How to Add Instant Search in WordPress with Algolia

Have you ever wanted to add an instant search feature in your WordPress site? The default WordPress search feature is quite limited which is why a lot of probloggers replace it with third-party tools and plugins. In this article, we will show you how to add instant search in WordPress with Algolia.

Why Add an Instant Search Feature in WordPress?

The default WordPress search is plain and often not relevant. This is why many WordPress users replace it with third-party search tools like Google Search, or WordPress plugins like SearchWP. See our list of 12 WordPress search plugins to improve your site search.

A search feature on your website can significantly improve user experience. It helps users find content, which increases your pageviews and the time users spend on your website.

Instant search feature helps users find content as quickly as they start typing. This helps users get to their desired content much quickly. Think of it as MacOS’s spotlight feature for your WordPress site.

Having said that, let’s take a look at how to add instant search to your WordPress site with Algolia.

What is Algolia?

Algolia is a cloud based search platform that allows you to build beautiful search experiences for your websites and applications.

Once activated, Algolia will index all content on your website and replace the default WordPress search with a more powerful cloud based search.

It comes with a built-in instant search feature which means your users can get to the content faster without even seeing a search results page.

Algolia offers a free plan with 10,000 records and 100,000 queries per month. Their paid plans start from per month and come with a 14 day free trial.

Adding Instant Search in WordPress with Algolia

First, you need to visit Algolia website and sign up for an account.

Next, you need to install and activate the Search by Algolia plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, the plugin will add a new menu item labeled Algolia to your WordPress menu. Clicking on it will take you to the plugin’s settings page.

You will be asked to provide application ID and API keys. You can obtain this information from your Algolia account dashboard.

Copy and paste the required keys in the plugin’s settings page and then click on the save changes button to store your settings.

Next, you will be asked to index your content. Indexing allows Algolia to crawl and create an index of your content, so that it can be searched quickly without slowing down your website.

You can begin indexing by visiting Algolia » Indexing page and select the content types you want to be indexed. Don’t forget to click on the save changes button.

Algolia will now start indexing your content. It may take a while depending on how much content you have on your website.

Next, you need to enable the autocomplete feature. Go to Algolia » Autocomplete and check the box next to ‘Enable autocomplete’ option. After that you need to scroll down and select the content types to include in your autocomplete results.

Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.

Lastly, you need to replace the default WordPress search with the Algolia instant search. You can do this by going to Algolia » Search Page and select ‘Use Algolia in the backend’ option.

Selecting Algolia in the backend replaces your WordPress search with Algolia search.

Click on the save changes button to store your settings.

Adding Instant Search Box in WordPress

Now that you have successfully setup Algolia, let’s go ahead and add an instant search box on your website.

Algolia automatically replaces the default WordPress search form with an Algolia powered search.

If you have already added the search form to your WordPress site, then it will start showing results using Algolia automatically.

If you haven’t added a search form, then go to Appearance » Widgets page. Drag and drop the search widget to your sidebar. See our guide on how to add and use widgets in WordPress.

Please make sure to click on the save button to store your widget settings.

That’s all, you can now visit your website to see the instant search in action. Start by typing in the search box, and Algolia will start showing results as you type.

We hope this article helped you add instant search in WordPress with Algolia. You may also want to see our list of 24 must have WordPress plugins for business websites.

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The post How to Add Instant Search in WordPress with Algolia appeared first on WPBeginner.

Page 6 – WPBeginner

How to Improve Your Blog Search Ranking in Bing

alt="How to Improve Your Blog Search Ranking in Bing" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/default-image-500x308_c.jpg" />

class="border" src="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.com/images/2011/1207-1.jpg" alt="BING Search Engine" />

The vast majority of SEO discussions focus on how to rank well in Google (href="http://www.Google.com" target="_blank">http://www.google.com), and with good reason. Google is unquestionably the king of search, and there is a good chance things will stay that way for quite some time. That said, Bing (href="http://www.bing.com/" target="_blank">http://www.bing.com) is having a strong impact on the industry, and it can no longer be ignored by anybody who takes SEO seriously.

Now that Bing controls the Yahoo! search results as well, it means that they control at least 30 percent of the search market. In other words, nearly a third of people are now looking at Bing’s search results, not Google’s. Therefore, if you properly optimize your site to deal with both Google and Bing, you could see almost a 50 percent increase in your traffic over focusing just on Google.

