[ad_1] Consulting WP is a powerful and dynamic WordPress theme that aims to solve two common problems faced by newly established consultancy firms and similar businesses. On the one hand, it’s no secret that if you’re ever going to thrive in today’s digitally-dominated industry, your online presence has to really look the part and stand out from the crowd. On the other, burgeoning businesses hoping to bootstrap their way to success rarely have the kind of capital needed to spend thousands on a bespoke design. At the same time, some may even struggle to splash out hundreds for a top-of-the-line premium WordPress theme. This is where Consulting WP really comes into its own. The theme developers have spent countless hours researching the ins and outs of the business, finance, and consulting industries in order to come up with a product that provides everything your firm could possibly need to succeed. The result is not only a visually stunning, well-designed theme that is going to strike the right chord with your potential customers but also one which delivers that top-of-the-line premium quality at an entry-level price, with 50 themes, over 500 theme options, and more than 35 key features. Below, we’ll look at the ins and outs of this popular theme to help you decide if it’s the right fit for your new venture. Consulting WP Business WordPress Theme Review Consulting WP has been designed to give business owners everything they need to build a standout website for their consulting firm or services company. This means Consulting WP has all the standard features a high-quality premium theme is expected to have, as well as industry-specific features to aid you in building a well-designed and highly functioning business website that is sure to draw more clients and customers than ever before. Perhaps the best part (or certainly one of the best parts) is that it does all this at such an affordable price. Article Continues Below The whole theme package currently retails at just $59 for a one-off, standard Envato license, with an optional six months extra support available for just $17.63. This means that even if you’re just getting started with your new business, you’ll still be able to get a high-value theme that’s well within your budget. When we say high-value, we really do mean it, too, as Consulting WP features all of the main key features you’d expect from a much more costly package. These include: 50 Customizable Demos Whereas other themes feature maybe a handful of demo styles that all look similar to others you’ve seen on the net, Consulting packs in an impressive 50 demos, with new ones continuing to be added. This doesn’t just add a tick in the win column for value-for-money, either. Each one of the demos offers unique, attractive, and on-brand designs that pretty much guarantee to represent your brand in the best possible light and that are packed with plenty of design features and functionality to compel passing visitors to get in touch. We’re not just talking about the homepage here, either. Each demo also contains very stylish templates for portfolios… Blog posts… Article Continues Below And other mission-critical pages. Customization Options If, after browsing through the 50 demos, you decide that even your favorite doesn’t perfectly reflect your brand the way you want to, you’ll find a wealth of customizable theme options that help you to tweak and fine-tune it to your liking. For example, choose from one of four predefined skin colors and personalize your website to match your brand. More so, take advantage of the advanced theme options menu and change things such as header layouts, footer content, post types, typography, menus, social media elements, and more, all from one convenient location. Page Builder Integration To help with even further levels of customization, or even to build brand new pages and templates within your theme, Consulting WP also effortlessly integrates with both WPBakery Page Builder (formerly Visual Composer) and the ever-popular Elementor page builder. This means that regardless of which page builder you’re most comfortable with, you can quickly put to work in building brand new layouts, adding content, and generally making your new site your own. Speaking of Elementor, the latest version of Consulting WP includes the new Elementor Header Builder as well as Pearl Header Builder tools to offer even more customization. Bookit and Other Premium Plugins Elementor and WP Bakery aren’t the only premium plugins that you can use to optimize your site. Strengthening its case as one of the top value-for-money theme packages around, Consulting WP also comes with some of the best WordPress plugins for businesses, including a free copy of the Bookit plugin, which on its own is valued at around $39. Bookit can serve as the heart of your online booking system, allowing clients to book consultations and other appointments with ease. Article Continues Below For more advanced users, the plugin can be seamlessly synced with your existing Google Calendar set-up to help you manage your appointments, while integration with popular payment platforms like Stripe and PayPal help you to help your customers pay for their consultations with zero hassle. What we like best about this plugin, though, is that it’s remarkably easy to use, featuring a fresh, clean, recently upgraded design which ensures that even absolute WordPress beginners can take to it in no time at all. Beyond that, Consulting also ships with a free copy of Stylemix’s Cost Calculator builder as well as the eRoom Zoom Meetings & Webinar plugin to help you manage online communication via your website. On a final note regarding plugins, it’s worthwhile mentioning that the theme is also fully compatible with all of the following: Display Multiple Locations Proving itself to be the gift that keeps on giving, Consulting WP also offers the ability to offer location-specific content to people in different areas. This can be done via a simple drop-down menu displaying all of the locations in which you currently operate. While seamless
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Astra Theme Review: Is It the Best WordPress Theme in 2021?
