Tag Archives: Live

7 Best Live Chat Plugins for Your WordPress Website

[ad_1] At some point during the natural lifecycle of a company, cultivating customers takes priority. As such, your support services become a key battleground. Live chat plugins are one way to offer your customers practically instant access to your support team. They let users talk to either a real person there and then, or a smart ‘bot’ that redirects them to the right place. In this post, we’ll look at a number of live chat plugins, and offer some advice about which one would potentially suit you. Before that, let’s talk about why live chat is a great customer service channel. An Introduction to Live Chat (And Why You Should Implement It) For the uninitiated, live chat does what it says on the tin. In other words, a customer accesses your site – usually looking for support – and can connect with a representative through a button on the page: While live chat was initially ‘manned’ by a real person, gains in Artificial Intelligence (AI) means that tailored bots are more common now. This brings about a number of benefits: The initial heavy lifting when uncovering a user’s support needs can be handled in a routine way by sophisticated tech. Users are essentially self-solving their issue, which means you can treat aspects of the live chat experience as an extension of your knowledge base. You can ‘qualify’ the user for more advanced support. This lets you create dedicated ‘tracks’ and processes for your support chain, and makes them more efficient. Given these reasons, implementing live chat on your website is a great way to bring users through your support funnel in a refined way. How We Chose Our 7 Live Chat Plugins WordPress wouldn’t be the platform it is without plugins. While you can implement practically any functionality using them, this post will look at live chat specifically. To narrow down our list, we’ve used the following criteria: All plugins must have been updated within the last six months to work with a modern version of WordPress. Where recorded, a plugin must have a rating of at least 80% – for example, four stars on either WordPress.org or CodeCanyon. Finally, a plugin must have a relatively substantial number of active installs. For example, plugins hosted on WordPress.org usually need a minimum of 1,000 installs. Because of the above criteria, you’ll notice that popular solutions such as Zendesk Chat and Intercom aren’t included. In a nutshell, their WordPress plugins didn’t meet the standard we set, although the services themselves are stellar. Summarizing the 7 Top Live Chat Plugins for Your WordPress Website LiveChat. Busy support teams using a personal approach will love this plugin. Tidio Live Chat. Arguably the best all-around live chat plugin for WordPress. Sendinblue. If you’re already a user of Sendinblue’s other products, you’ll find this plugin ideal. Crisp Live Chat. If you have a complex product, Crisp will fit the bill. HubSpot Live Chat. HubSpot subscribers are likely going to use this live chat plugin, although it offers value for non-subscribers too. Olark. This plugin will be great for support team as part of a sales funnel. Tawk.to. A top plugin that offers myriad features completely free forever. 7 Top Live Chat Plugins for Your WordPress Website Without further ado, let’s take a look at the plugins. The seven here are in no particular order, although we encourage you to compare them all against your own requirements. 1. LiveChat First up, we have WordPress Live Chat Plugin by LiveChat – we’ll simply call it “LiveChat” here. The plugin has a number of esteemed customers, such as McDonalds, Adobe, and PayPal. As such, the live chat plugin is great for larger organizations. LiveChat also develops the WooCommerce Live Chat plugin for WordPress too, so they have a number of solutions regardless of your specific need. Under the hood, LiveChat offers a number of efficiency features, such as canned responses. You’re able to send personalized messages to users automatically, and also send them files through the chat window. However, the biggest plus point of LiveChat is also its greatest drawback. It’s an expansive live chat platform with practically everything you’ll need to support your customers. As such, it could be overkill for a smaller site. Overall, LiveChat is great for businesses with heavy support needs, especially if a personal approach to your support provision is important. Pricing: LiveChat starts at $16 per month, per agent. There are a number of tiers depending on your needs, although you could see costs quickly shoot into three-figures per month. 2. Tidio Live Chat Next up, Tidio is a company offering a well-supported live chat plugin with solid user feedback. It’s designed for WordPress site owners in mind, and also integrates email marketing services and a chatbot into the package. Installation is rapid, and once you’re ready, you’re able to set up multiple chat windows across different pages. The plugin supports nearly 200 languages out of the box, and offers a number of customization options to help you match Tidio’s chat windows to your branding. Because of the integrated email marketing, you’re able to follow up with users once they leave your website, turning your support channels into a sales funnel entry point. What’s more, there are a number of third-party integrations available. We’d argue that if you’re running a WordPress website, Tidio is going to be a front-runner for your live chat needs. It’s a modern solution, with a thoughtful feature set. What’s more, our research indicates it’s one of the more well-maintained plugins available. Pricing: Tidio offers a stacked free tier, which could be enough for many site owners. However, there are three other tiers that cater to different needs. Each one works out around $200–225 per year, which could become pricey if you’re looking for an all-in-one support solution. 3. Sendinblue Sendinblue is better known for its stellar email marketing services, although the live chat functionality more than pulls its weight. You’re able to leverage built-in design tools to

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How to Use Git to Push Your Local Site Live

