Step 1: Log In to Your WordPress Dashboard

1. Access Your Admin Area:
   • Open your web browser and go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin.
   • Enter your username and password to log in.

Step 2: Install a New Theme

Method 1: Installing a Theme from the WordPress Theme Directory

1. Navigate to Themes:
   • In the left-hand menu, go to “Appearance” > “Themes.”
2. Add New Theme:
   • Click on the “Add New” button at the top of the page.
3. Browse or Search for a Theme:
   • You can browse featured, popular, or latest themes, or use the search bar to find a specific theme.
4. Install the Theme:
   • Once you’ve found a theme you like, hover over it and click the “Install” button.
5. Activate the Theme:
   • After the theme is installed, click the “Activate” button to make it your current theme.

Method 2: Uploading a Theme from a .zip File

1. Navigate to Themes:
   • Go to “Appearance” > “Themes” in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Add New Theme:
   • Click on the “Add New” button at the top of the page.
3. Upload Theme:
   • Click on the “Upload Theme” button at the top of the page.
4. Choose File:
   • Click the “Choose File” button and select the .zip file of the theme you’ve downloaded from a third-party provider.
5. Install and Activate:
   • Click the “Install Now” button. Once the theme is installed, click the “Activate” button to set it as your active theme.

Step 3: Customize Your Theme

1. Access the Customizer:
   • Go to “Appearance” > “Customize” to open the WordPress Customizer.
2. Customize Settings:
   • Here you can adjust various settings such as site identity (logo, site title), colors, menus, widgets, and more, depending on the options provided by your theme.
3. Save Changes:
   • After making your adjustments, click the “Publish” button to save and apply your changes.

Step 4: Add Theme-Specific Content (Optional)

1. Import Demo Content:
   • Some premium themes come with demo content that can be imported to set up your site like the theme demo. Check the theme’s documentation for instructions on how to import demo content.
2. Configure Theme Options:
   • Many themes have their own settings or options panel where you can configure additional features. Check the theme’s documentation or settings under “Appearance” or a custom menu item added by the theme.

Step 5: Test Your Site

1. Preview Your Site:
   • Visit your website to see how it looks with the new theme. Make sure all elements are displaying correctly.
2. Check Responsiveness:
   • Test your site on different devices and screen sizes to ensure it’s responsive and looks good everywhere.
3. Adjust as Needed:
   • Return to the Customizer or theme options to make any final tweaks or adjustments.

Conclusion

Installing and activating a theme on WordPress is a simple process that can significantly enhance the appearance of your website. Whether you’re using a free theme from the WordPress directory or a premium theme from a third-party source, following these steps will help you get your new theme up and running in no time.

If you encounter any issues or have questions about theme customization, check the theme’s documentation or support forums for additional help.

Step 1: Create a DigitalOcean Account

1. Sign Up: If you don’t already have a DigitalOcean account, go to DigitalOcean’s website and sign up.
2. Add Payment Information: Enter your payment details to activate your account.

Step 2: Create a New Droplet

1. Log In to DigitalOcean: Access your DigitalOcean dashboard by logging in.
2. Create a Droplet:
   • Click on the “Create” button and select “Droplet” from the dropdown menu.
   • Choose an OS: For WordPress, a popular choice is Ubuntu. Select the latest version of Ubuntu (e.g., Ubuntu 22.04).
   • Select a Plan: Choose a plan that fits your needs. For most small to medium WordPress sites, the basic plan (e.g., $5/month) is sufficient.
   • Choose a Data Center: Select a data center location that is closest to your target audience.
   • Add SSH Keys: For secure access, add your SSH keys. If you don’t have an SSH key, you can generate one using tools like ssh-keygen on your local machine.
   • Create Droplet: Click on “Create Droplet” to launch your server.
3. Access Your Droplet:
   • Once your droplet is created, you will receive an email with its IP address and root password.
   • Use an SSH client (like ssh in the terminal or PuTTY on Windows) to connect to your droplet:
     bash

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     ssh root@your_droplet_ip


Step 3: Set Up the Server Environment

1. Update Packages:
   • Once logged in, update your package lists and upgrade existing packages:
     bash

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     sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

2. Install Necessary Software:
   • Install Apache:
     bash

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     sudo apt install apache2

   • Install MySQL:
     bash

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     sudo apt install mysql-server

   • Secure MySQL Installation:
     bash

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     sudo mysql_secure_installation


     Follow the prompts to set up a root password and secure your MySQL installation.

