Monthly Archives: November 2016

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Best Analytics Plugins for WordPress

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Why need analytics for a WordPress site?

Analytics Plugins are important to Track WordPress site users and to know more about them, which is important to run a successful websites nowadays. Website owners need an analytics solution that helps them gather data and provide insightful reports into user activity on their site.

Analytics plugins can tell which pages users visit the most, where the users are coming from, how long do they stay on the website, and which links do they click on the most, etc.

Here are some of the popular WordPress Analytics Plugins:

1) Google Analytics by MonsterInsights (Formerly Google Analytics by Yoast)

monsterinsights_fi-600x314

One of the most powerful WordPress analytics plugin allows you to Connect Google Analytics with WordPress by adding your Google Analytics tracking code. It is just the stats that matters.

Not only can you track page views, visits, average visit duration, bounce rat, and referrers, but you can also enable advanced settings to track your site’s demographic and interest for advertising, also analyze shopping behaviors to boost your products’ performance.

Key features:

  1. Simple installation through integration with Google Analytics API: authenticate, select the site you want to track and you’re done.
  2. This plugin uses the universal or the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the fastest and most reliable tracking code Google Analytics offers.
  3. Gives you incredibly nice visitor metric dashboards right in your WordPress install.
  4. Option to enable demographics and interest reports.
  5. Outbound link & downloads tracking.
  6. Configurable options to track outbound links either as page views or as events.
  7. Option to track just downloads as page views or events in Google Analytics.
  8. Option to track internal links with a particular format as outbound links, very useful for affiliate links that start with /out/, for instance.
  9. Possibility to ignore any user level and up, so all editors and higher for instance.
  10. Option to anonymize IP’s for use in countries with stricter privacy regulations.
  11. Tracking of your search result pages and 404 pages.
  12. Full debug mode, including Firebug lite and ga_debug.js for debugging Google Analytics issues. > Development on GitHub

The development of Google Analytics by MonsterInsights takes place on GitHub. Bugs and pull requests are welcomed there. For support, you have two options: either buy the premium version of Google Analytics by MonsterInsights, this will give you access to their support team, or refer to the forums.

2) Analytify

analytify-wordpress-plugin

A basic free version is available plus the following paid versions:

1) Personal – $29

2) Small Bussiness – $49

3) Agency – $99

4) Developer – $199

You get your Google Analytics Dashboard inside your WordPress Admin Panel. eCommerce Analytics for WooCommerce is also available. This plugin makes Google Analytics simple for WordPress.

You can See Traffic data for individual blog posts and pages of your site and also you can See What’s happening when users come to your site. Analytify makes Google Analytics SIMPLE enough for WordPress users that anyone can understand and see what is happening on their websites.

Premium Version:

Shows Real-Time Stats, Campaign Stats, ShortCodes, Front-end Stats and more reports in backend and front-end. Premium version has better e-commerce tracking. Analytify believes One size does not fit all – and have created four different pricing plans so you can choose one that works for your business.

Key Features:

  1. Easy installation. 1-Click Authentication process.
  2. Analytify Dashboard
  3. Statistics Per Posts/Pages
  4. Universal/Traditional Tracking
  5. Responsive & MultiSite
  6. List of top Countries & cities.
  7. REAL-TIME Statistics of your site in dashboard -Premium
  8. Campaigns Statistics – Premium
  9. ShortCodes (Simple and Advanced) for Custom Statistics of your own choice – Premium

3) WP Statistics

wpstatics

The statistics are displayed through easy-to-understand graphs, which is a nicely measured considering the sheer breadth of information WP Statistics throws at you.

WP Statics is a comprehensive plugin for your WordPress website’s visitor statistics. This plugin tracks statistics for your WordPress site without depending on external services and uses arrogate data whenever possible to respect your users privacy.

On screen statistics presented as graphs are easily viewed through the WordPress admin interface. Includes a thorough admin manual which can be accessed from within the plugin’s dashboard. The manual can be downloaded from the same section in either ODT or HTML format.