[ad_1] Considering using the Astra theme for your website? In our hands-on Astra theme review, we’ll help you decide whether it’s the right theme for your needs. Astra has the impressive distinction of being the most popular non-default WordPress theme ever. It was the first and only non-default theme to pass the one million active install count at WordPress.org and it’s done that with a perfect 5-star rating on ~5,000 user reviews. All that to say – a lot of people like Astra. And – spoiler alert – I’m one of those people, so this is going to be a generally positive Astra theme review, though I will highlight a few areas where other themes do things a little better. To help you understand why I, and so many other people, like Astra, I’ll divide this review into two parts. First, I’ll cover six areas where Astra stands out from the competition. These areas are: Lightweight performance Multipurpose design 150+ importable starter sites Detailed WordPress Customizer controls Compatibility with other WordPress plugins Powerful custom layouts feature for advanced users Then, I’ll give you a quick guide on what it’s like to create a site with Astra, go over the pricing, cover some FAQs, and give you my recommendations at the end. Let’s dig in! 🎩 Why Is the Astra Theme So Popular? Six Top Features I think there are six main reasons why the Astra theme has been so successful – let’s go through them… Lightweight Performance – You Can Create a Fast Website As your site’s foundation, your theme plays a big role in how quickly your site loads. One of Astra’s standout features is that it’s super lightweight. On a fresh install with just the theme, an Astra site is only 37 KB with 7 HTTP requests. Is it the fastest theme I’ve ever tested? Not quite. But it’s pretty dang close! For example, GeneratePress is only 26 KB with 7 HTTP requests, which technically beats out Astra. But I don’t think most people are going to notice the extra 11 KB 🤣 In the grand scheme of things, Astra is faster than 99% of WordPress themes and you can build incredibly quick-loading sites with Astra. Multipurpose – You Can Use It For Anything Astra is a true multipurpose theme, which means you can use it for literally any type of website. This includes: How is it so multipurpose? Well, its flexibility comes from the next three points that I’m going to talk about. Easy to Use – Demo Sites Make It Easier to Get Started To back up its multipurpose chops, Astra comes with 150+ importable demo sites built for a range of different use cases and niches. Organic Store You can browse all of the demo sites by clicking here, but here are some examples of specific demo sites to highlight Astra’s multipurpose nature: Travel Blogger & Influencer The demo sites themselves are built with your choice of four popular builders: Because all of the demo content uses a drag-and-drop builder, it’s super easy to customize everything to meet your needs. Flexible Options in the Customizer – You Can Adapt It To Your Needs Another reason why Astra is such a good multipurpose option is because of its incredibly detailed customization options, all of which are available through the native WordPress Customizer. There are two advantages to using the Customizer: It’s simple and code-free. You can make your changes using pre-built options – no tech knowledge needed. You get a real-time preview, so you can instantly see how your choices will affect the design of your site. In general, the Customizer gives you a ton of options when it comes to: Layouts Colors Typography Features Metadata Etc. I can’t show you every single option because there are a lot. But I do want to highlight a few of my favorites. First, there’s the drag-and-drop header/footer builder, which lets you create a custom header using a simple interface like this: You also get a ton of options for controlling other layouts. For example, you can configure different blog page layouts, adjust metadata, etc. You also get detailed global color and typography controls. This is really nice if you’re using a page builder because you can use Astra to control your global styles and just have the page builder inherit them. That way, if you ever change your branding, the page builder will automatically update based on your global styles and you won’t need to edit each page individually: Compatible – It’s Compatible With Page Builders, WooCommerce, and LMS Plugins There are two types of compatibility here. First off, Astra works great with page builder plugins thanks to its global style rules and page-level controls. It makes a great option to pair with: Here are the page-level controls: Second, Astra has built-in compatibility options for some other popular plugins you might be using including: WooCommerce Easy Digital Downloads LifterLMS LearnDash For example, if you’re using LearnDash to create an online course, you’ll get access to built-in Astra customization options to control the layouts of your LearnDash course content. Powerful Custom Layouts Feature Finally, if you upgrade to Astra Pro, Astra has lots of advanced features to give you more control over your site. One of my favorites is Custom Layouts, which lets you create custom designs that you can “inject” into various parts of your site (kind of like hooks). You can create the designs using the native editor or your favorite page builder and then insert them anywhere on your site using conditional rules. For example, you could design a CTA box that you want to display at the end of all your blog posts. Then, you could use Astra Layouts to automatically inject it on all blog posts (or maybe just a certain category of posts or posts from a certain author). Or, it’s also really handy for including ads. You can even target your layouts to specific user roles, devices, time/dates, etc. If you
Continue readingCloudways Review 2021: Best Managed Cloud Hosting?
