[ad_1] There’s no denying that if you want to monetize your site or build an eCommerce store with WordPress, WooCommerce is the way to go. The powerful, versatile plugin currently powers over 6.5 million active online stores, making it the global leader in the world of eCommerce software platforms with a total market share of 36.68%. To put that into perspective, the second biggest eCommerce platform, Squarespace Online Stores, enjoys just under a 15% share of the same market. So what is it about this platform that makes it so popular? As you’ll read in this comprehensive WooCommerce guide, the answer is really a combination of things: 1. It runs on WordPress, which itself powers a significant portion of all the websites on the Internet. 2. It’s very easy to set up and use, meaning you can set up a complete online store (see our Woocommerce Tutorial) with practically no technical know-how required. 3. It offers an impressive list of features that can be extended via a variety of top WooCommerce add-ons and integrations, many of which we’ll share with you below. First, however, let’s talk about what exactly WooCommerce does, and how you can put it to work to build your online retail business. What is WooCommerce? At the most basic level, WooCommerce is a plugin that transforms your standard WordPress site into a dynamic online store. Yet to leave the description at that would be to do a disservice to what a rich and extensive tool WooCommerce really is. Via its own core features and many of the third-party extensions that we’ll share with you later, this comprehensive platform gives you everything you need to run your online business, handling everything from sales, shipping, and taxes to advanced marketing campaigns, all without hardly ever having to leave the WordPress environment. Article Continues Below WooCommerce Core Features: Out of the box, WooCommerce offers all of the following: Basic reporting and analytics Customizable eCommerce themes Add products to sell physical, digital, or service-based items Subscriptions Payment gateways Abandoned cart tools Manage orders Manage shipping and taxes Manage customers Marketing tools. The great thing is that if you find any of WooCommerce’s in-built tools don’t offer quite the level of functionality you need, you can always add one of the platform’s own 800+ extensions or one of the thousands of third-party add-ons out there. WooCommerce Analytics and Reporting By default, WooCommerce offers a standard set of reporting and analytics tools that provide that data on things such as: Your best and worst-selling products How many customers you’ve acquired Your inventory levels. All of this is relatively easy to access and make sense of, meaning it may be a good option if you’re just starting off and only have a few orders. However, if you have a lot of data and need more high-level reporting features, the following three extensions are a better option. 1. Metorik There are a few key reasons why we rate Metorik as the number one reporting and analytics tool for WooCommerce. First, the platform was developed by an ex-Automattic engineer who helped to build WooCommerce in the first place which means that, of all the third-party extensions out there, few understand WooCommerce and its users better than those at Metorik. Second, it utilizes an attractive, clean interface with intuitive navigation and a visual reporting style which makes it much easier to understand your data than the default WooCommerce reporting features. Thirdly, it provides an extensive array of reports on everything from revenue generated and total orders to how much tax you’re paying, to what extent refunds are hurting your bottom line, and more. Learn more about this powerful analytics tool in our comprehensive Metorik review. Pricing: Plans start from as little as just $20 for up to 100 orders per month. Try Metorik 2. Advanced WooCommerce Reporting If you’re happy with the level of data provided by WooCommerce but find the lackluster layout doesn’t lend itself well to gaining quick, accurate insights into your store performance, or if your success is such that Metorik’s order-based pricing doesn’t suit your budget, try Advanced WooCommerce Reporting instead. This popular plugin takes your core WooCommerce data, presents it in a much more easy-to-understand format, and provides you with both more data points and reporting options. Advanced WooCommerce Reporting Cost Advanced WooCommerce Reporting is available for a one-time cost of $45 for a standard Envato license. Try Advanced WooCommerce Reporting Don’t like any of these options? See our guide to the top 9 best WooCommerce reporting and analytics tools for your store. WooCommerce Product Add-Ons It’s hard to criticize WooCommerce’s product pages. Regardless of your theme, you’ll be able to present customers with all the information they need to make a purchasing decision, including dynamic product photos, shipping details, and more. Still, depending on the products you’re offering, you may want to go further and allow customers to personalize your products, upgrade their purchases, or create their own product bundles. If you’re looking for the perfect solution to allow you to do that, WooCommerce Product Add-Ons is the one for you. This feature-rich extension gives customers more flexibility over their purchases by allowing you to add a wide range of extra fields to your products. Elsewhere, you can also offer upsells, customized product packages so that you can sell personalized gift boxes and even a price calculator for more complex orders. See our detailed WooCommerce Product Add-Ons guide to learn more. Pricing: $69 for a single-site license or $119 for use on unlimited sites. Try WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Managing Shipping and Delivery in WooCommerce When you first install WooCommerce, you’ll be able to offer customers multiple shipping options with different rates and assign those options to different regions. This is a great start, but as with everything eCommerce related, you can enhance your shipping process with a number of add-ons, including: 1. WooCommerce Advanced Shipping The WooCommerce Advanced Shipping plugin allows you to use table rate shipping to set an
