At its core, WordPress consists of a set of PHP files and a MySQL database along with some image files. Moving your WordPress website to a new host essentially involves copying those components and plopping them down on your new host.

That sounds simple enough.

But there are some things that can make the process tricky. For instance, hosting configurations (including things like which PHP version your host has implemented, file system permissions, SSL certificates, and other things that are host specific) can affect how your website behaves when it’s moved to its new home. You’ll want to be sure that you’ve considered all of those elements of migrating your website.

If your WordPress instance is a simple, straight forward website (plugins all updated, nothing custom, etc.), then moving it to a new host is usually an easy process. However, if you have done a lot of custom work on your WordPress website, you may need some help from more experienced web hosting experts.

Manually Moving Your WordPress Site to a New Host

Manually moving your WordPress website to your new host is the most technically involved of the methods that I’m going to discuss.

To manually move your WordPress site, you’ll follow these steps:

• Make a compressed (using the zip or tar function) backup of all of the files that comprise your WordPress site. On a new WordPress install, this would be all the files under the wordpress folder.
• Make a backup of the MySQL database you’re using for your WordPress website. You can do this by using a tool such as PHPMyAdmin, which the most popular hosting providers support.
• Copy your compressed WordPress files to your new hosting setup by moving the compressed file to the file system of your new host and decompressing it. Make sure the file structure is set up the same way as it was on the previous host, including that the root WordPress folder is in the web root directory of your new web host.
• Set up a new database that mirrors what you had on the previous host. Once the database is created, you’ll then dump the SQL file you created into the new database instance you create in your new hosting environment.

Because of how different hosting environments are, it’s likely you will need to do some checking and likely a bit of troubleshooting to tweak hosting settings so that your website looks and acts like it did on your old host.

Using a WordPress Migration Plugin

There are several WordPress migration plugins that can be used to bundle up your WordPress instance on your existing host, then move it to your new host without having to deal with so much of the technical issues as you do when you’re manually moving your WordPress site to a new host.

The one that I’ve used most often and that is the most popular for people who want to move a WordPress site to a new host is called All-in-One WP Migration. Using this plugin, you can create a backup of your entire site into a file that is type .wpress.

On your new web host, you’ll go ahead and install a basic WordPress instance, from which you’ll install the All-in-One WP Migration plugin. Once you’ve installed the All-in-One WP Migration plugin on your new host, you can import the .wpress file that you created from your old host.

I’ve had a lot of success using this plugin. However, with larger websites, the .wpress file you create is so large that you may run into issues (e.g. network timeouts, shortage of disk space) downloading it from your existing host or uploading it to the new host.

Having Your New Web Host Move Your WordPress Site

Some web hosting companies offer a service in which they will move your WordPress website over to their hosting service. Web hosting companies are eager to get your business, which means that many of them have dedicated technical resources to ensure that you get moved over to hosting with one of their plans as smoothly as possible.

I recently moved several of my ecommerce stores from LiquidWeb to Pressable, which is one of the web hosts recommended by WooCommerce. Pressable has a specific plugin they have created that allows you to simply connect your old website to a new staging instance you create inside of your Pressable hosting dashboard. The video below is a quick walk-through of how Pressable’s plugin works.

If you run into snags, the Pressable customer support team can take over and do the migration or help you with your use of their plugin.

The post How to Move a WordPress Website To a New Host appeared first on TheTechnologyVault.com.

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that allows users to create online stores on which they can publish products that store visitors can add to a shopping cart and purchase through an online checkout system.

Shopify stores are hosted ecommerce platform solutions, meaning that the software that runs the store and the store itself come as a combined package. When you set up an account with Shopify, you are given a store owner portal that allows you to do everything you need to sell online, including:

• list the products you want to sell online, including creating new products and editing existing products
• choose a theme for your store and customize it to have the look that fits your brand
• set up a merchant payment processor account to accept credit cards, PayPal, and other payment methods

There are lots of other features available from Shopify that can be used to support your online store depending upon your specific needs related to shipping, ware

Alternatives to Shopify

There are over a million stores online that use Shopify, it’s not the best fit for everyone. Below are some alternatives to Shopify that you may want to consider.

BigCommerce and Wix are both hosted e-commerce platforms like Shopify, meaning you get the hosting and the shopping cart system together when you use those platforms. WooCommerce is a free, WordPress plugin that you install on a host that you choose.

Shopify Free Trial

Does Shopify Have a Free Trial? Yes (14-day)

Shopify’s free trial gives you 14-days to test out how their system works. Shopify’s free trial will not allow you to actually sell any products on a live store. The free trial is only intended to let you try out the features of Shopify. If you want to begin selling on Shopify, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the paid plans.

