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6 Steps to speed up a WordPress theme for videos

October 13, 2015

A WordPress theme for videos offers significant flexibility in changing setting, adding or removing built-in plugins and modifying theme options to enhance page speed. Therefore, the owners of WordPress video sites should use the following steps to ensure a faster site performance.

6 Steps to make a WordPress theme for videos faster

Step 1: Enable gzip Compression

Enable gzip compression in WordPress can reduce load time by over 300%. So, you should compress the code of the used WordPress theme for videos if possible. If compatibility used to be an issue with earlier browsers, almost modern browsers can handle gzip compression out of the box with significant returns in site performance.

WordPress theme for videos 1

Step 2: Cut down on code bloat

Many free and paid WordPress themes for video portfolio are guilty of using excessive HTML/CSS elements, which adds up to site bloat and reduces page speed. After installing any WordPress video theme, you should remove all superfluous HTML and CSS elements, reduce unnecessary tags, optimize and combine CSS rules for maximum efficiency.

Step 3: Compress images in the WordPress theme for videos

Loading large images places significant strain on the server. You should ensure that every image of the WordPress video theme you use is optimized and compressed to consume as little bandwidth as possible.

Step 4: Minify CSS and Javascript in the theme’s files

WordPress theme for videos 2

“Minify” is an add-on to PHP 5 that combines multiple CSS and Javascript files, then serves them with gzip compression. It is integrated into W3 Total Cache and other plugins. It helps reduce code bloat, remove excessive whitespace and avoid redundant server connections to make faster page loading time.

Step 5: Avoid installing unnecessary built-in plugins

Almost every premium WordPress theme for videos comes with built-in plugins, which offer you more options and features. However, plugin bloat is one of the reasons causing slow site performance. Almost plugins create extra files to load and process which places strain on server and increase loading time. Therefore, you had better reduce the number of built-in plugins used on your video site as much as possible. In general, a WordPress site should not have more than five plugins, including built-in ones, and the ideal figure never exceeds 10.

Step 6: Remove default advertisements

Advertisements are often the last elements loaded on a webpage because they rely on external servers to host their media. Flash and image-based ads makes page loading time slower and they can push well-optimized site into slow loading category. You should remove default advertisements in the used WordPress theme for videos and images to see a noticeable improvement in performance and meet the demand of visitors.

WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

[Tips] Choosing a video theme on ThemeForest: 5 things to look for

October 9, 2015

Sometimes, words are not enough. Thus, the recent years have seen many bloggers switching to a video blog or magazine to deliver their content. If you have ever had an idea of creating your own “vlog” on WordPress platform, ThemeForest theme marketplace will be a great support. The marketplace is actually a pool of well-developed themes available for your interest. Below you will be provided a number of tips to choose the most appropriate video theme ThemeForest.

How to select a WordPress video theme – ThemeForest

Mobile-friendly interface

video theme themeforest 1

Over the past years with the emergence of smart handheld devices, a large number of Internet users have a tendency to surf the internet on their mobiles. Your video website’s content should follow this trend to gain more visitors. This mobile-friendly feature should also be a top priority when choosing a WordPress video theme ThemeForest.

In addition, modern users also tend to utilize different browsers depending on which devices they are using. The browsers diversely range from Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer to mobile browsers. Thus, take a fully mobile-friendly video theme ThemeForest in order to make sure that all your video content is properly displayed on any platform.

Fast loading time

Loading time is quite an important consideration for web owners. In the case of WordPress video theme, this feature is utterly essential. As compared to other types of websites/blogs, video content requires more time to load, and a compilation of video can become a real burden on the internet bandwidth. For this reason, you should prioritize a video theme ThemeForest that supports video upload or has integrated plugins to optimize the loading speed.

Wide choices for customization

video theme themeforest 2

As a matter of fact, video theme is just a niche in this pool of WordPress themes; accordingly, the options are quite limited. Thus, it is rather common that some prominent themes are chosen by many web owners. Then it comes the problem that how to distinguish your site from numerous other video websites/blogs. The answer must lie in the customization of the chosen theme. When a WordPress video theme ThemeForest offers a wide variety of customization choices, you are freely to individualize your interface in accordance with your interest and convenience. By this way, the possibility of identical video websites/ blogs will be greatly reduced.

Short-codes

Short-codes are usually overlooked by web owners. However, in the case of WordPress video theme ThemeForest, this is particularly important. Short-codes are generally referred to WordPress-specific codes which let you do nifty things with very little effort. The short-codes can helps you, for example, quickly fetch audio or video data, embed Google maps and add other multimedia elements to the website. A video theme ThemeForest with well-developed short-codes will do a better job optimizing your video content.