Continue readingTag Archives: wordpress
The WordPress Community Isn’t Ready to Leave Twitter – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Elon Musk has bought Twitter in a $44B deal that closed this week, tweeting “Let the good times roll,” on Friday after taking the helm. Musk fired top executives at the company and tweeted an appeal to Twitter’s advertisers to share his motivation in acquiring what is arguably the world’s most important social network: “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk said. “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.” Musk also hinted at the importance of content moderation, saying “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” The company is forming a council to discuss content moderation, but nobody knows what that will mean for the future of Twitter. Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022 While some Twitter users have considered migrating to Tumblr, the structure and user base isn’t currently comparable to the Twitter experience. In response to Verge co-founder Nilay Patel’s provocative article titled “Welcome to hell, Elon,” Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg tweeted his support. “This is an unfortunately good summary of why running a social network is so hard, as I’ve learned with Tumblr,” Mullenweg said. “I am wishing Twitter the best and also hope this doesn’t slow down Tesla or SpaceX, which I think are critical to the future.” Patel aptly communicated the weight of the political challenges Musk will face in his commitment to steering Twitter away from becoming “a free-for-all hellscape,” which some think has already happened. If Musk decides to open the doors to unsavory characters who were banned in the past, it may drive the social network into the ground. While the WordPress community has many online gathering places – various Slack workspaces, P2 blogs, and Facebook groups – it has always been Twitter that served as the place for both casual interactions and breaking news. It is the de facto social network for those working in tech. There are many who only use the platform for keeping up with WordPress news and the community. “There’s nowhere else to really go!” WordPress product designer Mike McAlister said. “WordPress people are pretty much exclusively on Twitter it seems.” Apart from the few optimistic souls who think Twitter will be better than ever, many community members expressed apprehension about losing the network they have built over the years. As the closing of the sale loomed, people threatened to leave Twitter on principle if Musk gained control. That day has arrived, but for the most part the WordPress community is not abandoning Twitter. “Twitter has had too good of an impact on my life to just jump ship,” Edan Ben-Atar said. “I’ll stick around for as long as it makes sense. For now, nothing has changed from what is noticeable to the eye.” WordPress designer Dustin Henrich says he is staying but also looking up the people he follows on other platforms. “I’ve made too many good connections, enjoy reading about people’s tech and non tech lives, and learning from some wicked smart people,” Henrich said. “I’d truly be sad if this just all went away.” Decentralized social networking, which has so far failed to gain much mainstream attention, is getting a second look in light of Twitter changing hands. WordPress agency owner Tom Finley is experimenting with using the Activity Pub plugin to set up his site as a private Mastadon server. It implements the ActivityPub protocol for WordPress so readers can see the site’s posts on Mastadon and other federated platforms (that support Activity Pub). Some WordPress community members are flirting with joining Mastadon instances, or have already committed to posting in both networks, but we are not yet seeing a mass exodus flocking to the fediverse. I’m giving Mastodon a try although I’m still sticking around here for the time being. I hate to say it but what about more use of the official WordPress Slack workspace? I often go there if I need to find someone in the community. — Shawn Hooper (@ShawnHooper) October 28, 2022 “We’ve seen this attempted exodus to the promised land many times before,” Ross Wintle said in a post that explains why he isn’t optimistic about people successfully leaving Twitter. “Without a proper mass migration of people and organizations to another service, it doesn’t stick. “You end up with people cross posting to multiple services to reach all the people that they want to reach. And then as a reader I’m checking multiple services and seeing the same things. The signal/noise ratio goes down. And most people get fed up and end up back where they were before.” The most hopeful speculators ask if this could this be the return of blogs. At the moment blogs are not social enough, and there isn’t a critical mass of bloggers eager enough to adopt the protocols necessary to connect their sites in a stream of easily digestible, short updates. Until Elon Musk makes more radical changes, many WordPress community members see no reason to leave Twitter. “For now, I don’t see a reason to leave,” WordPress developer advocate Birgit Pauli-Haack said. “Block, Unfollow, Mute are my friends for curating my feed. I did cancel my subscription to Twitter Blue after 12 months. Being allowed to edit tweets is not worth it.” I’ve been through so many social networks over time as they come and go. I lost count how many people say they are leaving Twitter. I use Twitter primarily for note taking, links, etc. I see nothing about that to change. — David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) October 28, 2022