   • Install PHP:
     bash

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     sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-mysql

3. Restart Apache:
   • Restart Apache to apply changes:
     bash

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     sudo systemctl restart apache2


Step 4: Create a MySQL Database for WordPress

1. Access MySQL:
   • Log in to MySQL:
     bash

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     sudo mysql -u root -p

2. Create a Database and User:
   • Run the following commands to create a database and user:
     sql

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     CREATE DATABASE wordpress_db;
CREATE USER 'wordpress_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress_db.* TO 'wordpress_user'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
EXIT;


Step 5: Download and Install WordPress

1. Download WordPress:
   • Navigate to the /var/www/html directory and download WordPress:
     bash

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     cd /var/www/html
sudo wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
sudo tar xzvf latest.tar.gz
sudo mv wordpress/* .
sudo rm -rf wordpress latest.tar.gz

2. Set Correct Permissions:
   • Adjust the file permissions:
     bash

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     sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html

3. Configure WordPress:
   • Rename the sample configuration file:
     bash

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     sudo cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php

   • Edit the wp-config.php file to add your database details:
     bash

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     sudo nano wp-config.php


     Update the following lines with your database information:

     php

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     define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress_db');
define('DB_USER', 'wordpress_user');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'your_password');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');


Step 6: Complete the WordPress Installation

1. Access Your Website:
   • Open your web browser and go to your droplet’s IP address. You should see the WordPress setup page.
2. Follow the Installation Wizard:
   • Choose your language and click “Continue.”
   • Enter your site title, admin username, password, and email address.
   • Click “Install WordPress” and then log in using the credentials you set up.

Step 7: Secure Your Server

1. Set Up a Firewall:
   • Use ufw to set up a basic firewall:
     bash

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     sudo ufw allow OpenSSH
sudo ufw allow 'Apache Full'
sudo ufw enable

2. Enable Automatic Security Updates:
   • Install and configure unattended-upgrades to keep your system updated:
     bash

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     sudo apt install unattended-upgrades


And there you have it! Your WordPress site is now up and running on DigitalOcean. With this setup, you’re ready to start customizing your site, installing themes and plugins, and adding content. If you encounter any issues or need further customization, DigitalOcean’s documentation and community forums are great resources for additional help.

Keeping your WordPress website under maintenance can be crucial for updating, troubleshooting, or making significant changes without disrupting user experience. Fortunately, setting your site to maintenance mode is a straightforward process. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to put your WordPress website in maintenance mode using a plugin.

Why Use Maintenance Mode?

Maintenance mode allows you to:

• Perform Updates and Upgrades: Make changes to your site without visitors encountering broken pages.
• Fix Bugs and Issues: Address technical issues or bugs while ensuring that users are aware of the temporary unavailability.
• Create a Professional Announcement: Display a custom message or landing page to inform visitors about the maintenance and expected downtime.

Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Maintenance Mode

Method 1: Using a Maintenance Mode Plugin

1. Log in to Your WordPress Dashboard:
   • Access your WordPress admin area by logging in with your credentials.
2. Install a Maintenance Mode Plugin:
   • Go to “Plugins” > “Add New.”
   • Search for “Maintenance Mode” or “Coming Soon” in the search bar.
   • Choose a plugin that suits your needs. Popular options include “WP Maintenance Mode” or “Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode by SeedProd.”
   • Click “Install Now” next to your chosen plugin and then activate it.
3. Configure the Plugin Settings:
   • Once activated, go to the plugin settings from the “Settings” menu or directly from the plugin’s dashboard.
   • Customize the appearance and content of your maintenance page. You can usually add a logo, message, and contact information to inform visitors about the ongoing maintenance.
   • Set the mode to “Enable” or “On” to activate maintenance mode.
4. Test Your Maintenance Page:
   • Visit your website in an incognito window or a different browser to ensure that the maintenance page is displayed correctly.
   • Make sure the page looks professional and provides all necessary information.
5. Deactivate Maintenance Mode:
   • Once your updates or maintenance tasks are complete, return to the plugin settings.
   • Switch off the maintenance mode by setting the plugin to “Disable” or “Off.”
   • Check your website to confirm that it’s back to its normal state and fully operational.

Method 2: Using Custom Code (Advanced Users)

If you prefer not to use a plugin, you can manually set up maintenance mode using code. This method involves editing your theme’s functions.php file:

1. Access Your Theme’s Functions File:
   • Go to “Appearance” > “Theme Editor” and select the functions.php file.
2. Add Maintenance Mode Code:
   • Insert the following code snippet at the end of the file:
     php

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     if (!current_user_can('edit_themes') || !is_user_logged_in()) {
wp_die('Sorry, we are performing maintenance. Please check back later.');
}

3. Save Changes:
   • Click “Update File” to save your changes.
4. Test and Revert:
   • Ensure that the maintenance message appears for non-logged-in users.
   • Remove or comment out the code when maintenance is complete.

Conclusion

Using maintenance mode ensures that your WordPress site remains user-friendly and professional while you carry out essential updates or repairs. By following the steps above, you can easily set up and manage maintenance mode, providing a seamless experience for both you and your visitors. If you encounter any issues or need further customization, consider consulting the documentation for your chosen plugin or seeking help from a WordPress developer.

Step 1: Install the Duplicator Plugin

1. Log in to Your WordPress Dashboard: Go to your current WordPress admin area.
2. Navigate to Plugins: Click on “Plugins” > “Add New.”
3. Search for Duplicator: In the search bar, type “Duplicator” and press Enter.
4. Install and Activate: Click “Install Now” next to the Duplicator plugin and then activate it once the installation is complete.

Step 2: Create a Package

1. Access Duplicator: Go to the “Duplicator” menu on the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard.
2. Create New Package: Click on “Create New” to start the process.
3. Set Up Your Package: Follow the wizard to configure your package. The default settings usually work well, but you can customize them based on your needs.
4. Build the Package: Click “Build” to create your package. This may take some time depending on the size of your site.
5. Download the Package: Once the build is complete, download both the Installer and Archive files to your local computer.

Step 3: Prepare the New Hosting Environment

1. Upload Files: Use an FTP client or your hosting provider’s file manager to upload both the Installer and Archive files to the root directory of your new hosting environment.
2. Create a Database: Set up a new MySQL database and user on your new host. Note down the database name, username, and password, as you’ll need these for the installation process.

Step 4: Run the Duplicator Installer

1. Access the Installer Script: Open your web browser and navigate to the installer script by entering the URL to the installer file. For example: http://yournewdomain.com/installer.php.
2. Follow the Wizard: The Duplicator installation wizard will guide you through the setup. Enter the database details you created earlier.
3. Test and Run Deployment: Click on “Test Database” to ensure everything is set up correctly. If the test is successful, click “Run Deployment” to start the installation process.
4. Complete the Installation: Follow the remaining prompts to complete the installation. You may be asked to update your permalinks and log in to your new WordPress site.

Step 5: Final Touches

1. Verify Site Functionality: Check your new site thoroughly to ensure everything is working as expected.
2. Update Settings: Update any site settings, such as permalinks and security settings, to align with your new hosting environment.
3. Delete Installer Files: For security reasons, make sure to delete the installer files and any remaining backup files from your server.