This plugin enables you to track visitors, current sessions, page statistics, queries from all major search engines, browser details, and referrers. The data you collect can easily be exported to XML or CSV files or set to be e-mailed to you at predetermined intervals.

Features:

  1. Makes uses of Maxmind GeoLite2 technology in order to display in-depth geographical data.
  2. Visitor IPs can be hashed in order to protect their privacy.
  3. Users can be excluded from the statistics depending on a wide range of criteria which can be customized to your liking.
  4. Enables you to restrict access to the analytics dashboard to whichever back end roles you choose.
  5. Online users, visits, visitors and page statistics
  6. Search Engines, see search queries and redirects from popular search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu
  7. Overview and detail pages for all kinds of data, including; browser versions, country stats, hits, exclusions, referrers, searches, search words and visitors
  8. Support for hashing IP addresses in the database to protect your users privacy
  9. Interactive map of visitors location
  10. E-mail reports of statistics
  11. Set access level for view and manage roles based on WordPress roles
  12. Exclude users from statistics collection based on various criteria, including; user roles, common robots, IP subnets, page URL, login page, RSS pages, admin pages, Country, number of visits per day, hostname
  13. Record statistics on exclusions
  14. Automatic updates to the GeoIP database
  15. Automatically prune the databases of old data
  16. Widget to provide information to your users
  17. Shortcodes for many different types of data in both widgets and posts/pages
  18. Dashboard widgets for the admin area
  19. Comprehensive Admin Manual

 

4) Crazy Egg

crazyegg

Free for 30 days, then:

a) Basic -$9/mo

b) Standard – $19/mo

c) Plus – $49 / mo

d) Pro – $99 / mo

Crazy Egg lets you see exactly what people are doing on your website. Like, showing you where people are clicking in your website and where they aren’t. Or how many people scroll down your which pages and where most people stops to get their desired piece of material. Also where those people are coming from, and who clicks on what the most!

This plugin shows you where your visitors are clicking on your site. This technology is called heat-mapping, and it allows you to visualize how your users interact with your website.

One of the first things people find when using Crazy Egg is that their users are clicking on things that aren’t even links. Where might that be happening on your site?

Pros

  • Allows you to see where users are clicking on your website with heatmaps technology.
  • Crazy Egg also offers a scroll map which shows how far users are scrolling on your pages.
  • You also get to see the number of clicks on each element in overlay map.
  • Their Confetti tool allows you to segment your clicks into referrals, sources, search terms, etc.

Cons

  • Its free for 30 day trial but after that you will have to choose a monthly pricing plan.
  • It takes a screenshot of the page and then reports your clicks which is more useful for static pages but not so effective for dynamic pages like a blog’s main page.

Key Features:

  1. Get priceless insights for high-ROI changes
  2. Use your web budget way more effectively
  3. Make a great case for prioritizing your redesign
  4. Speed up your user testing & analysis process
  5. Show your boss your changes worked
  6. Enjoy more conversions and better engagement

5) WordPress.com Stats jetpack

jetpack-1024x616

Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that lets you handle Traffic Growth & Insights, Collect valuable stats and help you grow your site traffic. Once you have your stats enabled and running, you can view them in a number of different ways with Jetpack.

Get more in-depth stats by this plugin where you can see information about Referrers, Top Posts & Pages, Search Engine Terms, Subscriptions, and Clicks. This is a great way to see what content is popular on your site so that you can write more about the topics that your visitors really like. To get even more information on Stats, you can simply enable the Enhanced Analytics option which brings you more information about your site including your best total views per day, your all-time views and comments totals, and features like Views By Country which shows you where in the world your posts are being seen!

 

Formaly this plugin is a Powerful tools that help you build, grow, and measure your audience with below features:

  1. Site stats & analytics
  2. Automatic social network sharing
  3. Related posts to keep visitors on your site longer
  4. Enhanced distribution on WordPress.com

 

6) Woopra

woopra

Paid Version Available: Small Business – $79.95 (More at – https://www.woopra.com/pricing/

This plugin adds Woopra’s real-time customer analytics to any WordPress installation. Track your website, apps, emails, and more to truly understand your customers.