Continue readingHow to Add Header and Footer Code in WordPress
[ad_1] The WordPress platform does a great job to help those without coding experience to implement just about any type of functionality. However, in some cases you’ll need to add header and footer code in WordPress to help third-party services embed its own functionality. The most typical use case for this is to integrate Google Analytics into your site. However, there are plenty of other reasons you’ll want to do this – you may already know why you want to carry this task out. For this tutorial, we’re going to show you a couple of ways to add header and footer code in WordPress. First though, we’re going to take a look at the sorts of reasons you’d want to do this in the first place. What You Can Achieve With Extra Code in the Header and Footer of Your Site A standard website will break down into a few different components, much like a text document: Header. Your site’s header contains a number of ‘pre-loading’ elements, and details about your Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, encryption, any JavaScript, and more. Footer. This operates in a similar way to your header, but instead ends up at the bottom of the page. Body. Most of the functionality you implement on your site will be within the ‘body’ of your content. This is the primary focus of almost everything within the WordPress dashboard, and the body represents what you see on the page. Servers will load pages in a linear way – the head, body, then footer. This means the code in the header will load first, but footer code will load after everything else. Everyday Code Snippet Use Cases Social media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools will often need you to add header code in WordPress. This is because those services have to take some priority when a site loads in order to log everything that comes after it. It’s a similar situation with CSS code, because this dictates how your site will look. If this was in the footer, you’d see an array of layout changes before you see the styling. While JavaScript helps us to produce, view, and interact with modern websites, it isn’t a necessary component (in a technical sense.) As such, JavaScript in the footer will give you greater performance in many cases, and if you have that option, you should go with it. In fact, there are many more use cases, and we cover them in more detail in another article on the WPKube blog. However, in a typical WordPress situation, you don’t have access to the header and footer elements of your site. To do this, you’ll need to either get your hands dirty, or call on outside help. How to Add Header and Footer Code in WordPress (2 Ways) Over the rest of the article, we’re going to cover two ways to add header and footer code in WordPress. Both are simple, but we prefer one over the other: You can use a plugin to help you add the code to the right areas of your site. You’re able to add code to your functions.php file, and you’ll need to have extra knowledge on how to access your site’s files. We’re going to look at the plugin option first, for reasons we’ll explain shortly. 1. Use a Plugin to Add Code to Your Header and Footer If you want to implement something in WordPress, a plugin should do the job for you. We’d consider a plugin the default in most cases for WordPress websites. As such, if you want to add header and footer code in WordPress, the Embed Code plugin will be ideal: This is a solution that our sister site DesignBombs develops, and it gives you a quick and painless way to add code either to your site as a whole, specific pages or posts, and even custom post types. To use it, you’ll install and activate the plugin in the typical WordPress way. When this process finishes, you’ll see a new Settings > Embed Code option on the dashboard: On this screen, you’ll spot two text areas: one for the head and one for the footer. You’ll even get a hint as to where the code you enter will sit within your HTML: Using this tool is super-straightforward. Once you enter your code, save your changes. This will add any code here on a global (i.e. site-wide) level. However, you may only want to add code to an individual post or page. You can do this through the Block Editor – the metabox and options you need are at the bottom of the screen: While Embed Code is our preferred method, and one you should use for the minimum of fuss, there is also another way that can get you the results you need. We’ll look at this one next. 2. Add Code Snippets to Your functions.php File Every WordPress installation can access a dedicated functions.php file within its top-level or theme-specific directory. This enables you to add snippets of code to help WordPress use more functionality. However, there are some prerequisites you’ll need to understand and have in place before you begin: You access your WordPress core files – and by extension, the functions.php file – using Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP.) As such, you’ll need knowledge of how this works in order to find your sites files and work with them. We’d also recommend you use a child theme, in order to preserve your changes if the theme in question receives an update. You’ll want at least working knowledge of WordPress hooks, actions, and filters. What’s more, you’ll want to understand how WordPress accesses your header and footer through these hooks. When it comes to using SFTP, WPKube has a selection of articles that you can consider essential reading: You may also want to look at the WordPress Developer hook library, especially those entries for wp_head and wp_footer, although this is optional as you won’t use them
Continue readingWeekly WordPress News: Promote with us!