Fortunately, you don’t have to completely overhaul your SEO efforts in order to rank well in Bing. Most of the factors that improve a site’s rankings are the same in both search engines. That said, there are some important differences that you can’t ignore if you want to capture as much search traffic as possible.

Editorial Links

The first important difference is the relevance of editorial links. An editorial link is a link from within the content of an article. Many SEO experts have already pointed out that Google now places a stronger emphasis on these types of links than other types of links such as Blogrolls, comments, link directories, and similar links. But Bing places an even stronger emphasis on these types of links.

This doesn’t mean that other links don’t matter, but it does mean that if you want to rank well in Bing, you better have a strategy for getting contextual links. This isn’t going to happen by spamming the Internet with comment links or buying links in the sidebar. You’ll need to write guest posts, use link baiting techniques, and find other ways to attract links from the content of articles.

One easy way you can increase your number of editorial links is to start an article marketing campaign. This can be as simple as writing some short (300-500 words) articles and including your links within the body. Be careful though – you won’t improve your ranking with Bing if you just throw your link in the article over and over again. Your article needs to make sense, and your links should be worked in naturally in a way that doesn’t interrupt the flow of the article or make it sound contrived.

Press Release

Press releases are another great way to get editorial links. If your company or website is doing something newsworthy (like launching a new product, donating to a charity, or hosting an event), then write about it in a press release and include a link back to your website. If you have the budget available, there are a number of good press release distribution services out there (like PRWeb.com) that will send out your release for you. You can also distribute your press release manually if money is an issue. A good press release can get picked up by thousands of other websites and news sources, which can result in a ton of good editorial links pointing back to your website.

Do Not Buy Links

Whatever you do, though, do not buy links from link brokers or other websites that sell links in bulk. Bing (and other search engines) frowns upon this practice and will actually punish you for purchasing links with a worse ranking. The best kinds of links to get are organic links that you acquire naturally using effective link-building strategies like the ones we just talked about. If you suddenly acquire 100 new links overnight, Bing will get suspicious and could penalize you.

Domain Name

Another factor that seems to have relevance is the href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/web-hosting-beginner-guide/">domain name. While having the keyword in your domain matters a lot for Google, it matters even more for Bing. There is some debate about whether an exact match domain is more important than a good brand name, and this will depend as much on your own business strategy as anything else. Nevertheless, realizing that this factor is even more important for results in Bing is an important thing to keep in mind while you make this decision.

Content Freshness

Finally, Bing seems to have a stronger emphasis on content. A page can rank well in Google even if there is almost no content on the page. This doesn’t appear to be the case with Bing. The search engine prefers to rank pages that have a lot of content on them. Even if a page has a large number of high quality links pointing toward it, Bing may refuse to rank it well if it doesn’t have very much content on it.

It’s a good idea to add fresh, unique content to your website on a regular basis anyway, in order to attract visitors and give them a reason to keep coming back to your website, and if this will help your Bing rankings too then that’s just icing on the cake. If you find that you have trouble creating your own content, you can find ghostwriters and freelance bloggers on job auction sites like Guru.com and Elance.com that will create content for you at an affordable rate.

As with Google, the most important ranking factor for Google is links. While the domain name and the amount of content on the page are both important, the difference in links is the most important factor that will improve your rankings in Microsoft’s search engine.

Page 25 – Web Hosting Secret Revealed

How To Speed Up Your Website For Better Search Rankings

alt="How To Speed Up Your Website For Better Search Rankings" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0322-5-500x338_c.jpg" />

It is no secret that Google is now using site speed as one of the ranking factors. Google Webmaster Central Blog made an official announcement on this some years ago:

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests…

And, Matt Cutts has repeatedly mentioned about the importance of website speed optimization in his href="http://youtu.be/vLp9Qf99DCI" target="_blank">videos and title="Matt Cutts Blog Post On Site Speed" href="http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/" target="_blank">blogs. While searching and reading more on this topic, I bumped into several case studies that confirm on this – In one href="http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2064113/Case-Study-Impact-of-Code-Cleanup-on-Site-Traffic" target="_blank">article on Search Engine Watch, Work Coach Cafe gained an extra 40% organic traffics after cleaning up its codes and broken links; on another href="http://www.retailtouchpoints.com/cross-channel-strategies/885-the-growing-need-for-speed-how-site-performance-increasingly-influences-search-rankings" target="_blank">case study, SmartFurniture.com CEO confirmed that the site made a quantum lead in search engine rankings simply by increasing his site performance.

