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://yoursite.com);   2) Clearing the browser cache and cookies is another way to resolve this issue. Most of the log out issues are related to the browser cookies that are stored on your browser. You would need to clear the browser cache as well as the browser cookies to resolve this issue. 3) If the issue still persists, then try to deactivate the plugins on the WordPress website. You can manually deactivate all the plugins on your website using FTP client. After logging into FTP server, navigate to the public_html directory and then to the wp-content directory. Disable all plugins on the website. After deactivating the plugins, you’ll have to activate them one at a time to identify the culprit plugin. 4) Ensure that your WordPress site is permitted to save cookies on your browser.  In some cases, your web server is disabled to accept cookies. When this happens, WordPress will be unable to save the cookies, which means you will be logged out again and again. To fix this, you would need to enable ‘Allow Site to Save and Read Cookie Data ‘on your web browser. 5) If the issue is still reoccurring after changing all the above settings, then you would need to restore the website from any of the working back-ups or contact us(your hosting provider) for restoration and everything should be working then.

WordPress, the content management system that does not require any introduction. But here is the fact, There are 313,050 million sites built on WordPress. And it has a 59.7% of market share in content management. With WordPress, you can host files and database on different servers/machines very quickly as it uses MySQL as a database management system. In this guide, we will configure WordPress with an external database in Ubuntu 16.04 servers. First of all, What do we mean when we say WordPress with external database? It means that we are going to host WordPress files on one server(Application server). And we are going to host our WordPress database on another server(Database server). Our goal is to execute MySQL queries on database-server and process and display data on application-server. There are many advantages of hosting application and a database on separate servers. Especially if your WordPress application is growing at a reasonable rate. Here are some benefits you get with this setup. Let’s say your application-server requires more computing power than your database-server. In this case, you can only upgrade your application-server and keep your database-server the same. This way, you can upgrade and downgrade servers based on the computing power they need. In the case of downtime, you can quickly know if it’s an issue on a database server or an application server. If you want high availability set up for your database, Follow this guide to create a master-slave replication in MySQL. With replication, you can keep your site up and running even if the main MySQL server is down. In case of monitoring, you can monitor the load and memory on the application server. While you can monitor queries per second, slow queries, read/write queries, and much more on the database server. I just have mentioned three advantages here, but there are many more that you will experience. So, Let’s get started with the tutorial. Configure WordPress with external database What will you need to follow this guide? Well, you will need two Ubuntu 16.04 servers. Both the servers must be clean with only the operating system installed. And a root access to both the servers as we will install packages and update configuration files. Here are the IP addresses and hostnames we will use in this guide. Application server: application-server (1.2.3.4) Database server: database-server (4.5.6.7) First of all, we will configure our application server. It is not going to be a typical LAMP server setup, because we do not have to configure MySQL on our application server. So, let’s get started. CONFIGURE APPLICATION SERVER On the application server, we will install Apache to serve the HTTP requests and PHP to interpret PHP code requested by Apache. And we are going to use the MySQL database hosted on the database server, so we do not have to install MySQL on this server. Execute the following commands on the application server. root@application-server:~# apt-get updateroot@application-server:~# apt-get upgrade -yroot@application-server:~# apt-get install apache2 -yroot@application-server:~# apt-get install php7.0 php7.0-curl php7.0-mysql php7.0-mbstring php7.0-dom php7.0-gd -yroot@application-server:~# apt-get install libapache2-mod-php7.0root@application-server:~# apt-get install mysql-client -y The first four commands will update repositories, upgrade packages, install Apache, and install PHP7.0 along with the PHP libraries required for WordPress. And the last one will install MySQL client that we can use to test the remote connection with our database server. To verify if Apache and PHP are installed and configured correctly, execute the following commands and then access the public IP address of the application server in the browser. root@application-server:~# rm /var/www/html/index.htmlroot@application-server:~# echo “<?php phpinfo(); ?>” >> /var/www/html/index.php On the browser, you should see a page with PHP configuration information just like the following image. If you can see this page on the public IP address of your application server, you have successfully configured the application server. Now, we can move on to the configuration of our database server. CONFIGURE DATABASE SERVER Database server configuration is also easy. It is because we have to install MySQL and update the MySQL configuration file to allow remote access. Execute the following command to install MySQL on your database server. root@database-server:~# apt-get updateroot@database-server:~# apt-get upgrade -yroot@database-server:~# apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client -yroot@database-server:~# mysql_secure_installation While executing the third command, you have to enter the MySQL root password. And while running the fourth command, You have to answer a few questions. Answer it like this. Enable Validate Password Plugin? No Change the password for root? No Remove anonymous users? Yes Disallow root login remotely? Yes Remove test database and access to it? Yes Reload privilege table now? Yes Once done, try to log in to your MySQL server using the following command. root@database-server:~# mysql -uroot -p If you can log into your MySQL server, you have successfully installed MySQL on the server. Now, it is time to update the MySQL configuration file to allow remote connections. Execute the following command to open the MySQL configuration file in edit mode. root@database-server:~# nano /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf In the file, find a line containing bind-address. You have to uncomment this line and replace the default value with the IP address of your database server. The updated line should look like the following. bind-address = 4.5.6.7 Do not forget to replace the example IP address with yours. Once done, press CTRL+X followed by Y followed by Enter to save the file. Now, restart the MySQL server using the following command to apply the new configuration. root@database-server:~# service mysql restart All the hard work is now over. Now, we can create a database for our WordPress application on the database server. CREATE DATABASE FOR WORDPRESS ON DATABASE SERVER First of all, log in to your MySQL server using the following command. root@database-server:~# mysql -uroot -p; Enter the password you have set while installing the MySQL server. Once you are in, run the following queries in MySQL to create a database and a user having access from our application server. mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;mysql> CREATE USER ‘wordpressUser‘@’1.2.3.4‘ IDENTIFIED BY ‘qawsedrf123‘;mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO ‘wordpressUser‘@’1.2.3.4‘;mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; Now, if you want to test if the user and database are successfully created, login to your application server and execute the following command