[ad_1] We are checking in with your latest dose of weekly WordPress news. This week, We are happy to announce that we will be accepting Black Friday deals from all our Partners and Subscribers and promoting them on our platform for absolutely Free. Have a Deal that you would like us to promote? Make sure to fill up this form – https://wplift.com/black-friday-deals-form Note – We will be reviewing all entries individually before we make them live on our website. Let’s get to all of this week’s WordPress news… WORDPRESS NEWS AND ARTICLES TUTORIALS AND HOW-TOS RESOURCES [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingNew Missing Menu Items Plugin Adds Site Building Links to WordPress Admin – WP Tavern
[ad_1] If you are going all in on building sites with the new full-site editing (FSE) experience, then you may have noticed a lack of menu items that will deliver you directly to the tools you need to use. It may be because the Site Editor is still in beta, or because WordPress leadership may still be discussing whether to rename FSE. Perhaps it’s better that users don’t blindly stumble into FSE templates from the main admin menu, but some of these site building features are buried away with no quick access. For example, you are three clicks deep before arriving at Template Parts. Managing reusable blocks is also a tucked away on a separate screen that can be accessed through the post editor but sends you to a new page. If you’re using the block editor, and reusable blocks Do yourself a favor cut and paste this at the end of your website: /wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=wp_block Then bookmark it. — Ben LayerWP & WPDeals.email (@benswrite) October 26, 2022 When LayerWP founder Ben Townsend brought attention to this in a tweet, Roy Sivan responded with a link to a new free plugin that creates quicker access to these menus. Missing Menu Items expands the admin menu with links to reusable blocks, navigation menus, templates, and template parts, so they are all one click away. It adds them to the Appearance menu under the Editor (beta) link: If you are regularly working with Reusable blocks or editing navigation and templates, this plugin will save you some time and help you zip around the editor faster. Missing Menu Items was made by Easily Amused, the creators of Block Styles, a commercial plugin that lets users further customize core blocks with unique styles and boasts “fully responsive block-level design control.” The team will be adding more useful menu links and admin improvements in future releases. Users can contact the development team with menu item requests and they will consider them. Missing Menu Items is available on WordPress.org. Direct support is available for those who have purchased a BlockStyles membership, and community support can be found in the plugin’s forums on the directory. [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingFinding a second chance in life through WordPress – വേർഡ്പ്രസ്സിലൂടെ ജീവിതവിജയം
[ad_1] ഈ ഉപന്യാസം മലയാളത്തിലും ലഭ്യമാണ് Here is Hari reading his own story aloud. I will never forget the day I turned 22. I was officially at the lowest point in life as I woke up that morning. While my peers were employed with multinational companies or pursuing higher education at top universities worldwide, I had just been fired from my first “job” and was broke. Things were so bad that I had even become a pariah in my own family. Setting aside all those negative thoughts, I pulled myself out of my bed and switched on my computer, which lit up with a partly-written blog post on the TinyMCE editor of WordPress 3.0.1. That sight filled me with hope. I felt a strong creative urge to continue writing and started typing away. After completing that post, I leaned on my chair, marveling at my creation. All my negative emotions had now disappeared. I realized that even if I failed in life, I would always have two things with me – my blog and the open source software that powered it (WordPress). And that was all I needed to trudge onward. Little did I know that this open source software (that powers 40%+ of all websites in the world today) would eventually become my raison d’être and give me a life I could never even dream of! Discovering WordPress I was born and brought up in Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala, India as an only child to engineer parents. Since computers and programming had always fascinated me as a kid, I enrolled in an engineering course with a specialization in information technology after high school. My goal was to take up a career in technology. I even had lofty dreams of pursuing research in computer science. My batch had a four-month break before college started, and during this time, I started working with my friends’ web services startup. One evening, while working on a client’s website, I was introduced to WordPress. It was a revelation. You could create and customize websites from an admin panel without needing to hand-code in HTML! I loved it and wanted to create a WordPress website on my own. However, since I did not have the resources to purchase a domain and hosting package, I did the next best thing – I set up a blog on WordPress.com. As the cliche goes, that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 🙂 Thriving with WordPress during tough times Soon, the holidays were over, and college started. With high hopes, I stepped foot into one of Kerala’s top engineering colleges. However, within a few days, I realized that I was a misfit in this system. The Indian educational system is designed for rote-learning by default and rejects everyone that does not comply. My ‘radical’ dreams of thinking out of the box, finding knowledge outside prescribed textbooks, exploring the practical side of concepts, and even furthering original ideas – made me an outcast. I was disappointed, disillusioned, and eventually lost interest in academics. To add insult to the injury, my friends kicked me out of the web services startup, which was my saving grace during this ordeal. During this challenging time, it was WordPress that kept me going. Pouring my mind into my WordPress blog helped me survive the trauma of college. Fueled by curiosity, I tried to find practical applications of core computer science concepts taught in college by tinkering with WordPress code and creating mock websites. Slowly I started earning pocket money through freelance projects and