[ad_1] Managed cloud hosting is a remarkable upgrade from the traditional cloud hosting option, allowing businesses to get more done in less time. But finding a provider who gets it right can be tough. Compared to traditional hosting, managing a cloud service requires more effort. A provider must keep the site fully updated, run regular security checks, create data backups, and allocate resource utilization based on load changes frequently. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that promises to deliver unmatched performance, ironclad security, and seamless scalability for your websites. But is it all true? In this Cloudways review, we’ll dig into its features, pricing, and more to help you determine if it’s the right option for you. Let’s start from the very beginning. Cloudways Review: What Is It? Launched in 2011, Cloudways is a managed hosting services provider that helps users reap the benefits of the cloud. It has its own managed platform, allowing you to spin up servers and deploy apps within minutes. Cloudways supports all the top website building tools, such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, PHP, and many open-source tools. The company works with five top cloud providers—AWS (Amazon Web Services), Linode, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, and Vultr—to offer a variety of cloud computing services to its customers. The great thing about Cloudways is its “pay-as-you-pricing.” The pricing model allows you to pay depending on the resources you need. This makes Cloudways an ideal choice for SMBs and individual users with a limited budget. Cloudways’ main appeal is managed cloud hosting. It’s a step up from the traditional managed hosting many of us are accustomed to. Let me give you the 411 on how managed cloud hosting can boost your website hosting experience. Article Continues Below Why Managed Cloud Hosting? Managed cloud hosting is a more cost-effective and scalable solution compared to traditional managed hosting. With traditional hosting solutions, your site and its data are stored on a single server with one backup. Cloudways stores your site in the cloud across multiple servers for greater protection and stronger performance. Because your site is stored on multiple servers, you’ll have several backups, and you’ll be able to restore your site if there’s ever a problem easily. The cloud environment also means you can prompt multiple copies of your site to be replaced throughout any data centers of your liking. Cloudways hosting also delivers better uptime and reliability because any server in its cloud network can take over if the first one stops working. This is known as having a “failover” strategy. Additionally, because Cloudways can detect a website visitor’s location, the system can also intelligently load information from the server closest to that person, meaning your site loads faster. With a sophisticated algorithm handling all of the data switching and a copy of your site maintained across servers, Cloudways offers much greater reliability and performance. Great if you want to keep things smooth but, don’t know how to manage all the technical bits behind the scenes. Cloudways Review: The Features The exact features you’ll get from Cloudways depend on the hosting plan you choose. Advanced plans give you access to more bandwidth, memory, storage, and processing power. But all Cloudways users get: 1. Free site migrations If you already have your website hosted on another site, you can easily choose Cloudways to handle the migration for you. This can save you a lot of time trying to collect all the information required from one server to move to another. 2. High-speed server performance Cloudways strives to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible, with access to the latest technology from 5 of the top cloud providers in the world. The provider also relies on CDN to deliver content via a geographically distributed network of servers, which helps minimize lags in loading web page content. 3. Auto-healing Cloudways makes it easy to handle any issues your website might have with a unique automatic healing feature. The auto-healing system identifies the source of a problem when a crash is imminent and addresses it by itself. No manual intervention is needed. 4. Excellent security For peace of mind, Cloudways offers a dedicated firewall to help protect you and your customers. Additionally, you get features like two-factor authentication to prevent intruders from gaining access to member accounts. Users can also access a free SSL certificate (via Let’s Encrypt) to protect all data moving between your site and your visitors. 5. Simple setup Cloudways allows you to set up a website with one click. There’s also one-click app and plugin installation if you want to add new functionality to your site. The provider fully supports PHP-based applications and CMS frameworks like Magento, Drupal, Laravel, and WordPress. 6. Staging and Cloning Staging allows you to create a dummy website where you can test any changes before they go live. This is a great way to ensure everything works properly before making a change. You can also clone sites and make copies to ensure you can easily back up your site or switch servers when required. 7. Advanced caching Cloudways offers various caching mechanisms for server optimization. Users can access a proprietary caching plugin called “Breeze,” which supports the Cloudways CDN. Other popular caching plugins like Redis and Varnish are also available. The cloud infrastructure from Cloudways is built on the technology of five different cloud providers – all of which are ranked among the most reliable companies in the world. The cloud partners offer VPS and dedicated servers for extra-fast performance. 8. Flexibility and scalability Cloudways hosting can adapt to suit your business. If your traffic starts to grow and you need to upgrade your server access, you can use the “Vertical Scaling” feature. This functionality allows Cloudways users to increase their hosting plans’ RAM, CPU, and storage features in a couple of clicks. As Cloudways follows the “pay as you go” pricing model, you’re also not tied to specific contracts. You pay only for what you use, and you can change