Woopra is information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. Woopra also tracks anonymous website & mobile app users from their first touch until they identify themselves.

Centralize your customer touchpoints with AppConnect. Woopra integrates with your favorite tools, in just a few clicks and without a single line of code. Woopra provides customer intelligence platform is both customizable and adaptable, to archive your business goal. Enterprises across various industries have integrated this plugin Woopra with their wordpress sites to understand their users and enhance the customer journey.

Woopra allows you to Understand your customers from every angle. Also lets you to Build dynamic customer segments based on behaviour. It helps you to Make data-driven decisions WITH REAL-TIME ANALYTICS

This plugin helps you to Improve your conversion rates with Funnel Reports.Easily compare how different segments move through your funnel to identify your best and worst converting types of customers.

You can take Take real-time action on real-time data WITH AUTOMATIONS. Woopra provides solution for SAAS, Mobile Apps, Ecommerce, Gaming, Banking & Financce, Automative and many.

Key Features:

  1. Know who’s on your website in real-time
  2. Build a behavioral profile for every visitor and member
  3. A rich user interface and client monitoring application
  4. Real-time Analytics
  5. Funnel Analytics
  6. Retention Analytics
  7. Visitor and member tagging
  8. Real-time notifications
  9. Easy Installation and Update Notification

One of the biggest advantage of Woopra is, it supports WooCommerce, the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress.

 

7) WP Power Stats

wppowerstats

Free Plugin.

Discover your visitors in real-time, intuitively and with style. Powerful and accurate real-time visitor statistics plugin for your WordPress.

Using this plugin you can View your site visits statistics at a glance: browsers, operating systems, visitors and much more. WP Power Stats offers highly customizable settings to fine-tune the tracking. One click install and your site is ready get tracked. This plugin is lightweight and carefully integrated in your WordPress site, which results in fast, secure and reliable outcome.

This plugin sets no third party services, all statistics are private on your hosting and are accessible only by you.

Key Features:

  1. Advanced Customization
  2. Lightweight
  3. Secure
  4. One click install
  5. Retina ready
  6. Multi-language

 

8) Analytics Stats Counter Statistics

analytics-stats-counter-statistics

Analytics Stats Counter Statistics plugin analyses visitors statistics on your web page, unique users, countries, city’s, IPs.

This plugin lets you analyze your unique users. This plugin consist of two core parts:

Stats Counter plugin
Non visual core system of Analytics Stats Counter to analyze and count visitors of website, updating this data in the database of website counter;

Stats Counter widget
Visual part of Analytics Stats Counter plugin. The Stats Counter widget is responsible for counter visualization on website and for counter code output on HTML of website;

The developers behind Analytics Stats Counter Statistics also works on the ongoing development of a wide range of webpage administration tools, but their statistics plugin is a step above their other offerings.

Its developers have a passion for data analysis and were inspired to take a swing at developing their own tool after experimenting with Google Analytics. Even though they’re not quite in the same league yet, their plugin packs more than enough features to stand on its own.

Features:

  1. Allows to generate narrow results and analyze details pertaining to unique visitors.
  2. Provides Statistics by city, country, operating systems and browser.
  3. Allows customization to provide a more personalized experience.
  4. Statistics widget.
  5. Password protected in order to provide restrict access to the information.
  6. Unique and Returned Visitors (Web Page “Views”)
  7. Manage multiple domains only with one account
Services

Upwork or Freelancer – which one is better

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Upwork or Freelancer

If you are considering outsourcing some of your work, you may have heard there are several portals for outsourcing. They are like a marketplace. Skilled freelancers list their services and clients like you post their jobs and try to find a good match.