Faster Page Load Time Also Equals To Better Conversion

style="text-align: center;">class="aligncenter border" alt="Site Load Time Infographics" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0322-5.jpg" width="750" />

But wait, there are more reasons why you should take time to speed up your website. In one study on travel site users, I learned that 57% of website users will only wait for three seconds or less before abandoning a site. In another href="http://blog.tagman.com/2012/03/just-one-second-delay-in-page-load-can-cause-7-loss-in-customer-conversions/ " target="_blank">popular research at Tagman (see chart above), it shows that an increase of one second in page load time can cause nearly 7%  loss in customer conversions.

In short, page load time not only affects search rankings, it also impacts greatly on conversion rate and visitors reach. For more similar statistics, make sure you visit Mashable for this href="http://mashable.com/2012/03/14/slow-website-stats-infographic/" target="_blank">beautiful infographic.

How To Improve Your Website Speed

When I first learned about all these two years ago, I was like “Wow, there’s so many benefits in this!”. What’s come next is inevitably the question ‘how’. How do we speed up our websites? How do we measure the speed of our website and compare with others? How do we get things done without getting into too much technical details?

Ian Lurie wrote href="http://searchengineland.com/29-ways-to-speed-up-your-website-70437" target="_blank">29 Ways To Speed Up Your Website back in March 2011 and it’s a true gem. If you are serious about tweaking your website speed, you should follow every single tips shared in the article.

However many of these solutions may be beyond the technical skills of everyday website owners and bloggers. So I thought I’d revisit on this topic and look for simple ways and so the non-techie users can implement without pouring too much of time and energy.

1. Slim Down Your Site

In many times when a page load time is slow, it simply means the page is overweight.

The solution is easy: Go on a diet! Take a thorough check on your website and ask yourself these questions:

• Are you keeping too many unused CSS in the server? Delete them!
• Are your images too large? Optimize them with Photoshop, Fireworks, or Smush It if you don’t have a graphic software installed in your PC.
• Are you having excessive HTTP headers? Remove them!
• Are you keeping too many spam comments? Undeleted comments in your spam box will simply slow down your database response time. Remove them asap!
• Are you using too many plugins on your CMS? Are you using outdated plugins and scripts on your site? Well then it’s time to do some clean up and updating job.
• Is your JavaScript too heavy?  Minify and compress it!

While these tips seem pretty simple, I won’t be surprise to see experienced webmasters or web designers fail to keep up with it. A few years back I was careless and I wasn’t aware that the WordPress theme I am using has a <?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly’); ?> embedded in the header.php file. Needless to say, the function generates dozens of unnecessary lines in HTML files as time goes. It’s a silly mistake that can be fixed in seconds, but then it took me more than 2 years to realized it as I wasn’t looking on my own source code.

2. Avoid Unnecessary HTTP 300’s, 400’s and 500’s

HTTP 300’s refers to server redirects, HTTP 400’s refers to authentication issues, and HTTP 500’s refers to server errors – all these results for HTTP requests cause unnecessary extra round trips* for the browsers. While certain HTTP 300’s are unavoidable (such as 301 redirection to a new page location), you should look into every HTTP 400’s and 500’s errors and try to fix every one of it.

* What’s A Round Trip Time Anyway?

General speaking, a webpage weights roughly 1,100KB in size and consists of roughly 100 objects (href="http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/ ">source); a web browser can only request 2 – 6 objects at a time depends on user’s configuration. Round Trip Times is the number of round trip it takes for a browser to open up a page completely. For example, In order to load a webpage with 100 objects, a browser that is configured to carry 5 requests at a time will takes 20 round trips to load the webpage. Since the lesser round trip times it takes, the faster a webpage loads; we should minimize the number of objects available on one page.

3. Use CSS Sprites

CSS Sprites refers to the technique where multiple images were combined into one image file and shown parts of it to the users at a time. Using CSS Sprites reduces the number of browsers round trips and hence makes web pages load faster.

Now wait, I know this might seems a little too much for some of you who don’t like to get your hands wet on CSS but trust me, the concept is much simpler than it sounds. And, best of all, there are free tools online that can get things done without touching the CSS codes. Check out href="http://spriteme.org/" target="_blank">Sprite Me and href="http://spritepad.wearekiss.com/" target="_blank">Sprite Pad – things can be done in just a few drag-and-drop and clicks.