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 readingStrive Content Calendar Review
[ad_1] The Strive Content Calendar for WordPress aims to solve a problem that any content publisher will undoubtedly be familiar with: Managing the entire process of preparing, creating, and scheduling content as simply as possible without having to manage multiple platforms, apps, or endless spreadsheets. Rather than having one tool for planning your content, another for managing deadlines and scheduling, and a third for actually getting that brand new post lined up in the publishing queue, Strive brings all of that -and more- together in a single tool that you can use from within WordPress itself. The intended goal is a much more streamlined and simplified process that is easier to manage, meaning fewer editorial headaches and more time to focus on growing your sites. Does it achieve that goal? Let’s find out in this comprehensive Strive Content Calendar review. Strive Content Calendar Review Strive is a relative newcomer to the world of WordPress, having first hit the market in June of this year and aiming to give other content scheduling tools such as WP Scheduled a serious run for their money. Speaking of money, that’s one of the first things that really attracted us to this tool. The whole thing is available for the fairly low cost of $7 per month all-in. Unlike other WordPress plugins, there’s no upselling, nor are there multiple pricing tiers to choose from. Article Continues Below If you’re anything like us and sometimes find yourself scratching your head as you spend a long time trying to work out which features -and thus, which pricing plan- you actually need, you’ll no doubt appreciate this all-inclusive, one-size-fits-all approach as much as we do. There’s also a free 30-day trial which gives you access to all the features with no need for a credit card to ensure you don’t accidentally forget to cancel and end up paying for something you don’t need. Again, if you’re used to other plugins which offer limited features with their free trials, this is likely to appeal to you. How to Use Strive – Setup and Features So far, so good, but we’ve talked a lot about Strive’s features without actually saying what they are or how the platform actually works, so let’s put it to work on one of our own sites and look at exactly what this new content calendar has to offer. Getting Started With Strive After heading to the pricing page, select ‘Start Free Trial’ and select the payment option you’d prefer if you later decide to go ahead and make Strive your new content calendar. As you’ll see, things get a little cheaper ($5.83 per month) if you opt to pay for a year’s subscription in advance, and even cheaper still if you opt for the $199-lifetime subscription. For those wondering, we did the math: $199 is the same as paying for 2 years and 4 months on the monthly subscription or 2 years and 10 months on the annual subscription. Either way, this isn’t the most important factor to begin with, as you don’t have to pay a penny to get started, and you can always contact Strive later if you change your mind about your payment commitment. With that done, simply enter a few basic contact details, choose whether you want them to send you security and feature updates (usually a good idea), and hit “Start Trial.” Installation When you’ve done that, check your email address, where you’ll find Strive has sent you a download link and activation key to get started. Article Continues Below The plugin downloads to your computer as a Zip file which you can then upload by going to your WordPress dashboard and carrying out the usual three-step process: Go to Plugins – Add new Click Upload plugin Select the plugin from your hard drive and install it. After activating the license key (included in your email) it’s time to get into all of Strive’s features. Strive Features Calendar View The first thing you encounter when you first open Strive is the calendar view which provides an at-a-glance look at all of your upcoming posts and their scheduled publishing date. This makes it infinitely easier to view your current publishing schedule than scrolling through WordPress’ own posts menu and checking the date of each post. Instead, you can immediately see when content is due to go out, giving you a much clearer picture. The best part is that if you’re not happy with the way your schedule is set up, you can simply drag and drop posts around the calendar to a time that’s better suited to you, which is a far easier approach than opening up each post and manually editing the publishing date. Adding New Content If there’s a free date you wish to add content to, doing so is as simple as hoving over that date in the calendar, clicking on the ‘+’ icon, which shows up in the top-left hand corner, and then selecting to either create a brand new post from scratch or take one of your pre-written drafts and schedule it. Editing Posts If you need to make quick edits such as changing the title, slug, or editorial status or adding categories, doing so is as simple as clicking on the post to bring up the quick edit menu. If you need to make edits to the content itself, that’s as simple as hovering over the scheduled post and clicking the edit icon, which appears in the top-right corner. This highly visual style makes managing your entire content schedule much more straightforward, but it’s far from the only feature you’ll find with Strive. Article Continues Below Color Coding Another aspect of the calendar that we love is that each post is color-coded according to its publishing status as follows: Red – Not Started Orange – Currently writing Yellow – Editing Green – completed and ready to go. If you’re managing lots of content and need to be able to quickly see whether or not
Continue readingEverse Theme Review: Multipurpose Elementor Theme
