[ad_1] On the fence about using Divi AI to improve your workflows when building websites with Divi? In our hands-on Divi AI review, we’ll give you a look at how it works and, more importantly, whether it’s any good. To help answer that second question, I’ll also show you the results of some test AI prompts that I ran for text content, images, and code generation. Divi AI is based on GPT 3.5 and Stable Diffusion, so there won’t be any real surprises there, but it will give you an idea of what it can do (and it will also show you how Divi AI is aware of the content on your site). Let’s start with a basic introduction to Divi AI and then I’ll give you a hands-on look at how it works… Divi AI Review: How Does It Help You? Divi AI can primarily improve your workflows in three key areas: Text content – you can use Divi AI to generate short-form or long-form text content from scratch, with additional tools to control the voice/style of your content. Or, you can also use it to refine existing content. Images – you can generate unique images based on simple text prompts. You can also fully control the image style, size, aspect ratio, and more. You can generate images from scratch or you can feed Divi AI existing images and have it iterate on that. Code – you can generate unique code snippets for custom CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Divi AI is already trained on Divi’s codebase, so you can be confident that the code snippets will play nice with Divi. For example, Divi AI can recognize Divi terminology in your prompts (such as you asking it to style a certain module). Why Use Divi AI Over Other AI Web Design Tools? Obviously, Elegant Themes has not built their own AI models from scratch for these: The text and code generation is based on GPT 3.5. The image generation is based on Stable Diffusion. Here are some of the details that make Divi AI unique, though: Divi AI is already trained on the Divi codebase and you can make it aware of your website’s content. For example, it can factor in the title of your site, the content of the page that you’re editing, and so on. So while it uses the same foundational starting point as many other AI tools, Divi AI is still uniquely well-suited for Divi sites. You can access Divi AI directly from the Divi Builder. This is more convenient than other AI tools, where you would need to work in a separate interface and then manually move the generated content to your site. Divi AI offers unlimited usage for one flat price. This can save you money versus other tools that have monthly limits or charge you extra depending on your usage. I’ll talk more about Divi AI pricing later on. How Divi AI Works: Hands-On Testing the AI With Prompts Now that you understand what Divi AI offers and what makes it unique, let’s take our review of Divi AI more hands-on and I’ll show you what it’s actually like to use Divi AI on a real website. I’ll start with a basic look at how you can access Divi AI. Then, I’ll go through generating the three main types of “content” that Divi AI supports: For each type of AI generation, I’ll run through a few different example prompts to give you an idea of how effective it is. Let’s dig in… How to Access Divi AI As long as you have an active Divi AI license, you can access Divi AI directly from the Divi Builder. You’ll see a new option in the module settings when you’re editing an area that supports AI content generation. You have a few options to access the AI content. For example, if you’re editing a Text module, you’ll see a Generate Content With AI button to generate the text for that module: The same is true of other areas, such as Image modules, the code editor, and so on. I’ll show you real examples of these different areas over the next few sections. However, I think it’s easier to choose the smaller AI option that appears in individual fields. For example, if you place your cursor in the text editor, you’ll see an AI option appear next to the dynamic content option. I prefer this approach because it lets you actually enter your prompt, whereas the other button seems to take you straight to the refinement interface. Choosing this option will expand a drop-down with a list of options that are pertinent to that type of content. Below, I’ll show you specifically how it works to generate content, images, and code. Generating Text Content As I mentioned above, I think the best way to generate text content is to click the small AI icon in the text field that you want to populate. This will expand a drop-down with a bunch of options. For text content, the two most important options are at the top: Write with AI – generate text content from scratch. Improve with AI – use AI to improve the existing text in the box You’ll also get other quick actions for more specific tasks, such as lengthening or shortening the content, changing the tone, translating it, and so on. For example, if you choose the Write with AI option, it will open a popup where you can choose what type of content to generate, add your prompt, and add context (such as letting Divi AI look at the content of the page, section, or module). If you click the Guide Me option, it will expand more advanced settings for tone of voice, must-use keywords, specific content lengths, and so on. Once you click Generate Text, you’ll see the generated text. You also might get multiple results, which you can browse by clicking the arrows. You can then click the Use This
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Honest Thoughts + Discount Code (2022)