Two of the biggest freelancing websites also called portals or marketplaces are Upwork and Freelancer. Here is a brief overview of both:

  1. Freelancer – Popular and getting bigger by the day. They bought out several smaller competitors and have become quite big. Large pool of freelancers. The interfaces are too graphic intensive and that makes it slower than it should be. It seems the designers are not that great at UI design and mistake big graphics to be user friendly. The encouraging part is that they seem to be headed in the right direction. Let’s hope they can incorporate a work room like the old Elance used to have, that is, the client hires a freelancing team and then the team assigns resources to the work room. That is a key feature favored by clients whose jobs require multiple resources. Instead of hiring 4 separate people, a consolidated work room will allow a client to hire one team and then let the team manage by assigning multiple resources and aggregating their hours. Chances of finding a good freelancer – High. Chances of finding a good team – High.
    Commission Charged: 10%
  2. Upwork: This is the big behemoth resulting from the merger of Odesk and Elance. Elance had the better framework and UI. Unfortunately the merged company took the clunky interface of Odesk and has imposed it on the new company. It’s amazing how the bigger the company gets, the farther from reality it gets. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. The people in charge seem to be oblivious of what’s happening to the UI. Every day without fail they have system outages. Neither clients or freelancers can access the system, their messaging system does not work. Their dispute resolution team behaves like third world monkey courts. Instead of trying to simplify, they are trying to make it more complicated and add even more features. A ton of customers have abandoned Upwork in total frustration and freelancers are following suit. Good news for competition. Chances of finding a good freelancer – Medium.
    Commission Charged: 20%

Whichever portal you go with, proceed carefully and in small steps. Try to establish good communications with the freelancer or team first, be it through Skype or telephone or email. Once you get comfortable with each other, outsourcing can be a great way of stretching your dollar.

Good Luck!

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WooCommerce Help

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Over the last few years, WordPress has become the platform of choice for building websites. As it became popular, several plugins got developed for ecommerce. WooCommerce has become the most popular plugin for ecommerce on WordPress.

Looking for WooCommerce help
WooCommerce Support

Many semi technical people can setup a basic WooCommerce site without too much hassle. The challenges start when you want to go beyond the basics. As payment is involved and as user experience is important for the success of an ecommerce site, it is best to involve professionals at this stage.

A professional developer can help you with issues like:

  • Simplified checkout
  • Multiple payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net etc.
  • Integrating shipping calculators for USPS, UPS, FedEx etc
  • Building configurators to people can add options within options
  • Reservations
  • Scheduling
  • Reminders
  • Order history
  • Backup and security
  • and many other applications.

Are you at a stage where you need professional help to get up to the next level? If so, give us a call or fill out the contact form. We’ll be glad to help.

Here are some of WooCommerce projects:

Custom website developed in WordPress WooCommerce
WordPress WooCommerce
Custom website developed in WordPress WooCommerce
Custom website developed in WordPress WooCommerce

 

Custom website developed in WordPress WooCommerce
WooCommerce, Sensei, Classroom Reservations
Looking for WooCommerce help
WooCommerce Support

 

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How to secure your WordPress site?

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WordPress security is often referred to as “hardening.”. After all, the process is like adding reinforcements to your castle. It’s all about securing the gates and putting guards on every tower for better monitoring and protection against external threats.

WordPress is the most popular blogging and CMS tool on the Internet. Part of its popularity is its ease of use. That is exactly what makes it a prime target for hackers. Do you have a WordPress blog or website? Then this article will help you. None of these solutions guarantee 100% protection but some protection is always better than no protection against hackers, viruses, malware, adware and ransomware.