[ad_1] Elementor is a powerful page builder, but it requires a compatible and customizable theme. While there are dozens of ‘highly compatible’ themes for Elementor out there, you need to do a thorough check before you can say for sure that the theme is a good fit for you. In this article, I’ll be reviewing the Everse theme by DeoThemes. If you are looking for a compatible theme for your WordPress website running Elementor, this article is perfect for you. Everse Theme: Quick Overview Everse is a lightweight and customizable multi-niche WordPress theme which comes with in-built seamless compatibility with popular products like Elementor and WooCommerce. The pro version of the theme comes with 20+ professionally pre-built starter sites. Almost every starter site has more than five well-designed pages or sections that you can import with just a single click and can customize further. Here are some highlights of the Everse theme: Everse comes with full compatibility with the WooCommerce theme allowing you to create an eCommerce store and start selling products and services online. Since the theme follows strict high-quality code standards, the theme is blazing fast and lightweight. Moreover, you don’t have to worry about SEO as it is fully optimized to rank well on Google search results. The theme also features a powerful mega menu builder to create unlimited mega menus for your website. With this feature, you can create and present large catalogs of products/ menu items while simplifying the website’s navigation. The header and footer builder of Everse allows you to take control over their design. Even if you do not have Elementor Pro, you can pretty much customize every aspect of the header/footer with ease. With Everse, you get access to the Eversor plugin, which extends elementor and adds unique and valuable widgets in your library. Regarding pricing, you can get Everse for $49/year for a single site license. If you want an unlimited websites license, you can get it for $99/year, and for the lifetime license, you can get it for a single payment of $249. Now to explore the theme features in detail, let’s look under the hood and see what Everse can achieve on a standard WordPress installation. On Hands with Everse In this section, I will give Everse Pro a test spin and explore its features. So let’s jump right into it! Installation Once you have Everse Pro, you can install it on your website like any other plugin. Go to the WP Admin dashboard > Appearance > Themes > Add New. Now upload the theme and click on the install button. Once you have installed the pro plugin, you need to enter the license key on the Freemius activation page. Simply enter the license key to activate the plugin. Setting Up After installation, you’d be redirected to the plugin’s setup page. However, before you can start using the theme to its full potential, you need to install a few more plugins. Here are the plugins: Everse Core: The main supporting plugin for the theme with functions like social media, CPTs, and WordPress widgets. Elementor(If you don’t have it already): Customize parts of the theme and pre-built starter sites. If you do not have Elementor pro, you can work with Elementor’s free version as well. Eversor: Elementor’s extension that adds a library of 15+ custom widgets[1] and 20+ WooCommerce widgets. Kirki Framework: A robust framework for adding options in the WordPress native customizer. The plugins mentioned above come pre-packaged. So you just have to click on the ‘begin installing plugins’ link on the notice, and they will be installed automatically. Article Continues Below Everse Starter Sites In the WP Admin dashboard > Appearance > Everse Starter Sites, you can access and view all the designs. In addition, you can import as many templates as you want and can customize them further. To import a starter site, just go to the design you wish to import and click on the import button. If a theme uses any required elements to function correctly, it will be displayed in a prompt. Then, you just need to click on ‘Install and activate plugins’ to grab the required plugins with a single click. After the import was completed, the theme was live on the website. Customizing Everse Starter Sites Customizing the pages is pretty much the same as customizing any page built with Elementor. Go to pages > the page you want to edit and click on the ‘Edit with Elementor’ button. In the Elementor editor, you can quickly make changes to the design, content, or styling of the elements. On the elements sidebar, you get a section for Eversor widgets. You can use these widgets while designing. Here are some of the widgets: Services Contact form 7 Pricing tables Image before and after Navigation menu Off-canvas Breadcrumbs Advanced Google maps Menu Search Projects Everse WooCommerce Builder Everse comes equipped with a powerful WooCommerce builder. You can create a new product template from scratch or you can import a demo from the Everse Starter Sites plugin and start customizing it. With 20+ custom-built WooCommerce widgets like product title, product price, or related products, you can create every WooCommerce parts or page that is required to run a successful eCommerce store. WordPress Native Customizer Options While the theme is pretty much editable with Elementor, DeoThemes added more options in the WordPress customizer. Kirki powers the options in the customizer, so make sure you have that installed and activated on your website before you visit the native customizer. You get all the standard options like colors, font styling, website logo, and site identity. On top of these options, you get some unique features: Header and footer customization options such as layout styles, logo, etc. Social options can add links to social profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, and they will be applied on the page automatically. Option to make the website GDPR compliant by showing a cookie consent notification bar with the opportunity to customize
Continue readingNewsomatic Review: Feature-Rich Autoblogging Solution