Sprite Pad

style="text-align: center;">class="aligncenter border" alt="Sprite Pad" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0322-2.jpg" width="750" />

Sprite Me

style="text-align: center;">class="aligncenter border" alt="Sprite Me" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0322-3.jpg" width="750" />

Also, for further readings and examples of CSS Sprites, visit href="http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/" target="_blank">this and href="http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=447210" target="_blank">this tutorial.

4. Avoid Using CSS @import

CSS @import function helps load external stylesheet to your webpage. The bad thing about this is that it simply adds additional browser round trip times and increase your webpage load time. To solve this, simply use a <link> tag instead.

In case you are a casual blogger and have no idea what am I talking about, just go have a look on your header.php (if you are using WordPress), ctrl + F and search for ‘@import’, move .css files to the same server if necessary, replace @import lines with <link> instead.

Example, replace

@import url(“../style1.css”);

@import url(“../style2.css”)

to

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style1.css”>

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”style2.css”>

5. Update Your CMS

Well this is a no-brainer, right? Updates are meant to boost performance and security and the least you can do for your visitors is to keep them on an updated CMS platform.

6. Cache All You Can Cache

These days in most cases I rely on a third party plugin for caching. For one, I am too lazy to look into it; secondly, there are pros that can do things much better than me, why waste my energy in this? In case you are on WordPress, try WP Super Cache – it’s one of the most popular cache href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/" target="_blank">WP plugin at this time of writing. In case you are Joomla, check out href="http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/performance/cache/9495" target="_blank">Cache Cleaner.

In brief, these plugins help cache the latest version of your webpage and reduce the needs of generating dynamic content during a repeat visit.

There are plenty of technical details to crunch in this topic, feel free to read more at href="http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/performance/caching.xtp" target="_blank">here and href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/caching.html" target="_blank">here.

7. Get On A Content Delivery Network (CDN)

class="alignright" style="border: 0px;" alt="CDN services" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0322-6.jpg" width="300" height="123" />

A CDN stores your static files across servers worldwide and serves your web pages from different servers based on user’s location. Example, when a user from Malaysia access to your website, the CDN will delivers your web content (mainly static files like images and HTML files) from the server located in Asia, say Singapore; on the other hand if the user is located at Mexico, the network will choose to deliver the content from a nearer server location, say United States.

There are different brands of CDN available out there but in general CDN can be grouped into two categories – Pull CDN and Push CDN. For more details, I suggest you have a look on some of the reputable CDN services such as href="http://www.maxcdn.com/" target="_blank">MaxCDN, href="http://www.edgecast.com/" target="_blank">EdgeCast, href="http://www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn" target="_blank">CloudFlare, as well as href="http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/" target="_blank">Amazon’s CloudFront.

8.  Consider A Better Web Host

If you are serious about tweaking your site faster, consider href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/choose-the-right-web-hosting/">picking a better hosting.

Roughly one year ago I switched one of my websites from a shared hosting account at Hostgator to href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/hosting-review/wp-engine/" target="_blank">WP Engine (a cloud based hosting). Things changed dramatically ever since I moved, the average page load speed cut down from over 900ms to 500ms – an almost 100% improvement (see chart below).

style="text-align: center;">class="aligncenter border" alt="WHSR Page Loading Speed" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0322-4.jpg" width="750" />

Lesson learned: Sometimes you just can’t rely on the cheap stuffs. If you are paying less than per month, don’t expect to get on top of this speed game. If you want your website to load lighting fast, perhaps the easiest way to do so is to shift your website to a better web host.

If you are thinking of getting a better host, you can read more about href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/compare-best-five-hosting/" target="_blank">my Best 5 Web Hosting Picks.

9. Optimize Your Database

If you are on MySQL, things can be done easily on phpMyAdmin. And if you are on WordPress, things can be done even easier with the right plugin. href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-optimize/" target="_blank">WP Optimize, for example, allows you to clean up your database in just a few clicks.

10. Place Your Scripts At The Footer Whenever It’s Possible

One easy way to improve your page load time in the view of visitors is to to place codes and scripts (for example, Google Analytics) at the footer whenever is possible. Though I believe it barely helps in term of SEO, doing so will nevertheless  makes your website viewers feel that the page is loading in a faster manner – as this allows critical content to load before browsers execute the scripts.

More Tips On Speeding Up Your Website

There, you now have my 10 quick tips on how to improve website speed.

I am sure there are many other methods to get the job done, why not tell us yours – What’s your #1 tips for a non-techies to speed up their websites?

Page 21 – Web Hosting Secret Revealed