And that’s it! You’ve successfully installed your WordPress website using the Duplicator plugin. With this powerful tool, migrating or setting up your site is a breeze. If you encounter any issues, consult the Duplicator documentation or reach out to their support for assistance.

But the problem is, how can we extract scalable data and put them into Excel efficiently? This would be an extremely tedious task if done manually by repetitive typing, searching, copying, and pasting. So, how can we achieve automated extraction and scraping data from websites to Excel? Reading the following parts, and you can find 3 different solutions.

Method 1: Automated Web Scraping Tool

If you are looking for an easy tool to scrape data from web pages to Excel but don’t know about coding, then you can try Octoparse – the best web scraping tool, which can scrape website data and export them into Excel worksheets either directly or via API. Octoparse works for both Windows and macOS devices, it provides auto-detecting mode for almost all websites and preset templates for popular sites so that you can extract data into Excel without coding skills. Follow the simple guide below.

Steps to Extract data from website to Excel with Octoparse

Step 1: Paste target website URL to begin auto-detecting.

After download Octoparse and install on your device quickly, you can paste the site link you want to scrape and Octoparse will start auto-detecting.

Step 2: Customize the data field you want to extract.

A workflow will be created after auto-detection. You can easily change the data field according to your needs. There will be a Tips panel and you can follow the hints it gives.

Step 3: Download scraped website data into Excel

Run the task after you have checked all data fields. You can download the scraped data quickly in Excel/CVS formats to your local device, or save them to a database.

Except for auto-detecting, you can also scrape popular sites like Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Google Maps, etc. with preset templates. Just reading the tutorial of scraping data into Excel with Octoparse templates.

Method 2: Get Web Data Using Excel Web Queries

Except for transforming data from a web page manually by copying and pasting, Excel Web Queries are used to quickly retrieve data from a standard web page into an Excel worksheet. It can automatically detect tables embedded in the web page’s HTML. Excel Web queries can also be used in situations where a standard ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) connection gets hard to create or maintain. You can directly scrape a table from any website using Excel Web Queries.

Here list the simple steps on how to extract website data with Excel web queries.

• Step 1. Go to Data > Get External Data > From Web.
• Step 2. A browser window named “New Web Query” will appear.
• Step 3. In the address bar, write the web address.
• Step 4. The page will load and will show yellow icons against data/tables.
• Step 5. Select the appropriate one.
• Step 6. Press the Import button.

Method 3: Scrape Web Data with Excel VBA

Most of us would use formula’s in Excel (e.g. =avg(…), =sum(…), =if(…), etc.) a lot, but are less familiar with the built-in language – Visual Basic for Application a.k.a VBA. It’s commonly known as “Macros” and such Excel files are saved as a **.xlsm. Before using it, you need to first enable the Developer tab in the ribbon (right-click File -> Customize Ribbon -> check Developer tab). Then set up your layout. In this developer interface, you can write VBA code attached to various events. Click HERE to getting started with VBA in Excel 2010.

Using Excel VBA is going to be a bit technical – this is not very friendly for non-programmers among us. VBA works by running macros, step-by-step procedures written in Excel Visual Basic. To scrape data from websites to Excel using VBA, we need to build or get some VBA script to send some requests to web pages and get returned data from these web pages. It’s common to use VBA with XML HTTP and regular expressions to parse the web pages. For Windows, you can use VBA with Win HTTP or Internet Explorer to scrape data from websites to Excel.

With some patience and some practice, you would find it worthwhile to learn some Excel VBA code and some HTML knowledge to make your web scraping into Excel much easier and more efficient for automating the repetitive work. There’s a plentiful amount of material and forums for you to learn how to write VBA code.

Final Words

Now, you have learned 3 different ways to pull data from any website to Excel. Choose the most suitable one according to your situation. However, Octoparse is always your choice if you don’t have coding skills or you want to save more time.