[ad_1] Autoblogging is not a new concept and has been around for years. For those of you new to this term, Autoblogging is a process that allows you to fetch content from various sources and publish blogs with that content automatically without any need for human intervention. It just needs selecting specific feeds, setting up the schedule, and starting the machine. The autoblogging tool starts populating your website with content from selected feeds. In this article, I will be reviewing one of the most popular auto blogging tools — Newsomatic. I will also give it a test run to see its features and functionalities. Let’s dive in! Newsomatic Review Newsomatic is an automatic API-based content importer that you can install on your website and start pulling content from your favorite feeds or sources. If you are into auto blogging, this tool is the ideal automation machine that makes post publishing and populating blogs super easy. While most auto blogging tools stick to news and similar niches, Newsomatic covers various niches as there are more than 70 listed sources that work with the Newsomatic API. You just need to set up the cycle once, and it starts importing content from the listed websites. How does it work? Newsomatic is powered by its functional API that makes pulling content from other websites easy. The new and upgraded API version enables easy starting up, and you can begin populating your website with helpful content within minutes. Since the plugin has its dedicated API, the users get full control over it. So, if you want to add new sources, you can do it just by contacting the plugin devs. Features of Newsomatic When I first gave this tool a test run, I was amazed by the number of options and granular control it offers. It won’t be possible to cover every feature in this review so that I will be covering all the prominent features only. Easy import: With Newsomatic API, you can easily import content and blogs from popular websites and start publishing on your website in minutes. Customization: Resulting posts are fully customizable like any other post based on some predefined rules. Control over content: You have full control over links, images, titles, content, featured images, and even post status. Translation: With Google translate support, you can translate the blog posts to any language of your choice effortlessly. Posting directions: You can define the minimum or maximum limit of the post titles and can choose to post only if the article has an attached image; define banned and allowed keywords. Text Spinner: The plugin comes with a powerful words spinner that replaces words with synonyms to beat plagiarism issues. Auto replaces images: The tool allows you to automatically replace images in blog posts with images from copyright-free sources like Pixabay, Pexels, and Flickr. Random sentence generator: This feature creates random, meaningful sentences that work for both crawlers and readers. Skipping posts: You can set up different rules to skip posts that do not match your preferred criteria. Information meta box: This gives a detailed information meta box to give extra information about automatically generated posts at the end of every post. Search articles easily: This feature allows you to search for articles by keyword in any language. Alright, that’s enough about features. Let’s take Newsomatic for a test spin and see how it works. Hands-On with Newsomatic I created a test environment to try out Newsomatic, and in my experience, the installation was pretty straightforward. Simply uploading, installing, and activating the plugin like any other would do the job. Since the plugin is distributed from Codecanyon, you need to add the purchase code in the plugin settings tab and the Newsomatic API key. Article Continues Below The main settings page is a huge list of customization options that we will get into later. First, let’s see how you can start importing posts from other websites. Automating Custom News to Posts To start the autoblogging engine, you need to go to WP Admin > Newsomatic Post Generator > Custom News to Posts. Here you can add as many sources you like for your website. Let’s say I am setting up an automatic engine for a Gaming website. Here’s what I’ll do; Select the article source from the list of options. I am choosing GameSpot. Now for the schedule, I am setting it up to run every 2 hours. To limit the maximum number of posts, enter the number of posts. Post status is set to publish. Item type to fetch is set to Post since I want to import blog posts. Set the author I want to byline. You can even import the author from the source. Click on the Active checkbox to set the rule to active. For more granular options, click on the Settings button. Here you’ll get access to the advanced settings. If you want to change the search query string, source country, generated text title, content, format, you can do it all from this menu. One notable feature that deserves to be mentioned is that a help tooltip box accompanies every customization option. If you are not sure about any option, you can simply hover over the question mark icon, and it will tell you exactly what the option is supposed to do — no need for back-and-forth referring to the documentation. Now once you’ve set the changes, click on the Save Settings button. Now you can select an action for the rule. For that, just click on the Select an Action button and select the option you want to run. For example, I want to run this rule and import blogs from GameSpot. I just need to choose the “Run This Rule Now” option and click ok on the prompt message displayed. All the posts from that niche will be imported. Likewise, you can set up other sources as well. Plugin Main Settings Probably the first page you’ll see and covers all the overall options for the
Continue readingCheckout X Review – Increase WooCommerce Sales With This Plugin