[ad_1] Considering using the Blocksy theme to build your WordPress site? In our hands-on Blocksy theme review, we’ll help you decide if this multipurpose theme is right for your site. If it is, we’ll also share our exclusive Blocksy discount code, which will get you 10% off your purchase. Blocksy is a lightweight multipurpose theme that you can use to build literally any type of website, from blogs to business websites, portfolios, eCommerce stores, and more. In general, I think that it deserves a spot on the list of top options that use this lightweight, multipurpose approach. It’s packed with well-designed Customizer options to help you easily customize your theme. For more advanced users, it also offers strong tools for custom layouts, conditional content, and more. And for WooCommerce stores, you get tons of advanced features. There are a few downsides. For example, while all of its demo sites look amazing, the quantity is pretty limited when compared to similar themes. But overall, Blocksy is a great theme and you certainly won’t be disappointed in using it for your site(s). To help you understand why I say that, here’s everything that we’ll cover in our Blocksy review: ⚙️ Exploring Six Key Features in Blocksy: How to Use It To kick off our Blocksy review, let’s look at some of the most notable features and what it’s like to use Blocksy. 1. 25+ Importable Demo Sites To get started with Blocksy, you can either design your site from scratch or import one of Blocksy’s 25+ pre-built demo sites. While only having 25+ demo sites is a bit limiting when compared to other themes that are offering 100+ sites, the demo sites all look amazing. Basically, while the quantity might lag other themes, the quality is top-notch and equal to or above all the other themes I’ve looked at. You can browse the full collection here: Some demo sites are built with both Elementor and Gutenberg (and a few support Brizy), while others only support Gutenberg. When you import a demo site, you can choose to import just the Customizer settings or the demo content too. If it supports multiple builders, you can also choose your preferred builder. Overall, the demo import process has a very nice wizard, which includes setting up a child theme for you: And just like that, you can have your site looking like the demo in under a minute. 2. Very Detailed Customizer Options To control the general design of your site, you’ll use the native real-time Customizer, along with tons of built-in options. You can use these options to control your blog layouts, colors, typography, headers, footers, and so on. In general, you get a ton of options, so I can’t show you everything. But let’s take a look at some of the most notable areas… Header and Footer Builder To control your header and footer, Blocksy gives you a drag-and-drop builder inside the Customizer. You can use a bunch of different elements to add content to the header grid. You can also use the options at the bottom to customize your header for different user devices: You’ll also get additional options to customize the overall header, as well as individual header rows and elements. Blog Layouts You get a bunch of options to control the layouts for both individual blog posts and your blog archive pages. Blog archive options: Blog single options: Blocksy also has some nice touches, such as giving you dedicated options to customize comments sections, author pages, and category pages. Colors You can set up a unified global color palette to keep consistency. If needed, you can then adjust individual colors when working on specific parts of your site. Typography To control typography, Blocksy has a nice system that lets you set up typography for different types of text: You’ll also get typography options in some other areas, such as dedicated options for the post title, excerpt, and other details. You saw some of these in the blog archive screenshots above. 3. Page-Level Controls In addition to the Customizer options, Blocksy also offers detailed page-level controls that let you control the layout of your posts/pages on an individual level. This gives you full control over the canvas, which is great for both using the block editor or integrating with page builder plugins. Here’s what you can do: Hide the page title. Choose different page layouts. Adjust the background color. Adjust the spacing. Hide other page elements (featured image, share box, header, or footer). Here, you can see all of the Blocksy page-level controls: 4. Conditional Headers, Footers, and Sidebars (Pro) With the free version of Blocksy, you can fully customize your header, footer, and sidebar…but you can only have one version of each element for your site. With Blocksy Pro, however, you can create multiple designs and use conditional rules to display each one. This lets you optimize those elements for different parts of your site. For example, you could create a custom header for a certain post type or for blog posts in a certain category. Or, you could create different headers for anonymous users vs logged-in users or even users with different roles, which is especially great for membership sites, online stores, and online courses. For example, with headers, you’ll get an option to add a new header inside the header builder: You can then design that header just like you created your global header. The one addition is that you’re able to set up conditional rules for that header to control when to use it: Pretty dang useful! 5. Custom Layouts/Hooks, AKA Content Blocks (Pro) Blocksy Content Blocks are a more advanced feature that helps you customize your site. With Content Blocks, you can create three types of custom designs: Custom content that you inject at different spots in your theme using hooks. Popups that you can display on your site. Custom theme templates, such as designing a custom single post template. If you’re a casual user, you
Continue readingHonest Review of WPX Hosting (2021)