Google AdSense. I eventually bought my own domain and moved to self-hosted WordPress. All-in-all, WordPress not only helped me survive college but taught me more than college ever could. By the end of four years, I had learned PHP, MySQL, web designing and development, open source philosophy, and even became a better writer thanks to WordPress! Even as the nightmare called college went on by the side, I collected a bunch of professional accolades. The most memorable ones include being an honorary speaker at one of India’s top engineering colleges, getting a chance to interview Richard Stallman himself, winning an international essay competition, and becoming a freelance journalist with one of India’s national newspapers. Life was challenging but promising! Presenting at NIT Calicut – one of India’s top engineering colleges, as an invited speaker Selected as a runner-up for Mindful Leadership co-organized by University of Dayton, Ohio and Loyola Institute of Business Administration Finding out about Automattic My love for WordPress encouraged me to add a question about Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, in a trivia quiz that I hosted at an intercollegiate quiz in my third year. The question went unanswered, but while preparing for the quiz, I learned about Matt’s company – Automattic, Inc. Automattic owned WordPress.com and had 30+ employees working remotely from all corners of the world then. Since WordPress was everything to me, working for the company that runs WordPress.com felt like a dream. I believed that I had a real shot at making it to Automattic; since it was a fully distributed company, I could work remotely from India without having to worry about work permits or visas. The “Happiness Engineer” role seemed like a perfect fit for me, and I decided to apply right after graduating from college a year later. A glimpse from the same quiz that I hosted where I would shortly ask that question about Matt that would go unanswered! However, life would have other plans for me. Dreams come crashing down – but not without hope! History teaches us that every misfit meets debilitating failure early on in life. After surviving for nearly three and a half years, my crash came in my final year. Since I lacked the minimum attendance, I did not graduate with my batchmates and was asked to repeat my last semester with my juniors. It was a major blow – not just for my ego, but also for my existence. Nevertheless, I did not lose
Continue readingHow to Set Up a WordPress Paywall for Your Content
[ad_1] Lots of WordPress site owners see their content as more than information – it’s money. Taking your hard work and charging for it is a natural progression for many. Because the ecosystem is able to help you bolt on almost any functionality you need, a WordPress paywall is straightforward to implement. You’ll know a paywall through lots of different names, but regardless, it lets you restrict access to your content unless a user pays up. The form of this payment doesn’t have to be cash though: emails, social media mentions, and more can be the currency. There are lots of plugins to help you implement all manner of paywalls on your site too – good news if you have a specific need in mind. In this article, we’ll look at a few options to help you create a WordPress paywall. Before this though, we’re going to give you the lowdown on what a paywall is, the positives and perils to consider, and how to choose the right style of paywall for your site. What a Paywall Is In short, a paywall is a way to restrict access to content on your site. You’ll see this type of content restriction have different names depending on the use case, branding of the company, and more. For example, you might see this called a content locker, gated content, and other terms. It all helps you achieve the same goal. Your content sits on your site as normal, while a plugin locks a certain set of users out of the content you set. You’ll often find this sort of restriction suits informational content, such as a course or tutorial style blog. In contrast, you could also use a WordPress paywall for time-limited and relevant content, such as news and current affairs. Later on, we’ll talk about the different ways you can implement a WordPress paywall. For now, let’s discuss the benefits something like this can give you. Why a Paywall Is Fantastic For Monetizing Your Content and Cultivating a User Community You can see the evolution of self-hosted WordPress through the companion subscription site, WordPress.com. This platform has a free tier for users, which harks back to the early days of blogging: The reason this is relevant is because lots of these blogs went from being personal diary entries to information hubs. At some point, the blogs with heavy traffic and users began to monetize their content. This precipitated the evolution of WordPress from a blogging platform into a Content Management System (CMS). When these sites switch to a premium subscription model, the users (or some of them) will come along for the ride. However, it’s a fallacy to think that a paywall will decimate traffic and income. It might seem counter-intuitive, but a paywall can give you a greater sense of community and better quality traffic. Here’s why: The new users you bring in will want to be there, because they have paid to do so. Your existing users will offer greater loyalty to your brand and site, again because they are paying to stick around. Combined, you have two groups of users who see enough value in your content that they will shell out for it. This gives more value to any hits you get behind the paywall, and drips through to your comments sections, social media engagement and promotion, and much more. However, there are some definite negatives to consider if you want to implement a WordPress paywall. We’ll go over some of these next. The Drawbacks of Using a Paywall for Your WordPress Website You’ll want to note a few of the cons when it comes to WordPress paywalls. No system is perfect, and this one comes with its own unique challenges: First, you will have less traffic. However, as we note in the previous section, the numbers hitting your site will be of a higher-quality. Because that traffic expects more from your content, you’ll have to deliver. This can change how you create and deliver content, and will also affect your expenditure. You’ll have to mind that you don’t affect