Tips for better WordPress security:

  1. Keep your WordPress site and plugins up-to-date. Consider Automatic Core Updates. This is very simple and there are plugins like WP Updates and others to help you.
  2. You may want to create a child theme before making any changes to your functions.php file.
  3. If somebody is offering Premium (Paid) plugins for free, don’t buy/download them. Quite often they would be modified and infected with malware.
  4. Keep Track of Dashboard Activity. This is also great for security because it allows you to connect the dots between a specific action and a specific reaction. So, if a certain uploaded file caused your site to break, you can investigate it further to see if it contained malicious code. Suggested plugin: WP Security Audit Log
  5. Avoid using the admin username of ‘admin’ and you must use strong passwords
  6. Pick the Best Hosting You Can Afford. Good hosting companies have strong protection of their own and you are less vulnerable.
  7. Spam Protection. For Comment Spam, a good plugin is Akismet. For form spam, a good plugin is SI Captcha.
  8. Clean your site – remove unnecessary files, plugins, themes and older backups.
  9. Use a good security monitoring software like Wordfence or LifeLock. There are others too. Some have a free basic version and a more robust paid version.
  10. Do daily backups through your hosting company or a third party service. If you get hacked, you can recover using your backups. No backup, no recovery.

I hope this helps.

Do you have some additional suggestions? Feel free to mention them in the comments below.

Stay Safe!

Services

Top 4 Reasons you need Interloper Inc.

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Any business that aims at being competitive today should have a professional website. If your business does not have a professionally designed website, you risk losing many potential clients. People don’t take you seriously. Customers evaluate products and companies long before they make their buying decision and if your website does not measure up in form or function, your prospects will click away to your competitor’s. Why lose customers?

Most projects require multiple skills and being a company enables us to put the right person on the right job and make sure your project gets done in the best possible manner and on time.

Four Key areas we can help you with:

1. Form:

The way we approach your project is to first assign you one of our creative designers who will work with you to put together a design that reflects your vision for your website, looks elegant and professional and most importantly meets the expectations of the type of customers you are trying to attract. During this process we may go back and forth several times to get the design just right. Good design should establish brand identity, credibility, be in line with current trends and technologies, drive your call to action and give you a competitive advantage.

2. Function:

Once design is finalized, we hand it over to our developers to integrate the design into the backend and incorporate all the necessary functionalities. Our focus is making the customer experience easy and fruitful. They should be able to find the information they need easily and then make them flow through the website to the desired action.

3. Traffic Generation:

We have a very methodical, slow and steady approach to generating organic traffic. We start with Social Media Marketing and then move over to traditional SEO as a secondary activity. Our focus is always on generating real traffic to your page or site. Traditional SEO focuses on moving you up in search engine results. Social Media Marketing focuses on generating organic traffic straight to your page or website, by that I mean real people visiting your site. Since search engines now highly value social traffic, quite often all this social activity results in better search engine rankings too.

4. CRM – Customer Relationship Management:

It’s very hard to get a customer. Once you do and serve him well, shouldn’t you follow up regularly and build on that relationship? Unfortunately most companies don’t. It boggles the mind but that’s how it is. We help you implement a CRM system to strengthen your relationship with your customers and make him a lifetime customer.

Depending on the industry you are in and which study you believe, acquiring a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It makes sense. You don’t have to spend time and resources going out and finding a new client — you just have to keep the one you have happy.

Convinced? Call us or fill out the contact form and let’s explore how we can help you grow your business.

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Shipping calculator for WooCommerce

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Are you using WooCommerce and want to ship via USPS (US Mail). You would like a customer to add items to his shopping cart and the calculator figure out his postage cost based on the weight and value of his order and his shipping address. Well don’t despair. There is a very good plugin for that.

It’s called The USPS Shipping Plugin for WooCommerce and you can purchase it through Themeforest.

Features:

Domestic

  • Priority Mail
  • Express Mail
  • Standard Post
  • First Class

International

  • Express Mail International
  • Priority Mail International
  • Global Express Guaranteed
  • First Class Package Service

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Services

Review of VPS Hosting services

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Has your website been getting more traffic lately? Congratulations! That is what we are all aiming for. Now, let us discuss a few pressing questions.

If you started out small with shared hosting and now you have a lot more visitors, chances are your site is taking longer to load because of the limited resources at your server’s disposal. That could distract visitors and potential clients from your site altogether. What can you do to avoid that? Simply move your site from shared to VPS hosting.