[ad_1] A fast website is vital to your online success. No matter what the purpose of your website, from blogging for fun to selling products online, your site will benefit from quick loading times. Improving website speed can help you get more visitors thanks to an increased visibility in the search engines. Faster websites also have higher conversion rates, resulting in more of those visitors joining your email list, clicking on links, purchasing products, or taking some other important action. Delivering fast loading websites is exactly what WPX Hosting was created to do. In this WPX Hosting review, we’ll be looking at what this WordPress web host has to offer. If you’re starting a new WordPress website or thinking of upgrading the hosting arrangements for an existing site, be sure to read this WPX Hosting review to find out if this service is the best option. Why You Need a Fast Website Before we get to the WPX Hosting review proper, let’s take a quick look at why you might want to upgrade to a faster web host and improve the speed of your website with the help from some data. According to some studies, if your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load 57% of all visitors will bounce and go elsewhere. 80% of those visitors will never come back and half of them will tell their network about their negative experience. If you’re selling products or offering downloads from your website, you’ll be interested to learn that Walmart found that when load times jumped from 1 second to 4 seconds, conversions declined rapidly . However, for every 1 second of improvement, they experienced up to a 2% conversion rate increase. Firefox reduced the load time of their site by 2.2 seconds and increased downloads by an impressive 15.4%. There are plenty of data and studies showing the negative impact of slow loading times as well as the positive benefits of increasing site speed. Even if you’re not running a multimillion dollar operation, I’m sure your site can benefit from improved loading times. WPX Hosting Review So now that we’ve covered why you need a fast website, how do you go about improving your loading times? Well, one of the quickest and easiest ways to speed up your WordPress website is to choose a high-performance web host. Therefore, if you want to enjoy the benefits of a fast loading website, this WPX Hosting review will be of great interest. We’ll start this WPX Hosting review by exploring the best features and some of the benefits you can enjoy by signing up with this web host. Then we’ll look at the user experience offered by WPX Hosting and the pricing options available. WPX Hosting Features If you’re interested in managed WordPress hosting services, your focus is probably on site speed and loading times. A good managed WordPress host has lots to offer. However, performance is usually the main reason website owners are prepared to pay a premium to sign up with these companies. Before we look at the features and user experience of this website, let’s see how fast WPX Hosting really is. WPX Hosting Speed Test To test the performance of WPX Hosting, we set up our own test sites using the best-selling multi-purpose Avada WordPress theme. Specifically, we installed Avada and one of its demos on a fresh installation of WordPress hosted on an entry level shared HostGator web hosting account. We then compared this website to an identical configuration hosted by WPX Hosting. Here are the results of our WPX Hosting speed tests using Pingdom: Budget shared host load time: 3.60 seconds WPX Hosting load time: 1.97 seconds (45% faster) We also saw improvements when testing the page speed and loading times using GTmetrix and Google Page Speed Insights. As you can see upgrading from entry level shared web host to a faster service like WPX Hosting can have a dramatic impact on your site’s loading times. When you consider the improvements in conversion rates and user experience that can be gained from increasing site speed, choosing a faster web host looks very appealing. It’s good to see the improved loading time was below the 3 second cut off mentioned earlier. Site speed isn’t everything, though, so let’s take a look at what else WPX Hosting has to offer. Daily WordPress Website Backups As part of their service, WPX hosting will back up your website on a daily basis. For increased protection, WPX Hosting stores the backup files on a separate server and keeps them for 28 days, which is longer than a lot of other hosts. You can easily restore any backup with just a few clicks. You can also take a manual backup as needed, which is useful to create a backup right before you make a big change: Of course, you can also use your own backup solution including plugins like BackupBuddy or BackWPup and store the files yourself. Free WordPress Website Migration Service If you already have a WordPress website, you might be wondering if moving to a faster web host is worth the effort. There are plugins and tools available that can help you migrate a WordPress website. However, the process isn’t always straightforward. Thankfully, WPX Hosting offers a free site migration service. The migration service is reportedly completed in 24 hours. The team will move your entire WordPress website from your current web host to your new WPX Hosting account. The migration of email associated with that website is included in the service too. Email Service All WPX Hosting plans include email. This allows you to send and receive emails using the address associated with your website’s domain name. When setting up email, you can choose to have email forwarded to another address, such as your Gmail account. Alternatively, you can access the emails through webmail, a client like Outlook, or on a smartphone. Google Apps is also supported. Straightforward Management Dashboard We’ll look at the process of installing
Continue readingWP Engine vs SiteGround for WordPress Hosting: An Honest Comparison