your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when you implement your paywall. Because the visibility of this content is less, you’ll see fewer backlinks as a result. Advertising on your site can go either way. On the one hand, your paywall and resultant lower traffic might mean ad revenue isn’t as straightforward to come by. However, ads within locked content should perform well because it will offer high targeting. We’d argue that the positives outweigh the negatives in most cases. In fact, you’d likely already know if you want to use a paywall, or if one isn’t right for you. For instance, if your site’s revenue is based around advertising, a paywall doesn’t make much sense. For the classic blog transforming into an information site, you’ll likely want to consider content restriction. How to Choose a WordPress Paywall Model and Architecture for Your Site As you might expect, there are different types of paywall you can implement, and in some cases you can also decide on the architecture you use. For WordPress users, the latter is simple. You’ll use a plugin to implement the paywall, so this will dictate the architecture you use. In most cases, it will be a local setup. This means the functionality to lock content will live on your server. Cloud-based paywalls won’t, of course. As for the paywall model you choose, there are a few to note: Free trials. You’ll often sign up to receive a few days free of unrestricted access. From there, you’ll need to choose a plan. Subscriptions. This is the classic approach to gated content. You’ll ask the user to pay a set amount over a designated period for access to the content. Pay-Per-View. Some sites will let you purchase access to a single article, yet restrict the rest. It’s arguably the least sustainable paywall strategy, but it can help a user to read the content they want. Free trials
Continue readingNavigate Your WordPress Site Like You’re DC’s Flash
[ad_1] The WordPress admin dashboard, also called WP admin, is the mission control for your blogging or business website. It lets you create and manage pages, change styling with the help of themes, add functionality using plugins, and do much more. However, you don’t get any shortcuts or actions for quick navigation, meaning it could take you a while to get around pages and complete specific tasks. That’s about to change, though, because a new plugin offers a fast and easy way to control your WordPress site. CommandBar for WP Admin is a plugin that lets you move quickly through pages, take contextual actions related to the content, and search for anything on your site. It’s designed to boost your productivity with quick actions and shortcuts to get stuff done in the WordPress admin and Gutenberg editor. But how easy is it to set up and configure? And is it really the fastest way to navigate your WordPress website? Get the answer to these questions and more in this hands-on review of CommandBar for WP Admin. CommandBar for WP Admin: Overview CommandBar for WP Admin enables you to find specific pages and content within a few clicks. It’s built to drive step-change improvement in WordPress navigation, from finding an item to editing it in minutes. The plugin works with both WordPress admin and the popular Gutenberg editor, making it easy to control various aspects of your site. Here are the key features of CommandBar: Spotlight-style search: By offering instant search for anything on your site, including posts, images, or even orders and products, the plugin makes navigating WP admin blazingly fast. Pro shortcuts: It’s not just pages, though. All critical actions in WordPress admin, like post creation, are just a few clicks away. Plus, you can add custom keyboard shortcuts for any common task, such as changing a post’s category or inserting an image. Contextual editor actions: CommandBar is useful for editing actions, too. You can jump to recently edited items or take contextually relevant actions quickly while editing a post or page. Hands-On With CommandBar for WordPress Now for the exciting part: I’ll show you how to install CommandBar and use it to control your WordPress website. First, download CommandBar for WP Admin from its WordPress.org directory listing or official website. Then, log into your WordPress dashboard and install it via the Plugins tab. Alternatively, you can search for “CommandBar” in the plugin library and click “Install Now.” Launching CommandBar To access CommandBar in the WordPress dashboard after it’s installed, enter CTRL + K (on Windows or Linux) or ⌘K (on Mac). The shortcut will open CommandBar in a modal in the center of the page. Alternatively, you can click the “Find anything…” button in the header to launch the plugin. Searching Pages, Posts, Media, etc. Once the plugin is installed, it’ll automatically hook into your existing pages, media, orders, etc. This makes it quick and convenient to find anything you have available in WordPress. For example, you can search for posts by entering their title or keywords in CommandBar: Article Continues Below The plugin also shows a preview of the post content, which can be really helpful for seeing what it’s about and how it’s organized. Plus, you can change the post’s title without having to open the post. Any changes will be reflected under the Revisions section in CommandBar: If you have WooCommerce installed on your site, you can also search for orders using parameters such as the customer’s email and billing address. Navigating Through WordPress In addition to content search, CommandBar offers navigation commands that let you quickly jump between sections of the WordPress admin dashboard. For example, if you type “comments” in the plugin field, it’ll take you to your comments section within seconds. CommandBar ships with some navigation shortcuts already set, but you can set your own shortcuts for going to a specific section. To do so, hover over the section you want to create a shortcut for and click “Add shortcut.” Using Contextual Actions Another thing you can do with CommandBar is take contextual actions. This are small but important actions that let you get stuff done quickly. Let’s say you want to edit the price of a product you created in WooCommerce. Instead of scrolling down the product page, you can just type “Price” in CommandBar to jump to the relevant section. Content Creation with Gutenberg CommandBar has deep integration with the Gutenberg editor, which makes it