Integration with social media

video theme themeforest 3

First, such social channels as Facebook or Twitter will definitely be a better communication channel leading to your website/blog. For this reason, many WordPress theme developers always integrate social sharing buttons into their themes. The second thing to pay attention is the video embedding feature that allows users to embed videos from third parties on their video site. For many reasons, web owners do not directly upload videos to their sites. Instead, they usually choose to embed them from other popular platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion. When choosing a video theme ThemeForest, you should also take notice of this feature, making sure that your theme is compatible with as many platforms as possible.

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

Checklist for Choosing a Perfect University WordPress Theme

October 8, 2015

With thousands of university WordPress themes are released and updated day by day, selecting the right one for your educational site might be a hard mission. A huge of options leads you to be overwhelmed and have a wrong choice. So it is necessary to know exactly what you want for your product or project. In addition, with the support of this post, you can save time for giving an accurate decision. It presents useful advices and checklist of important things to consider before choosing a university WordPress theme.

university WordPress theme 1

4 things to consider before choosing a university WordPress theme

Type of Education Website

Before you go shopping for an online university WordPress theme, you should understand what type of education site you are going to build in order to limit the list of functions and features that are necessary for each type of site. For instance, you would build a site have a lot content like a learning manager system which need more specific features or just a simple one like a brochure.

Also, you should decide which elements are important on your site and which items will be displayed on your home page. This is the basis to pick a theme whose capabilities match your content as not every stunning theme is able to inspire your site.

Design and User Experience

While the matched theme will show off your content (posts, images, audios and videos, etc.) on your education site, its design may increase the attraction of your site looking. There are plenty of websites sell WordPress themes you can find such as ThemeForest, StudioPress and Elegant Themes, which have the best designers. You should experience the demo of each theme to find out the interesting features or obstacles before you get it.

SEO and Site Speed

university WordPress theme 2

The most important way of promoting your site is applying the process which called search engine optimization (SEO). That helps search engines know how the visitors interact with your site in order to rank it on the search engine results. Apparently, the site speed and loading times influent the search engine rankings.

Choosing a fast loading university WordPress theme can increase search engine rankings, online revenue and enhance overall user experience of your website. Avoid using the themes that are too feature-heavy, use a lot of large file formats or have not been updated for a long time. They will pull the site speed into the gutter.

Free vs. Premium University WordPress Theme

Last but not least, that is the price of the university WordPress theme you will choose. In the past few years, the quality of free WordPress theme for university website was usually low. Yet WordPress community has developed day by day and has been available with thousands of great free WordPress themes to pick up. Some popular sources for free themes like WordPress.org are available to check. However, it’s worth considering the premium university WordPress themes with various features available to choose from. Also the prices might be competitive, which allows you can pick a quality premium online university WordPress theme with adaptable payment. Using a premium theme means that its updates and support are always available for you, ensuring that the theme is compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

In a nutshell, the most important of choosing a theme is the quality and the support, so both free and premium university WordPress theme have their own advance.

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

Best education WordPress themes & Checklist for building a school site

October 7, 2015

You think about building a self-host WordPress site for your training center and want to create a checklist for it. You find out that there are a lot of things to do but do not know where you should start. You may wonder: “What should I consider?” or “How to choose a theme among the best education WordPress themes?”

In this article, we will show you the most important things you need to think about when you are planning to build a WordPress education website or renew an old one. Also, we will suggest some best responsive education WordPress themes which are used by many schools.

1. Form and Content

A website is a communication gate, like a school guide, e-mail, a letter, a poster, etc., which identify the school. Therefore, it is important to adjust both the content and form, in the culture and identity of your school.

When you develop an identity for the school, always ask for work files or vector files of your logo and other branding files. If you build a website, these files are needed.

Remember to think about what content should be on your website:

  • General information such as contact information, mission, vision and educational concepts
  • Impressive school photos, videos and text, current data such as calendar and news
  • Documents such as school guide and newsletters

And what’s more?

  • Is there a communications handbook which could be used as an auxiliary guide?

Also, when you understand what content should be on the site, you can start to make a list of best education WordPress themes whose design may highlight the content.

2. Purpose and Function of the school website

best education WordPress themes 1

Before you define the functionality of the school site, it is important to ask yourself the question: What do we want to achieve with your website?