What is VPS hosting?

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It is a dedicated server carved into a few private servers for users like you who have outgrown shared hosting but still cannot afford a dedicated server. You pay a little more than a shared server and you may need a part time webmaster to manage but your website will perform smoothly and your customers will interact with your website without any delays. Greater customer satisfaction quite often transaltes to more business.

What is the best VPS hosting provider for me?

There are plenty of VPS hosting providers, you need only choose the right one for you. We know it is time-consuming and not that simple, so we have done the leg work for you. We have done a comparison of VPS plans from major hosting companies and you can find a chart that compares price by CPU cycles, memory allocation, storage and bandwidth. We compare major hosting companies like GoDaddy, HostGator, MyHosting, Dotster etc. We update our data periodically, so you can find the best VPS hosting deals. The comparison of VPS Hosting Companies is listed at http://bloggerkhan.com/vps-hosting-vps-servers/185

Moreover, you may find plenty more useful information for your site and business. We pride ourselves on providing current and interesting content for our visitors. Feel free to browse around. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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The benefits of outsourcing for small businesses

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Are you a small business owner? Are you so busy with the day-to-day running of your business that you are loosing track of your goals? If the answer is yes, you need to take a step back and think about outsourcing. It is perfectly okay to let professionals take some of your workload.

What is outsourcing?

Outsourcing is a cost and time-saving strategy that has become really popular in the past two decades. It involves transferring some of your workload to professionals elsewhere because it is more cost effective for your business. Even though it seems like a big step for a small business and you want to keep all the strings in your own hands, the outsourcing strategy will prove beneficial for you in the long run.

Why outsource?

As a beginner entrepreneur, you need to have your eyes firmly set on your business. You have a promise to deliver to your customers. Whether it is a product that takes some time to assemble or a service that is yet to be organized, your customers expect you to deliver as soon as possible. If you are the head of a new start-up, chances are that you will be doing all the work by yourself for a while. But, are you capable of running the show alone? Can you afford to spend so much time and money on learning how to do every little thing? If the answer is no, you need to consider the possibility of outsourcing some of your work.

When should you start thinking about outsourcing?

The answer is right away. Considering the fact that customers place their confidence in you and your business, you need to clearly state what you can offer. Having the big picture is great, but do you have the time to work on all the tiny details it consists of?

Whether it is an online store, where you have to make sure that the website is user-friendly; easy to navigate; bug-free, or a small coffee shop where you have to create the perfect ambience; choose the suitable background music; be in charge of the marketing campaign, etc. in the grand scheme of things, these are all distractions from your main goal. As they say, “time is money”, so the more time you end up spending on finding a solution to the small problems, the more money you lose in the long run.

What should you outsource?

Let’s take the coffee shop example again. You want to open a place that is going to be the synonym of relaxation, a place where you can spend a pleasant time chatting with your friends. You have a logo in mind, and the array of music that would be best suited for your type of clients. Unfortunately, you are not a graphic designer that can create the logo representative of your ideas and you could end up spending hours in frustration, trying to learn how to use one of the many graphic design programs. At the same time, you have to think about the interior and how you are going to promote your shop. By outsourcing the task of creating the logo to a designer, you save precious time. Time that you can spend doing what you are doing best and promoting your business. Of course, there are always tasks that are too important and you have to handle them by yourself as the manager or owner, but delegating the smaller things to professionals will prove to be a good investment in the long run. Consider outsourcing your web development, part of your administrative work, your social media content and your book keeping and you suddenly have a lot more time to spend on growing your business.

In conclusion, outsourcing represents a real time and money saver for small businesses. By letting others take care of what you are not great at, you can focus on your strengths and grow your business. Even though when you outsource, it seems like dollars leaving your business, hour for hour, outsourcing delivers a better bang for the buck than doing everything yourself.

Convinced? Contact us at InterloperInc.com and let’s help you out from data entry to web design, virtual assistants to customer service. Contact us. You’ll be glad you did!