easy to perform content-related actions. Let’s say you decide you want to add an image to a post. In CommandBar, type the phrase “image” and click “Insert image at cursor” to execute an action. Then, search for and choose a relevant image to insert it in your post. (P.S. You can also add a caption and alt text to an image before inserting it inside your post’s content). And besides adding an image to your post, you can change its title and category, as well as preview it before you hit that publish button. CommandBar also offers quick actions for adding pages, posts, orders, etc. Plus, it keeps track of the pages you visited recently so you can quickly get back to any work in progress. Overall, CommandBar for WP Admin is a really handy tool for sifting through and performing actions on your WordPress website. It’s incredibly fast, too, and doesn’t have any competition at the time of writing. CommandBar for WP Admin Pricing CommandBar is free to use on WordPress websites. You can access all the features discussed above without paying any fee. Final Verdict WordPress admin is powerful and brimming with exciting options. However, navigating it swiftly can be challenging, especially if your admin has bulked up a little over time. Fortunately, CommandBar for WP Admin exists to help you control your site and get stuff done faster than you could ever do on your own. You get a robust search function, handy shortcuts, and contextual editor actions to control all the important stuff that
Continue readingWordPress Black Friday & Cyber Monday Deals (2022)
[ad_1] If you were looking to build a business website, start an online store, or simply improve your existing website, there is no better time than now. With this year’s WordPress Black Friday deals, you can avail your favorite plugins, themes, hosting, and services for a fraction of the cost! Ready to get massive savings on Elementor, Divi, managed WordPress hosting, and lots more? In this post, we’ve curated all the best 2022 Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and promo codes from across the web. Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2022 Deals: Plugins, Hosting and Themes Below, we’ll divide these 2022 WordPress Black Friday deals into three main categories, which you can click to jump to: Promoted Deals Grab your spot here Editor’s Pick These are our featured WordPress Black Friday deals that we love: Plugin Deals Elementor Deal: Up to 50% off; Elementor’s most popular plan, Expert, is at a 30% discount Validity: November 22 – December 2 Coupon Code: No coupon code required Elementor is our favorite page builder plugin and what we used to build this site. Check out our Elementor review. Get This Deal WP Rocket Deal: 30% OFF on new licenses. Validity: November 23 – December 1 Coupon Code: No coupon code required Get This Deal Article Continues Below Barn2 Plugins Deal: 30% OFF ALL plugins (annual and LIFETIME) Validity: 19 November – 30 november Coupon code: No coupon code required Barn2 Media makes some great plugins like Posts Table Pro, WooCommerce Product Table, WooCommerce Private Store, and more. Go to Barn2 Astra Growth Bundle Deal: Up to 63% Validity: November 22 – December 3 Coupon Code: No code needed The Astra Growth Bundle gives you access to all Astra Pro features, 180+ Starter Templates, WP Portfolio plugin, Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder, Ultimate Addons for Elementor, Convert Pro plugin, Schema Pro plugin as well as access to all of Asta’s future plugins. Get This Deal wpDataTables Table & Chart Plugin Deal: 30% OFF Validity: November 23 – December 1 Coupon Code: No code needed wpDataTables is a mature table plugin that works with a large amount of data easily, or you can create simple tables with cell styling, merge cells, and many more. Enjoy nice and smooth chart rendering with this plugin. Get This Deal Sendinblue Deal: 50% off Validity: November 15 – 30 Coupon Code: Sendinblue helps businesses grow their business through email campaigns, transactional messaging, and marketing automation. Check out our review of this platform here. Get This Deal Wholesale Suite Deal: 60% off (includes new sales, additional plugins, & upgrades) Validity: Nov 22nd (Early Black Friday) through to midnight Nov 30th (Cyber Monday Extended) Coupon Code: Discount auto-applied Wholesale Suite lets you easily add wholesale to your WooCommerce store. Control wholesale user roles, wholesale pricing, product visibility, order minimums, tax display, get a streamlined ordering form, user registration & approvals, plus much more. Reduce wholesale-related admin work and ditch the spreadsheets by bringing your wholesale operations online. Get This Deal Master Addons for Elementor Deal: 50% off Validity: November 20 – December 2 Coupon Code: BLACKFRIDAY50 Master Addons enhance the website customization ability for Elementor users. It’s packed with more than 50+ awesome elements and extensions. Check out our Master Addons for Elementor Review. Get This Deal WPForms Deal: Up to 65% off on WPForms subscriptions Validity: November 22 – 26 Coupon: No coupon code required WPForms is one of the most popular and user-friendly form plugins. Get This Deal Ninja Tables Deal: 40% Validity: November 15 – December 5 Coupon Code: No code needed Create any type of fully responsive and customizable data tables effortlessly and keep all your data and information well-organized in a tabular manner—Ninja Tables has got you covered! Get This Deal FluentCRM Deal: 40% Validity: November 15 – December 5 Coupon Code: No code needed FluentCRM is the best email marketing automation plugin for WordPress to turn your WordPress dashboard into a fully functional email marketing automation platform. Get This Deal WeDevs (Dokan, WP ERP, Project Manager, etc.) Deal: Up to 50% off premium WeDevs plugins Validity: November 17 – December 2 Coupon Code: No Coupon Required WeDevs makes a number of popular plugins including: Get This Deal Fluent Forms Deal: 40% Validity: November 15 – December 5 Coupon Code: No code needed Fluent Forms is the fastest, most lightweight, and smartest WordPress form builder you can get your hands on to navigate your way around webforms Get This Deal Smart Slider Deal: 40% OFF Validity: Nov 23 – November 30 Coupon Code: SAVE4021 Smart Slider is an advanced slider, carousel, and block creation tool for WordPress. Check out our in-depth review here. Get This Deal Ultimate Addons for Elementor The Ultimate Addons for Elementor plugin is a collection of advanced Elementor widgets and is a must-have for any website using the Elementor page builder. It comes with 40+ widgets, 300+ creative website templates, and section blocks that will speed up your workflow. 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Continue reading7 Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins and Tools (Tested) – 2022