A school site has more than one function:

  • Recruit students
  • Communicate with parents, students, colleagues and other schools through the interactive features of this website
  • Access to available material to facilitate homework

And much more…

Determining purpose and function of the site is very important since it decides which features your theme need to have. This helps you complete your list of best education WordPress themes.

3. Security and Privacy

Be cautious and careful when posting photos on the website. Not all parents are happy when they find pictures of their children online. Many schools ask for agreement in their registration form.

You can choose to make a selection of photos that are publicly supporting the presentation of the school. The other photographs may be shielded so that only parents and teachers can see them by using a password.

Are there other areas of the website that you want to make available to colleagues or parents of students?

4. Target audience

best education WordPress themes 2

Who is this site for?

Of course, parents of potential new students will first contact with your school via the site, so be sure that the website gives a good picture of the school and invites them to come.

Consider also the current parents; they can simply stay up to date on the developments of the school. This facilitates the involvement of students. So remember to involve them in the content and ensure that they can be proud of their school website. Your students are the most important ambassadors of your school.

5. Cost

What budget do you have for a website? Now and in a year?

WordPress itself is free; and it comes with a lot of free themes and plugins. However, when building professional school sites you will need to use the best education WordPress themes among premium WordPress themes. This is worth investing in since a website is more than just a recruitment tool, maybe you can cut costs on other communication channels (such as newsletters, school guides, letters) by making them digitally via the website or email.

A website is not a one-time investment, keep in mind that the website should be maintained. It is better if you can hire a developer to manage and keep your website safe and updated.

In short, plan a budget for the following things:

  • Website building: Domain, hosting, premium WordPress themes and plugins, etc.
  • Website management
  • Site maintenance

6. Management/Editorial

Make sure that you manage the website through a so-called system. View this critically before you build the website. It is important that the website is easy to manage itself. This avoids additional external support costs and prevents the contents from being tracked.

  • Who is primarily responsible for keeping the website?
  • Who will take care of the content of the website? An editorial team, and every teacher, perhaps students can also make a contribution?

Make the website part of the permanent communication. For example, always place the newsletter on the website.

7. Technical maintenance

best education WordPress themes 3

Most of premium plugins and the best education WordPress themes offer professional technical support. However, you should take a deep look at them to ensure that technical maintenance remains affordable and is carried out by trusted partners.

Avoid being too dependent on the developer you hire. WordPress is an open source, so you can always enable another partner to take over the maintenance of the website, or make technical adjustments.

8. Other interesting questions

  • Do you need a site with social networks such as Twitter, or Facebook? It is a fact that everybody increasingly uses them, be aware of that. See if you can make use of them.
  • Remember that websites are increasingly being viewed on mobile devices. So, how can you take this into account and make use of it?
  • If you are building a site network, do you want to buy some best WordPress themes for online education or just purchase one item?

best education wordpress themes

List of some best education WordPress themes

  • University – Education, Event and Course Theme
  • Academy – Learning Management Theme
  • Clever Course – One of the best education WordPress themes for online courses
  • LMS | Responsive Learning Management System
  • Kids Zone | Responsive Children Theme

Above are some of the best responsive education WordPress themes for your preference. You can purchase it on ThemeForest with only $59 for each item.

Hope you will have a perfect school site!

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

Checklist for Choosing a Perfect WordPress Video Theme for Your Site

September 10, 2015

With so many WordPress themes on offer, you may wonder which theme is perfect for your video projects and match your content.

So, by spending a few minutes reading this checklist, you will understand what you need to look for. This helps you save lots of time and effort when filtering out the best WordPress video theme 2015 for your site.

List of Required Features

Before reviewing WordPress themes, you need to write up a checklist of features your video website will require and ensure that any theme that catch your attention include them. There are some features and functionality you should expect to see in a video WordPress theme. This could include responsive design, retina display support, video post format, YouTube video support, self-hosted video support and more.

Support for video plugins

While most WordPress themes and plugins should work well together, you can still save your time and effort by searching out video themes which are compatible with the most important plugins you plan to use.

For example, if you are video sharing website using Huge-IT Video Gallery, it can be helpful to look for a theme that is compatible with this tool. While most themes should work with this plugin, a video theme that lists compatibility with it will include full support for the plugin and allow you to take full advantage of Huge-IT Video Gallery.

Additionally, it’s worth checking the compatibility with the most popular plugins such as WooCommerce, WordPress SEO and WPML.

Free vs. Premium WordPress Video Theme

WordPress 2015 is content-focused; therefore, free video themes sometimes cannot meet your need of having unique video content in various formats. In that case, you should consider using a premium template for your website. When purchasing a premium WordPress video theme you can receive frequent updates and dedicated technical support.