[ad_1] Lots of companies go to great effort to make website development straightforward for the average user. This makes sense, because there are site owners who don’t have (or want) the time to learn every aspect of running a local site. However, with a bit of research, you can use Git to handle the process of pushing your site live. This gives you a little more security, and once you set everything up, an easier path for making site changes. Even so, getting to that point is admittedly tough. There are lots of prerequisites to consider, skills you need to have, and tools to hand. Also, you’ll need to think through the process the first few times, because there is a lot to remember. However, using Git to push a site live is possible for almost every user, and it doesn’t have to be as complicated as you think. For this tutorial, we’re going to show you step by step how to use Git to push a local site to a live server. First, let’s run over some of the tools and technologies we’ll feature in the post. An Introduction to Git For the unaware, Git is a Version Control System (VCS). It’s a way to save and record the changes you make on a project – often a app or a website. It’s something we touch on elsewhere, but you’ll need to know more about it for this tutorial. The typical way to use Git is through a Command Line Interface (CLI) – if you have experience with the WP-CLI, it’s a similar approach. You’ll use commands to mark and organize the files you work on in a number of ways: Before you issue commands, files will stay ‘unstaged’. This means they are not part of your Git ‘repository’ (the directory that stores your history). You’ll issue a command to stage all or some of your files, at which point you can still work on them. When you finish, you commit the files to the ‘repo’ from the staging area. This is akin to saving those changes. It can be more complicated than this, but for the most part you’ll use only a handful of commands to carry out day-to-day work with Git. Using Git for Team-Based Development Git is a key tool for development teams, because each developer will open a different ‘branch’ within the same repo. This means everyone can work on the project without affecting the files for others. At regular intervals – often as the last task of the day – the team will commit changes to the repo. A senior member of the team will then look to ‘merge’ all of the branches and changes together to the main or trunk of the repo. At this point, you’ll have the definitive set of project files within the repo. For a single developer – likely you – Git still has value as a kind of incremental saving tool. You’ll open a new branch, work on your site, then stage and commit those changes. It means you can do whatever you like on the branch without affecting any other file on your site. When you want to commit (or delete) you can do so. A Quick Primer on Local WordPress Development Before we move on, we should note that working on your site away from your live server is a recommended typical practice. If you don’t yet do this, check out our piece on how to install WordPress. Also, you might want to consider a dedicated app to work on your site. Local by Flywheel is a good option, but so is DevKinsta. Regardless, there are lots of ways to create a local site, and it’s something you’ll want to have in place. Why You’d Want to Use Git to Push a Local Site Live The main reason you’ll want to use Git to push your site live is one we mention above: Flexibility. The nature of Git means you’ll have a main branch that serves as the definitive set of project files. However, you can open up as many new branches as you need – indeed, it’s the exact way large teams use Git at scale. With this approach, you can create a new branch to work on your site’s homepage design, without the need to affect your core files. Consider a branch a kind of clone that you merge back into your main branch through staged commits. However, there are a few other reasons why Git is useful: You can host this Git repo in any location. GitHub and GitLab are two sites that focus on hosting Git repos. From there, you can bring in other team members or developers if you need extra support. You’re even able to migrate a site with ease. Of course, you won’t need to work on your live site, which is fantastic from a security- and performance-related viewpoint. However, you can choose to only push the files you work on. This offers immense benefits because you don’t need to touch your WordPress database. This is the key goal of website staging, and it’s possible to do using Git and a local install. However, to get to this point, you’ll want to have a number of tools, skills, and prerequisites on hand. Next, we’ll go through what they are. What You’ll Need Before You Use Git to Push Sites Live (Tools and Skills) It’s worth noting what you should already have in place before you even think about what extras you’ll need. For example, make sure you have the following to hand: A local version of your current website. Access to your hosting control panel and server as an administrator. From here, you can consider what else you need to use Git with your local site and live server: You’ll need to install Git on your computer. You often achieve this through the command line. Speaking of which, you’ll want to have knowledge of how to use the

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The WordPress.org Block Pattern Directory Is Now Live – WP Tavern

[ad_1] Yesterday, the WordPress pattern directory went live to the world as the development team behind it put the finishing touches on the project. It will work similarly to the theme and plugin directories in time. Along with WordPress 5.8, users can browse and use block patterns directly from the post editor. Officially, the pattern directory shipped as part of the WordPress 5.8 release. The Tavern did not include this in its coverage yesterday because it was still listed as an “in-progress” project until several hours later. The team was still wrapping up several issues yesterday for the initial launch. Pattern directory homepage. The current patterns in the directory are a curated list of designs from over 20 volunteers. The team called upon the community in early June, and it answered. To date, there are over 70 patterns across six categories to choose from: Buttons Columns Gallery Header Images Text Thus far, translations are complete for 12 languages. Others are at varying completion percentages, but there are dozens more that are incomplete. This would be an easy entry point for anyone who wants to give something back to the WordPress project. I had a hand in building the About Me Cards and Team Social Cards patterns, but I cannot take all the credit. Kjell Reigstad and Mel Choyce-Dwan took my initial ideas and ran with them. It was a rewarding experience just peaking a bit into how other designers work. I only wish I could have put in more time during the initial submission window. About Me Columns (left) and Team Social Cards (right) patterns I look forward to submitting more patterns when submissions are open to everyone, the project’s next phase. “Work is now beginning on the next milestone, which will enable patterns to be submitted by anyone, similar to the Theme and Plugin Directories,” wrote Kelly Choyce-Dwan in the announcement. I am excited to see where the overall community can take the directory. Submissions have been limited and held to a specific aesthetic that will not be universally appealing. It may be hard for some users to look beyond centuries-old artwork, flowers, and the current fling with offset columns to see how a specific layout would work for their site. For others, it is perfect. Even I struggle with this. I can see the structure beneath the default images and text, but I am not inspired to use most of the patterns because they simply do not fit my personal style. When selecting one, I want to feel like the designer was building something just for me. I suspect that will play a part in winning over more users and bringing some holdouts over to the block system. Gallery-categorized patterns. One limitation of the pattern directory is the imagery. Now that services like Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay have put limitations on their licensing, it can be tough to find photos and artwork that meet the guidelines for submissions to WordPress.org. However, that could open up a bit with the potential integration of Openverse, formerly the Creative Commons search engine. Making it easier for pattern designers to find the perfect images to build out their visions would improve the overall quality. What will eventually make the pattern directory a worthwhile venture is when the best designers from the WordPress ecosystem step up and begin competing. I eagerly await a breadth of authors putting their own stylistic spin on submissions. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link

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