[ad_1] Trying to choose between WP Engine vs SiteGround to host your WordPress site? WP Engine and SiteGround are two of the bigger names in the WordPress hosting space and both offer quality hosting products. However, they do so at different price points and with slightly different features, so you’ll want to make sure you’re picking the right host for your situation. That’s what we’ll help you understand in this post – both hosts can be a good pick; it’s just about matching the right host to your needs and budget. Keep reading to learn whether SiteGround or WP Engine is better for you… WP Engine vs SiteGround Comparison Summary If you’re in a rush, here are the basic conclusions of our comparison: Taking price out of the equation, WP Engine is the overall best host out of these two. However, SiteGround is still a good bit cheaper than WP Engine (though some recent changes have made the gap smaller). Because of its lower prices (and still quality service), SiteGround is probably still the better option for most “regular” WordPress sites including low-traffic blogs, portfolio sites, brochure websites, etc. SiteGround is also better if you’re just launching your first WordPress site because you’ll get everything you need for a cheaper price. For “serious” websites like high-traffic blogs, eCommerce stores, or membership sites, then WP Engine is probably the better choice because it can better stand up to resource-heavy sites and offers useful features that SiteGround doesn’t. Detailed WP Engine vs SiteGround Comparison Now, let’s go more in-depth by comparing SiteGround vs WP Engine in five key areas: Customer satisfaction Features Performance Support Pricing 😊 Customer Satisfaction Let’s kick things off with a basic question – which host has more satisfied customers? When in doubt, the wisdom of the crowds is usually a pretty good starting point. To get a good understanding of how people feel about a host, we aggregated reviews from several different platforms/surveys including Trustpilot, WhoIsHostingThis, CodeinWP’s hosting survey, and Review Signal. We then averaged out the overall rating from each site (this data is current as of April 2021). The idea is to get an overall picture of how people feel about each host. Here’s the overall satisfaction for each host, standardized to a score of 100: Overall ⭐ CodeinWP WhoIsHosting Trustpilot Review Signal WP Engine 84 ⭐ 89 82 88 77 SiteGround 86 ⭐ 86 96 94 68 Overall, that’s pretty dang close, and you can see that customers are about equally as satisfied with WP Engine as they are with SiteGround. The scores are also pretty good in general, which shows that customers at both hosts are pretty happy. Interestingly, though, the scores are moving in opposite directions from when we first collected this data in early 2020. That is, WP Engine has improved from its older 75% while SiteGround has dropped a bit from its older 89% (perhaps because of its pricing changes). ⚙️ Features Now, let’s compare some key features in a table: Feature WP Engine SiteGround Custom hosting dashboard ✅ ✅ WordPress autoinstaller ✅ ✅ Automatic WordPress core updates ✅ ✅ Server-level caching ✅ ✅ Free SSL certificates ✅ ✅ Staging ✅ ✅ Email hosting ❌ ✅ Automatic daily backups ✅ ✅ On-demand backups ✅ ✅ Built-in CDN ✅ ❌ (has a Cloudflare integration) Free migrations ✅ ✅ Safe automatic plugin updates ✅ (higher-tier plans) ❌ Elasticsearch ✅ (eCommerce plans) ❌ Multisite support ✅ (higher-tier plans) ✅ Local development tool ✅ ❌ Pre-installed WP-CLI ✅ ✅ As you can see, the main “feature” advantage that SiteGround has over WP Engine is that SiteGround offers free and unlimited email hosting (e.g. create a you@yoursite.com email address). WP Engine does not offer email hosting, so you’d need to use a third-party service like Google Workspace or MXroute to add email hosting, which is a small added fee. Other than that, WP Engine is the winner in terms of advanced features because it has some useful options such as: A built-in CDN (SiteGround advertises a CDN, but it’s really just a Cloudflare integration). AI-powered safe plugin updates with automatic rollbacks. Elasticsearch, which is great for WooCommerce stores or other search-heavy sites. Multiple staging environments (Staging & Development). Easy local development and push to live hosting with Local. * Not all of these features are available on the entry-level WP Engine plan – more on pricing later. Additionally, one thing that I didn’t add above is that all WP Engine customers get free access to the Genesis Framework and all StudioPress child themes, which is a nice little bonus. 🏎️ Performance To assess a host’s performance, we like to rely on Review Signal’s performance benchmarks as they implement rigorous testing in several different areas. SiteGround is a regular participant in the benchmarks, but WP Engine has unfortunately not participated in the past couple of years. In the 2020 benchmarks, Siteground earned Top Tier status (the highest designation) in both the <$25 and $25-$50 per month tiers. WP Engine last participated in 2018 and only with its enterprise plan, but it also earned Top Tier status in the 2018 benchmarks. Anecdotally, I’ve also tested these hosts several times myself and found that SiteGround offers excellent performance for the money, but WP Engine holds up better in load test situations. Based on their prices, this is kind of what you’d expect. So I would sum it up like this: SiteGround offers good performance for its price and will be plenty fast for most “regular” WordPress sites. For example, low-traffic blogs, portfolio websites, simple brochure websites, etc…all of those will load fast on SiteGround and you won’t benefit that much from WP Engine. WP Engine is better for high-traffic and/or high-resource sites. For example, high-traffic blogs, eCommerce stores, membership sites, etc. 💬 Support Both WP Engine and SiteGround offer 24/7 support on all plans. For WP Engine, you can get support via: Live chat and ticket on all plans. Phone support on the Professional plan and above. SiteGround
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