[ad_1] Searching for the best image optimization plugins or tools to speed up your WordPress site’s images? By now, you probably know the importance of website loading times and page speed. The internet has been abuzz with news about how loading times impact your bottom line and Google has been pretty clear about favoring fast loading websites and blogs. While there are many ways to optimize the speed of your website, one of the first places you should look to make improvements are the images you use. To help you with optimizing your images, in this post we’ll take a look at seven best image optimization tools and compare their results with real testing. We’ll start by sharing details for each image optimization tool along with its individual performance. At the end of the post, we’ll put everything together into a few different comparison tables so that you can easily see how the different tools and plugins stack up. 📚 Here’s everything that you’ll find in this post: Seven Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins and Tools: Individual Details and Performance Below, we’ll share details for the seven best WordPress image optimization tools and plugins. Beyond sharing basic features and pricing information, we also tested each plugin on this list by seeing how well it was able to optimize the same two test images using both lossless and lossy compression: Both images are 1280 px wide and we’re sharing data for the full size image (rather than one of the smaller thumbnail sizes that WordPress automatically generates). We also did not convert them to WebP, which is a feature that a lot of image optimization tools offer. Instead, we kept them in their original image formats. Of course, beyond the file size savings themselves, you also might be concerned with the quality of the compressed images. To my eye, all of these tools resulted in more or less the same image quality, so I don’t think it needs to play a role in your decision: For lossless compression, there was no difference in quality (which is the definition of lossless). For lossy compression, there was a small reduction in quality, but it was very difficult to notice and I didn’t see any noticeably different results between the different tools in terms of image quality. 1. EWWW Image Optimizer When you install and activate EWWW Image Optimizer, it will automatically optimize any images that you upload to your website. It can optimize JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and PDFs and it also allows you to go through your existing media library and optimize already uploaded images. The plugin can also convert images to the best format if you decide to enable this option in the plugin settings. One of the benefits of EWWW Image Optimizer is that it allows you to optimize images using their specialized servers to provide both lossy and lossless compression. In short, this means that image optimization won’t cause additional load on your server. The paid service also offers other enhancements such as a built-in CDN, WebP conversion, automatic scaling, and more. Alternatively, you can do the processing on your own server for free, but you can only access lossless compression if you use your server. Pricing: If you use your local server for processing, you get unlimited usage for free. However, this only supports lossless compression, which is a pretty big limitation. Paid plans start at $7 per month for unlimited image optimizations for a single site, along with a built-in CDN. 👉 Use our exclusive EWWW Image Optimizer coupon to get 15% OFF. How did the plugin do? Image File Type Compression Type Original Size Reduced Size Percentage Reduced JPG Lossless 271 KB 271 KB 0% JPG Lossy 271 KB 151 KB 44.2% PNG Lossless 416 KB N/A* N/A* PNG Lossy 416 KB 105 KB 74.8% *I couldn’t get EWWW Image Optimizer to run a lossless PNG compression for some reason. Even if I chose lossless, it still used lossy compression. 2. Smush Image Compression and Optimization Developed by WPMU Dev, Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin is available in both free and premium versions. After you install the plugin, you’ll be taken to the plugin settings page where you can see how many images were already optimized and configure which thumbnail sizes you want the plugin to optimize, whether images should be resized, and more. The free version of the plugin lets you optimize unlimited images, but each individual image cannot exceed 5 MB. The plugin can optimize your JPEG, GIF and PNG images individually or you can use their bulk optimize feature. In addition, you can optimize image files that are uploaded outside your media library such as images stored in your theme files. Pricing: To remove the 5 MB limit for individual images and access other paid features such as CDN image delivery, WebP conversion, and more, the paid plans start at $7.50 per month. How did the plugin do? Image File Type Compression Type Original Size Reduced Size Percentage Reduced JPG Lossless 271 KB 268 KB 1% JPG Lossy 271 KB 224 KB 17.5% PNG Lossless 416 KB 320 KB 23% PNG Lossy 416 KB 74 KB 82.3% 3. ShortPixel ShortPixel is a freemium plugin that can compress JPGs, PNGs, and GIFs. After the plugin installation, you will prompted to sign up for an API key by providing your email address. The plugin will automatically optimize every uploaded image and you can also bulk optimize images already present in your media library. The plugin supports both lossy and lossless compression methods. It will also optimize all the thumbnails created by WordPress, remove EXIF data, set a maximum resolution for your images, and save a backup of every image you upload to a new folder. Other useful features include the following: Conversion to WebP or AVIF formats for smaller file sizings. Retina image serving. PDF optimization in addition to images. The original ShortPixel plugin optimizes the images on your site’s server. However, there’s also
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