A lot of people new to building a site end up coming to the conclusion that WordPress is the right choice for them. Very rarely will WordPress be unable to accomplish the site you want. The question that makes all the difference in what your site can do is which theme you choose, so you’ll have to ask yourself “Should I spend 50$ on a theme or should I go with the free themes WordPress offers?”

Before making this important decision, you should put together a basic vision of what you want to accomplish. What you expect from your website as far as functionality is key into what theme you’re going to get.

Free themes can be great for someone just looking to write blog posts to share with friends and family, or other personal pet projects. Free themes are less maintained than premium ones, which means updates aren’t released as often. They’re also not monitored to ensure they don’t break. Because they’re updated less often, it’s likely they won’t work with a large portion of the available WordPress plugins.  If you’re unsure what your long term needs are, you can always use a free theme now and upgrade to a premium theme later.

A lot of questions come into play when looking for a theme. If you answer yes to any of the following questions, you should heavily consider a premium WordPress theme.

• Are you building a business site?
• Do you want your site to be fully customizable?
• Are you selling anything?
• Do you need your site to appear professional and establish reputability?

Premium WordPress themes can be a huge benefit to those new to WordPress by offering extra functionality, flexibility, and overall freedom on your site.

Here are a few recommendations from MOJO Marketplace

• The Core
• Creative Theme
• Highend Theme

Or check out MOJO Marketplace’s most popular Premium WordPress Themes

Another huge benefit of premium themes is most of them have the ability to self set up, out of the box. This allows you to begin changing the images and text of your website a few minutes after installing the theme.

Overall, the goal is to weigh your options determine how much your website is really worth to you. If functionality, a professional appearance, and usability are not important to you, free is probably the way to go.

But if your plan is to generate revenue or run a business, then investing in a premium WordPress theme will help you hit the ground running, be easier to manage day to day, and grow with you over time.

Have you decided to go with a premium WordPress theme, but having difficulty choosing which one? Check out our post on how to choose the right WordPress theme

You just put made some great changes that you’re happy with to your site. You walk away grab a drink, maybe take a break. When you get back to your computer you find all of your work is lost. A bleak feeling of discouragement swells up inside you . . . What could you have done differently? Back up your site! It is one of the most important things you can do as it can save you a lot of time, money, and heartache.

What?

The best way to get started in understanding our topic is asking. “What does ‘backing up your site’ even mean?”

Firstly, each website is simply a folder with multiple files that make up your site and in turn portions of files can be deleted, lost, altered, or saved! Now backing up your website entails taking that folder filled with all the files making up your website and making a copy. Once that copy is made then it is saved to a separate location that you can access whenever any issues show up with your website!

When?

Lots of backup services actually perform backups automatically for you based on a schedule you can input. Such as a daily backup or weekly backup. It can be hard to determine what you need for your site and how best you can protect it. One thing that is recommended is every time you are going to make a bigger change or finish making a bigger change take a backup of your site. SAVE YOUR WORK!

Where?

With backups you can save to multiple different locations. You can place your files on your local computer which is recommended. You can store them in dropbox, google drive, email, your server (some hosts do not allow you to store backups on their server), and your hosting company will also store a backup of your site on occasion.

Why?

A huge question people can have is why would I waste the space to have my files on my computer?  We’ve gone over this one a little bit throughout this post trying to instill the importance of saving your site in multiple locations. Extra copies of your site means if you et hacked, malware, or break something you can restore a working functional version of your site. The real question isn’t why back up your site it should be why wouldn’t you backup your site?

How?

There are multiple ways to do just that, sometimes your hosting company even offers a way to backup all your files. You can use a plugin to make backups for a WordPress site. You can use FTP(File Transfer Protocol) to make a backup of your files. When it comes to protecting and saving your site you’ll want to make sure you are backing up your site.

The following links are for backups based on your site building platform;

WordPress – https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups

Drupal – https://www.drupal.org/project/backup_migrate

Joomla – https://docs.joomla.org/Backup_Basics_for_a_Joomla!_Web_Site

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) – Recommended checking with hosting company for preferred methods of backing up your site when using FTP.

Overall take note of how important a backup of your site really is as it can save you time, money, and frustrations. Don’t lose your information just because you didn’t take a couple minutes to create a backup.

Backups save sites!