Video Theme WordPress 2015 1

Pre and Post-Sales Support

After making a shortlist of suitable WordPress video themes, you should investigate the pre and post-sales support that is available with these themes.

There are some WordPress theme stores and marketplaces which allow users to freely access to their customer communication areas or support forums. You may also get in touch with the theme’s support team via or even email, online contact form telephone.

Mobile Optimization

Since April 2015, Google has included mobile-friendliness as a factor to determine your website’s rank in the search results. Thus, it is necessary to install a fully responsive video theme on to your WordPress site. Though most of WordPress themes available are responsive by default, it would be better to check whether the one you choose is completely mobile friendly.

Site speed and performance

Site speed and performance play a large part in how usable your site is and how SEO friendly it is. In addition to choosing the right web host, it is critical to pick a fast loading video theme. You can test the theme speed by running its demo through an online performance testing tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

Video Theme WordPress 2015

Conclusion

You may be easily distracted and overwhelmed due to the huge number of WordPress video themes on offer today. However, if you understand what you want, it would be much easier to find the the best WordPress video theme 2015 for your individual needs.

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

The common of SEO friendly education WordPress themes

September 9, 2015

Nowadays, not only shops and businesses but many education organizations also do SEO for your websites. And a significant part of them choose to use WordPress – a SEO friendly platform, in order to manage the website content.

Before doing SEO for your WordPress education website, you need to pick a search engine optimized theme and set up a SEO plugin. However, with so many themes available, it would be hard to know which features are important and which are not. This article shows you the features SEO friendly education WordPress themes need to have. It will help you to select a theme that is as search engine friendly as possible.

The common of SEO friendly education WordPress themes

Responsive Design

education WordPress themes 1

From an SEO standpoint, it is very important for a website to be mobile friendly as this can improve the site’s rank in the search engine results pages and attract more website traffic. And using an education WordPress theme with responsive design is an effective way to ensure your site is mobile friendly.

The number of premium and free responsive education WordPress themes increase everyday. So you can pick such a one with no difficulty.

No Homepage Sliders

education WordPress themes 2

Homepage sliders are a common feature of many popular premium themes available today. However, these content sliders are bad for SEO since they increase the number of H1 headings per page, as opposed to the use of just one H1 heading per page, which is common SEO best practice.

Additionally, while some search engines use site speed as part of their ranking criteria for a website, these sliders can slow down the page. As a result, homepage sliders may have a negative impact on your site’s rank.

Therefore, a SEO optimized WordPress education theme will have no homepage slider or allow you to choose whether to use homepage sliders or not.

Schema.org Markup Integration

Education WordPress themes that make use of schema.org markup can help you optimize your education website and increase the number of site visitors from search engines like Google.

You can use this markup to enable rich snippets for your site, including your school’s photo, links to social media profiles, ratings, address, location, video thumbnails and more.

education WordPress themes 3

The rich snippets helps search engines better understand your content. Also, this information can be displayed on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, making your content look more enticing when shared socially.

You can use a plugin to add rich snippets to your WordPress education site, or select an education WordPress theme which integrate schema.org markup.

SEO Plugin Compatibility

There are a lot of premium and free responsive education WordPress themes which are completely compatible with popular SEO plugins. This allows you to take full advantage of the SEO plugin you use and even enhance its functions.

Hopefully this article can help you to choose a suitable SEO friendly education WordPress theme for your site and get more students as well as sell more courses.

Featured, WordPress Tips

Four useful tips to optimize images in an education theme | WordPress

August 29, 2015

Images are often considered one of the best parts of WordPress sites, including educational ones. They set the mood, catch the eyes and even invite emotions.

However, images are often the biggest files on a server so they may affect the loading speed of the site. To solve this problem, this article introduces four favorable tips to optimize all images uploaded to your site as well as used by your WordPress education theme, WordPress plugins.

1. Choose the Suitable Image Format

education theme wordpressJPEG format is usually the best choice for photos when you’re on a bandwidth budget. In fact, you can see almost no visible difference between PNGs and JPEGs. However, the PNG is much larger than the JPEG. Also, remember that every time you edit and save a JPEG image, you lose a little bit of the original image quality.

If an image contains typography, or is a screenshot or any other form of computer-generated images, then it is better to choose PNG or SVG format. Besides, GIF format is the good choice for animated images.

2. Keep the Original Image File

To optimize images in education center WordPress theme, it would be better if you experiment with different compression options. Nevertheless, always remember to keep the original images safe as some time when the file is compressed, you cannot undo the change. This might be a simple tip that helps you save time.