Etsy’s significant user base enables an ideal opportunity for companies and even Etsy sellers to gain value and boost their operations. Thus, web scraping comes in handy in such a case, allowing you to extract Etsy data for:

• Price and product availability tracking

• Pricing strategy insights

• Finding new product trends

• Collecting reviews

• Competitor research

• Finding new leads and potential customers

In this guide, we’ll overview why it’s challenging to scrape Etsy and what types of public data you can scrape. Next, we’ll show you how to scrape Etsy product data with Oxylabs’ Etsy Scraper API to get the parsed data and save it to a CSV file.

Difficulties of scraping Etsy’s marketplace

Like most websites these days, Etsy employs anti-scraping measures to stop any bot activity on its website. From tracking the website users’ actions to implementing CAPTCHAs – bypassing these Etsy’s anti-bot measures isn’t a cakewalk.

You may need to use proxies to constantly change your scraping requests’ IP addresses, as well as set up various headers and user agents to make the requests appear as coming from an actual browser. Managing all of this requires a lot of effort and in-depth knowledge, but a dedicated web scraper like Oxylabs’ Etsy Scraper API can immensely ease the process. It takes care of anti-bot measures with proxies, custom headers, user agents, and other features, allowing you to jump straight to further analysis of data.

With the API, you get a maintenance-free web scraping infrastructure with access to a vast proxy pool. Since Etsy Scraper API is a part of E-Commerce Scraper API, you can also access dedicated scrapers for the top 50 online marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and many more.

Overview of Etsy’s page types

There are three main types of Etsy web pages:

Product pages

This is where all the products are listed based on a search term. Etsy product pages include product information, such as:

• The product image

• The title

• Ratings and the number of votes

• Price, discount, and the discount end date

• And the seller’s name

There you can also find specific tags, like “Star Seller”, “FREE shipping”, “Bestseller”, “Popular now”, and “Etsy’s pick”.

Product listings

This is a page where you can find all the information about a specific product listing. Product listings include the same information as the product pages, but you’ll also find:

• More product images

• More information about the seller and the number of sales made

• Product highlights

• Descriptions

• Detailed ratings

• Customer reviews

• And detailed shipping information

Shop pages

Here, you’ll find more information about the seller and their items. Shop pages include details, like:

• The shop title

• Short description

• Ratings

• The number of sales

• The profile of the shop’s owner

• An announcement

• All the items the shop sells

• All the customer reviews

• A detailed section about the shop

• And the shop policies section

Using a web scraping tool, you can scrape Etsy product data as it’s publicly available. So, let’s get into it.

How we design our Amazon product scraper is going to heavily depend on:

• The use case for scraping this data?
• What data we want to extract from Amazon?
• How often do we want to extract data?
• How much data do we want to extract?
• Your technical sophistication?

How you answer these questions will change what type of scraping architecture we build.

For this Amazon scraper example we will assume the following:

• Objective: The objective for this scraping system is to monitor product rankings for our target keywords and monitor the individual products every day.
• Required Data: We want to store the product rankings for each keyword and the essential product data (price, reviews, etc.)
• Scale: This will be a relatively small scale scraping process (handful of keywords), so no need to design a more sophisticated infrastructure.
• Data Storage: To keep things simple for the example we will store to a CSV file, but provide examples on how to store to MySQL & Postgres DBs.

To do this will design a Scrapy spider that combines both a product discovery crawler and a product data scraper.

As the spider runs it will crawl Amazon’s product search pages, extract product URLs and then send them to the product scraper via a callback. Saving the data to a CSV file via Scrapy Feed Exports.

The advantage of this scraping architecture is that is pretty simple to build and completely self-contained.

How To Build a Amazon Product Crawler​

The first part of scraping Amazon is designing a web crawler that will build a list of product URLs for our product scraper to scrape.

Step 1: Understand Amazon Search Pages​

With Amazon.com the easiest way to do this is to build a Scrapy crawler that uses the Amazon search pages which returns up to 20 products per page.

For example, here is how we would get search results for iPads.