[ad_1] Checkout X is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform which promises to help you improve sales on your WordPress WooCommerce store. It’s a bold claim that many others have made in the past, and no doubt one that many more will continue to make in the future. So what makes Checkout X so unique? Is it a worthwhile tool for improving your WooCommerce sales? There was only one way to find out. We recently installed it on one of our sites to test out. You’ll discover exactly what we thought in this in-depth Checkout X Review. Checkout X Review Right out of the box, there are two clear things to love about the Checkout X WooCommerce tool. The first is the price tag, or rather, the lack of one. The second is its unique approach. Checkout X Pricing The company offers a completely free version of their service with no strings attached that is perfect for new start-ups and gradually growing stores. This gives you access to all of Checkout X’s standard features (more of which later), plus the ability to generate up to €1,000 in upsells without paying a penny. For larger stores that generate more than €1,000 per month, the €39 Unlimited Plan may be better suited. This allows for unlimited upsells with a 5% per upsell charge applied after your first free €1,000. Article Continues Below Finally, the platinum plan for eCommerce stores generating more than €25,000 only charges a 2.5% upsell fee after the first €1,000. Both of the latter two plans also include some useful extra features, including access to live chat support and the removal of the Checkout X branding, the latter of which can be essential for maintaining a professional appearance. A Software as a Service Approach The other thing we like about Checkout X is that it does things differently. Many tools that promise to improve your store come in WooCommerce plugins which place an extra burden on your web hosting server. While a single plugin may not do too much damage, running an extensive library of heavy-duty plugins can slow down your website performance. One of the big advantages of Checkout X is that although you do have to install a plugin, it’s very lightweight and is only used to connect your site to the software, with all of the hard work being done on Checkout X’s servers. Naturally, this means you get all of the advantages of a powerful upselling tool with none of the drain on your resources. How to Use Checkout X Further adding to the platform’s appeal is just how easy it is to use. From the homepage, head straight to the sign-up page and register for an account. In our experience, this took less than a minute and couldn’t be more straightforward. Article Continues Below Once you’re in, hit “Next Step” and then choose whether you want to connect the platform to a WooCommerce site or a Shopify store. Naturally, being all about WordPress here at WPlift, we went with the WooCommerce option. This is just as well as Checkout X no longer works on Shopify sites due to a change in Shopify’s Terms and Conditions. Connecting Checkout X to Your WooCommerce Store On the next screen, enter the domain name of your WooCommerce store and click “Connect Checkout X.” You’ll need to approve access so that the tool can do what it needs to do, after which you’re ready to start putting it to work on your store. Setup Wizard The tool continues to impress by offering a simple four-step setup wizard to take the hard work out of using it. The four steps involve. 1. Install the Plugin This is no more difficult than clicking the “Open WordPress to Install the Plugin” link, which takes you directly to the Checkout X page on the WordPress plugins directory. Install it as you would any other plugin, and when you’re done, return to the wizard and click “Verify Installation.” 2. Add in Shipping Rates Next, use the simple tool to add your shipping rates and set up any shipping conditions you need. For example, you may choose different rates for international shipping, offer discounts or free shipping for orders over €100, or whatever works for you and your business. Article Continues Below 3. Add Payment Methods The third set-up option lets you choose from a list of different payment methods. All of the usual suspects are here, including Stripe, Klarna, PayPal, card payments, cash on delivery, and more, meaning you’re well set up for however you prefer to accept payments. 4. Preview and Publish Finally, when you’re happy with everything, you can preview and publish your Checkout X checkout experience and be ready to use it. Customizing Your Checkout X Checkout We think it’s a little confusing that Checkout X doesn’t include the checkout customization tab in their initial four-step set-up wizard. It would certainly make sense to include it just before publish and preview. Still, it’s not exactly hard to find and can be used to tweak the look and feel of your checkout experience so that it better reflects your brand. This tab lets you not only change the colors and add a logo but also add links to your privacy policy, T&Cs,[1] and other essentials. How Checkout X Improves Your WooCommerce Sales With the setup process out of the way, it’s time to explore the actual benefits of using Checkout X. On the whole, there are four main ways that CheckoutX helps to boost your WooCommerce sales. These include: 1. Abandoned Cart Recovery Adding some kind of abandoned cart tool to your website is a tried-and-trusted way of getting customers to come back, complete purchases, and boost your revenues. So it’s nice to see that Checkout X includes this as an option, saving you the hassle of installing an additional abandoned cart plugin. Using this tab lets you create the message you want to send to those who abandon their
Continue readingBluehost Hosting Review: It Is Cheap, but Is It Good?
[ad_1] The post Bluehost Hosting Review: It Is Cheap, but Is It Good? is written by Karol and appeared first on WPKube. Bluehost is one of the most popular and, at the same time, most affordable web hosts on the market. In this Bluehost hosting review, we take a look at what’s under the hood, how good the platform really is, and whether it’s the right solution for your next website project. Here are the things we’re going to cover: Types of…. Continue Reading [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingLearnDash Review 2021: The Best WordPress LMS Plugin?