3. Use the Best Retina Format

Retina technology displayed huge picture quality benefits but created a couple of problems for us. Typical monitors use 72ppi while a Retina display ranges 150 to 300 ppi. This makes images and fonts more beautiful and makes larger image files and reduces page loading time, especially with mobile devices.

The good new is that the human eyes actually pick up different in quality on Retina devices after compression. A huge JPEG saves at a high compression rate that can look better than smaller image at reduced compression when you resized your page.

Another way to solve the problem is to create a second version of your image file at double size. For example, a 100 x 100 px image at 80ppi will need to become 200 x 200 px, then resized back to 100 x 100 in your page, or increased to 160ppi.

4. Use a Compression Tool or Plugin for WordPress

There are some choices for education center WordPress theme when you think about automating image compression. Here are a few of many great compression tools available on the Internet.

TinyPNG

education theme wordpressThis is the best tool to take the hard work out of compressing PNG images. You just need to upload your images and download the free compressed version. You can upload 20 images with maximum size of 5MB. There are some great TinyPNG plugins for WordPress.

WP Smush.it

education theme wordpress 1This is a great WordPress plugin that helps to reduce image sizes and speed up page loading time.

EWW Image Optimizer

education theme wordpressThis is also a good plugin but you need to take note of the warnings. For example, when you have compressed a GIF, you can’t edit it again.

WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

Five key tips to choose an impressive WordPress video theme

August 24, 2015

Nowadays, videos are getting more and more popular due to the development of technology and Internet, which is illustrated through the figure of 72 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds. It means that you can easily publish your videos. However, at the same time, you also find it difficult to get attention of viewers to your content.

Good news for WordPress users is that they can now take all worries out with WordPress video themes since they can provide users with amazing sites to present awesome videos. All you need to do is choosing a theme that can create a lasting impression on your visitors to guarantee they will frequently visit your site. The following given tips will be useful for you when picking a stunning theme for your video website.

wordpress video theme responsive

1. Curate a highly compatible theme

There are a bunch of devices and browsers, and you are incapable of forcing your visitors to use a particular device or browser compatible with your theme. The perfect option is choosing a theme that supports a large number of popular browsers.

Also, when you choose a WordPress video theme, responsive design is another factor that you should consider. Because responsive WordPress themes for video will help your website adapt to all screen sizes.

It should be much better if you can use a theme available on mobile as more and more people are using smartphones to watch and share videos these days.

Thus, always bear in mind that the more highly compatible theme you select, the more visitors you attract.

2. Choose a SEO friendly WordPress video theme

It is necessary to choose a SEO friendly theme if you want your videos to be known by a large number of audience. You are expected to focus on the SEO features and code of the theme to make sure that your contents can reach high-ranking on Google search result page and be watched by many people.

3. Select a user-friendly WordPress video theme

Not all of your viewers are master at technology, so your website is expected to possess a user-friendly theme to gain the largest number of visitors. You should choose a theme using friendly elements to bring your visitors the most pleasant experience. Besides, themes compatible with WPML Plugin are the perfect choices as they provide full translations to help you create multilingual websites for people from various countries.

4. Choose a theme having clean appearance and many customization options

If your website is beautiful and impressive, it will likely attract a lot of audience. You should also review responsive WordPress themes for video that has many personalization choices. Those will give you more opportunities to make your website stand out.

5. Pick a video theme treasuring special features and tremendous support

Special features are to help you run your site effectively and leave your viewers with an unforgettable impression. The theme should be able to present a stunning and neat portfolio of your works to make it easy for your visitors to find the videos on your site. Basically, it is supposed to allow you to showcase your content in Channels and embed video URLs from well-known video hosting sites. You should also consider your own purposes to choose themes with exclusive features, such as advertisement plugin, counting view and video rating plugin, etc. Additionally, never forget to select a theme that helps you create forum on your site as well as share your content on popular social network sites. It is extremely important that you choose a theme that provides full support at any time and is updated automatically to avoid bugs.

The five tips mentioned above are the keys to success in choosing an impressive WordPress video theme. Based on these tips, True Mag is considered one of the most leading themes, which has gained trust of more than 3000 users. You can try its demo right now with just one click and own it for only $59.

wordpress video theme responsive

About CactusThemes

About CactusThemes

We are Power Elite Author on Envato. We specialized in WordPress Themes and Plugins development. Our products focus on User Experience and Business Solution, in many categories such as Video, Sport, Magazine, University, Blog...

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