'https://www.amazon.com/s?k=iPads&page=1'

This URL contains a number of parameters that we will explain:

• k stands for the search keyword. In our case, k=ipad. Note: If you want to search for a keyword that contains spaces or special characters then remember you need to encode this value.
• page stands for the page number. In our cases, we’ve requested page=1.

Using these parameters we can query the Amazon search endpoint to start building a list of URLs to scrape.

To extract product URLs (or ASIN codes) from this page, we need to look through every product on this page, extract the relative URL to the product and the either create an absolute product URL or extract the ASIN.

?For new sellers, I would like to introduce that this will be a crawler tool that can crawl products from Shopify/ShopBase/Woocommerce/ViralStyle and from there the tool will export the corresponding csv files to import to the Shopify/ShopBase/ store. Your Woocommerce quickly and economically.

?If you have previously purchased version 1, please inbox me to update version 2 for free (add Woocommerce version).

?Official version 2 Fencilux Converter CSV has added crawler to add Woocommerce. The sellers on woo can freely scratch the products from woo.

?For new sellers, I re-introduce that this will be a crawler tool that can get products from Shopify/ShopBase/Woocommerce/ViralStyle and from there the tool will output the corresponding csv files to import to Shopify/ShopBase store / Woocommerce of you quickly and economics.

?The seller who bought version 1 last time, inbox me for free update for version 2 (add Woocommerce version).

What is Amazon Product Scraper and how does it work?

Amazon Product Scraper is a web scraping tool that enables you to extract product data from Amazon by using Amazon’s subcategory URLs or product URLs.

For example, this is an Amazon URL for the Computer Monitors subcategory:

https://www.amazon.com/s?i=specialty-aps&bbn=16225007011&rh=n%3A16225007011%2Cn%3A1292115011

Amazon subcategories typically have /s in the URL after the Amazon domain, so make sure your URL looks something like the example above.

So just add one or more Amazon URLs in the input field and select the maximum number of items you want to scrape. Then download the data from the output schema. You can even get this data via API without having to log in to the Apify platform.

Why scrape Amazon products?

Scraping Amazon products can help you to:

Monitor the performance of categories and subcategories on Amazon so you can put the performance of your products into context.

Discover up-and-coming brands and products to benchmark your performance within its category based on views, conversions, and reviews.

Fine-tune your advertising and messaging.

Use Amazon data to give you an edge in competitive intelligence.

How many results can you scrape with Amazon Product Scraper?

Amazon Product Scraper can return over 100 000 results on average. However, you have to keep in mind that scraping amazon.com has many variables to it and may cause the results to fluctuate case by case. There’s no one-size-fits-all-use-cases number. The maximum number of results may vary depending on the complexity of the input, location, and other factors. Some of the most frequent cases are:

• website gives a different number of results depending on the type/value of the input
• website has an internal limit that no scraper can cross
• scraper has a limit that we are working on improving

Therefore, while we regularly run Actor tests to keep the benchmarks in check, the results may also fluctuate without our knowing. The best way to know for sure for your particular use case is to do a test run yourself.

How much will scraping Amazon Products cost you?

When it comes to scraping, it can be challenging to estimate the resources needed to extract data as use cases may vary significantly. That’s why the best course of action is to run a test scrape with a small sample of input data and limited output. You’ll get your price per scrape, which you’ll then multiply by the number of scrapes you intend to do.

Watch this video for a few helpful tips. And don’t forget that choosing a higher plan will save you money in the long run.

7 pages Amazon limitation

Amazon sometimes restricts search terms to a maximum of 7 pages, please validate the number of pages in the URL. To overcome this limit, try to use one of the regular categories and combine it with the search terms. E.g. instead of just searching for Diamond rings, find Jewelry or Women's rings category and combine them with the search term.

Is it legal to scrape Amazon?

It is legal to scrape publicly available data such as product descriptions, prices, or ratings. Read our blog post on the legality of web scraping to learn more.