You don’t need a credit card to start a free trial with Shopify. You just need an email address to get the trial up and running.

Shopify’s free trial period starts as soon as you sign up, not when you begin working on a store, so it’s a good idea to have time set aside to give the Shopify platform a good test run before you commit to signing up for the 14-day free trial.

Shopify Pricing

Shopify has several different plans to accommodate businesses and individuals in their various phases of growth and shopping cart needs. Here are their most common e-commerce plans. The pricing and features for these plans are similar to what BigCommerce (their main competitor) offers.

Outside of these three basic pricing packages, Shopify offers two other plans that extend beyond the spectrum of small businesses to the larger ones who would use the Advanced plan.

Shopify Lite – Buy Button – $9/month

For $9 per month, people who are bloggers or have other online presence can add a basic shopping cart that allows people to purchase products while reading the content.

ShopifyPlus – Enterprise Ecommerce – $2,000/month and up

Shopify has an enterprise solution that starts at $2,000 per month. Enterprise solutions for e-commerce allow enterprise-sized companies to have custom integrations done and offload much of their IT needs to Shopify’s hosted e-commerce platform, which is built based upon the collective experience of handling more than a million online stores.

Shopify Demo

Shopify Reviews

Shopify is one of the most popular shopping cart systems in the world for good reason. It is a solid product that tends to get good reviews. Here are some Shopify reviews from trusted critics who have evaluated the Shopify feature set, the customer service, and other aspects of Shopify in comparison to other options.

Shopify FAQs

What programming languages are used to create Shopify?

• Ruby
• JavaScript (React)
• PHP

The post Shopify Ecommerce Platform appeared first on TheTechnologyVault.com.

Thinkific was designed primarily with education entrepreneurs in mind, people who want to profit from sharing their knowledge using the Thinkific course-building and promotion toolset. However, Thinkific is also used for employee training and corporate educational purposes as well.

Thinkific Demo

Thinkific Pricing

Free

Cost: $0

Access to Thinkific’s core feature set. This plan is essentially a test-drive of the Thinkific platform.

Basic

Cost: $49/month

Includes basic Thinkific features needed to launch one course.

Pro

Cost: $99/month

Thinkific Pro is for serious course creators determined to build their own education business using the Thinkific platform. Includes all of the Thinkific tools and features.

Premier

Cost: $499/month

This plan is for advanced users who are at the next level for online education and who want to scale their business. Includes all of the Thinkific features + Thinkific’s Growth package for scaling market efforts.

Thinkific for Lead Generation

Thinkific’s software platform can even be used for lead generation. Considering the customer journey as being closely associated with education about products and services, Thinkific’s set of tools can be used to escort potential customers through the product education process, acting as lead input system for a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. As potential and existing customers continue to learn more about a product or company, that education can then be used to generate revenue. By making the learning experience interactive between a customer or sales lead and an internal sales team members makes the sales process much more streamlined.

Thinkific integrates directly with Salesforce, connecting Thinkific user data with Salesforce contacts. Thinkific can also be integrated with CRM tools like HubSpot, Pipedrive, or InfusionSoft using the Zapier automation tool.

Thinkific for Entrepreneurial Educators

Thinkific was designed to give online educators simple but powerful tools to create online courses that can provide customized experiences for an unlimited number of students. Thinkific has resources for educators to build their own personal instructor websites on which they can sell and publish courses.

Here are a few of the resources Thinkific provides for course creating entrepreneurs:

• Delivery flexibility: lessons can be presented as live, on-demand videos, or a combination of both
• Assessments and certificates: built-in ability to evaluate students and formally reward them for succeeding
• Progress tracking: in-depth progress reporting system for each student
• Communities and memberships: ability to create an interactive section of your course for engaging with students or allowing them to interact with each other
• Drag and drop website builder: an easy to use tool for creating and organizing course content, then publishing it
• Checkout system: accept signups and payments through Thinkific’s ecommerce payment system
• Product flexibility: ability to sell your educational content in standalone courses or as components of bundles or subscriptions
• Pricing and marketing tools: control over pricing, coupons, and subscription, and promotion

Thinkific Course Examples

To understand how Thinkific’s learning management system works, it’s helpful to see what existing instructors are building with their courses. Here are some examples of courses that are marketed and published on Thinkific’s LMS platform:

Jonathan Levi’s SuperLearner Academy

James Testani’s GoodGuitarist School

The post Thinkific Online Course Platform appeared first on TheTechnologyVault.com.