[ad_1] Considering using LearnDash to create online course content with WordPress? LearnDash is a popular WordPress LMS plugin that works for both serious academic institutions, solo course creators, and everyone in between. It can help you create unlimited courses, add unlimited lessons and topics, quiz your learners, require assignments, etc. It also includes built-in features to charge one-time or recurring access fees, as well as advanced features like content dripping, course prerequisites, and more. Overall, it’s definitely one of the top options when it comes to WordPress LMS plugins. And in our hands-on LearnDash review, we’re going to take a detailed look to help you decide whether this plugin is right for you. Here’s how we’ll break up our LearnDash review: Thoughts on the types of users who can benefit from LearnDash A hands-on look at how LearnDash works Seven pros and two cons of LearnDash FAQs about LearnDash Final thoughts Let’s dig in… Who Is LearnDash For? LearnDash is a pretty flexible plugin that can benefit both academic institutions as well as businesses, solo creators, and more. On the academic front, LearnDash supports SCORM and Tin Can API (xAPI) for heavy-duty implementations. The ProPanel feature is also well-suited to academic institutions, as it offers quick assignment management, emailing features, and more detailed learner information/analytics. However, LearnDash can also be quite effective for more small-scale uses, too. For example, if you’re a solo course creator, LearnDash can help you create and deliver free or paid course content to your members, which makes it a great solution for monetizing your site with online courses. It can also be useful to businesses that want to provide training to employees. You can use LearnDash to set up employee onboarding or certification and track your employees’ progress to make sure they’ve completed all the relevant education materials. All in all, you have a lot of different ways to use LearnDash, which is why it’s one of the top WordPress LMS plugins. How LearnDash Works In this section, I’ll give you a general overview of what it’s like to create course content with LearnDash. Then, in the next section, I’ll single out some specific pros and cons. Basic Setup When you first activate LearnDash, it launches a “bootcamp” guide to show you all the actions you need to take to set up LearnDash. Each step includes a video and text article, and you can mark them as complete as you go through them: Overall, I think this is really convenient as it helps you make sure you’re not missing anything important. Creating a Course Your first step is to add a course. Each course can include unlimited lessons, topics, quizzes, assignments, etc. When you create a course, you’ll see the native WordPress block editor (for the course listing page content), as well as tabs across the top to configure additional options: Using the Course Builder The course builder is one of the most useful features in LearnDash as it lets you set up the structure of your lessons, topics, quizzes, and more using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Lessons are the main knowledge block, and then you can subdivide lessons into topics. You can use the buttons to add new lessons, topics, and quizzes and then drag-and-drop things to rearrange them as needed: Adding Lessons/Topic Content Once you’ve added the high-level structure of your course using the builder, you can open the editors for individual lessons/topics to add the content for those units. When you add a lesson/topic, you can add the content using the regular WordPress block editor. You’ll also get a useful Associated Content box in the sidebar to let you see how this unit matches up to other topics: In the Settings tab, you can also add a dedicated video that users must watch to complete the lesson, as well as configure other features like: Lesson materials (e.g. a PDF checklist) Assignments Lesson timers Adding a Quiz To add a quiz, you’ll get a dedicated quiz builder that works a lot like the course builder. You can add different questions and use drag-and-drop to change their order: If you go to the Settings tab, you can configure more advanced options like the passing score, retakes, question order randomization, a quiz certificate, quiz timer, and more. Setting Up Course Access Once you’ve added and organized your course content, the next step is to control access to your course, which you can do from the course’s settings. You have five options: Open – anyone can access the course. It’s public on your site. Free – the course is free, but people need to register and enroll for it. Buy Now – people pay a one-time fee for access. Recurring – people pay a recurring fee for access. Closed – you must manually add learners (or use a separate payment/membership plugin). You can also set up other restrictions, such as course prerequisites and access expirations: And that’s a general high-level look at what it’s like to create a course with LearnDash. Of course, I didn’t cover nearly every feature, because there are a lot of small options. But you should have a good idea of how it works. LearnDash Pros and Cons – 7 Pros and 2 Cons Now, let’s dig into some of the specific things that LearnDash does well…and some of its weak points. LearnDash Pros 1. User-Friendly Drag-and-Drop Builder I showed you the course builder in the tutorial, but it’s worth highlighting again because it’s such a useful feature. When you have a lot of lessons, topics, and quizzes, it can be hard to visualize how everything fits together and the progression that your students will follow as they move through the course. Having the course builder interface not only makes it easy to see how everything fits, but it also lets you easily make changes using drag-and-drop. It also just generally speeds up your course building because you can easily open the editors for all the course’s content from one spot.
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